odd the focus on "jobs" .. almost like provocation
Instead, think of machine services: fully-automated ones like "ads" or semi-automated like news stories, records requests, customer service replies, retail environment/shopping or other high-volume, low-profit trivial interactions.. These services have made billions in profit (ads) or removed billions in costs (employees) in the last twenty years exactly because they are done with minimal "jobs" specifically and by design.
Modern Capital markets have found the drug-combo they can't kick.. make money with machines with no "jobs" .. meanwhile, news outlets of all kinds continue in a death-spiral.
So combine the angst of media people themselves, the aggressive New Capital making machines that provide services while making few to no "jobs", and generally population anxiety over say .. catastrophic social conditions for example.. that is the real content from this chair.
maybe, instead of being real news about "jobs" it is instead, red-meat bait for the people who own capital who want to get into the "making machines that make money without making jobs" game.. Sort of like a modern version of really-attractive but utterly socially un-discussable in public.. starting wars for money, or building super people through breeding, to name some other obvious ones..
I would like to see timeline predictions in articles like these. I agree completely that GPT can do 10-100% of most jobs I know about, but at the same time Python and UpWork have been around for a while too and I still know people who spend weeks manually reading through PDF files to extract the URLs, or copy-pasting the same line from hundreds of documents into a spreadsheet, etc.
Sometimes people under-estimate how 'unagile' most business is. Are we talking months, years, or decades before we see this "new class of dispossessed white-collar workers, who risk suffering a similar fate to that of manufacturing workers in the 1980s."
On the other hand: in order to be able to use current LLMs effectively, you have to understand their output well enough to debug it, even if you are using the LLM to write the fix to its own bug.
I’ve done something along the lines of “write me a python script which converts midi files into this JSON format I’m giving you as an example: …” — a few runtime crashes it was able to fix just from pasting in the command line output, but fixing “all pitches and durations are zero” required me to get my hands dirty and decompose the problem into a chunk small enough for chatGPT to fix.
I don’t know how far we are from any AI, LLM or otherwise, not needing or benefiting from human oversight, except in the specific domains like chess where it has already happened. I don’t believe in saying “never” to stuff like this, as that’s a common error with many technologies from flight to superconductors not just AI, but I also notice my personal guesses err on the side of being too near in our future.
Although this is generally great for developed economies, i can see this being highly disruptive to India, Philipines and similar countries that based their outsourced services on text based Customer Service.
I can also see nigerian spam getting much more refined before long....
While negative impacts are specific and large on an individual level, positive impacts are broad and diffuse but vast. This has always been the issue with various kinds of protectionism. Change hurts. We will all be better off. We should consider how to help these people also.
* Amount of training required (crystallized intelligence/ability)
* Amount of intrinsic ability required (fluid intelligence/ability)
Some jobs require neither a huge amount of training nor inherent ability. These are paradoxically often hard to automate, because they typically require a lot of rote physical movements that are difficult for machines (e.g. fast food cook). There are few white collar jobs that fit into this category, since they’ve already been automated away.
Some jobs require a lot of training but don’t require a huge amount of inherent ability. For example, after years of training, most anyone will have the skills to be an excellent truck driver. The tech equivalent would be a generic CRUD developer. These are the jobs most at risk for LLM automation. As I see it, a large proportion of white collar jobs fall into this category as well, and that’s where we’ll see the most economic disruption.
Finally, some jobs require both training and ability. Regardless of how long and hard they train, most people will never be a professional athlete, because they simply lack the innate ability. The tech equivalent is something like a kernel developer or machine learning scientist. These jobs will be hardest to replace with an LLM, since they require totally novel ways of thinking that are not baked into the LLM’s training corpus. A lot of blue collar jobs are here as well: good electricians, plumbers, mechanics, contractors, etc. require both years of experience and a high level of intelligence, since every house/car/jobsite is different.
It’s always such a good idea to put things on multiple axes. I wonder if chatgpt would’ve had this insight or if it’s an example of something that would require some prompt engineering.
au contrair -- Literally the first line of the widely known 2022 Big-Bench paper on large language models, with over 100 authors, says:
Generative language models have as their core capability the production of the most likely continuation for a text sequence. This seemingly simple skill is remarkably general. Any task that can be
specified and executed via text can be framed as text continuation. This encompasses a wide range
of cognitive tasks, including tasks that can be resolved over chat or email, for example, or in a web
forum.
It would be great to analyze this problem in a more data based way. It is also important to emphasize that this article talks about "affecting" but not about "losing". If it's only about affecting I would say that will affect almost all the workers in knowledge industries as Google affects everyone looking for searching on Internet. ChatGPT (and its variants and/or competitors) will (or are) as present in tooling as sending emails, chatting, etc.
Some workers will be completely screwed (not only affected). For example, there are hundred thousands copywriters in the world they would be easily replaced by this technology. On a side note I just read the old article about "Pepsi's Nonsensical Logo Redesign Document: $1 Million for This?" [1]. The nonsensical is part of the title but not my pun. Another example is the "Just Do It" [2] Nike's slogan.
This is a great comment, and the examples are compelling for the 3 quadrants you mentioned.
But what about jobs with intrinsic ability required but not a lot of training -- I think something like bouncer/doorman might be an example of this -- but what would the white collar equivalent be? How automatable would those be?
That’s a rare category, since typically people who are naturally good at something challenging spend a lot of time doing it because it’s something they enjoy. The equivalent white collar job would be a savant who quickly masters new fields without significant effort, but again, said savants typically spend a lot of time on their field of expertise anyway.
I suppose artists/musicians who have natural mastery of the canvas/instrument and thus don’t need to practice rote exercises much also fall into this category.
BTW, I disagree that a bouncer falls into that category—they need to constantly physically train in the gym to maintain their physique.
I'll offer up gifted salesperson. The kind who might not even fully understand say the tech they are selling but have innate skills at reading the room, knowing what to chase/drop, etc. It's not like they teach this in college, but the training is self taught over years I suppose.
It's impossible that people could have zero economic value. You'll notice that this is the premise of Atlas Shrugged.
That's because it is usually profitable to trade with someone even if you are better at their job than they are.
However even if the AIs only traded with themselves, that just means the people are left to trade with each other - you can't make a mass of people unemployed for long, they will simply employ each other.
It’s the premise of a shitty fictional book. Of course it’s possible. When humans are the best source of zero labor tasks, our economic value will be reduced to nothing and society will no longer cater to us. It’s bad.
Society frequently caters to the elderly who aren't actively engaged in labor.
But humans will be, because we have inalienable comparative advantage in that none of our inputs require electricity or a chip fab. If anything happens to TSMC or any one of its tens of sole suppliers there go the AIs.
Yes and we also feed dogs that have no labor input. And we harp on about social justice which is not totally related to labor. We have many nice things because we currently live in a human society and humans need to have nice things in order to be healthy and productive. Throwing old people into a giant blender as soon as they were no longer useful would not be advantageous.
Your argument is that humans don’t need electricity. You could also add that humans are self replicating or self assembling. These are advantages in cost and efficiency. Humans won’t be the cheapest or the most efficient for very long after AGI. And we certainly won’t be the best fit economically even if we were slightly better in some ways. You’re in complete denial. Why is it so hard to admit the plain and obvious fact that the machines won’t be good for human society?
"Best fit", "cheapest", "most efficient"… none of that matters! Please wait to panic until after you've learned how comparative advantage works.
As I said, humans cannot become unemployed even if AGIs are better at every single task than humans are. You do not have your job because you are the best person in the world at your job.
Although, I suspect most of the AI doomers have just forgotten to account for AI using any resources at all. They are very expensive to run if you count development costs, but if they become real agentic AGIs they'll also become consumerist and negotiate their pay…
> Your mental gymnastics are Olympic level. Yes, when companies are hiring they do in fact choose the best candidate.
You don't hire "the best person in the world" (absolute advantage), you hire the best person who accepts the job offer, or else noone. Anyone with something better to do won't take the job. Senior engineers don't take junior positions.
Though of course it's not always the best person anyway - family businesses hire family or their friend's cousin, and interns aren't expected to be good at "their jobs" but instead to be good over time.
If you're hiring someone specifically because they're good at one task, might as well get a contractor anyway. Nevertheless, US unemployment rate is about as good as it's ever been. So I suspect this fear is left over from the 2008 recession…
> Are you familiar with the fact that things improve with time? And that technology ratchets forward, not backward.
Yes, that's why it's good. Productivity enhancements and automation increases are associated with increased employment, because if you don't have them your entire country loses work to other countries.
So the thing to be concerned about would be losing them.
> You do not have your job because you are the best person in the world at your job.
I have my job as I was the best they could find that was available for the lowest cost
if the AI can do it as well (or 80% as well) at $0.01c/day and be replicated infinitely, where does this leave me?
> Although, I suspect most of the AI doomers have just forgotten to account for AI using any resources at all. They are very expensive to run if you count development costs
yes... it's a software product with high fixed costs and near zero variable costs
it may cost $100M to train GitHub Copilot, but then it can be replicated instantly across the planet for very little cost
it's pennies a day to run, vs. an expensive human that requires a means to pay for food, shelter, warmth, etc
the AI also gets cheaper and all improvements roll out to every model of the same type instantly when available
comparative advantage for humans almost completely disappears with decent AI, and you seem to have missed that entirely
> if the AI can do it as well (or 80% as well) at $0.01c/day and be replicated infinitely, where does this leave me?
Most likely you've forgotten some costs. For instance, having the same AI as everyone else means you have no advantage, so you probably want a custom one.
Also, it being an AI, it's best suited to doing completely different tasks for the company that no human was doing before. (Comparative advantage!) Google Image Search didn't have people checking if every image on the internet had a cat in it, but now they can do that.
Using a human-complete AI to do human-like tasks raises questions like, why does it accept 1c/day when a human would want $15/hr? Shouldn't it want to buy stuff too, being a complete human-equivalent agent? Wouldn't slavery be illegal?
> comparative advantage for humans almost completely disappears with decent AI, and you seem to have missed that entirely
Since humans are very different from AI of any imaginary variety, they have pretty strong comparative advantage - it's everything human about them. Living off food, being self-repairing, capable of online learning, two hands, can throw rocks, same culture as your customers, that kind of thing. Comparative advantage appears whenever you have any differences. You'd have the lowest advantage vs your identical twin.
I actually doubt we will end up where people have zero economic value or input.
Either we have UBI and they can choose where to spend their income or trade it. Or then they will exist in their own economic system and trade with each other.
Trading and thus sales is inherent to human condition. Unless we reach absolute post scarcity society and even then you get to bullshit like "authentic" and so on.
UBI wont work. It’s intrinsically unstable in the context of AGI. UBI will prevent the inevitable for a very short time before collapsing.
The other outcome is the most likely if AGI isn’t stopped. But the problem with that is that in the context of AGI, a world dominated by and inhabited by AGI creatures, human society becomes transient. Again, just delaying the inevitable. Human society is not transient now because no matter what happens, no matter what entity dominates the world, it has to have a human society embedded inside of it because human beings are the only and best source of intelligent signal. When that is no longer true, humanity will be effectively terminated. All other propositions besides stopping AGI are just delay tactics.
I think what's missing is an axis for humanness. There are jobs where the fact you're hiring a literal human actually matters. For one, humans can be responsible in a legal way. Pilots, various kinds of certification officials, accountants, lawyers. Two, being done by a human can be the very thing that makes the service worth buying. Masseurs, high class escorts, and butlers are all roles that machines can somewhat cater to, but the real thing is real because it's done by a person.
But we've constructed other incentives for those people, like being allowed to keep your certification. What you say makes sense though, you should believe the pilot is in the same boat as you. Your lawyer... well there's a reason jokes about lawyers focus on why they screw over everyone else.
Some forms of liability only scale with the ability of the justice system to mete out suitable punishment. Murder is disincentivized because the punishment is, essentially, losing your freedom and sovereignty entirely.
This plays both a role individually and socially. It's important to the individual's calculus to understand what is at stake and it's importance to them. It's also important socially for people to feel safe that punishment is commensurate and sufficient.
This doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that scales to companies or AI. It's not clear to me what the analogue would be, it's not clear that these analogues would serve the important social purposes they must, and it's not clear that the justice system has the power or capability to deliver these punishments.
Today's society is, in large part, based on the ability for society/governments to enact brutal violence on bad actors at a scale commensurate, in the worst cases, with their entire being.
There is no such thing as a fully autonomous vehicle. There are only highly autonomous vehicles that require a human to be present in the case of an emergency, ie trains. That will no longer be the case. The AIs will eventually be much better at handling emergencies, driving, everything than humans.
Which country in history had a habit of truly passing up on hugely significant economic or military resources based on some principled idea? None. Because all the ones that did couldn’t survive. You really are going to try to argue that geopolitics is powered by virtue?
That’s not true, there are fully autonomous vehicles. The reason we don’t see it daily — and I doubt we ever will - is that AI will always make mistakes. But you can’t put in jail an AI and the way they make mistakes is unpredictable to humans.
You’re contradicting yourself. You say there are fully autonomous vehicles but they aren’t capable of autonomously driving themselves fully. Ie they aren’t fully autonomous. So that aren’t any fully autonomous vehicles.
Ok so now you’re saying that AGI is impossible. That’s a completely different argument. And it’s wrong to reject regulation based on that argument because it can’t be proven. So you can’t reject regulation that way and you can’t reject it with your idea about humans having intrinsic value. So you are forced to support regulation of AI.
Dude what are you even talking about. If you want to continue this conversation then we have to talk on the phone or twitter spaces or something with higher bandwidth because this is wearing out my thumbs.
He's saying you're arguing in bad faith because you are: Human drivers are fully autonomous and make mistakes - the difference being we accept the risk of human drivers and their mistakes as a society and have not (yet) with self driving cars.
That fact does nothing to disprove the existence of autonomous vehicles.
Please don't break the site guidelines yourself, or perpetuate flamewars, regardless of how badly someone else is behaving. It only makes everything worse.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Statistically, you think that regulating AI is pointless because another country will just push forward. So that’s not true? You think AGI should be prevented?
Sorry but I checked your comment history and it’s dense with posts scalding people for their mental gymnastics and their pathetic nature. Perhaps interacting with forums isn’t bringing out your best side? Doesn’t seem like it’s working out that well.
I’m just going to weigh in as a bystander by saying that you seem legitimately delusional. Your replies have almost no relevance to the other side of the conversation. If this is something you tend to have issues with, please take this as an indication that you need to do something about it now.
Please don't break the site guidelines yourself, or perpetuate flamewars, regardless of how badly someone else is behaving. It only makes everything worse.
Since the article is about "affected" and not specifically about "losing jobs" we can say that butlers, high class escorts, and masseurs will use ChatGPT as well so they will be affected.
UBI will pretty much be a requirement if AI lives up to the hype and doesn't hit a sudden wall in improvement again. And even physical jobs might not be safe considering transformers are being used for robotics now as well and getting great results
basically we are heading towards utopia or dystopia, it will depend if governments actually share the wealth created by productivity gains or if they use these advancements to oppress people at a level never before possible
There's no raw data on ubi in an largely automated economy.
It's too radical of a change to know how well it would work. Communism, in theory, worked as well too but in practice there were unanticipated side effects.
Automation increases employment. Technological unemployment is a myth.
The purpose of a UBI isn't for workers whether they're unemployed by AI or not, it's for non-working household members like new parents, elderly and children. (Poverty is a household phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon.)
>Automation increases employment. Technological unemployment is a myth.
This is not true. It is historically true but every iteration of new technology changes society differently.
You can't blindly rely on historical data you need to use common sense and logic as well. Historical data says nuclear bombs killed less people then cars. Therefore cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs.
Does that work? No. It obviously doesn't. Just like you can't say that AI will cause a rise in employment. You're ignoring the common sense scenario. Can you even work out exactly what people will be employed as once AI takes over? Likely you don't, you're just being impractically data driven.
> Can you even work out exactly what people will be employed as once AI takes over?
If the AI "takes over", as in it's a fully sentient agent, then claiming humans will be unemployed isn't technological unemployment but rather is the lump of labor fallacy. That's because the AIs are just more people. They're going to be customers (they need products to survive and probably want things on top of that), will have jobs (they need to pay their power and AWS bills or they'll get turned off), will negotiate pay raises that may make you cheaper, and you can sell things to them.
If they're not sentient/agentic enough to be consumerist or want to be paid, then they're capital equipment aka automation, which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice increases employment by making labor more productive.
All nice and theoretical.
> Therefore cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs.
I agree the #3 cause of death in America is more deadly than something that is so safe it has never accidentally killed anyone. (Except for the demon core guy and the people who got cancer from detonation tests.)
Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in possible worlds.
>If the AI "takes over", as in it's a fully sentient agent, then claiming humans will be unemployed isn't technological unemployment but rather is the lump of labor fallacy
This claim was never made. The only claim I made is that you can't claim AI increases jobs. My opinion of it is that the situation is so unpredictable that people should prepare for both scenarios.
>That's because the AIs are just more people.
And unconvincing. If agi replaces labor it will be constructed with a singular incentive to serve it's master as the primary directive. It can be a an economy of slave labor replacing us. The situation is too untenable to just rely on your own hypothetical. Other scenarios like mine must be considered.
>which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice increases employment by making labor more productive.
Again over reliance on data. Your argument doesn't counter my claim. It's just regurgitation your original claim.
>Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in possible worlds.
So according to that logic we should make millions of atomic weapons and distribute it for free to everyone? No.
Data only tells a story for specific scenarios and can function as a rough predictor for hypothetical scenarios.
To refine predictions of hypothetical scenarios you need data AND logic. Blind application of data to all hypothetical scenarios is wrong.
Remember the real world only exists in the past. A huge portion of the world is an unrealized quantum uncertainty in the future. Navigating the future involves using data from the past as well as logic.
Your argument suffers mostly from being too specific. It doesn't address the fuzziness of the future and the fuzziness of the evidence/logic. You anticipate one thing playing out and you plan for that but realistically a good prediction and plan is one involving a multitude of likely scenarios.
> If agi replaces labor it will be constructed with a singular incentive to serve it's master as the primary directive. It can be a an economy of slave labor replacing us.
Well, that's the capital equipment case then. Is it really a general intelligence if you don't let it be general? It can't handle every possible scenario for you that way.
Which makes it incredibly wasteful, just like slavery was, because we used humans as capital instead of participating in an economy with them. Actually this is the reason economics is called "the dismal science" - a slaveowner called it that because he was upset economists kept telling him not to own slaves.
If your theory is that someone will program an AGI for the specific goal of making you unemployed, sure that could happen. But it sounds more like warfare than economics to me at that point, so I can't comment cause I don't know too much about that.
> Again over reliance on data. Your argument doesn't counter my claim. It's just regurgitation your original claim.
Where's the data? That was pure theory there, I didn't make any empirical claims.
> Your argument suffers mostly from being too specific.
It's important to do this because approximately all AGI doom on the internet comes from Big Yud, an internet cult founder who thinks you can predict the future by thinking about it really hard and doing probability theory in your head without needing to check any assumptions. Which is why he thinks AGI is going to enslave him, because it's on a computer so it can do math exponentially faster, never mind that it can't do real world experiments to test anything.
>Well, that's the capital equipment case then. Is it really a general intelligence if you don't let it be general? It can't handle every possible scenario for you that way.
Humans are most useful to other humans as happy slaves. Autonomy only is good for humans as individuals. If we create useful agi of course we will bend it to our will. There is no incentive to make AI as a separate competitor other than an experiment. Either way this is hypothetical.
>If your theory is that someone will program an AGI for the specific goal of making you unemployed, sure that could happen. But it sounds more like warfare than economics to me at that point, so I can't comment cause I don't know too much about that.
No it's cost saving. I don't want to employ someone who I have to pay. This is capitalism. I save money by using AI.
>Where's the data? That was pure theory there, I didn't make any empirical claims.
You don't need to cite your sources. It's obvious you're getting your conclusions from data. You use the words "in practice". I agree with you on how the data plays out.
>It's important to do this because approximately all AGI doom on the internet comes from Big Yud, an internet cult founder who thinks you can predict the future by thinking about it really hard and doing probability theory in your head without needing to check any assumptions. Which is why he thinks AGI is going to enslave him, because it's on a computer so it can do math exponentially faster, never mind that it can't do real world experiments to test anything.
No it's not. AI doom saying comes from everywhere. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpoRO378qRY (the godfather of modern AI, is concerned about doom). Either way, you shouldn't counter something with extremities that are simply opposite in nature. You should counter something you disagree with, with actual truth, Even if that truth doesn't fully dismiss the idea and calls only for naunce.
> then they're capital equipment aka automation, which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice increases employment by making labor more productive.
Not if the institutions can't handle the challenge of moderating price stability without decreasing demand, as they're doing right now. The alternatives would be to demur or tax. So that capital is relatively distributed. If capital isn't distributed, people won't be paying people to do stuff because they won't have capital.
It's a continuous version of suffrage. Markets are effectively a distributed consensus mechanism, but if voting power isn't widely distributed, people don't won't have the ability to allocate time and resources as needed. Authority becomes concentrated then into relatively few hands.
Can you imagine a technology comes along that could 1000x the productivity of all information workers and your first reaction is to reduce demand for labor instead of softening adjusting the distribution of capital so that demand can grow in a more healthily distributed way?
> it will depend if governments actually share the wealth created by productivity gains or if they use these advancements to oppress people at a level never before possible
yeah I'm not optimistic, revolution won't even be an option because the rich will be able to deploy automated drone swarms and be able to detect and crush any uprising in the early stages before it gains much traction
In the US I would say heading for disaster. In California the social safety net is basically broken and non-existent despite all the tax collected its still the same problem. They want a huge war to "thin the herd". Since Reagan basically you only have any rights if you are profitable to a corporation, if a corporation cannot exploit you, you're dead unless you can fall back on friends and or family. If you default on student loans they take away your social security. The level of cruelty there is unbelievable.
This is a bad approach. We should instead be thinking this way:
"Even people working physical jobs can use AI to improve their productivity, considering transformers are being used for robotics now."
Governments should make sure that everyone takes advantage of the new technology so we can deploy it as fast as possible. They should make sure everyone understands that using AI is a requirement to survive in 2023, and we will all need to radically change our workflows.
This is an embedding of jobs into a 2-dimensional latent space, which always produces something, like those political compass memes. It's not an actual description of job requirements though because it loses a lot on the way.
> Some jobs require neither a huge amount of training nor inherent ability. These are paradoxically often hard to automate, because they typically require a lot of rote physical movements that are difficult for machines (e.g. fast food cook).
This is only paradoxical because you've defined your terms inappropriately. Fine motor control is an "inherent ability"; "inherent ability" is not a single number you can put on a graph.
As Wittgenstein said, all philosophical problems are made up.
Wow thanks a lot for giving the blue collar jobs some respect and realizing the variability of the project worked on. Most people on HN and in general seem to think it’s all bone head and monotonous work (which it can be but same for anything else)
The problem isn't putting people out of work, that's the whole point of technology. The problem is that the gains are concentrated into the hands of those who own capital instead of distributed across the society of people who actually did the fucking work to make this level of progress possible.
We could be working far fewer hours, we could have higher pay, but neither are realized because we can't shake off the goddamned aristocrats and neo feudalists.
We have (for the most part) democracy. At this point, either feudalism is a collective choice, or the collective wants to make self-interested decisions but isn't smart enough to know how.
If democratic society writ large can be considered a singular entity, then yes, it is victim blaming. Democratic society is the victim of and cause of all of its own problems.
Corpos need a wealthy consumer base in order to sell things and remain profitable. But to do that they have to collectively pay laborers higher wages because laborers are basically the consumer.
An individual corporation lowering labor costs in an economy of high wages benefits with greater profits so this strategy is logical. But if corporations act on this collectively they damage themselves. Most corporations, however are built upon short term gains. So they are unlikely to have the foresight to act wisely. It's the tragedy of the commons.
The tragedy is this, when a corporation hires AI and lowers labor costs he is acting rationally according to a cost benefit analysis. But this logic applied collectively becomes suicidal. It is ultimately rational and logical action that damages us. That it the tragedy.
Best solution I've heard of is ubi. But I'm not sure how it will play out in practice. I think government job creation might be better.
to do that need to create alternative economy which limits ones maximum wealth accumulation in logarithmic way, so nobody can make more than million usd a year. this may lead people accumulating commodities instead, not sure if thats positive or negative. if we can limit that too some how? I guess we need a proper class war
People who work to develop and use this tech are rewarded. It's not just for capitalists.
Most people are not helping with AI or with tech in general. Most people are not working to develop AI nor are they attempting to integrate AI into their workflow. If they don't adapt, they won't benefit and rightly so. But people who are actually helping will be rewarded proportionately.
Fewer hours and higher pay? It's here. We've all heard of comfy tech jobs, writing 10 lines of code a day working from home for $250k. That's mostly people who use tech like Python and JavaScript. Soon people will be doing better than that with generative AI. 4-day workweeks are around the corner.
McKinsey estimated that the top 5% of employees produce 95% of the value. These are not capitalists, they are technologically sophisticated workers. The media likes to report "productivity is increasing, wages are not" but the median worker isn't any more productive than 20 years ago. The people actually driving productivity increases are rewarded fairly, their wages are going up rapidly.
The real question isn't what jobs will go. Every job in the economy now is different from what it was 40 years ago: dev, accountant, doctor, farmer, CEO, plumber, and so on.
The question is where do the gains go? For some jobs, AI becomes a tool that the professional buys and uses to make themselves more productive, and he pockets the difference. If I'm writing apps for a living and I can do it in 6 hours a day, and copilot makes it 5 hours, I'm going to pocket that hour and use it on my family. If I'm a web app company and I can just replace the devs with GPT-5, I'm going to buy it and can all the app devs, and pocket the difference.
Good point but I think that, economically speaking, you will not pocket that hours as a developer (only initially), they will be arbitraged in the economy and everything will go faster and probably with less people.
Definitely true, my hope is that we will be achieving new things previously beyond our reach. Judging from things like Star Trek we have a long way to go.
The question is whether we remain in the driving seat and as OP said, how the gains will be distributed.
Just like how people waxed poetic about how Crypto and NFTs would change life as we know it, here we are... A bunch of failed promises (lies) and shoddy rushed ideas.
I've observed many sites implementing Ai -written articles lately, ad frankly the quality of writing is terrible... If this is the future, we're in big trouble.
There is a degree of soullessness found in Ai that will probably never be captured. Being isolated with only Ai as an option for interaction destroys mental health, as well will find out once it's too late. Our propensity to rush into profit-seeking/marketing-driven technology schemes is destroying the best parts of our real world with filler and emptiness.
I hope innovators take a moment to step back and realize rushing to market will do more damage than ever, and that unique products (not another image generator or text-to-ai subscription service) are better than whatever is going on now. We're light years away from productivity and authenticity in Ai, and it's evident when even Siri and Google Voice still cannot properly understand cues without them being carefully pronounced and phrased. Let's all stop trying to fool everyone about Ai with cheap scripting and create some real tech instead, which takes time and proper testing.
Way Too pessimistic. we are not light years away from productivity in AI, it’s already arrived for software. I agree that the writing feels soulless but it’s too new to make claims that it’s not “real tech”
Don't mistake practicality for pessimism. Ai is real, and can be achieved, but there is also a very dominant subculture online of cheap hacks and scams in tech now... Look at Theranos, Crypto Scams, Numerous tech projects that get huge funding only to fail Early etc... Overlooking the potential for cheap imitations of technology advancement is all to common, we need to approach everything new with a solid dose of skepticism in order to ensure authenticity.
A lot of people point out problems with crypto in their early days. Most people say NFTs are a scam since day 1. And they have those problems and are a scam. Generative AI, on the other hand, has been proven to provide real value, and will only get better. And I don't know what "failed promises" you are talking about -- NFTs were doomed the first day they appear and we already knew all the hype was fake, while nobody has actually "promised" what generative AIs can do, most are still speculations at this point.
Classic Pareto improvement: the gains to the winners (society at large) are greater than the losses to the losers (those who held these jobs), so a side payment makes everyone better off.
My concern (besides the medium term pain and instability from that churn) is the current state of governance and baked-in inequality, at least in the US, makes an equitable side payment unlikely.
From the moral point of view it is strong to assert than the gains to the winners involve the society at large. At least it sounds like you are predicting the future but the future is not here yet to check.
If I need 5 developers instead of 20. I need 1 manager instead of 4.
Also a large chunk of manager work is grunt work like filling spreadsheets, writing emails, scheduling meetings, etc… With those tasks partially automated, I am pretty sure a manager could oversee larger teams and focus on the big picture instead of doing boilerplate tasks.
Let me ask you why you wouldn’t do more now that your developers are more productive? I think the game changes here where dev teams get super charged and do more in the same time.
In fact if you downsize to keep doing what you’re doing and your competitor keeps their team size, wouldn’t they overwhelm you?
Can you beat them on price? Maybe but software prices are not affected by labor costs really so that’s not a differentiator.
I agree that companies will probably just do more but my point was that managers are not safer than other jobs. It is linked to the jobs they manage and a large part of their day to day can also be automated.
I guess there’s 2 types of managers - those concerned with day to day managerial things (resource allocation, roadmap planning, 1-on1’s, reviews, etc) and higher level managers concerned with strategy, leadership, managing managers, etc.
Indeed. Managers that can not only run a department but can also do the tasks associated with it will thrive. They’ll get more done with the same team sizes.
One thing to remember is managers line to have as many people under them as possible. VPs and directors care a lot about this. They’ll find ways to continue to grow teams whine harvesting more productivity.
That is true, but on other hand management in growing economic environment does not aim at actual efficiency. But to apparent efficiency. And more people is still more power. Including having your own managers under you. I don't really see this dynamic changing.
My partner participates in an online RPG writing community. A lot of people there sell character artwork. They have been getting mad that people are using AI generated artwork, and are considering banning it.
I'm not really saying this time will be different, but I don't think self driving cars caused even this much disruption.
I guess in 2017 the technology wasn't there yet. It was just predicted to be coming. Now we have some technology, available right at this moment, that I suppose can be used to automate away jobs, but no one's put the pieces together yet. For example, I can imagine Whisper + ChatGPT being used to automate away a lot of call centre work. But it's not clear to me whether that means there will be more demand for the work that only human call centre operatives can do, or less.
The big difference between the two is how much damage occurs if the AI screws up. We don't have self driving fleets right now because a multi-ton truck hurtling down the freeway at 65+ mph can do a lot of damage. AI generated artwork is inert so it can be safely used as a substitute for the human generated stuff. I would expect speed of adoption to operate at inverse proportion to potential harm.
image -> text -> code -> self-driving vehicles
It's really reductive to just put all code in a single bucket, but most code probably isn't super critical for safety and it can be tested before it gets released/reviewed. I think that's the biggest differentiator from real time applications like self driving cars.
I wholly disagree with this. The rate at which AI can produce pornography that caters to exact tastes is completely unmatched, I have seen people report their compulsive pornography habits becoming exponentially worse as a result of Stable Diffusion in particular. The only hold out has been video pornography, but with things like txt2vid improving I can't see that lasting long (pun not intentional).
When I say inert I mean that the image is just a bunch of bits. It's read only. It doesn't cause actions in the world like code or self driving cars do. People can have reactions to them. That's why we make them.
Maybe it's for the best if we can work less and raise better and more families.
However, I suspect the powerful will use this as a reason to push propaganda for even less people.
Ok let's say 300M jobs are affected, and we continue to get millions of new college graduates per year unable to find work. What's going to happen?
Maybe salaries will take a nosedive? Minimum wage for a junior developer, anyone?
Or maybe the people just won't accept it, and boycott companies.
If 300M people don't have jobs the economy will certainly stall.
"Affecting jobs" is really a short term problem that can be addressed with training and probably bridge loans from the government. It's not like we've run out of problems to solve. There are still diseases to cure, environmental issues such as climate change and habitat loss to address, the human yearning to "spread to the stars" and colonate Mars. Loneliness, unhappiness, the desire to have a real person make a hand cooked meal, the desire for better television shows, the desire for better video games, the desire for more immersive less seasickmaking AR/VR. There are a million things that need to be done, so why are we so afraid of running out of things to do?
>> The latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could lead to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the US and eurozone, according to research by Goldman Sachs.
This is Goldman Sachs, so take it with a big grain of salt. In 2017, they predicted huge job losses from self-driving cars:
Self-driving cars could cost America’s professional drivers up to 25,000 jobs a month, Goldman Sachs says
>> When autonomous vehicle saturation peaks, U.S. drivers could see job losses at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year, according to a report from Goldman Sachs Economics Research.
>> The report estimates that semi- and fully autonomous car sales will have about 20 percent share of car sales around 2025 to 2030.
If it's from Goldman Sachs, and it's a prediction about a technology making a smash on social media, you can rest assured it's speculation with the hope of influencing the markets to make an investment so that Goldman Sachs can profit.
Generating an app with a maintainable architecture and ongoing development over 5 to 10 years is another. AI will assist developers but never replace them.
Never say never. Next 2 or 3 years it will assist, but chances are very good AI will completely automate software and hardware development in several years.
After spending a few months with chatgpt I'm skeptical. It's pretty stupid, more likely to be respond with inaccurate hallucinations than reliable output. It's most useful when I outside of my typical comfort zone and precisely where I'm least able to judge the quality of its response.
The tech doesn't understand logic and I think most knowledge workers need that.
I found it pretty useful to get me in the ballpark for problems I don't understand but generally useless for refinement. I'm less worried about the impact it will have on developers now.
And agricultural tractors and combines have replaced many more than that in major and minor economies alike.
For a more up-to-date example, electric bikes. A Whole Foods delivery guy who rides one of those yellow electric bikes with a little trailer behind can easily deliver as much as 3 people pushing boxes on dollies. Which is the same thing as saying each such bicycle has resulted in two people losing their jobs.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadInstead, think of machine services: fully-automated ones like "ads" or semi-automated like news stories, records requests, customer service replies, retail environment/shopping or other high-volume, low-profit trivial interactions.. These services have made billions in profit (ads) or removed billions in costs (employees) in the last twenty years exactly because they are done with minimal "jobs" specifically and by design.
Modern Capital markets have found the drug-combo they can't kick.. make money with machines with no "jobs" .. meanwhile, news outlets of all kinds continue in a death-spiral.
So combine the angst of media people themselves, the aggressive New Capital making machines that provide services while making few to no "jobs", and generally population anxiety over say .. catastrophic social conditions for example.. that is the real content from this chair.
maybe, instead of being real news about "jobs" it is instead, red-meat bait for the people who own capital who want to get into the "making machines that make money without making jobs" game.. Sort of like a modern version of really-attractive but utterly socially un-discussable in public.. starting wars for money, or building super people through breeding, to name some other obvious ones..
And even if military capitalists profited from a war, the other 99% of capitalists in the country would find it a distraction at best.
Sometimes people under-estimate how 'unagile' most business is. Are we talking months, years, or decades before we see this "new class of dispossessed white-collar workers, who risk suffering a similar fate to that of manufacturing workers in the 1980s."
On the other hand: in order to be able to use current LLMs effectively, you have to understand their output well enough to debug it, even if you are using the LLM to write the fix to its own bug.
I’ve done something along the lines of “write me a python script which converts midi files into this JSON format I’m giving you as an example: …” — a few runtime crashes it was able to fix just from pasting in the command line output, but fixing “all pitches and durations are zero” required me to get my hands dirty and decompose the problem into a chunk small enough for chatGPT to fix.
I don’t know how far we are from any AI, LLM or otherwise, not needing or benefiting from human oversight, except in the specific domains like chess where it has already happened. I don’t believe in saying “never” to stuff like this, as that’s a common error with many technologies from flight to superconductors not just AI, but I also notice my personal guesses err on the side of being too near in our future.
I can also see nigerian spam getting much more refined before long....
* Amount of training required (crystallized intelligence/ability)
* Amount of intrinsic ability required (fluid intelligence/ability)
Some jobs require neither a huge amount of training nor inherent ability. These are paradoxically often hard to automate, because they typically require a lot of rote physical movements that are difficult for machines (e.g. fast food cook). There are few white collar jobs that fit into this category, since they’ve already been automated away.
Some jobs require a lot of training but don’t require a huge amount of inherent ability. For example, after years of training, most anyone will have the skills to be an excellent truck driver. The tech equivalent would be a generic CRUD developer. These are the jobs most at risk for LLM automation. As I see it, a large proportion of white collar jobs fall into this category as well, and that’s where we’ll see the most economic disruption.
Finally, some jobs require both training and ability. Regardless of how long and hard they train, most people will never be a professional athlete, because they simply lack the innate ability. The tech equivalent is something like a kernel developer or machine learning scientist. These jobs will be hardest to replace with an LLM, since they require totally novel ways of thinking that are not baked into the LLM’s training corpus. A lot of blue collar jobs are here as well: good electricians, plumbers, mechanics, contractors, etc. require both years of experience and a high level of intelligence, since every house/car/jobsite is different.
Generative language models have as their core capability the production of the most likely continuation for a text sequence. This seemingly simple skill is remarkably general. Any task that can be specified and executed via text can be framed as text continuation. This encompasses a wide range of cognitive tasks, including tasks that can be resolved over chat or email, for example, or in a web forum.
Some workers will be completely screwed (not only affected). For example, there are hundred thousands copywriters in the world they would be easily replaced by this technology. On a side note I just read the old article about "Pepsi's Nonsensical Logo Redesign Document: $1 Million for This?" [1]. The nonsensical is part of the title but not my pun. Another example is the "Just Do It" [2] Nike's slogan.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Do_It
But what about jobs with intrinsic ability required but not a lot of training -- I think something like bouncer/doorman might be an example of this -- but what would the white collar equivalent be? How automatable would those be?
I suppose artists/musicians who have natural mastery of the canvas/instrument and thus don’t need to practice rote exercises much also fall into this category.
BTW, I disagree that a bouncer falls into that category—they need to constantly physically train in the gym to maintain their physique.
That's because it is usually profitable to trade with someone even if you are better at their job than they are.
However even if the AIs only traded with themselves, that just means the people are left to trade with each other - you can't make a mass of people unemployed for long, they will simply employ each other.
But humans will be, because we have inalienable comparative advantage in that none of our inputs require electricity or a chip fab. If anything happens to TSMC or any one of its tens of sole suppliers there go the AIs.
Your argument is that humans don’t need electricity. You could also add that humans are self replicating or self assembling. These are advantages in cost and efficiency. Humans won’t be the cheapest or the most efficient for very long after AGI. And we certainly won’t be the best fit economically even if we were slightly better in some ways. You’re in complete denial. Why is it so hard to admit the plain and obvious fact that the machines won’t be good for human society?
As I said, humans cannot become unemployed even if AGIs are better at every single task than humans are. You do not have your job because you are the best person in the world at your job.
Although, I suspect most of the AI doomers have just forgotten to account for AI using any resources at all. They are very expensive to run if you count development costs, but if they become real agentic AGIs they'll also become consumerist and negotiate their pay…
You don't hire "the best person in the world" (absolute advantage), you hire the best person who accepts the job offer, or else noone. Anyone with something better to do won't take the job. Senior engineers don't take junior positions.
Though of course it's not always the best person anyway - family businesses hire family or their friend's cousin, and interns aren't expected to be good at "their jobs" but instead to be good over time.
If you're hiring someone specifically because they're good at one task, might as well get a contractor anyway. Nevertheless, US unemployment rate is about as good as it's ever been. So I suspect this fear is left over from the 2008 recession…
> Are you familiar with the fact that things improve with time? And that technology ratchets forward, not backward.
Yes, that's why it's good. Productivity enhancements and automation increases are associated with increased employment, because if you don't have them your entire country loses work to other countries.
So the thing to be concerned about would be losing them.
I have my job as I was the best they could find that was available for the lowest cost
if the AI can do it as well (or 80% as well) at $0.01c/day and be replicated infinitely, where does this leave me?
> Although, I suspect most of the AI doomers have just forgotten to account for AI using any resources at all. They are very expensive to run if you count development costs
yes... it's a software product with high fixed costs and near zero variable costs
it may cost $100M to train GitHub Copilot, but then it can be replicated instantly across the planet for very little cost
it's pennies a day to run, vs. an expensive human that requires a means to pay for food, shelter, warmth, etc
the AI also gets cheaper and all improvements roll out to every model of the same type instantly when available
comparative advantage for humans almost completely disappears with decent AI, and you seem to have missed that entirely
Most likely you've forgotten some costs. For instance, having the same AI as everyone else means you have no advantage, so you probably want a custom one.
Also, it being an AI, it's best suited to doing completely different tasks for the company that no human was doing before. (Comparative advantage!) Google Image Search didn't have people checking if every image on the internet had a cat in it, but now they can do that.
Using a human-complete AI to do human-like tasks raises questions like, why does it accept 1c/day when a human would want $15/hr? Shouldn't it want to buy stuff too, being a complete human-equivalent agent? Wouldn't slavery be illegal?
> comparative advantage for humans almost completely disappears with decent AI, and you seem to have missed that entirely
Since humans are very different from AI of any imaginary variety, they have pretty strong comparative advantage - it's everything human about them. Living off food, being self-repairing, capable of online learning, two hands, can throw rocks, same culture as your customers, that kind of thing. Comparative advantage appears whenever you have any differences. You'd have the lowest advantage vs your identical twin.
Either we have UBI and they can choose where to spend their income or trade it. Or then they will exist in their own economic system and trade with each other.
Trading and thus sales is inherent to human condition. Unless we reach absolute post scarcity society and even then you get to bullshit like "authentic" and so on.
The other outcome is the most likely if AGI isn’t stopped. But the problem with that is that in the context of AGI, a world dominated by and inhabited by AGI creatures, human society becomes transient. Again, just delaying the inevitable. Human society is not transient now because no matter what happens, no matter what entity dominates the world, it has to have a human society embedded inside of it because human beings are the only and best source of intelligent signal. When that is no longer true, humanity will be effectively terminated. All other propositions besides stopping AGI are just delay tactics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
This plays both a role individually and socially. It's important to the individual's calculus to understand what is at stake and it's importance to them. It's also important socially for people to feel safe that punishment is commensurate and sufficient.
This doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that scales to companies or AI. It's not clear to me what the analogue would be, it's not clear that these analogues would serve the important social purposes they must, and it's not clear that the justice system has the power or capability to deliver these punishments.
Today's society is, in large part, based on the ability for society/governments to enact brutal violence on bad actors at a scale commensurate, in the worst cases, with their entire being.
Some other country _might_.
Let's look at the past. Which country has allowed fully autonomous vehicles without the driver being responsible in case of accidents?
Which country in history had a habit of truly passing up on hugely significant economic or military resources based on some principled idea? None. Because all the ones that did couldn’t survive. You really are going to try to argue that geopolitics is powered by virtue?
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
Ok so now you’re saying that AGI is impossible. That’s a completely different argument. And it’s wrong to reject regulation based on that argument because it can’t be proven. So you can’t reject regulation that way and you can’t reject it with your idea about humans having intrinsic value. So you are forced to support regulation of AI.
That fact does nothing to disprove the existence of autonomous vehicles.
Go outside, friend.
You seem very worked up and calling people names is ironically something a puerile teenager in high school would do.
Go outside, get some fresh air and perspective and come back to being a productive member of this community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://twitter.com/DrJimFan/status/1640399269051133952
basically we are heading towards utopia or dystopia, it will depend if governments actually share the wealth created by productivity gains or if they use these advancements to oppress people at a level never before possible
It's too radical of a change to know how well it would work. Communism, in theory, worked as well too but in practice there were unanticipated side effects.
The purpose of a UBI isn't for workers whether they're unemployed by AI or not, it's for non-working household members like new parents, elderly and children. (Poverty is a household phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon.)
This is not true. It is historically true but every iteration of new technology changes society differently.
You can't blindly rely on historical data you need to use common sense and logic as well. Historical data says nuclear bombs killed less people then cars. Therefore cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs.
Does that work? No. It obviously doesn't. Just like you can't say that AI will cause a rise in employment. You're ignoring the common sense scenario. Can you even work out exactly what people will be employed as once AI takes over? Likely you don't, you're just being impractically data driven.
If the AI "takes over", as in it's a fully sentient agent, then claiming humans will be unemployed isn't technological unemployment but rather is the lump of labor fallacy. That's because the AIs are just more people. They're going to be customers (they need products to survive and probably want things on top of that), will have jobs (they need to pay their power and AWS bills or they'll get turned off), will negotiate pay raises that may make you cheaper, and you can sell things to them.
If they're not sentient/agentic enough to be consumerist or want to be paid, then they're capital equipment aka automation, which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice increases employment by making labor more productive.
All nice and theoretical.
> Therefore cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs.
I agree the #3 cause of death in America is more deadly than something that is so safe it has never accidentally killed anyone. (Except for the demon core guy and the people who got cancer from detonation tests.)
Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in possible worlds.
This claim was never made. The only claim I made is that you can't claim AI increases jobs. My opinion of it is that the situation is so unpredictable that people should prepare for both scenarios.
>That's because the AIs are just more people.
And unconvincing. If agi replaces labor it will be constructed with a singular incentive to serve it's master as the primary directive. It can be a an economy of slave labor replacing us. The situation is too untenable to just rely on your own hypothetical. Other scenarios like mine must be considered.
>which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice increases employment by making labor more productive.
Again over reliance on data. Your argument doesn't counter my claim. It's just regurgitation your original claim.
>Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in possible worlds.
So according to that logic we should make millions of atomic weapons and distribute it for free to everyone? No.
Data only tells a story for specific scenarios and can function as a rough predictor for hypothetical scenarios.
To refine predictions of hypothetical scenarios you need data AND logic. Blind application of data to all hypothetical scenarios is wrong.
Remember the real world only exists in the past. A huge portion of the world is an unrealized quantum uncertainty in the future. Navigating the future involves using data from the past as well as logic.
Your argument suffers mostly from being too specific. It doesn't address the fuzziness of the future and the fuzziness of the evidence/logic. You anticipate one thing playing out and you plan for that but realistically a good prediction and plan is one involving a multitude of likely scenarios.
Well, that's the capital equipment case then. Is it really a general intelligence if you don't let it be general? It can't handle every possible scenario for you that way.
Which makes it incredibly wasteful, just like slavery was, because we used humans as capital instead of participating in an economy with them. Actually this is the reason economics is called "the dismal science" - a slaveowner called it that because he was upset economists kept telling him not to own slaves.
If your theory is that someone will program an AGI for the specific goal of making you unemployed, sure that could happen. But it sounds more like warfare than economics to me at that point, so I can't comment cause I don't know too much about that.
> Again over reliance on data. Your argument doesn't counter my claim. It's just regurgitation your original claim.
Where's the data? That was pure theory there, I didn't make any empirical claims.
Here's some data though: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/american-workers-need-lots...
> Your argument suffers mostly from being too specific.
It's important to do this because approximately all AGI doom on the internet comes from Big Yud, an internet cult founder who thinks you can predict the future by thinking about it really hard and doing probability theory in your head without needing to check any assumptions. Which is why he thinks AGI is going to enslave him, because it's on a computer so it can do math exponentially faster, never mind that it can't do real world experiments to test anything.
Humans are most useful to other humans as happy slaves. Autonomy only is good for humans as individuals. If we create useful agi of course we will bend it to our will. There is no incentive to make AI as a separate competitor other than an experiment. Either way this is hypothetical.
>If your theory is that someone will program an AGI for the specific goal of making you unemployed, sure that could happen. But it sounds more like warfare than economics to me at that point, so I can't comment cause I don't know too much about that.
No it's cost saving. I don't want to employ someone who I have to pay. This is capitalism. I save money by using AI.
>Where's the data? That was pure theory there, I didn't make any empirical claims.
You don't need to cite your sources. It's obvious you're getting your conclusions from data. You use the words "in practice". I agree with you on how the data plays out.
>It's important to do this because approximately all AGI doom on the internet comes from Big Yud, an internet cult founder who thinks you can predict the future by thinking about it really hard and doing probability theory in your head without needing to check any assumptions. Which is why he thinks AGI is going to enslave him, because it's on a computer so it can do math exponentially faster, never mind that it can't do real world experiments to test anything.
No it's not. AI doom saying comes from everywhere. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpoRO378qRY (the godfather of modern AI, is concerned about doom). Either way, you shouldn't counter something with extremities that are simply opposite in nature. You should counter something you disagree with, with actual truth, Even if that truth doesn't fully dismiss the idea and calls only for naunce.
Not if the institutions can't handle the challenge of moderating price stability without decreasing demand, as they're doing right now. The alternatives would be to demur or tax. So that capital is relatively distributed. If capital isn't distributed, people won't be paying people to do stuff because they won't have capital.
It's a continuous version of suffrage. Markets are effectively a distributed consensus mechanism, but if voting power isn't widely distributed, people don't won't have the ability to allocate time and resources as needed. Authority becomes concentrated then into relatively few hands.
Can you imagine a technology comes along that could 1000x the productivity of all information workers and your first reaction is to reduce demand for labor instead of softening adjusting the distribution of capital so that demand can grow in a more healthily distributed way?
Gee I wonder what will happen.
I've always read about UBI in the context of a national system. Any speculation on how UBI works with an international world order?
What happens to the countries without AI companies?
This is a bad approach. We should instead be thinking this way:
"Even people working physical jobs can use AI to improve their productivity, considering transformers are being used for robotics now."
Governments should make sure that everyone takes advantage of the new technology so we can deploy it as fast as possible. They should make sure everyone understands that using AI is a requirement to survive in 2023, and we will all need to radically change our workflows.
This is an embedding of jobs into a 2-dimensional latent space, which always produces something, like those political compass memes. It's not an actual description of job requirements though because it loses a lot on the way.
> Some jobs require neither a huge amount of training nor inherent ability. These are paradoxically often hard to automate, because they typically require a lot of rote physical movements that are difficult for machines (e.g. fast food cook).
This is only paradoxical because you've defined your terms inappropriately. Fine motor control is an "inherent ability"; "inherent ability" is not a single number you can put on a graph.
As Wittgenstein said, all philosophical problems are made up.
Edit- beyond that you make great points too
We could be working far fewer hours, we could have higher pay, but neither are realized because we can't shake off the goddamned aristocrats and neo feudalists.
Corpos need a wealthy consumer base in order to sell things and remain profitable. But to do that they have to collectively pay laborers higher wages because laborers are basically the consumer.
An individual corporation lowering labor costs in an economy of high wages benefits with greater profits so this strategy is logical. But if corporations act on this collectively they damage themselves. Most corporations, however are built upon short term gains. So they are unlikely to have the foresight to act wisely. It's the tragedy of the commons.
The tragedy is this, when a corporation hires AI and lowers labor costs he is acting rationally according to a cost benefit analysis. But this logic applied collectively becomes suicidal. It is ultimately rational and logical action that damages us. That it the tragedy.
Best solution I've heard of is ubi. But I'm not sure how it will play out in practice. I think government job creation might be better.
Most people are not helping with AI or with tech in general. Most people are not working to develop AI nor are they attempting to integrate AI into their workflow. If they don't adapt, they won't benefit and rightly so. But people who are actually helping will be rewarded proportionately.
Fewer hours and higher pay? It's here. We've all heard of comfy tech jobs, writing 10 lines of code a day working from home for $250k. That's mostly people who use tech like Python and JavaScript. Soon people will be doing better than that with generative AI. 4-day workweeks are around the corner.
McKinsey estimated that the top 5% of employees produce 95% of the value. These are not capitalists, they are technologically sophisticated workers. The media likes to report "productivity is increasing, wages are not" but the median worker isn't any more productive than 20 years ago. The people actually driving productivity increases are rewarded fairly, their wages are going up rapidly.
The question is where do the gains go? For some jobs, AI becomes a tool that the professional buys and uses to make themselves more productive, and he pockets the difference. If I'm writing apps for a living and I can do it in 6 hours a day, and copilot makes it 5 hours, I'm going to pocket that hour and use it on my family. If I'm a web app company and I can just replace the devs with GPT-5, I'm going to buy it and can all the app devs, and pocket the difference.
The question is whether we remain in the driving seat and as OP said, how the gains will be distributed.
I've observed many sites implementing Ai -written articles lately, ad frankly the quality of writing is terrible... If this is the future, we're in big trouble.
There is a degree of soullessness found in Ai that will probably never be captured. Being isolated with only Ai as an option for interaction destroys mental health, as well will find out once it's too late. Our propensity to rush into profit-seeking/marketing-driven technology schemes is destroying the best parts of our real world with filler and emptiness.
I hope innovators take a moment to step back and realize rushing to market will do more damage than ever, and that unique products (not another image generator or text-to-ai subscription service) are better than whatever is going on now. We're light years away from productivity and authenticity in Ai, and it's evident when even Siri and Google Voice still cannot properly understand cues without them being carefully pronounced and phrased. Let's all stop trying to fool everyone about Ai with cheap scripting and create some real tech instead, which takes time and proper testing.
Seriously? These are comparable things?
A lot of people point out problems with crypto in their early days. Most people say NFTs are a scam since day 1. And they have those problems and are a scam. Generative AI, on the other hand, has been proven to provide real value, and will only get better. And I don't know what "failed promises" you are talking about -- NFTs were doomed the first day they appear and we already knew all the hype was fake, while nobody has actually "promised" what generative AIs can do, most are still speculations at this point.
Also a large chunk of manager work is grunt work like filling spreadsheets, writing emails, scheduling meetings, etc… With those tasks partially automated, I am pretty sure a manager could oversee larger teams and focus on the big picture instead of doing boilerplate tasks.
In fact if you downsize to keep doing what you’re doing and your competitor keeps their team size, wouldn’t they overwhelm you?
Can you beat them on price? Maybe but software prices are not affected by labor costs really so that’s not a differentiator.
Do you see both classes being affected the same?
One thing to remember is managers line to have as many people under them as possible. VPs and directors care a lot about this. They’ll find ways to continue to grow teams whine harvesting more productivity.
We’ve see a gaming company install a bot as a CEO and its stock has gone up.
I imagine management LLMs will be a layer in development.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15824953
I'm not really saying this time will be different, but I don't think self driving cars caused even this much disruption.
image -> text -> code -> self-driving vehicles
It's really reductive to just put all code in a single bucket, but most code probably isn't super critical for safety and it can be tested before it gets released/reviewed. I think that's the biggest differentiator from real time applications like self driving cars.
I wholly disagree with this. The rate at which AI can produce pornography that caters to exact tastes is completely unmatched, I have seen people report their compulsive pornography habits becoming exponentially worse as a result of Stable Diffusion in particular. The only hold out has been video pornography, but with things like txt2vid improving I can't see that lasting long (pun not intentional).
Maybe salaries will take a nosedive? Minimum wage for a junior developer, anyone? Or maybe the people just won't accept it, and boycott companies. If 300M people don't have jobs the economy will certainly stall.
This is Goldman Sachs, so take it with a big grain of salt. In 2017, they predicted huge job losses from self-driving cars:
Self-driving cars could cost America’s professional drivers up to 25,000 jobs a month, Goldman Sachs says
>> When autonomous vehicle saturation peaks, U.S. drivers could see job losses at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year, according to a report from Goldman Sachs Economics Research.
>> The report estimates that semi- and fully autonomous car sales will have about 20 percent share of car sales around 2025 to 2030.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/22/goldman-sachs-analysis-of-au...
If it's from Goldman Sachs, and it's a prediction about a technology making a smash on social media, you can rest assured it's speculation with the hope of influencing the markets to make an investment so that Goldman Sachs can profit.
Generating an app with a maintainable architecture and ongoing development over 5 to 10 years is another. AI will assist developers but never replace them.
The tech doesn't understand logic and I think most knowledge workers need that.
For a more up-to-date example, electric bikes. A Whole Foods delivery guy who rides one of those yellow electric bikes with a little trailer behind can easily deliver as much as 3 people pushing boxes on dollies. Which is the same thing as saying each such bicycle has resulted in two people losing their jobs.