Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

AI working isn't the dystopian option. Imagine AI can do none of those things, but the people who control the capital believe they can.

That's the dystopia.

Yeah and not unlikely.

There are trends in both directions in manufacturing. On the one hand, we had amazing fountain pens with forged gold nibs hand-tuned by a nibmeister that can do things you can't replicate now. The trend was toward really crappy pens that could be mass-manufactured and required less skill by the consumer to operate, but are demonstrably inferior. People chose to buy the cheaper, barely passable option more often by orders of magnitude.

On the other hand, we have automotive manufacturing. Modern cars are more reliable, safer, more comfortable, more performant, more featured, capable, (and expensive?) than ever.

With knowledge work, it's clear that certain things will get "optimized" into disfunction. (Look at the complete lack of agency corporations have taken away from the people operating the public interfaces to the company.) Be it help/support centers, resolving unusual issues, or dealing with automated bans/account deactivations.

It's hard to say what direction it will go...

> Imagine AI can do none of those things, but the people who control the capital believe they can.

I don't need to imagine, that's the reality we live in right now

If you recall how it was just 4 years back. Since then more progress in AI than in previous 40. Which in turn better than prev 400. It's accelerating and unstoppable. It will be very different world in 10 years from now. I hope I live this long...

Idk if I'd call it "progress" at this point. There were a few big steps and then companies poured billions to shove it in our face. And from what I hear we hit a plateau with current approaches.

I don't think AI is really following Moore's law here.

> I hear we hit a plateau with current approaches

Then we need new. The important last year step was distillation as mainstream. In my opinion. Now using old models to train new is normal or even necessary. That was done before, but it was sort of experimental. Creating targeted datasets is a very powerful thing. Now big models can be trained on quality data instead of internet random mix. This includes long thinking and tools use examples from the beginning and not as fine tuning.

Another way of thinking is AI is steadily getting close to human level IQ. Not approximating, it will cross the line. This distance had reduced dramatically in last few years. Then it's singularity that everybody was talking about for so long.

This year we already have google's robotic multimodal. It's closed, but likely will be reproduced. Significant step toward useful generic robots.

We do. But we're not in an innovation environment anymore. It's pump and churn what we're currently doing and hope we brute force "intelligence". Ironic situation.

There's lots of promises out there but not much action nor real world appeal to this stuff. That's pretty much textbook gifting as of now.