Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg lays down ‘laptop rule’ to spot if AI can replace your job – Crypto News – Crypto News
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Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg lays down ‘laptop rule’ to spot if AI can replace your job Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg lays down ‘laptop rule’ to spot if AI can replace your job

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Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg lays down ‘laptop rule’ to spot if AI can replace your job – Crypto News

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Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg has warned about the changes that AI may bring to the workforce. The senior AI leader outlined a new ‘rule of thumb’ to identify whether the job you are doing could be easily replicated by AI.

In an interaction with Professor Hannah Fry, Legg laid down what he calls the ‘Laptop Rule’, noting that if a job can be performed entirely using a screen, keyboard, camera, speaker, microphone, and mouse, it is cognitive in nature and therefore replicable by AI.

“If you can do the job remotely over the internet just using a laptop, then it’s probably very much cognitive work,” Legg noted. “If you’re in that category, I think that advanced AI will be able to operate in that space to some extent.”

However, Legg also pointed out that there is a ‘human aspect’ to some forms of cognitive work that could protect these jobs. He took the example of influencers, whose work can be done completely remotely but who possess a distinct personality or human connection, which makes it harder for AI to fully replace them.

When prompted by the interviewer that his assessment would mean AI could end up threatening a large number of jobs across society, Legg said, “We need people who study all these different aspects of society to take AGI seriously.”

“And my impression is that a lot of these people are not,” he added.

“I think there’s an enormous opportunity here. But just like any revolution, like the Industrial Revolution or anything else, it’s complicated. It has all kinds of effects on society in all kinds of ways. And to get the benefits of that while minimizing the risks and the costs, we need to navigate this carefully. And at the moment, I think nowhere near enough people are thinking about what AGI means for this particular issue, and we need a lot more people doing that,” he further noted.

When will AGI be reached?

Legg also stuck to his long-standing prediction that there is a 50:50 chance that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be reached by 2028. However, he clarified that this would be a form of ‘minimal AGI’, and that fully developed AGI is still several years away, though it could be achieved within a decade.

For context, AGI is believed to be a hypothetical stage in AI development where systems achieve intelligence comparable to humans across most, if not all, tasks. There is no universally accepted definition of AGI within the AI community, nor is there a fixed timeline for when it will be achieved. While figures like Elon Musk and Legg believe it could be just a few years away, others, such as former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun, have warned that simply scaling large language models (LLMs) will never lead to AGI.

That said, there is a growing belief within the AI world that once AGI is achieved, it could fundamentally reshape the workforce. Some, like Musk, believe it could usher in an era of “universal high income,” while others are far less optimistic about its societal impact.

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