Kevin Simler

Q: Is the key to getting @Kasparov63 back on top over the robots just mumbling “education & retraining” with ever greater conviction? Good for @AndrewYang for pointing out that “The key is more education!” is just a slogan not a plan. He’ll take real heat...but he’s on target.https://twitter.com/AndrewYang/status/1130486501517778945 …

You could’ve said the same thing when making the switch from farming to industry. There’s unlimited room in STEM.

I’d love to talk this through sometime Naval. My fear is that there is a big difference. I might rephrase and say “there may yet be unlimited room in creativity and discovery based areas, but repetitive occupations may be over...even in STEM.” But I don’t know if you’d agree.

We agree. STEM workers transfer repetitive jobs to software and robots. What remains is creative work and the demand for human creativity, in all facets of life, is unlimited.

Where is it written that there will always be creative work that is *best* done by humans? And what guarantees that most humans will be able to do that work?

Everyone can be creative, given time and tools. Outstripping human creativity requires General AI, which is really far away. If / when that arrives, all debates become obsolete.

I am concerned that the history of machine learning often tells us something else. We imagined that what is now called AGI was needed for many tasks that subsequently turned out to require much less. This is potentially true of what we see as ‘creative’ tasks in our near future.

The bar for creativity will continue to rise, as it always has, from cave paintings to Pixar movies.