I prefer the term artificial person

I really have no way of evaluating what sound to me like the apocalyptic/messianic claims in this essay, so I’m hoping our learned commenters can jump in, along with the rest of you.

The tl;dr is: AI has made a massive qualitative leap in the past two years/six months/since last month, so if you used a free version of ChatGPT in 2024 you have no idea what’s out there now. I used free versions of the big AI players last May to do extremely basic research, and they were laughably bad, so I dunno man. Plus my fraught relationship with Jennifer Campos just last summer makes me wonder if this isn’t all still mainly a bunch of frantic bullshit dressed up in hard to penetrate technobabble.

Here’s the central claim in terms of the political economy, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of all this:

This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.

I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.

Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.

So I copy and pasted this whole essay into the paid version of Claude, and asked it “but what about our jobs?”

Here is what it replied:

I can’t lie to you about your chances. But you have my sympathies.