As automation and AI advance in any field, it will first find a task impossible, then gradually become capable of doing it at all, then eventually capable of better than many or most humans who try to do something, and then better than the best human. But improvement does not stop there, as better than the best human may still be worse than the best human using the best tool; so this implies a further level of skill, where no human is able to improve the AI’s results at all rather than get in the way or harm it. We might call these different phases subhuman, human, superhuman, and ultrahuman. The interesting thing about this distinction is that each level has different practical implications.
At subhuman, the AI is unimportant and used largely in cases where performance doesn’t matter much or where a human is unusable for some reason (such as environment). Taking arithmetic as an example, Pascal’s calculator was ingenious but sold only a handful of units and made correspondingly little difference. Once the human phase is reached, then it may become an economic force to be reckoned with, as it will be better than many humans and have other advantages; this may prompt a global revolution in that field as all the humans adopt the new technology and use it to assist themselves. A calculator as fast & accurate as the median human at arithmetic will be better than the median human because it is more systematically reliable. Here the mechanical calculator can take off, with de Colmar’s Arithmometer selling millions of units. The calculator becomes a complement to a human accountant or clerk, as it double-checks sums and by its reliability helps handle the escalating arithmetic needs of the industrial economy such as double-entry accounting & statistics for small businesses, corporations, researchers etc.
At the superhuman level, no longer does any human do the task on their own except for learning purposes or debugging; those humans now focus on things like when the task should be done or from what perspective it should be described. The humans using it become more productive and more valuable and employment increases; they do not become unemployed because the accountant still needs to punch in the right numbers to the calculator to figure out the corporation’s balance, and the (human) computers are still executing more complex algorithms than the calculator understands even if the calculator is now doing all the arithmetic – a pile of fancy electro-mechanical calculators could not replace the human computers for the Manhattan Project, they needed many people (often women) to handle the full workflow to answer various questions the physicists set up, check the answers at a higher level for sanity, etc.
At the ultrahuman level, the technology becomes autonomous in the sense that a human no longer contributes to it at all, and that occupation disappears. The calculator, having developed to the level of a programmable digital computer, now fully obsoletes ; the computer is fully unemployed and no longer exists as an occupation. The calculator has gone from complement to substitute: it now fully replaces a computer. No human does arithmetic or square roots for a living, nor do they even double-check the arithmetic results, computer now means exclusively programmable digital computers’, and the lower-skilled parts of occupations which formerly involved much arithmetic cease to exist and people are now employed for higher-skilled roles – eg accountants now specialize in international tax evasion rather than cranking through the balance sheet and verifying that all accounts balance to zero.
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