Steve Newman on Second Thoughts

The hypothetical situation we're discussing, as framed by Noah Smith, is that AIs are "better than humans at every conceivable task". That implies that AIs have already tackled all of the edge cases, as well. It's perfectly legitimate to envision a scenario where AIs are mostly great at most things, but fall down on some edge cases. But that's a *different* scenario, based on competitive advantage (being better at edge cases), rather than comparative advantage. Of course in practice, for some time to come we are likely to be on a complicated, bumpy ride where AIs are straight-out superior at some things, hopeless at other things, and a messy middle set of tasks or jobs where AIs are mostly superior – sometimes astronomically so – but also suffer from edge cases.