I work in tech. Not at OpenAI. I am a middle manager at a mid-tier software company. AI is not taking my job fast enough. I can use AI tools to review the emails written by my staff (esp. non-native English speakers). Hopefully I can soon use such tools to make some of their code less impenetrable. But my job involves switching between many things on any given day and I typically complete about 30% of the things I should complete. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords but the results have been underwhelming thus far.
Re: Comparative advantage, if we add in a few changes the the classic wine and cloth scenario in line with (likely) reality we see that a corner solution of employing robots to do everything and humans to do nothing might be optimal:
It occurred to me once, that the world's oldest profession may be among its last. In a world of full automation and massive inequality, there will be a market for irreplaceably human services- services where a human delivering them is the whole point- whether for reasons of status, intimacy or even darker motivations. As long as there is a class of the ultra-wealthy there will always be people who want to have sex with a real lady (or gentleman) and not a robot and are willing to pay. Even sadder services might exist- professional 'friends' and hangers-on, gladiators and personal 'entertainers' willing to do humiliating things for money. At the more sane end, therapists, of course, and butlers, maids, majordomos, sommeliers, aestheticians, and so on. An entourage, not dissimilar in some ways from the courts of old.
Obiter dicta, I mentioned the point about sex workers to a Christian poet I followed once. He was outraged and insisted that of course in the world of full automation, no one is going to want sex work- if they want real companionship they'll choose a wife, and if they just want sex, they'll use a simulation or a robot. This struck me as embodying a peculiarly impoverished view of the strange and alien passages in the human heart, and I wondered if that view- that people either desire true commitment and companionship, or just the raw sensation of sex sex sex easily given by a robot didn't reveal something peculiar about the limitations in the right-wing understanding of desire.
Yes. People don't just want sex, they also want *sexual validation* - for someone attractive to show them that they meet the standard for being good enough to *want* to have sex with (by actually having sex with them).
In particular, a sex worker that's obviously "only interested in the money" doesn't provide it.
This is why sugar babies, where there is some degree of plausible deniability about it being about the money, will likely remain even more popular than explicit sex work.
But there will be an awful lot of people who want to have sex, want to have sex with a human, and will be able to get over the preferences you describe.
I work in tech. Not at OpenAI. I am a middle manager at a mid-tier software company. AI is not taking my job fast enough. I can use AI tools to review the emails written by my staff (esp. non-native English speakers). Hopefully I can soon use such tools to make some of their code less impenetrable. But my job involves switching between many things on any given day and I typically complete about 30% of the things I should complete. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords but the results have been underwhelming thus far.
Re: Comparative advantage, if we add in a few changes the the classic wine and cloth scenario in line with (likely) reality we see that a corner solution of employing robots to do everything and humans to do nothing might be optimal:
https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/portubots-and-englifleshes-why-comparative
It occurred to me once, that the world's oldest profession may be among its last. In a world of full automation and massive inequality, there will be a market for irreplaceably human services- services where a human delivering them is the whole point- whether for reasons of status, intimacy or even darker motivations. As long as there is a class of the ultra-wealthy there will always be people who want to have sex with a real lady (or gentleman) and not a robot and are willing to pay. Even sadder services might exist- professional 'friends' and hangers-on, gladiators and personal 'entertainers' willing to do humiliating things for money. At the more sane end, therapists, of course, and butlers, maids, majordomos, sommeliers, aestheticians, and so on. An entourage, not dissimilar in some ways from the courts of old.
Obiter dicta, I mentioned the point about sex workers to a Christian poet I followed once. He was outraged and insisted that of course in the world of full automation, no one is going to want sex work- if they want real companionship they'll choose a wife, and if they just want sex, they'll use a simulation or a robot. This struck me as embodying a peculiarly impoverished view of the strange and alien passages in the human heart, and I wondered if that view- that people either desire true commitment and companionship, or just the raw sensation of sex sex sex easily given by a robot didn't reveal something peculiar about the limitations in the right-wing understanding of desire.
Yes. People don't just want sex, they also want *sexual validation* - for someone attractive to show them that they meet the standard for being good enough to *want* to have sex with (by actually having sex with them).
In particular, a sex worker that's obviously "only interested in the money" doesn't provide it.
This is why sugar babies, where there is some degree of plausible deniability about it being about the money, will likely remain even more popular than explicit sex work.
But there will be an awful lot of people who want to have sex, want to have sex with a human, and will be able to get over the preferences you describe.