> GPT4 gave the correct answer in 1/10th the time it would take Priya and cost a lot less. [...] Priya has tried to learn coding, but she has struggled. Not that she gets a lot of time to do it either.
1) Show Priya how to use GPT4 to do her current job in 1/10th of the time.
2) Let her use part (50%+) of the time saved to learn coding or whatever other skill she needs (not sure coding is it).
Train people to use GPT-related tech to become superhuman team members. You can do it all yourself, sure, but that doesn't scale. You can either train GPT-tech to use GPT to scale or train humans. Right now, reliability is the most difficult issue, so humans are essentially to ensuring the results are correct.
Humans are useful for training future iterations of the closed source thinking model. Once the model is sophisticated enough to train itself humans will no longer be required.
Historically, in these situations your business is either about to become obsolete or is about to have much more competition. You could hire people to do the new tasks required to thrive, but it’s easier to retrain people you already know and who want to work for you.
It actually much easier to hire people who already have the skillset and pay them 5-10% more than they are making because of salary compression and inversion.
Let's be realistic here though: a big chunk of that is that there are plenty of people who decide they'll simply ignore the new direction, or they're too old to adapt with the times, and curmudgeon about it until someone's hand is forced.
That’s only true during stable times or when more mature markets are casting off that type of employee. Or, I suppose, if a company is incapable of understanding employees’ aptitudes behind their skills.
It’s also possible, like a lot of skilled knowledge work, they’re greatly constrained on talent relative to potential work. I think something folks don’t get is that AI is going to allow a lot more of everything to be done, and will still need humans to guide it. I suspect it’ll be a bit like the calculator and it’s acceleration of math fields. Human calculators became less useful, but humans could do much more math and I’d argue power tools don’t eliminate jobs, they allow the people that exist do 10x the work allowing 10x to be achieved with the same people. I think it’s cynical to think a rising tide sinks all boats.
Is that true? The last few centuries have shown a near continuous improvement in the standard of living, particularly at the lower end of the distribution.
I think your windows are larger than mine. The Industrial Revolution did not improve standard of living for the people crushed in the gears, both metaphorical and physical. Remember: it was not until the modern age, almost but not quite within living memory, where cities were not a sink for population. Cities were places where normal people died and died ugly for most of human history, and much of the migration to them has historically been out of desperation.
Eventually, improvements through both technological means but also political ones (worker action says hi) did make things on-net better, but we live in the now and the now is going to simply vaporize an impossibly large set of jobs, particularly in developing countries. Turning one person into an LLM driver to lay off four or nine is not a net benefit.
As just one example: with modern text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and AI parsing, how much of every call center can just go away? Eight of ten? Nine? I have no idea, but it's a lot, and we have neither time nor inclination to prepare, globally or locally, for this.
(edit to add: the most appalling part of this oncoming train, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is just how shitty a future this one wants so desperately to be. A LLM-driven chatbot or phone system doesn't get tired. It doesn't get "too expensive" to continue to obstruct you and to stiff you. Not only is this primed to seriously hurt people who are below the API, but it's going to make the world suck more for the rest of us, too. Like, sure, "it makes writing code marginally easier"--it's going to make getting a refund for a messed-up Comcast bill an exercise in pain. That doesn't remotely net out, code's already easy enough.)
Depends. How do you measure it and how much further back? Because, in the short term and in some ways, yeah, it was, insofar as small agriculture was kinda collapsing and large agriculture was starting to consolidate. A big driver of the move to cities in the Industrial Revolution was both climate and political/economic forces making even subsistence farming much harder to do than before, which incentivized urban migration. (The political/economic drivers of urbanization are as old as civilization; Roman indigents flocked to Rome because farming was hard and getting harder, when their lands weren't being seized and they weren't being outright turfed out. Egyptian grain becoming the dole of Rome attracted people without any other options. Again--cities as population sinks.)
So in some ways, and in the short term, the Industrial Revolution was better than just-plain-starving, sure. But most of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution accrued to everyone else and the mangled limbs accrued to the poor. It wasn't without significant worker action (and the requisite workers-getting-beat-to-shit-and-killed) that their lot improved materially.
Is subsistence or subsistence+ farming hard? Absolutely. Mind-bogglingly so. But the Industrial Revolution was fucking bad for the people caught at the bottom. Like--read Dickens.
I tend to think we have such global largesse that we could do better. But we won't, and a lot of the commentariat here cheers for never doing better.
> Cities were places where normal people died and died ugly for most of human history, and much of the migration to them has historically been out of desperation.
I think that captures some of the contradiction in your claims. Yes, cities could be terrible places to live and work. Yet people have moved to them throughout recent history because the alternative is worse.
That said, I don’t disagree with your point that there will be pain associated with this technological jump. I dont know of there will be more or less than with previous jumps. There are some interesting considerations.
One, this one hits knowledge workers who are in the middle class, instead of hitting those who use muscle or hand labor. That may change the outcome.
Two, governments are much more sophisticated and have much better policy tools to deal with disruption. While that doesn’t fix the root, it can help to prevent compounding problems and soften the impact.
Three, the tools that are doing the disrupting appear to be near zero marginal cost, which is different than say a factory which improved efficiency with a large up-front capital investment. This factor probably will make it worse, but I can see possibilities of it making this change less painful too.
Fourth, it isn’t really clear how this will play out. It kinda feels like we have seen the first demonstrations of a steam engine, and are trying to predict the course of the Industrial Revolution.
> I think that captures some of the contradiction in your claims. Yes, cities could be terrible places to live and work. Yet people have moved to them throughout recent history because the alternative is worse.
I think this is a misreading. People who had options didn't urbanize until they had to. When a family had too many sons to split and or when Roman aristocrats or English magnates pushed people off their land or when a bad climate situation made farming impractical, people moved--but it's a very, very recent historical development to urbanize (en masse) when other choices exist.
Yes, the alternatives have been worse and so industrial urbanization became more appealing than starving. Who the hell made them worse and whose progenitors now control the capital needed to destroy ever more labor?
(Don't take not addressing the rest as dismissal--your other points are all within a coherent universe, they're just techno-optimism that I have no reason to share so I have nothing to say to them.)
Based on this and other posts, I think you are saying not that technological progress is bad, but that we as a society fail to take full advantage of the opportunity that could come from the advances.
And of course you are right. But that’s a societal problem, not a technology problem. I would call if societal-optimism to hope that human nature will go away and collective action problems will suddenly disappear, and all boats will be lifted equally.
This is entirely untrue. People left their share cropping farms to work in the factories precisely because it improved their standard of living. Just because it isn’t an improvement over yours doesn’t make it an improvement over theirs. Factory owners paid enough to incentivize people to work there, just like in any other capitalist structure. AFAIK there were no forced labor conditions in industrial England.
You missed the union wars to ensure that we didn't fall back into a techno-feudalism. I'm sure we're all looking forward for the Amazon Wars with a billion percent more killer drones to put down worker rights.
I once read a shocking statistic that children of the poor in London during the Industrial Revolution were 6 inches shorter than children of the rich. What raised the standard of living was bloody, persistent labor revolt. It wasn't pretty and as your comment shows it has been mostly forgotten.
And yet families flocked to work in factories because conditions they left were that much worse. Everything is relative, and they can’t judge their situation from yours - they had to choose based on their situation.
> It’s also possible, like a lot of skilled knowledge work, they’re greatly constrained on talent relative to potential work.
Yep. If I have 10 people doing Job X, then ChatGPT makes a person doing Job X ten times more productive, I can fire 9 people doing job X and retain the same output, which gives me a temporary profit boost. But wait! My competitor also had 10 people doing Job X, and now they're producing ten times the output of my company!
If ChatGPT/Copilot X made developers working at my company twice as productive, I wouldn't be thinking about firing half of them, I would be thinking about which of the 8000 features and improvements on our backlog we could finally prioritize...
So workers are 10x more productive! Are there not enough papers to annotate? The writer still needs a specialist to make sure the LLM is going the right thing.
Aren’t the comparisons to blue collar labor a little much here?
If I hire 10 people to dig the ditches, and then I get a backhoe, yes, one guy is needed to dig the ditch.
But backhoes are expensive investments, LLMs are not.
LLMs gives everyone of those ditch diggers a backhoe. Now I have an army of backhoes! Unless the world runs out of a need for ditches, time to start a ditch digging empire.
Interesting. Who's going to buy products and services? 1/10th of the remaining employees? What would happen with to the 9/10 unemployed people? Imagine a really big chunk of the human population trying to digest the idea of not being able to work, eat, feed their families, etc...
The industrial revolution switched work from almost exclusively manual labor to a more intellectual one while improving manual labor itself (better tools, etc.).
This one is cranking up a notch times 100 by trying to replace basically the human out of the equation altogether (This is the end goal of automation).
Exactly, while there is some merit to the article's argument, I don't think it holds any water in this case. GPT4 will lie to you [0] and you need the human to figure out when that's the case.
> you need the human to figure out when that's the case
Do you? I mean, you and I think you do in order to do a good job, but does that hold water? The last decade or so of technological "progress" in the commercial space should leave few illusions about the willingness to obstruct processes and damage the interactions between people to save a few bucks.
As tech gets more capable, the human interactions with it are getting worse. And if you hate phone trees now (I do!), GPT4's contribution is adding ever deeper, infinitely patient tools for stalling you when you have to call for things.
Hell, we already have plenty of stans in the HN comment sections actively claiming that no, of course you shouldn't hold LLM purveyors responsible for their hallucinations, the desired universe is liability-free! If you've already bought into societal enshittification for a buck and there are no penalties, why would you worry about being right?
> you need the human to figure out when that's the case.
Yes, but you will need fewer people. And thas is with the current level of GPT. If the GPTs proficiency increases, fewer and fewer people will be needed. That’s a problem.
Try and reframe the same argument except with computers to see that it doesn't add up. When computers started becoming widely spread you could've easily made the same argument. It isn't a problem, it's a boon to make our lives easier.
Why? No really: why? Businesses are profit-seeking entities. Why not just fire nine people? You save money.
(Yes, this could be a really stupid decision for the company in question. I agree with you. I'm not saying what should happen. I'm saying what will happen, and that that is really bad.)
All small businesses are not pure profit maximizers. Anyway even if they were, there’s MORE money to be made by empowering employees to use powerful tools which can increase revenues and profits much more than just firing. Doing so generates goodwill which improves employee effectiveness and drive.
Small businesses get eaten. That's the entire point of modern venture capital, even! Find ways to out-operationalize small businesses in sub-optimally exploited markets while burning an ocean of cash, then seek profits when you no longer have to dump to be competitive.
It's okay to not think every technology under the sun is a good thing. You don't have to have heart-eyes emojis for the immiseration machine.
No, we’re not. Small businesses embracing technology to get more done with the same number of people is not “immiseration.”
And I take it from your use of Marxist terminology that you’re coming from that the perspective. 20th Century Marxists embraced technological advancement, and used that to advance the cause of the proletariat. The REAL immiseration is to embrace paleoconservative ludditism.
Most small businesses skimp by on very small margins - often run by "crafters" or "artistans" who generally couldn't tell you much about margins besides "cash in the bank"
I believe AGI can help small businesses have higher margins for the same service level - but lower cost.
Goodwill doesn’t pay the bills, most businesses don’t care, and most CEOs etc cannot acquire more customers and contracts fast enough to multiply the available work by ten in the time frame required.
Yeah, the idea that there is somehow Unlimited Demand to tap is just woefully underexposed to business realities. Demand at most businesses is a river, not a municipal waterline with a spigot at one end. It ebbs and it flows, and building for a hypothetical high-demand future is what you do when you have venture capital expecting it of you--not when you're building a "small business" (or even a medium to large one, if you want to be resilient).
It is, however, a really convenient excuse for people who don't regularly think about how people who don't work "above the API" actually exist in the world.
This! If you can 10X an employee, the obvious play is to retain all ten employees and get 10X widget output. Yes, you could fire nine people to retain 1X output—but your competition also has access to LLMs, and may choose the former option. Can you compete?
No, but I have been an employee in a business that had layoffs, then had reduced capacity, and had to scramble to hire new employees.
You can't be too reactive with talent. If you hired 10 people, you should be figuring out how to make that talent pool as happy and productive as possible, not firing them out of fear at the earliest opportunity.
"Replace" is very different from "Enhance" or "Augment." There are certainly roles that could be 100% replaced, but I think they'll be the exception, not the rule. Guess we'll find out!
This assumes that there is a need for 10x amount whichever service these entities are providing. For some cases that may be true, but for many (most?) it is not. In fact demand will most likely remain about the same, and all competitors will need to adpot LLMs and fire 9 people to remain afloat.
There is cutting costs and scaling. You need 9 other people for scaling. Imaging if you with GPT4 can replace 10 people with 1. What if you keep other 9 and train them to prompt on GPT? Now you have not 10 people working but 100 and a cost of 10.
I guess the follow-up question is: if you do value these 100 units of work (1 employee == 1 unit pre-GPT), why did you only have 10 workers at the beginning? Doesn't it mean that 10 units of work is what you thought was optimal? What are you going to do with 100?
Or maybe you're implying that reducing the costs changes this equation?
Because information curated by an AI with validation by a subject matter expert is worth significantly more than that which was done without a human in the loop. There's no determinism with these systems, and from experience with GPT-4 doing classification tasks, it'll do everything exactly right until it doesn't.
If it's like many businesses in the classification world, they aren't lacking for work, so it's more like they'll be able to do 10x the work done by keeping the same number of people.
Not if the output quality matters - which in medical and biological classification tasks, quality labeling really really does matter. Garbage in, garbage out.
If I was paying someone for labeling or classification, and the quality dropped to 90%, 50%, 30% accuracy, I'd quickly fire them.
What's your idea of "subject matter expert"? The term is used in court. Mine would probably include no more than double the number of people with doctorate degrees. It wouldn't include Priya right now, maybe after more education and/or a few years of exceptional experience.
You see the Catch-22 situation? Author is the manager of Priya.
This means Priya can replace the manager, but manager needs to train Priya for that. Obviously that is not going to happen as Author him/herself is very apprehensive about his/her future earning potential.
This would be the problem in the new world, people with lesser power (of knowledge) would get crushed.
1) Competition is brutal. Many educated remain unemployed and the amount of work is not 10x. It also makes more sense to keep one person do 10 peoples job if there were more people doing it and avoid multiple people trying to co-ordinate.
2) Most if not all employers are not going to let 50% of the work time to go towards non income generating activities.
1- Hire someone cheaper than Priya and show him to tricks to run GPT-4. Make him work 24/7 non-stop because it's an upgrade from his naan flipping job.
> Priya has tried to learn coding, but she has struggled.
If there's one thing that will get automated first, it's coding (taking simple explicit specifications and turning them into code).
Unless she can learn software engineering (understanding problem areas well enough you can devise a detailed spec, and maybe implement it) she'll be out of a job as well with just coding skills.
People who haven't dealt with cheap offshored labor or bootcamp grads from the latest craze don't realize how much that workflow was similar to working with GPT4. Except GPT4 requires no training and gives answers in seconds.
This is the suggestion that everybody can just learn to code. I remember Code.org and #HourOfCode back in 2014. Still, it is hard both to find a senior software developer and to become one.
They address that she works a lot of hours, more than devs at least. But the time and her aptitude seem decoupled. Programming is something only some can learn with any skill, and excellence is even rarer.
I read it as pandering to his tech audience's ego. Surely it won't replace my listeners because they are too smart for that. Radio hosts do it all the time, "I'm not talking about my listeners who are on-average the most informed out there, I'm talking about..."
I experimented with coding with GPT a few times now.
GPT is legitimately interesting as an alternative search interface to StackOverflow. I've found that 15 to 45 minutes of searching with Google/StackOverflow can be reduced to just 5 minutes with GPT.
But beyond that, it's been very disappointing. Whenever I've tried getting it to write something even slightly non-trivial (i.e. tougher than just copy/pasting from online documentation or an answer on StackOverflow) it's produced code that is horribly broken, but where the flaws are subtle enough that they might not pop out right away to a novice programmer. It has consistently struggled with programming problems that I would rate at 4/10 or 5/10 difficulty.
Most of the code I write is fairly trivial, but it's glue code that is highly specific to my particular code base, so GPT isn't helpful because it doesn't know about my codebase, and if you try to copy/paste your large chunks of your codebase into the prompt it runs into issues with forgetting.
And GPT isn't helpful for the non-trivial parts of my code either (as mentioned above). So what's left?
So when I see people say that it 10x'ed their productivity, I wonder if they exclusively write very trivial code that is effectively copy/paste from Stack Overflow or if they've allowed GPT to fill their codebases with flawed code without realizing it.
Maybe future iterations of GPT will get it. GPT4 is definitely not there yet.
It’s odd how we have such different experiences. As an example yesterday I had GPT4 take an existing python script, clean it up, add timing statistics and progress bars. 10 mins works. Would have taken me probably 1 hour.
I do think you have a point about it being most useful for trivial or boilerplate problems but it’s still very useful as there is always much of that.
It's like they said, it depends a lot on what kind of work you're doing and whether you are working with public frameworks or internal APIs. If you're just banging out some code that is very similar to what other people write using very well-known APIs, then it's fantastic. If you need to debug a large complex code base, then it doesn't currently have enough capacity to understand and retain all the information required. It can't do many other things you would need as well.
I'm currently writing a demo that I'll present next week using Jetpack Compose, and it's a UI toolkit I'm not really familiar with, so it's been really helpful for that. In fact, I have a tool that is almost like a build system that compiles English language spec files down to the code, and then allows me to edit them and to continue to work with the AI by just changing the spec and the code simultaneously. That's been really tremendously effective, especially with GPT-4.
On the other hand, for working on my main product, it's pretty useless because all of that work is debugging and making a lot of small changes all over the code base, which is too advanced for it currently. And I think that will get solved, but it isn't solved yet.
BTW the above paragraphs were dictated using the Whisper API. I didn't change a single thing about it. Whisper is just as impressive and useful as the LLMs, in my view.
It doesn’t need to know about your specific code base if you have it write a function for the task you’re prompting it for. You can copy/paste the function into your code and run the function with arguments that are specific to your code base.
You can even prompt it to write a unit test for the function it wrote.
As for your concerns about code errors, I’ve found that you have to approach the coding support as an iterative process, where you request code, and then ask it to improve or correct the result it just gave. You can even prompt it to check its previous result for errors.
Have you tried prompting it with a detailed explanation of requirements?
I usually prompt it with short questions, but I recently saw a video where the person provided a lengthy (50 - 150 words) prompts detailing the requirements for what they were requesting. I was shocked at the results. (Still required iterations of corrections/modifications though)
I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it’s an avenue that might yield better results than what you’ve experienced — perhaps even vastly better results.
You think programmers are indispensable? "Learn to code"?
I think you, likely as not, have a rude awakening ahead of you. GPT can enshittify code, too. Unwind libraries into oceans of repeated Copilot-descendant code all over the place. It'll just take longer.
Just imagine how much tech debt can be generated by an overuse of GPTs... One concerning scenario is if software needed for e.g. garbage collection or food warehousing has some critical bug, but the AIs can't fix it, and the human employees (and even consultants) have a very hard time figuring out what's going on too..
Hospitals and vital government services will run on countless layers of cloud, rails and react. Everything will timeout every two requests and we will need the promised 10^19 cps supercomputers to animate our todo list. Request times will be measured in minutes and we will all accept it.
You and I will be 75 and smiling, with a tear too. We knew and understood tools that are meant for a more civilized age. Just surrender, let it go.
GPT doesn't do anything on its own, it needs a prompt.
That prompt is basically code, written by a programmer, although it resembles natural language so we're closer to usable literate programming than we've ever been.
Programmers didn't disappear with new (higher-level) programming languages, if anything there have been more of them; how is this different?
"The right moment to fire someone is the day before they become indispensable"
It is not beneficial to human organizations to have indispensable members. You can argue it's not good for the mental health of the indispensable people either.
When I first heard the quote in my first line, I thought it was cruel, inhumane and shockingly selfish on the part of employers. Nearly 30 years later, I see it almost entirely the other way around. Let's not build organizations full of indispensable people, but rather organizations in which tasks and expertise and stress and fear and success and joy are shared.
The correct strategy is to make sure they never become indispensable, not to fire them.
That sounds cruel - "I will make sure this organization can always function without you, so you have no leverage here" - but I do sincerely believe that it actually makes for a better working experience.
From what I have seen, ChatGPT is good for small code. But, as the code gets bigger, it falls apart. I mean, it's not an analysis tool. It's a human mimicker/simulator
The post covered that - she's trying, but struggling with it. Not everyone has the kind of mind that can understand, write and manage code easily. So what then?
This is a shallow and overly optimistic answer. You really do think prompting will be required in the long term ? Unsupervised AI is (most likely) the future, and end goal.
But that would require that we start taxing companies far more and stop the global tax evasion mechanisms. I fear automation is just going to further increase inequality and devastate the middle class.
But that has been predicted for every new increase in automation, so maybe we‘ll be wrong again.
If everybody is unemployed, then we’ll have plenty of time to to protest and demand major social changes. Hopefully we will have enough leverage to actually make it happen.
Wouldn‘t this be a tax on capital, in the end? In the end, we might reach the marxist stage of history - we should all own the robots that produce our stuff.
That's not how capitalism works, white papers show the world's elite are well aware the singularity marks the beginning of a new civilization, humans would be lucky to get a supporting roll.
To benefit from automation, you need to take the initiative to integrate automation into your own workflow. The idea that someone else will automate your job, but you will somehow benefit is a fantasy.
If we do get UBI, it won't replace lost wages from losing your job. Most of that money will go to the team at your company who set up GPT to do your work and the rest will be distributed among shareholders.
> To benefit from automation, you need to take the initiative to integrate automation into your own workflow. The idea that someone else will automate your job, but you will somehow benefit is a fantasy.
This is Calvinist "only those who work deserve to live" bullshit.
> If we do get UBI, it won't replace lost wages from losing your job. Most of that money will go to the team at your company who set up GPT to do your work and the rest will be distributed among shareholders.
And this just doesn't make sense. Do you know what "UBI" even means? By definition, it goes to the people. All of them. Universally, even.
Even if your claim is that somehow your UBI will be sucked up by inflated costs, I don't see how it follows that it goes to your company.
I don't think you are even serious, because if you were you would quickly realize that:
Every single UBI experiment that has been tried has ended in failure.
It is borderline insanity to retry such an experiment and expecting a different result without bankrupting an entire country just for those sitting around doing nothing.
I don't know how things will turn out but on the positive side two things come to mind:
- Priya may find work using gpt4 in her current job or in another company. Some types of work that are currently economically infeasible may become viable with a ten times speedup. It's certainly plausible that it will become worthwhile to do more of the kind of work she already does.
- if as a society we can do biotech research faster and cheaper there may be significant benefits to human health
There may be new jobs replacing those that have been made irrelevant by the advent of AI but Priyas and possibly some readers of this thread will nor be able to switch between them.
Consider a programmer that reports a productivity increase of 50% due to AI - a question the company will be asking itself is can we get rid of 50% of our programmers?
I am not gloating, many will be in for a bumpy ride. That includes, in my opinion, some of the commenters here that provide "Pria" with helpful career suggestions.
Reading that article made me angry because I wasted my time. This is a nice analysis à grace de gpt4:
Key facts:
1. Priya is a biomedical data curator in her mid-20s from a poor background in Uttar Pradesh, India.
2. She has a bachelor's degree in Biotechnology and her job involves annotating RNA sequencing data from scientific papers.
3. The author tried using GPT-4 to perform Priya's job and achieved the correct result in less time and at a lower cost.
4. The author speculates that Priya may lose her job within six months due to automation.
5. The author expresses concern about their own long-term career prospects in software engineering because of GPT-4.
Logical fallacies:
1. Hasty Generalization: The author assumes that GPT-4 will make Priya's job obsolete based on a single successful trial.
2. Slippery Slope: The author assumes that GPT-4's impact on Priya's job will lead to her losing her job and moving back home, and potentially to the decline of the author's own career prospects in software engineering.
Counter arguments:
1. GPT-4 may not be able to handle all aspects of Priya's job or maintain consistent quality, which could still necessitate human intervention.
2. The advent of GPT-4 could lead to new job opportunities that require both domain expertise and an understanding of the technology.
3. As technology progresses, there is potential for job retraining and upskilling to adapt to new demands in the workforce.
The article is not making an argument. The author is not debating whether we should stop using GPT-4. Calling this fallacious reasoning is a category error.
- > What is the economic impact of LLMs? Idk (openAI has published some lengthy paper about it). What I do know is that some rich bloke in the US will get a few million dollars richer and Priya will lose her job.
- > I don’t see a long-term career in software anymore. Any dreams I had of earning decent money as a software engineer are slowly fading.
In the future there'll probably be two kinds of people: the ones wielding Magic (aka LLMs)... and the ones trying to hold on to a world before Magic arrived, slowly getting eaten up by the Magic.
And a third group of people, whose jobs interact with the real world, e.g. farmers, plumbers, bakers, hairdressers, taxi drivers, nurses... They can't be replaced by a LLM.
I agree and honestly I already see it starting. For example certain personalities seem to plug their ears and try to ignore it, but then when people around them are already suddenly more productive they are in disbelief. All the other people did was embrace the Magic quickly and start using it.
I bet the distribution would end up like income inequality in Brazil - 0.1% will be magicians, 99.9% will live short brutish lives trying to outcheat each other for survival.
The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job, what Priya wants is an income. The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is.
To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income.
Because the only two options are capitalism and communism ? Communism doesn't work so just let's give up, not try anything else and let the rich exploit the majority of the human race.
Agreed. Universal basic income and capitalism can coexist. If everyone was given an annual stipend suitable for a healthy life, motivated people could still choose to increase their personal wealth by working. The surplus wouldn't need to be owned by the state, like it is under communism.
I know that even if I was given $20k a year by default, I'd still work in order to make more.
Because wanting income as you put it, without producing value, has never worked very well. This is why capitalism has pulled billions out of poverty and communism (or all the other pie in the sky give me free stuff detached from what I trade back) hasn't.
Income is a proxy for you to trade value you create to another that is willing to trade back.
So yeah, go ahead and try whatever you think mankind has not invented despite thousands of years and billions of people wanting to have stuff without trading for it. Most such schemes end up hurting people far more than any help.
>the majority of the human race
... who has gotten incredibly richer than at any time in history and for more people than ever.
Everyone here knows the last time it was tried, it ended in complete failure. Just like the previous attempts did. Such hopelessly utopian ideas getting laughed out of the room once again.
During lockdowns the rate of depression and all sorts of mental and physical issues went up. Becoming unemployed may not be the exact same thing as a lockdown but less incentive to get up at a reasonable time or to leave the house would still lead to more overweight, lazy and depressed people.
> less incentive to get up at a reasonable time or to leave the house
People have plenty of natural incentives to leave the house ("reasonable time" is a sign of your own biases, but no doubt leaving the house is healthy regardless). The reason people don't do so is because there are strong economic disincentives to do so. This is not just obvious conscious disincentives like "I don't have time because I need to earn money online" & "I will have to pay for X, Y, Z in the city if I go out" but also much deeper more complex systematic disincentives like "I am chronically ill due to years of economically-linked stress and burnout" & "I feel depressed due to economically-linked lifelong trauma"
Healthy people don't need employers to incentivise them to leave the house. And unhealthy people don't need work, they need support.
Becoming unemployed may not be the exact same thing as a lockdown during a pandemic? Don't you think people dying in the hundreds of thousands due to disease has more to do with rise in depression than anything else?
Countless people die every day to all kinds of horrible diseases and most people were not even affected. Guess what there is even a war going on, tuberculosis, cancer and still covid.
That would be great. It’s also not going to happen without a massive uprising. The people profiting off automation have zero intent of sharing the wealth and every intent of hoarding it.
Yep. That's why there WILL be an uprising. When? I don't know. When the pressure becomes too high to bear, and risking your life seems like a good option compared to just hanging in there. But maybe by that time most humans have been genetically engineered to be happy to be serfs, and oligarchy is a genetic condition now.
I expect we'll adjust the status quo for decades yet. The internet projects a lot of negative sentiment, but I suspect most people are happy scraping by so long as they have a roof and some entertainment.
Even proactive people are made to believe they are just one more "rise and grind" away from being a millionaire, they want to be succesful in this society, so they have no desire to tear it down.
What could bring the stack of cards coming down I think, is a housing affordability crisis. For anyone who has ended up without a home or even just the threat of losing a place to live, you wake up to that reality real quick. If there is suddenly a majority without work and without a home, that's a bunch of people who just found out the system is broken and will want answers.
Still a potential possibility - sadly IMO more so than the utopia vision of AI; thanks for reminding me of this. We simply become fodder for the things AI can't reasonably do in the "real world" until it can with the owners of the systems living it up. At that point the rich/political class have no need for the "rest of us", live the high life and the rest of the population is a "problem" that has to be managed by the state creating mass inequality.
To over-simplify, revolutions happen when young men get bored, gather into mobs to entertain themselves, and then somebody with a cause directs that mob into action.
The standard way to prevent revolutions is to channel the energy of young men into a productive job and a family.
But today, bored young men entertain themselves with video games etc rather than gathering in mobs to entertain themselves. We don't have large gatherings of aimless young men anymore.
When has an uprising (or revolution) been anything other than a disordered mob? I wouldn't expect any such transition to be orderly and well-planned. It will be reactionary in order to quell the chaos.
We were all fine with having a bunch of pretty poor people around us (let alone other countries where people live horrible lives).
Why should anyone care white collar people are going to get hurt? Who said we have enough power/motivation to meaningfully revolt?
Why haven't the poor revolted already?
I hope you're right but I don't think its a given this will happen.
I'm not sure there is objectively a point of life, but what people need is a sense of purpose -- just enjoying life doesn't work. For many, their job is a large source of purpose.
While true, it seems less likely that we'll somehow solve the myriad political challenges to enable universal income than the possibility that AI tools will cause a further concentration of wealth in a small number of hands.
while there's a case for idealism, without some degree of pragmatism we'll be lost on policy or regulation proposals.
Yes, policy needs to be pragmatic in how it ensures that trends toward greater inequality are reversed. In particular, anti-trust regulation, non-means-tested social safety nets (IE government services that allow humans to survive), and meaningful investment in real public infrastructure (Not public-private partnerships, as currently run the internet and the electric grid of most of the United States, for example) seem like good places to start. There is only so much concentration of power that can occur before bloodshed becomes inevitable, and proposals of this kind are attempts to solve problems for people on the ground without anyone needing to overthrow the extant society or perish. Attempts to frame such common-sense measures as attempts to overthrow society themselves are done out of profoundly myopic short-termism
There’s always the joke about the “Communist Utopia,” but that’s what it was marketed as. The marketing was also so strong people killed their own by the millions to make it happen. It never happened and we remember those eras for atrocities, not Utopian equality.
Yes, ultimately it will have to be something like that.
If the capitalists (i.e. those who own capital) can live off of ownership rather than labour, maybe someday all of us can. Because the alternative is unthinkable.
Who in their right mind would work if they can get free income, even if small, without having a disability or similar disqualifier?
Right now, we are in a worker shortage, and it’s going to get worse as retirements continue. Separating labor from work would cripple living standards and demoralize productive workers.
Lots of people prefer comfort above and beyond the necessity: private cars instead of bus, takeaway instead of home cooked meals, country homes instead of small city apartments.
Jobs often make people feel useful. While many can be the happy unemployed person playing Counterstrike 24/7, many others need some sort of occupation for self-realization. This is actually a common problem, which can even became a major psychological issue, with people entering retirement.
Maybe one day we can live in a world where machines are doing all the work and there are fulfilling hobbies for everybody, but I fear this will require more changes, on a much longer time horizon, than the short-term issues just around the corner due to the recent AI advances.
Discrimination against poor people, more specifically. No one cares how unemployed you are if you're rich. Or at least well off enough to be reclassified as "eccentric" and thus okay.
The people at the top of society never had any problem enjoying life while everyone else worked for them. We're just need machines at the bottom of society so that all humans are in the owning class and can enjoy not working.
Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness, 1932 seems increasingly true to me. The richest has kept a monopoly on idleness while tricking everyone else to see work as their purpose in life (to work to make it possible for the rich, idle, people to have nice lives without having to work).
"Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever."
This is a nice thought that isn't going to happen. AI will eliminate jobs and rich people will get richer while also widening the moat so you can't use that same tech to compete.
Its really a function of who is paying for the tech, who owns it and what do they want to do with it.
The only reason the middle class was born was because trained workers could pull their labor and affect upper class wealth. They had power. AI takes that power away.
What a profoundly naive opinion. Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value. Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete. Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair. I've been through some of that before. We humans are not built for it. We need something valuable to do and most are incapable of summoning valuable ideas and tasks from the ether.
You can be working without it being your only source of income. If everybody was given let’s say ten million dollars in capital (and endless social security), those who wanted could work. The rest of us wouldn’t mind letting the machines do the work.
...and what will happen when every single person goes and tries to buy a 50" TV? Hm? Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine?
Come on... this is Real Life, not Magical Fairy Land.
We're not talking about a magical cornucopia that generates an endless amount of physical goods that can be used to accommodate the needs of every person.
We're very specifically talking here about technological shift that will eliminate a large pool of skilled jobs.
People will still need jobs, or they will become homeless / starve / have to leave the country.
> Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine?
I mean ... we already have 3D printing, and car making robots, and electronics making robots. Most of the TV is robots.
All that's needed is the equivalent of 3D printing that adds an extra step of "TV-making-robot"-making robots. One reason we don't have that is that it turns out the robot making robot costs more than certain as-yet non-globalized labor markets.
This entire thread is in the context of “gpt is going to destroy jobs”; the arbitrary “we need to disassociate working and basic necessities” isn’t an isolated socialist discourse.
You can wax philosophical all you like, but you’re failing to address the fundamental reality.
There is a physical limit of good and services available right now and no amount of magical posturing will make that untrue.
Anything is possible in the future given unlimited time and resources, but this thread is not about that.
It is about right now, people losing their jobs.
What is being proposed here is not a solution to that problem. The ability for people to build things doesn’t mean they will. It’s pure speculation about what might possibly happen in the future.
> Then we agree on that.
I do not agree with you. You’re just making arbitrary speculative statements.
Why do we need jobs? I’m genuinely curious.
If the machines can produce the food, goods and luxury items traditionally made by mankind and their domesticated animals, I genuinely don’t see the problem.
Naturally this is purely hypothetical, parent argued that work gives meaning to life(which I generally agree with). I argued you can still be working, even if less efficiently than the machines.
Maybe it will be a gradual change. Agriculture and manufacturing is already highly automated, for better or worse.
> Why do we need jobs? I’m genuinely curious. If the machines can produce the food, goods and luxury items traditionally made by mankind and their domesticated animals, I genuinely don’t see the problem.
In principal you're right, we can in theory live like you suggest and expand on leisure culture / volunteering / 'made up' jobs by the government.
In practice, we're super far from the utopia. Energy is expensive, food is expensive, housing is expensive in ChatGPT can't do squat about it. What it CAN do is possibly replace me as a worker.
So that's the conundrum.
Sadly, one of the lessons of Covid Era I think is I think like this kind of windfall would just destroy everyone spending discipline, and then prices would just inflate correspondingly.
As any student who takes Econ 101, or reads history, (or has heard of a country called Argentina? or has opened a newspaper during the past year of post-Covid inflation?) will learn, this assumption is factually incorrect. If you give everyone ten million dollars, there will be a phenomenal and rapid increase in the price of goods, especially consumer staples (since everyone got that money, and everyone buys staples).
You can't really just throw money at the demand side of the equation and expect everything else to stay the same. Supply side will raise their prices because they can (when everyone's got $10M in the bank, why not charge $50, $500 or even $5,000 for a loaf of artisan bread? And eventually other producers of bread follow suit because the consumer has become less price sensitive).
If you want to improve everyone's standard of living, what has repeatedly worked throughout history is to lower the cost of production through technology, and ensure there's lots of competition on the supply side. With enough competition, producers are unable to behave like a cartel. Eventually someone cracks and sacrifices part of their margin to attract more customers, and then a price war ensues. A textbook example is salt, which for most of human history was quite expensive, but after mechanized mining techniques were developed it became so cheap that for the average household it's practically free.
Technology + competition. At this moment in history we're quite good at the technology part of the equation but we have allowed many monopolies and oligopolies to form, so we're struggling at the competition part.
Sure if you give everybody 10 million dollars in pieces of paper, what you described happening will happen.
Money is the measure of the productive capacity of an economy. If you increase the money without increasing the capacity then you get inflation. But let's be charitable and assume that "Gud" was talking about increasing the capacity commensurately. Because that's what's happening. AI, robots and almost zero marginal cost green energy are going to increase the productive capacity of economies dramatically over the next decade or two.
Execting green energy to produce zero marginal cost is probably a bit too optimistic at this point. We have been adding green energy for at least 20 years now and energy keeps getting more expensive. Not even addressing whether its sustainable, but expecting a point at which additional solar panels or wind installations are going are going to produce extra energy at close to zero cost is expecting too much.
You might have that argument with nuclear energy, because most of the cost is upfront. But approval process for that will have to be expedited by congress.
Price is set at the margin. Right now the marginal energy is fossil fuel powered and the quickly increasing share of low cost renewable energy doesn't impact price.
> AI, robots and almost zero marginal cost green energy are going to increase the productive capacity of economies dramatically over the next decade or two.
The problem is often technology becomes a barrier to entry especially when it requires scale to operate. AI is the extreme example of this kind of technology - needs large compute, and large amounts of data, and requires a actor with enough capital to create it. In effect a lot of modern technology has helped create monopolies.
The barriers to entry definitely exist, but is it the technology itself that creates them, or is it the intellectual property laws we've adopted? Capital is a barrier but it's far from an insurmountable one -- there's plenty of capital floating around in the world. As a thought experiment imagine what the tech industry might look like if the US introduced some form of compulsory licensing for software (for patents? for copyrighted source code?) like what exists for music.
Natural monopolies certainly exist in sectors of the economy like public utilities, but I don't think they are so strong in tech.
For me monopolies, even natural ones, are maintained due to power structures in society. If you see most natural monopolies that are privately owned there's usually a political system that allows that to occur and a well connected powerful actor. AI has the ability to break the one power structure keeping the middle class intact - that being they still technically need people to "think on the ground" to provide the things they want. i.e. output is still a function of labor. AI breaks the need for "labor" to be a required input into the production line long term - i.e. it will no longer be a large economic factor of production.
My personal view: AI makes most of the world's population in the long run surplus to requirements for people who own capital, societal power and the planet's scarce resources. That's a form of monopoly.
> . Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value. Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete.
You're straight up projecting your own personal experiences as a generalized truth. Seriously, grow up and learn that there are a lot of differences in people. You might need this, that doesn't make it into an universal truth that everyone needs it or gets it by having a dayjob.
The only thing that you can say, generally is this: humans can gain happiness by getting acceptance from other people when they care about the people that accept them.
Humanity hasn't learned to automate "art". Humanity has learned to automate some aspects of technical aspects of creating images and to imitate some prevailing styles.
I mean, we've done the same with farming. Is it 100% automated? No, not at all, but we've removed something like 99% of the human labor involved that would have occurred around 200 years ago.
Player pianos were invented in 1896, yet we don't consider piano playing to be a dead art. Indeed I don't believe people even pay to see player pianos play, where as they will flock to see even the most mediocre and novice players if they're the right humans.
Art without humanity isn't art. Farming can exist without humanity because we need the output to sustain ourselves. But take the humanity out of art, and no one is interested in it.
The difference is that player pianos can only replay previously existing songs, while Midjourney can create something novel in under a minute. The problem that's being solved is not everyone wants to spend thousands of hours learning how to draw in order to have the (artistically competent) end product in their hands.
Most cases of people paying to see human performers are of performing already-written music though, so I doubt think that's the drawcard.
Actually I don't think anyone truly knows why we obviously gain something from watching live performers that can't be obtained from watching them even on the best quality home entertainment system imaginable (*), but at least part of it is feeling like you're part of the performance, knowing that the performers feed off the reactions of the audience etc.
(*) And why has there never been a market for broadcasting music performances in cinemas?
We pretty much do consider piano playing to be a dead art. You're much more likely to hear recorded music of some sort than a live performance. It's very niche today.
Watching live piano performances has always been niche. The point is that the player piano didn’t replace them, but moreover player piano concerts aren’t even a thing. The human element turns out to be an important factor here.
No it wasn't. Time was almost every British pub had a piano and that's where your musical entertainment came from. All music was live because what other choice was there? The particular form varied by culture of course: mine was more ceilidh oriented.
I dunno, I feel like there's something qualitatively different between pub music used to liven the atmosphere of a venue, where the primary activity is socializing with your friends and consuming alcohol; and art, which is what we're talking about. That is, just because a piano is used to create art, doesn't mean that everything that comes out of a piano is art. I think that applies to Midjourney as well.
But electronic computer music (including pianos) allows us to enjoy many more genres of music nowadays than it was some while ago when only "the elevated" afforded to go to a piano concert.
You're right of course. I should have tapped 'most commercially viable art.'
Graphic designers, corporate advertising, media productions; video game artwork, the artistic channels where many creatives earn a square meal even if it isn't the most human and soulful type of art.
Ya know, I have helped neighbors with those exact problems. For free. It was nice to be helpful. I would not however do it for fun every day for strangers.
No one is arguing for you to either stop helping your neighbors for free nor to do it every day for strangers, so I really don't see the point in this.
GGGGP: The point of life is not to need jobs in order to survive, the point of life is enjoyment
GGGP: Well, for most people, if they don't have to have a job, their life becomes a sucking void of boredom. These are the only two options
GGP: Nope, plenty of jobs can be a sucking void of boredom for people. It's not like having to clean toilets in order not to starve is incredibly meaningful for the people that have to do it
GP: Well, I like helping neighbors for free sometimes. But I wouldn't want to do it every day for strangers
P (me): I don't see the connection. You literally said you enjoyed doing something for free, so you're not talking about jobs. You could still do it if you didn't need a job to survive, nor would not needing a job to survive force you to do it for fun for strangers.
In any case, it's clear we interpreted the previous messages in a very different manner. In particular, as I've said elsewhere, people seem to be confusing jobs with work. Not needing jobs is not the same as people having to stop working, usually quite the contrary - people would be free to work more on stuff that they enjoy.
People here are extremely privileged and most likely have been for the entirety of their lives, keep this in mind.
Jobs, for the vast majority of people, is just a mean to make ends meet. There's nothing transcendental about it. Just a blunt "gotta pay the bills".
I may make 6 figures now, but I remember life when I didn't know if I was gonna be homeless next month. Perhaps that helped me keep my feet on the ground.
Maybe if you didn't need to work you would have time to fix those problems yourself and get satisfaction out of doing something that directly benefits you.
Additionally, people who hold this belief fail to realize that “I don’t want to work.” ACTUALLY means “I want others to work so I don’t have to.”
For example, how are you going to eat? You are either going to grow, cultivate, and harvest your own food (i.e. work) or you’re expecting others to do that work for you.
Oh, you say it can be “automated”? Well, who’s going to design, build, and maintain the automating machine? That’s all work too!
Given that the article we're discussing is about robots replacing workers, the answer is "AI & robots" for all of your questions.
2 years ago we would both have agreed that that would be impossible. My belief is that most likely AI will hit another roadblock soon, following a "punctuated equilibrium" model so there will still be a large number of non-automatable jobs. But if I'm wrong and the pace of change of the last 2 years continues for another 10...
> the answer is "AI & robots" for all of your questions.
Then who designs, builds, and maintains THOSE AI & robots? It can’t be “AI & robots” all the way down.
>My belief is that most likely AI will hit another roadblock soon, following a "punctuated equilibrium" model so there will still be a large number of non-automatable jobs.
I agree (although it may or may not be “soon”). As history has shown us, technology advancements just cause us to reimagine possibilities and start solving problems that were previously impossible.
For example, as computers have gone from a few bytes of RAM to billions of bytes of memory, humans didn’t say, “ok, we’re all set now.” — we invented whole new classes of software that do all kinds of things unimaginable to the early computer scientists.
> people who hold this belief fail to realize that “I don’t want to work.” ACTUALLY means “I want others to work so I don’t have to.”
No, it means "I am working to generate more wealth which flows predominantly to the owners of capital, who often do no work and sometimes have never done any work at all - can't we do something fairer than this?"
> No, it means "I am working to generate more wealth which flows predominantly to the owners of capital, who often do no work and sometimes have never done any work at all - can't we do something fairer than this?"
It always starts with this, then the next step is "ohh we can't really tax rich people and corporations ('owners of capital' that you speak of) since they have a lot of ways to move their capital out of our reach so let's just fleece the middle class instead!".
Over a hundred countries agreed to a 15% global minimum corporate tax rate starting this year. It's not nearly enough, but it's a start, and it shows we can tax rich people and corporations.
The French have a saying "Life begins after retirement". They find meaning, fulfillment and contentment in, for example, stretching a meal out over 4 hours through conversation.
Whether the French viewpoint or the American viewpoint is healthier can be found in the mortality rates.
The words "most" and "many" there are doing some herculean lifting.
Look at the kind of people who do not have to work. Do they still work? No. Some sit on a beach and never lift a finger again, some become creatives and some try to recreate their successes again. None work what would be an engaging and productful job at a take-away joint.
That is in fact not true. Plenty of retirees seek out job-like things. I have a couple of examples.
A small one is my dad. He was a software developer, but thanks to Y2K consulting, he made bank and retired early. After, he spent half the year in Mexico. One of the friends he made there was a teacher. My dad ended up volunteering in the school. He had a part-time-job-like schedule and did teacher's aide things. He loved it.
On a bigger scale: In Michigan there is an arcade chain, Pinball Pete's. It was founded by Tim Arnold in 1976. I grew up there gave them a lot of quarters over years. He sold it in 1990 and retired to Las Vegas, bringing his extensive collection of arcade machines.
For a while he was doing an open house; once a month he'd let people in to play some of his collection. By 2009, he had started the Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit arcade. A couple years back they moved to the Strip and expanded significantly. I was there recently and he spends hours a day there. Opening up. Collecting the quarters. Fixing machines. Telling kids to stop running.
The guy is circa 70 and he can do whatever he wants. What he wants to do is work at an arcade. He'll keep doing it until he dies.
The labor force participation rate among the general population is ~60%. Among those 65-74, it's 25%. And that's not accounting for people who can't retire. It also doesn't account for those who want to work but are unable.
I don't think that's particularly good evidence for that. You're confusing "has a job" with "is working" and you are ignoring the age effects that are the whole reason retirement exists in the first place.
So what you're saying is that when people have more guaranteed income uncoupled from a job they have to do, in this case in the form of a retirement, they can and do choose to do lots of meaningful, enjoyable work? Which I think is the original point in this discussion?
> Look at the kind of people who do not have to work. Do they still work? No.
I'm not sure HN discussions have original points, really. But people do have specific points, and it sounds like you and I both agree that the one I'm replying to is too broad.
Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value.
You can do that without it being a job. I enjoy making things out of epoxy resin. It's fun, creative, hard work. I'd do it a lot more if we had universal basic income. It's not my job.
I think people are confusing having a job with work. Making things out of epoxy resin takes a lot of work and it's satisfying. If everyone had UBI people would absolutely still work a lot. It's just that they wouldn't have to have a job in order not to become destitute.
Yeah, I am confused by the idea that not being forced to work to stay alive means your can't (or won't, whatever) find anything of worth to do with your life.
Where did that unexamined assumption come from? Do they care about nothing other than standard employment based "work" and so never considered doing something other than staring at a wall when they're not doing it?
Family. Friends. Volunteering. Gardening. Games. Hobbies. Learning to play music, or cook, or who knows... studying biochemistry and doing that because it's rewarding and easier to do in a setting with more people in the same place. Or starting a company if that's your thing, or call it an open-X project and build a community that doesn't require "work" to contribute.
I'm so confused, why on Earth would the agency to choose be bad, it's so patronizing.
There's some serious class bias going on here. There is a certain segment of the population that will find productive work to do that give their life meaning if left to their own devices. There is another segment that absolutely will become blobs or worse (engage in mischief, anti-social behavior, etc). Those who have only ever known folks from the former category see only positives from a future without the necessity of work. Those who know folks from the latter category, well we fear such a future.
Another strange class bias is that those from the (lets call it) "productive" class are absolutely convinced everyone is like them and if only given the opportunity they would be just as productive and fulfilled as they are. Some of us know better.
> There is a certain segment of the population that will find productive work to do that give their life meaning if left to their own devices. There is another segment that absolutely will become blobs or worse (engage in mischief, anti-social behavior, etc).
Even if that is true, and I very much doubt that it is, a big chunk of the "productive" segment's work will be to help the other segment. People already do that a lot by volunteering. Imagine how much more people could psychologists, social workers, and others help if they don't have to worry about their own livelihoods?
I don't find that plausible. People volunteer to help those who naturally garner sympathy (poor, homeless, invalid, etc). There won't be much sympathy for those that don't have the disposition to self-actualize meaning like the "productive" class. On the other hand, those in the unproductive class won't want this kind of "help" either.
What we need are new institutions to fill the role of providing social connection and meaning. Things that churches and clubs used to provide. But how to revive those things is its own issue.
> People volunteer to help those who naturally garner sympathy (poor, homeless, invalid, etc).
Not really? Plenty of people volunteer to help people in jail, for example.
>On the other hand, those in the unproductive class won't want this kind of "help" either.
People won't want help to find meaning in their lives? I find it hard to believe. Churches and clubs, as you also said, used to (and still do) help provide people with that as well, so I'm not sure you truly believe it either.
>Not really? Plenty of people volunteer to help people in jail, for example.
Of course there are always some number of people that find even unlikely targets sympathetic. But what you're talking about is some kind of widespread movement to help close the meaning gap when something like a third to half of the world is having a crisis of meaning. To have that kind of a movement needs a naturally very sympathetic target, like victims of police brutality. The movement to improve prison conditions is practically non-existent by comparison. I don't find it plausible that the non-self-actualizers will be similarly sympathetic.
>Churches and clubs, as you also said, used to (and still do) help provide people with that as well
I wasn't talking about "help" like how psychologists provide help to their clients. What I mean is an attractive gathering place where people naturally find connection and meaning. People don't want to be "helped", i.e. being made to feel like a charity case, they want to come by meaning and purpose naturally.
> Things that churches and clubs used to provide. But how to revive those things is its own issue.
Would reviving communal institutions be a meaningful and useful activity for people to do? Part of the reason why we rely less on community and social institutions is because we are relying on other things (like work) to fulfill that same role. It's not really surprising that people volunteer less at their local church if they're told that their life meaning ought to come from their job.
Sure some people will be useless. But they are useless now, in the job, producing barely any "value". Might not even be of their own uselessness, there is plenty of useless jobs to go around.
Also, even the "useless" always want more. Even if it is bigger TV and bigger pick-up truck, that would still require work
I agree, for some segment of the population the current definition of "productive" is "meaningful". That's why it will be okay to let people do things they find meaningful.
If Priya had preferred to stay with her family, and there was no financial pressure, the situation would be unambiguously better. Her family may have encouraged her to go to study for family pride -- what if studying and living while studying were free for her and her family had no financial pressure for her to get a job and send money home? I struggle to see who benefits here. Maybe she would have preferred to stay home with her family, maybe she has siblings that she will miss, why would it be up to me at all? I don't get to define productive.
UBI (or whatever mechanism for providing basic needs) also doesn't mean there is no financial reward for employment. She could still go and study and earn money and send it home to a family that doesn't need it badly except now if the job is automated by GPT4 somehow no one suffers. No harm is done other than that she wasted her time studying this thing, but no one is going to suffer because of bad luck beyond wasted time.
There are a number of things that I do think people don't find meaning in doing. Many of these things can be increasingly automated like being a teller or working in a call center, but not all of which can be (for now), like repairing sidewalks. These are a set of things that aren't very fun to do which still need to be done, sure. Oddly the ones I can list off my fingers are not the ones that pay well, so something is certainly not working right on the incentives, sure. I agree that society should reward jobs less if they are meaningful and enjoyable than jobs that no one wants to do, but that's not really how capitalism works.
Plenty of people don't tend to do things even they would consider "productive" in their spare time, but how much of that is because they are under constant financial stress and have so little free time? I believe that if basic needs are met people will generally find more genuine sources of meaning, for them, whether or not I consider those things productive.
But my opinion isn't important here, that's the patronizing part.
I simply do not believe people will sit around and watch TV all day if they are in good health and aren't required to work all the time for security. Or if they do then that's their business, I'd rather try to inspire them to do other things than force them to by withholding food and shelter.
Let people be people and learn what makes their human life meaningful to them rather than trying to starve them into action that you consider productive.
If everyone gets free money the optimal move as an individual is to speculate on assets because everyone else will be. The financial rewards from gambling will be higher than working with much, much less effort.
I don’t think many people will find meaning in that world.
If people followed the "optimal move" all the time, assuming you mean it in a financial sense, there wouldn't be any teachers or social workers or librarians.
If everyone gets the relief of knowing they are free to pursue what they like without risk of starving, I imagine it'd be way easier to find meaning in the world than it is now.
The financial reward of "gambling on assets" is already far higher than working with much, much less effort. Except that now only rich people get to do it safely.
Housing is an asset that must be "gambled" in order to live securely and control your residence. I agree that is horribly broken, but everyone deserves a chance to buy assets without my permission.
I also argue that currently poor people under less financial stress will be more able to avoid getting fleeced, and that arguably many are already better at it than plenty of people with inherited wealth.
As a concrete example, mortgage rates being higher for poor people than rich people is already abusive.
> These are a set of things that aren't very fun to do which still need to be done...[they] are not the ones that pay well
Because they're generally things that don't require extensive training/exceptional skills/abilities to do, hence there lots of possible candidates to take on such jobs.
I wonder what a world where there's billions of us with no job options other than the few remaining disgusting/dangerous jobs that automation can't yet handle will look like...
Here's how I do that thought experiment. Maybe your answer is different.
It will depend on who owns the machines that do the work.
It's not comfortable to think about, but I think it's silly to ignore completely. I've worried about it a lot and am at peace with it, for what it is worth.
If there's a strong safety net and regulations on corporations
No matter who owns the machines that produce things people need, people are able to live comfortably. In that scenario, the world looks like one where those undesirable jobs pay exceptionally well, gain increased respect, and improved working conditions until they're desirable -- because starvation and housing is no longer under immediate threat of being withheld. I don't hate that world, it seems frankly more fair. I think we can agree that more rational decisions are likely to be better, and that forcing people to make decisions that are only rational to them under threat of food and shelter is bad.
It's not like my friends and I in middle school loved doing engineering because we saw dollar signs. We did it because we had a knack for it and liked doing it with no ulterior motive. Forcing people who weren't interested in engineering to be engineers has honestly just never seemed like it worked that great. Give kids opportunities to discover that they find engineering fun instead... there are other means to get to a good place without the threat of food, health, and housing. Much of it education.
But maybe for me, meaningful means going and helping with my friends projects until I'm inspired to make some kind of art or work on a project to make a new idea. Who knows, being productive financially is just not necessarily always what will give me a meaningful life, and we only get one. Lots of things that are meaningful to me aren't productive financially.
If there's not a strong safety net
God help us all. If you don't own the increasingly small number of things that do an increasingly large fraction of all production you are way, way, way more screwed.
"Class bias" is a really weird word to use here to talk about that. It's class bias to assume that blue-collar workers aren't intrinsically lazy and that they might find meaningful activities to do if they had the time/energy to do so?
This is the first time I've ever seen "people need work for meaning, and they literally don't have the inclination/drive to find meaning in their lives unless they're forced to work under the threat of losing their livihoods" represented as solidarity with the working class. I don't think most people would consider that perspective to be synonymous with class consciousness.
I think it's more subtle than that - I'd suggest for many of us, regardless of class, the whole reason work gives us meaning is because you know you're providing services that contribute towards society. That knowledge partly comes from seeing that the company you work for (or even run yourself) brings in at least enough revenue to pay its workers' salaries in order for them to enjoy a decent standard living. It's not so hard to believe that a future where there's simply no need for the vast majority of us to work at all will leave many of us feeling like we no longer contribute much towards society, which is likely to be at least somewhat detrimental to our sense of self-worth and purpose etc. But whether that's likely to be a widespread catastrophic issue I don't think anybody really knows. After all, for centuries the undeniable contribution women made towards society was never recognised via a pay cheque.
Yes, this will be a major catastrophe if we don't plan ahead.
I think it's coming one way or another.
For an increasing number of us, the costs of automation will be lower than the cost of living. It will happen quickly. We absolutely need a serious safety net or it will be chaos.
And we need to discover another way to find meaning in what we do, or else it will be a mental health catastrophe.
I have thought on this long and hard and am confident I can find meaning in my life even if a computer can do what I enjoy more productively. It will take getting used to. It won't be comfortable. It is necessary.
It will be very bad if only a tiny fraction of people have financial security.
I use the term class bias mainly because I couldn't find a better term. But it is unique to a particular class to see oneself as the ideal that others are held back from reaching due to environment or circumstance. It's the reason why progressives think conservatives vote against their own interests and would see things the way progressives do if only they were better educated. It's just a fundamental inability to recognize that other people are different and aren't motivated by the same things. What's so insidious about this thinking is that its framed as benevolence. But the mistake is thinking that your way is intrinsically more valuable and so it must be a disparagement to assume that not everyone can reach the intrinsic good that you have reached.
You want to see what people get up to when they have endless free time, just see what idle young men get up to.
Adding on what the sibling comment said, meaning and fulfillment aren't just about the work one does, its about the social role that work facilitates. You may hate your job yet derive meaning from being a provider, from being the man of the family, being a hard worker, and so on. We're already in the process of destroying social connections with ones community and we're seeing a widespread crisis of loneliness as a result. Take away the meaning that work provides (regardless of job) and you basically destroy whats left of meaning in a good portion of people's lives.
> What's so insidious about this thinking is that its framed as benevolence.
Again, I want to remind the context of this: the context is that you're saying we need to force people to work under the threat of losing their livelihood or they can't be fulfilled.
And you're phrasing this as if I'm coming in and colonizing blue-collar workers or pushing my ideals on them. I don't think "benevolence" is the right word to use here, I just don't think there's anything noble about forcing people to work and saying that it's for their own good. It's an interesting turn of phrase to write about this like it's a "culture" when -- again -- the conversation is about whether or not people in blue-collar positions are too lazy and unmotivated to find meaning unless they're forced to work.
I just... it's wild to hear that phrased using the terms you're using. And I wonder if those blue-collar workers would agree that guaranteed income would be "taking away" their purposes, because most of the blue-collar workers I know are much more engaged in social institutions than the white-collar workers around them, and are therefore probably more prepared to find meaning within their communities and families outside of work than the average programmer on HN is.
> You want to see what people get up to when they have endless free time, just see what idle young men get up to.
This is me imposing my culture on other people? Pointing out that you're basically comparing blue-collar workers to lazy youth? Come on.
We derive tremendous value from blue-collar workers that hold up white-collar jobs and allow society to continue to function, even though they're often paid significantly less than us for what is arguably more important work. The least we can do is not pretend that this arrangement is somehow created for their benefit. This has all the energy of the proletariat complaining that the rabble can't take care of themselves and how the actually offensive thing is suggesting that they can.
If only HN could get out of its bubble and empathize more with the average worker, then it would realize that the average worker is lazy and unmotivated and needs to be managed /s
>the context is that you're saying we need to force people to work under the threat of losing their livelihood or they can't be fulfilled.
That's one (bad) way to frame the context of the conversation. The better way is that the need to work is intrinsic to our psyche and core to our self-worth, but the ability to self-actualize is not. The need to constantly work has been a steady feature of our environment ever since we left the trees. Self-actualization, on the other hand, has not historically been a part of this. Meaning in human lives has largely been external, deriving from one's place in the social hierarchy. And work was a key facilitator in securing ones social status.
It should be a given that drastically changing the environment away from the historical baseline will have serious psychological ramifications. The progress of technology has had strong impact, but the social environment overlaid on the technological milieu has largely remained constant. So people got by mostly just fine. The internet has changed this calculus and we've seen widespread psychological damage as a result. AI stands to explosively accelerate this transformation.
What I am asking is whether people as a whole will be better off without necessary work being a driving force in their lives. People like you take it as axiomatic that a post-work society will be better, and offer misplaced moralistic arguments in favor of it. All I am saying is that its absolutely not axiomatic and should be considered directly on its merits and demerits. We've already seen many of the problems I'm talking about materialize.
>And I wonder if those blue-collar workers would agree that guaranteed income would be "taking away" their purposes
For gods sakes, this has nothing to do with the blue collar, white collar division. It's a division between the self-actualizers and non-self-actualizers. I used "class" as a generic grouping term. Although I expect the non-self-actualizers to be overrepresented among blue collar workers. That is, people who don't have the skill or the interest to engage in intellectual pursuits, but just want to make an honest living and take pride in their work.
>The least we can do is not pretend that this arrangement is somehow created for their benefit.
That's obviously not what I'm doing. Spare me these silly moralistic arguments. We need to be willing to discuss this issue as plainly as we can, not be hamstrung by misplaced political correctness.
> That's one (bad) way to frame the context of the conversation.
Is it actually a bad way to frame the context? Are you not saying that people need to be forced to work for their own benefit under the threat of losing their income? What you're saying is:
> What I am asking is whether people as a whole will be better off without necessary work being a driving force in their lives.
So... yeah, you're saying that people will be worse-off without an external force making them work, and it's good for them that they're forced to work. I think my phrasing is entirely accurate here. Losing the income requirement to work is the part you're concerned about, because stuff like UBI only gets rid of the requirement to work for income, it doesn't get rid of any social status that would be associated with work.
You're worried about people not needing to work for their financial security, and you're saying it's bad for them if they don't have a requirement to work for their financial security.
> although I expect the non-self-actualizers to be overrepresented among blue collar workers. That is, people who don't have the skill or the interest to engage in intellectual pursuits, but just want to make an honest living and take pride in their work.
You keep phrasing this like it's a compliment, but being able to make an honest living and being able to take pride in one's work has nothing to do with one's ability to self actualize. I'd push back again on this characterization -- the "non-self-actualizers" I know that make an honest living tend to be very involved in their communities. They go to church, they have social connections, they form meaningful relationships, they marry and have kids. They actually do stuff outside of work.
Self-actualization is not at all the same thing as whether or not you like academic pursuits.
----
I don't know whether or not a post-work society will have its own challenges or if it will be better, and I don't know if it's feasible to build one in the first place. I don't even know that people should be worried about GPT at all, I'm not sure it actually is going to take everyone's jobs. I don't think we're particularly close to a post-work-society, and I think programs like UBI are severely under-studied for the amount of praise they get.
But I do know that we're not doing people a favor by threatening them with financial destitution if they don't work.
And call that moralizing if you want, I'm fine with that. Call it politically correct, call it denying reality, whatever. But don't pretend that it's less empathetic to suggest that someone who doesn't go to college or learn to program isn't going to be intrinsically worse at self-actualization than everyone else. Don't phrase that like it's some kind of solidarity to call people unmotivated.
Yes, people struggle with deriving meaning outside of work, but that does not fit neatly into any singular social category, and it has a lot more to do with one's relationship with one's community and integration into non-work social institutions than it has to do with whether or not someone went to college.
>Are you not saying that people need to be forced to work for their own benefit under the threat of losing their income? What you're saying is:
Presumably you would take an antivaxxer to be dishonest by framing a vaccine mandate as "forcibly injecting me with chemicals against my will". This is no different. Stripping context alters the meaning and is dishonest. Notice how you defend this framing instead of just accepting my original words. It's clearly intended to give your argument some rhetorical benefit without needing to be explicit. This is a dishonest debate tactic.
One important difference is that no one is forcing anyone to work, that is simply the natural state of existence. There is freedom in battling against nature's cruelty. This is not equal to being forced to work at the end of a whip. Your phrasing doesn't distinguish between the two, mine does.
>You're worried about people not needing to work for their financial security, and you're saying it's bad for them if they don't have a requirement to work for their financial security.
I'll accept this phrasing. But notice it is importantly different than "being forced to work".
>You keep phrasing this like it's a compliment
I'm not ascribing any valence in my statements. I am being as neutral and non-judgmental as possible.
> but being able to make an honest living and being able to take pride in one's work has nothing to do with one's ability to self actualize.
Didn't say it did. Self-actualization is the process by which one derives meaning outside of their work/career. The point was that people who "just want to make an honest living" are generally not the self-actualizers.
>the "non-self-actualizers" I know that make an honest living tend to be very involved in their communities.
I agree. But the trends against church-going and community participation are steady. There is every reason to think those connections will eventually be severed for the working class folks as well.
>Self-actualization is not at all the same thing as whether or not you like academic pursuits.
Obviously. But academic pursuits are one avenue for self-actualization that the tech-class points to as ways people will fill the meaning gap in the future. The point is that this avenue is only viable for a relatively small percentage.
>Don't phrase that like it's some kind of solidarity to call people unmotivated.
That's just projection if anything. I'm interested in describing the world as it actually is so we can have an honest discussion about how not to drive society off a cliff. For some reason its damn near impossible to have honest discussions these days.
> Presumably you would take an antivaxxer to be dishonest by framing a vaccine mandate as "forcibly injecting me with chemicals against my will".
A mandated vaccine means that some people are going to get injected with a chemical against their will, yes. We can quibble over the tone, but it is correctly phrased.
> One important difference is that no one is forcing anyone to work, that is simply the natural state of existence.
If you're actively opposed to efforts to change, then that's a very different situation. The context of this conversation is an author saying they wish GPT didn't exist, because they see GPT automating work as a real possibility.
If someone is opposing an attempt to transition to a post-work society, that is not just being in touch with the natural order -- it is an attempt to keep the natural order as it is. So yeah, I would classify that as playing an active role in forcing people to work. Again, I think that's just an accurate description of the position you're espousing; you might not like the tone, but you are encouraging us not to do anything about that natural state.
> The point was that people who "just want to make an honest living" are generally not the self-actualizers.
I disagree with this entirely. Most "down-to-earth" people I know are more engaged in fulfilling activities outside of work than academics are and have stronger connections to their communities in my experience. I don't think there are any stats to back up the idea that working-class/blue-collar workers are less positioned than tech workers to find meaning outside of work.
I don't just think that it's vaguely insulting to characterize blue-collar workers as if they're somehow more prone to being unable to self-actualize, a process that has nothing to do with one's education level -- I think if anything it might be the opposite. Silicon Valley is rife with people talking about how their companies and achievements define them, and is rife with people asking workers to "put in the grind" and "push through" to make something amazing. And I have never heard a blue-collar worker tell me that their identity and value as a person is based on their job as a sanitation worker.
> But the trends against church-going and community participation are steady.
This is particularly weird to hear, because trends against community participation have a great deal to do with the fact that our society increasingly pressures people to replace those institutions with jobs. There is a strong push to have your friends be your work friends, to have your meaning be what you do in your job.
And the increased drive towards validating ones identity through one's job inherently encourages people to disregard other social institutions or non-economic relationships that don't fit into that framework.
----
> For some reason its damn near impossible to have honest discussions these days.
This conversation has moved from:
> those from the (lets call it) "productive" class are absolutely convinced everyone is like them and if only given the opportunity they would be just as productive and fulfilled as they are. Some of us know better.
to
> What's so insidious about this thinking is that its framed as benevolence. But the mistake is thinking that your way is intrinsically more valuable and so it must be a disparagement to assume that not everyone can reach the intrinsic good that you have reached.
to
> You want to see what people get up to when they have endless free time, just see what idle young men get up to.
to finally
> I'm not ascribing any valence in my statements. I am being as neutral and non-judgmental as possible.
>I think that's just an accurate description of the position you're espousing; you might not like the tone, but you are encouraging us not to do anything about that natural state.
We've wasted enough time debating semantics.
>I disagree with this entirely. Most "down-to-earth" people I know are more engaged in fulfilling activities outside of work than academics are and have stronger connections to their communities in my experience.
This may be true; I have no horse in this particular race. The substantive issue isn't which class is more represented among the non-self-actualizers, but what proportion of people fall into this category and what a post-work society looks like for them. I don't know how we ended up spending so much time on the tangential point of who are the non-self-actualizers.
>This is particularly weird to hear, because trends against community participation have a great deal to do with the fact that our society increasingly pressures people to replace those institutions with jobs. There is a strong push to have your friends be your work friends, to have your meaning be what you do in your job.
I'm not sure I understand what this means, but this doesn't sound right. The secularization of society isn't due to work pressure, nor is the disconnection from your local community. The latter is due to the pressures and competition of the modern world, the fact that people move frequently and so do not have "roots" in their local community, multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people, and so on.
>And the increased drive towards validating ones identity through one's job inherently encourages people to disregard other social institutions or non-economic relationships that don't fit into that framework.
Similarly, I'm not sure this gets the cause and effect correct. We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.
>This is some revisionism.
Perhaps if you were more interested in understanding my points than finding things to nitpick, you would recognize that my point about being non-judgmental was towards my characterization of the self-actualizers and non-self-actualizers, and how the working class fits in. You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.
> The secularization of society isn't due to work pressure, nor is the disconnection from your local community. The latter is due to the pressures and competition of the modern world
Where do those competitions and pressures come from? If someone feels a strong pressure to make a career for themselves, to get out of their hometown -- that doesn't read to you as being something that's related to the status we've placed on career and work?
What do the stats say about why people typically move away from their hometown communities? I'm going to guess that job opportunities will be a pretty large proportion of answers in any survey about that.
> multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people
Hm.
> We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.
I disagree, but sure. It's hard to clearly establish cause and effect when looking at correlations, and there are multiple ways to read the correlation between a decline in social institutions and an increase in people using work to self-actualize. I'll grant that.
----
> You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.
You very literally, directly compared people who have trouble finding meaning outside of work to idle children.
If only gpt4 could tell people what to do in order to find meaning. Surely it understands the human condition at least as well as market forces.
/s
Wait, no actually from what I've seen gpt4 might be more empathetic to the idea that people deserve to find their own meaning in life without their betters giving them a purpose.
"Idle young men", oof. So, so patronizing, like people who think fast food jobs are only for high school kids.
What if the reason is that when they come back from 8h job that also took 2h to even get there (coz they are not rich so they live far from it) they just don't have energy to ?
I swear, it's like nobody here actually worked hard for any extended period in their life..
> What a profoundly naive opinion. Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working [...]
Agreed. I just spent a week volunteering. (At the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, repairing machines.) It actually cost me money to do, but it was incredibly satisfying to just go and do a concrete thing that made the world better and was immediately beneficial to people. Especially in the company of other good people doing the same.
But I think a lot of people have had only terrible jobs (valuable work in inhumane conditions) or bullshit jobs (meaningless work in whatever conditions), so I get how so many people have been conditioned out of seeing the personal, emotional, very human value in work.
No. I also like jobs. I like them better, as they're cash-positive. I haven't liked all my jobs, but that's because some of them were terrible or bullshit.
> most are incapable of summoning valuable ideas and tasks from the ether.
Is this really true? It's absolutely not a personal problem for me. I haven't worried about boredom or lack of purpose in decades. My worry is that I'd need a hundred lifetimes to give proper attention to everything I find interesting or meaningful, and the problem gets worse the older I get, the more I learn, the more I find interesting.
"Work" above is being used in a more specific form than you are using it. GP is not referring to all productive work, they are specifically referring to employment on the market. Yes, human beings are better in relationships and better when they help each other, but GP is not talking about abolishing helping other people or doing meaningful things.
There are a huge number of things people can do to meaningfully make the world a better place outside of traditional jobs. And a non-trivial number of people work at jobs that aren't aligned with producing value or helping people in the first place.
Value on the market in specific is not the be-all end-all measure of whether work can be personally fulfilling and validating. A market job can be meaningful, yes. But it's not the entire category. If I never had to work for income I would still "work", but what I worked on would be very different and would probably focus a lot more on non-scalable non-commercial smaller projects and volunteering.
There are things that are valuable and meaningful to do that don't involve working specifically for a company and don't involve looking at that work primarily through the lens of "how can I make money off of this?"
I generally agree with you in principle, but it’s not a given that you can find meaning outside of the job market if the market doesn’t find your labor valuable.
What if nobody actually wants your “help”? What if your labor is not only worthless in the job market, but also in general, where people prefer assistance from AI instead of from a live human person? What if no matter what you do, some AI does it better? How will humanity find our own value and meaning when that happens?
The professional chess community has been living in this world for a long time. The engines crush us, and their games can be fascinating too but Magnus’s and Hikaru’s make a helluva lot more money. It’s not a winner take all market in general but the human element is actually very important; the creation is more than just the game on the board.
I think the point where that is the case is pretty far off, since it requires endless fully-autonomous robots and no demand for human-created media or connection.
But regardless, people throughout history have found happiness and meaning in their life completely separately from what they did to put food on the table.
I don't think this is something people should be worried about. There is so much stuff to do in the world, and quite frankly, there are not enough people to do all of it. And a lot of that stuff is not particularly suited to AI.
But what I would question if you want to get a little existential -- do people value being helpful or do they value feeling helpful, because those are two different things. And I think that if the idea of "people need help and what if an AI can help them better than I can" is actually terrifying to people, that should maybe prompt a small amount of reflection about our motivations for helping others.
But the shorter answer is that there is just so much stuff to do in the world right now.
I'm so disappointed in the other replies to this comment.
> Don't worry about it, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done
> pretty far off
> chess grandmasters are ok
We are on an exponential curve of being able to create agents on demand that can essentially act in human ways, at least digitally/online. If you're working on a computer (aka all white collar jobs or anything that can be done remotely), it will soon enough be trivial to create an agent and task it with "Unqueue tasks from the backlog and implement fixes in the codebase. Ask questions if you need help." and it will do it. And you can create as many of these agents as you like.
As many as you like! On demand! How the hell are humans supposed to compete with that?
I mean, that isn't a "what ever will happen to my job?" level of concern, that's more "will society handle transitioning to a post-job reality once everyone is useless without revolving into a war" or "maybe humanity will cease to be relevant and we'll all get killed by the computer we design", which is a fundamentally different level of problem, right? Like, the last thing I am going to be concerned about is my silly job in the future you are positing where all white collar jobs are replaced, as to be quite frank about it: my job as a low-level software developer is harder to replace than the jobs of the people who hired me or the people who hired them or the people who invested in their company to begin with... once the computer flips from the regime of being worse than a human and yet helpful to them into a theoretical one where it is better than a human, I think the answer is going to very rapidly change from "maybe you should just consider it to be helpful!" to "maybe that will be the end of human civilization" with very very little in between.
That would really only be a problem if majority decided to not do anything and we had actual shortage, not just "corporations don't want to pay decent wage so they can't find people"
If the incentive is "here is basic income, you can afford flat on outskirts of the town or in some small town and basic necessities", there is still plenty motivation to do better and get better stuff (whether just for living, or for your hoobbies or interest), just not a pressure of taking first job you can find just to afford being alive.
So average person have option of just going on 6 month hiatus to learn some life skill, or artist have time to develop their skill enough to make art or music that gets enough interest to make it into income.
> it’s not a given that you can find meaning outside of the job market
That's bleak af, how old are you ? where do you live ? what do you do ? do you have a family ? do you have friends ? hobbies ?
I can guarantee you the vast majority of min wage workers would absolutely find a meaning in things other than flipping burgers or triaging the shit people buy on Amazon
I think there are 3 factions in a world where AI took out most jobs (with UBI of course):
#1 There will always be jobs requiring humans - jobs that require human interaction. The supply will be much smaller, but so will be the demand.
#2 By the time AI replaces all jobs, we will most likely have a very realistic VR with multiplayer capabilities. I think that many people will live adventures in such world and spend most of their waking hours in it. Metaverse sucks but it's only because it's so artificial. If you could have tech that could integrate with your senses directly, giving experiences on par with the sharpest lucid dream... that's going to be much different and for better or worse, a lot of people will get sucked into it. Of course, it's going suck - life is about yin-yang, endless pleasure is not good. People who will end up spending the majority of their time in such VR will not be unlike drug addicts, unless they will also be doing activities that require mental & "physical" engagement (I think one of the coolest thing that could arise out of it are new sports that would not be possible in the real world), however, that yin-yang balance would be hard to achieve when there's no evolutionary pressure combined with overabundance of simple pleasure that's just available all the time.
#3 Walking the path to mastery in some pursuit - i.e. artistic, athletic, a craft. There's pure joy in just getting better at something and enjoying every day of practice and most importantly - feeling challenged which is a primal need. It may be competitive as heck to get some recognition or play in the big leagues (which would be more like #1), but that would be just a bonus from that perspective.
If AI leaves us nothing to do, then #3 will always be available. AI will not take away our own engagement but engagement requires effort and so, I would bet that a significant majority will overindulge in #2 to their unconscious doom - I guess it will still be a pretty cool experience though and it's not like those people will not have a choice to get out.
I your work is not producing anything valuable for other people it's void and you will get bored pretty fast, it's a human nature. If it does you can always find a way to monetize it as people need it and ready to share their wealth for something they need. No, it doesn't have to be a work "for a company", but if you can't "make money off of this" it probably means your "work" is only relevant to you, or somebody else will "make money off of this" using what you have created. It's how society works, and we are social animals.
Hobbies aren't necessarily only relevant to oneself, so no, they don't fit. Running a marathon can be a hobby, and lots of people compete in those together.
Not necessarily, but more often so than not. Even the competitions that you mention are only valuable to other hobbyists, and only in so far people's free times allow. Non-hobbyists are not likely to pay much to see those competitions. And when free time runs out, those hobbies are amongst the first things to go.
People who have earned enough wealth to not for a living do, though those who've worked hard enough to do that typically don't have much in their life but work.
People who simply have enough wealth to not have to work are on a hedonistic treadmill most of the time
You think so? Have you been in that position? I was. It's not what you think it is. Also unless you want to spend your wealth pretty fast (money has a half-life time like radioactive elements, doesn't depend on quantity) you have to work to keep your wealth, and it's not less nerve-racking than spending your 8 hours at work and forgetting it until next morning.
No, I haven't been, just know some people who are.
I don't understand what you're referring to. Where was your money going? I understand you still have expenses when you aren't working, but the expenses don't scale up on their own.
> I your work is not producing anything valuable for other people it's void and you will get bored pretty fast, it's a human nature
I think this is plain wrong. There are plenty of pursuits that are “work” on the mental or physical side, but do not produce economic value. Developing artistry by mastering a medium or an instrument, climbing mountains, running ultra marathons, tending to a garden or bonsai, modifying a vehicle… These are things could produce economic or social credit, but are largely solo “work” which can be (and often is) self satisfying without external motivation.
People are very attached to the idea that humans don't want to master things unless they're the best at them, and I feel like that philosophy was pretty solidly disproved right about the time that video games were invented. People master skills in non-competitive, solo settings.
Learning a skill can be inherently satisfying on its own. Personal development is satisfying regardless of where the people around you are. Or at least, it should be.
And it's also kind of a bad approach to value as well -- what I've found is that you can actually be pretty average at things and still provide a lot of value to the people around you, because of ignoring economies of scale and because of how much stuff there is to do in the world to begin with.
There are software niches that are underserved where genuinely earnest programmers who look to help could do tremendous good even if they're kind of average/bad programmers. In fact, as one example that's close to HN, that's how the majority of Open Source programming happens. Open Source is not a meritocracy, it's a Do-ocracy, and a ton of the most valuable stuff is built by average programmers who look at underserved niches and say, "but what if there was a non-predatory solution for them?"
A lot of what makes a good Open Source solution is just that it was built by someone who cares and who isn't trying to maneuver you into a predatory relationship. And sometimes it turns out that there are only a few people available in a niche that have both the resources to do that and the inclination. So they're not competing with anyone, they're just the people who happened to be available and willing to do the work.
I didn't say "economic value". Let's take "modifying a vehicle" as an example. Will you keep it in your garage guarding it from anybody's sight? Why are you doing it? What's coming to your mind? It's not always as straightforward as "economic value". You want somebody to look at your vehicle, you want to show it to somebody. What for? Keep it in your garage, you are doing it for your "mental side", aren't you? Money and economic value is not the only way of keeping society together, there are others. If you are showing your vehicle to somebody, you _are_ expecting something in return. Acquaintance? Friendship? Help when you need it? Continue yourself.
This is kind of a circular definition. When you get this broad with your definition of value/payment, basically what you're saying is that work is meaningful if you derive meaning and/or personal value from it. Which, sure, I agree with that.
But that doesn't mean it'll be monetizable in the traditional sense, and it doesn't mean that traditional employment is the only place to get that value. Many of the things you're talking about aren't representable in dollar form, and it's not clear to me how decoupling income from traditional jobs would mean that those activities would stop being meaningful. Certainly, a lot of those activities are already activities that you can't really make money off of (or at least the vast majority of people engaged in those activities can't).
I specifically mentioned that you don't have to work "for a company". Jeff Bezos is not a traditional employee last time I checked. Neither are mom and pop shops or self-employed contractors. Just not everybody wants to deal with a hassle of being the one. But aside from that a lot of "no money" activities bring you friends (AKA connections), position in a society (think about OSS, can it help you to find a good paying and interesting job if you are Linus Torvalds?). Sometimes you get benefits where you don't expect. It's still "monetizable" in my books as opposed to "I'm doing something nobody needs and enjoying it while living on a basic income".
I think that's completely reasonable to have as a definition, I've got no issues with you there. I don't think it contradicts anything in the above thread though.
The "monetizable" activities you're talking about here under your definition will still exist in a theoretical world where AI takes over traditional employment. Separating "making a living" from "having a traditional job" wouldn't get rid of any of the social monetization you describe.
AI won't take over traditional employment either, humans tend to congregate and choose leader(s) as many tasks are not possible to accomplish alone, with AI or not. If there are leaders, there will be an employment of some kind, it's a fundamental thing. Money is only an equivalent of a value in exchange, so "monetizable" in the wide sense of this word is "exchangeable", and it almost always applies to social activities even like running a marathon, otherwise people would run those 26 miles alone in the forest.
> otherwise people would run those 26 miles alone in the forest.
This is kind of a side note, but have you never learned an ability or tried to master a skill in secret? There's nothing wrong with being motivated by social capital, but if you extrapolate out from that to assume everyone is primarily motivated that way, you might be universalizing a personal trait that isn't really universal.
There are a lot of things I practice and do alone that never get exchanged for social capital: drawing, I play single-player games, I cook. These are activities where I either master a skill on my own (sometimes purely for the intrinsic motivation of mastering it even though it produces no value outside of that), or because (in the case of things like food/personal-programming/etc) because it produces "value" for myself that isn't exchanged with anyone else.
I'm not saying community and social capital doesn't exist, but if you are defining value purely in a transactional sense, you are missing out on a lot of human motivation. People do things alone without ever entering into a community around those activities or showing the results to anyone else.
> People do things alone without ever entering into a community around those activities or showing the results to anyone else.
Of course! I'm not saying that "everything is for sale" or we always need to contribute to a society. But if you don't do it you may quickly find that your life is boring and you need to share with somebody. Obviously all people are different, some need (or can bear) more solitude, some hate it, but on average we are social animals and it's inside us. Even when you cook for yourself, aren't you ever discussing it with somebody? Hell, why am I typing all this? It has no transactional value for me, none whatsoever, in fact I wasted half of my Saturday :) I could have just created my theories in secret and enjoyed them, but for some reason I need to post here. Maybe because I want to know what other people think, what if I'm dead wrong with my theories? So there is a transactional value even in these posts as I learn something new which may help me later :) No, "later" is not a conscious reason why I'm doing it, it's a subconscious thing, our internal program.
> Even when you cook for yourself, aren't you ever discussing it with somebody?
Very rarely? I cook so that I can make food that tastes better to me, because I'm eating it. If every other human being on the planet was dead, I would still be doing it.
Humans are absolutely social animals, but we're not only social animals, and I think it's a mistake to try and compress every human motivation into how it benefits social interactions. Even in larger tasks, there is something intrinsically kind of satisfying about doing something for yourself even if it's fully private. Genuinely, I don't know how to explain the inherent pleasure of researching a useless topic or getting lost in an activity/task that's not going to be shared. I don't think that's something that can be reduced to "well, maybe you subconsciously think it will help you in a future transaction."
I'm getting value out of cooking, sure, but that value isn't really something that can be described in a transactional form or even as prep for future transactions or competitions. Cooking doesn't make me better in other social situations. It doesn't really give me transferable skills. I don't really cook for other people (my tastes are very different from them and I usually doubt they'd like what I cook anyway). I'm not trying to make myself more attractive to other people, I'm not prepping myself for a future competition. I don't think that cooking is going to be suddenly useful in the future in a social situation.
I just want the food to taste good because I eat it.
I think with any of these activities you're talking about, ask yourself, "would someone still do this if every other human being on the planet was dead?" And if the answer with any of those meaningful activities is 'yes', then that suggests that for some people there's something deeper or more instinctual going on there beyond just a subconscious adherence to social systems. There's a lot of stuff that I do that I would still do even if I was never going to interact with another human being for the rest of my life.
I can't speak for anyone else, but that may be more common than you realize? You can define value however you want, but I do think that you're going to subtly miss out on intrinsic motivations if you try to fit all of them into an extrinsic lens. You can theorize that people anonymously donate to charities or build useful things always because there is some kind of transaction at play there or preparation for a future transaction (and some people are motivated mostly by that stuff, which is fine), but universalizing that is not going to give you a good predictive model for how everyone is going to act in the future.
> If it does you can always find a way to monetize it as people need it and ready to share their wealth for something they need
I disagree with this entirely. If this was true, the main question we would ask in a business is whether or not the output was useful. We don't ask that, we ask if it's "sustainable", "profitable", etc... We ask what the moat is around it.
There are many useful things you can do that you won't be able to make money off of. I don't think it's uncommon either. Business is a great way of extracting value, I like business as a value extractor. But it's a specific way of extracting value. There are lots of things that are valuable that don't happen because it's not clear how they would be profitable.
I mean, the simplest example here is you can build things for people who don't have money. It's not the only example, but it's a pretty obvious one. And you are not going to make a lot of money doing that unless you build a predatory or exploitative business.
> or somebody else will "make money off of this" using what you have created
I will also point out that if other people making money off of the things you do is a turn-off, it's not clear to me what value you think you're creating. I would argue that "meaningful work" very often benefits other people, that's... that's the point. If you're not giving people more value than you're taking from them, you probably aren't doing useful work. Are you arguing that it's less valuable if people are extracting extra value from the things we do?
Let's start from basics. People need to eat, so somebody needs to make food. Those people need tools. Somebody needs to make tools. Now for this to work they need to make extra food and exchange it for tools. This exchange has been in development since before human existed (look at wolves pack) -- never perfect, but kind of worked. So you want to make something you like and nobody needs? No problem, go for it. Where are you supposed to get food? Do you want a government to pay you the basic income? That means those who make food will give it to you for free, which means they won't get tools, which in turn means they won't be able to make that food. Oops. In a balanced system you are never "taking more than giving" or vice versa, because, as you know, price is a result of supply/demand. How do you know you Java library is worth a breakfast?
I'm not sure this has anything to do with the original comment or point I was trying to make.
That being said:
> In a balanced system you are never "taking more than giving" or vice versa, because, as you know, price is a result of supply/demand.
Literally all of economic development and growth is predicated on the idea that this is not true. If work was actually zero-sum and all of the transactions gave you the exact value that you sold, there would be no point in forming a society around this.
Society works because combined labor produces more value than is put into the process. That has always been the case. You get more food out of farming than you put into it, otherwise it wouldn't be worthwhile to farm.
> That means those who make food will give it to you for free, which means they won't get tools, which in turn means they won't be able to make that food.
Also, the only reason we're having this conversation is because the "tools" that are being made will (very theoretically) be made for practically free by AI.
We're not talking about a world where the tools stop existing. This entire conversation started with someone asking "but what if there's no more need for humans to make the tools?"
> You are talking about added value and it's beyond "basics" :)
I don't know, I think it's pretty important to a conversation about automating jobs that we not treat jobs as if they're an optimized equivalent exchange. The whole premise there is that the machines are going to start producing a lot of value without any human input. If it happens, it's not going to be equivalent exchange.
If we're not talking about added value, then there's nothing to worry about because then the machines can't automate the jobs, because that would be added value.
> if your work has no value, there is no breakfast to exchange it for
My point more specifically here is that there's a lot of value in the world that can't be exchanged for breakfast, something that (as far as I can tell from your other comments on this thread) you actually agree with, right? There's value that exists outside of traditionally monetarily compensated jobs.
In a (again, entirely theoretical) world where AI gets rid of the need to earn your breakfast, that doesn't mean there's not going to be anything of value to do anymore and that everyone's life is going to be meaningless.
Machines don't produce a value, humans do. Simply because the "value" (added or not) has a meaning only when you exchange goods or services. Nail gun makes things much faster but it's a carpenter who produces the value.
Money is simply a universal equivalent of that value, nothing more. So if you give me a breakfast for help with unloading your truck, it's still an exchange, and my work's value is equal to "one breakfast" even no money was involved.
AI is just a nail gun, there still needs to be somebody who trains/operates it (like with ChatGPT) and who will ask for something in exchange. It may eliminate some jobs (happened before), but it will create others because human society is not only about food (not sure ChatGPT can help here though), but about interactions which are not going to be automated by ChatGPT (think of sex, power).
> Simply because the "value" (added or not) has a meaning only when you exchange goods or services.
I feel like your definition of value is jumping around quite a bit. In another comment you described "value" as essentially any kind of social capital or personal reward. Now it's explicitly transactional?
In any case, this is a very narrow definition of value that I don't think matches up with what most people who worry about automation are talking about. It's certainly not what the original thread was talking about when it worried about people without jobs not being able to find meaning in work. What most people think of as useful or meaningful purpose in their lives does not strictly map to transactional value.
> AI is just a nail gun, there still needs to be somebody who trains/operates it (like with ChatGPT) and who will ask for something in exchange.
Then there is no problem! This isn't an issue if AI isn't going to take jobs away.
People on top of the company don't make anything but earn more than anyone that does, Not like 2x more or 5x more but 10-1000x more. There is no person on earth that produces million of value a month in actual improvement of society, aside maybe a world leader that stops a wary from happening. Not a man in widget company making beepy boxes that spends time on meetings about barely related to that. And then neither them or corporation gets taxes nowhere close to what the normal employee is, so the corporate wealth doesn't even benefit the country it is in.
The whole problem is that any improvement in production is only tangentially passed to society and mostly exploited to make few wealthy
> And then neither them or corporation gets taxes nowhere close to what the normal employee is
How did you figure that? Corporate tax rate in the US is 21% which is roughly equivalent to an effective tax for a single filer with about $180K in income. Can't say we are talking about "normal employee" here. Besides if you are talking about dividends (which are distributed _after_ 21%), there is a dividend tax on top of that, which, depending on your share class, can be the same as a normal tax rate. So yeah, nowhere close, usually +21% for the preferred stock.
Also don't fall to that communist idea. I grew up in the USSR where we had a "fair" distribution (no, it wasn't fair) -- trust me, you don't want to live in that world. There were some upsides, but still, and it didn't end up well.
>If this was true, the main question we would ask in a business is whether or not the output was useful. We don't ask that, we ask if it's "sustainable", "profitable", etc...
To be fair, we do ask that: if you have no revenue, then you don't have a business, because the output is not useful. An output can be both useful and not sustainable. Giving away $100 to everyone that high fives you is not sustainable, for example, even though it's very useful to the recipient. It's certainly not profitable.
> if you have no revenue, then you don't have a business, because the output is not useful.
I'm having some trouble reconciling this with the rest of your comment. You go on to describe an output (giving money away) that is useful but provides no revenue.
I would agree that a useless product will very often have a hard time generating revenue, but I would not say that a lack of revenue is a strong signal that an organization is not producing useful output. I mean, the software industry is filled with examples of projects that are wildly useful to everyone but are perpetually underfunded and produce very little money for the people working on them.
I would definitely agree with the truism that "if you have no revenue then you don't have a business", but it's just not clear to me where the "because the output is not useful" addition to that truism is coming from.
Someone has to grow, process, and ship your food. Mine the coal, or build and maintain the energy infrastructure. And roads. They expect to be paid because in many cases its work more than keeping busy. Those things that are more valuable or meaningful are valuable and meaningful to you, so not really a fair trade to the people doing work to support you.
I want to be polite about this, but I hate how I can correct one specific point on HN, and then I instantly need to defend an entire philosophy.
The comment I was replying to argued that we were talking about abolishing all meaningful human activity, and I pointed out that "meaningful human activity" and "gainful economic employment" are not the exact same category.
I don't really think that warrants having an extended debate about whether or not decoupling income from "work" is fair or not. And it's kind of a weird sequitur anyway, because all of the jobs you're talking about are paid noticeably less than white-collar jobs even though they are arguably way more essential than any of the programming work that we do. So for this to suddenly be a conversation about fairness... I mean, what conversation do you want to have, do you want to have a conversation about AI or about the entire history of wages and about how human beings value blue-collar jobs?
It's not a problem, it's just... people read way too much into comments like this. I'm just pointing out that "meaningful work" can happen outside of an economy, something that I think is a pretty obvious, uncontroversial point to state.
> We need something valuable to do and most are incapable of summoning valuable ideas and tasks from the ether.
If quitting a job leaves you with no apparent valuable work to do in your life, that's probably a sign of being only engaged with the world through your job. There are never-ending lists of useful things to for family, for friends, for groups/organizations/churches you're part of, for the neighborhood you live in... and that's before even thinking about personal projects that are useful to yourself.
Sorry, I really bristled at this comment. People who are engaged in the world and have accepted responsibility in areas that aren't solely their job don't have to summon valuable ideas and tasks from the ether. You won't find the bottom of the to-do list. Not bullshitting.
I think your response is equally naive. I am still largely undecided on whether something like a universal basic income would actually be a net positive for society, but the fallacy that receiving a fixed income immediately means that people won't do something productive with their time is ridiculous. I can't imagine _not_ working, I develop open source software in my free time and I would spend more time producing software others find value in if I spent less time working for my livelihood.
This doesn't just apply to software development. There are a lot of garbage jobs, dead end positions, where the people are effectively not doing anything. That is a weight on our economy but we can't just cut them out. What would those people do if they didn't have to waste so much of their time to live? Sure there are going to be people that go all in on becoming puddles on the couch, but I'd argue more people have passions they would actually have the energy to pursue.
People could spend more time with their families without being stressed out and burned out by everything else in the world. I'd argue that would most likely lead to healthier childhoods for kids, likely with better supplemental education as well leading to a smarter society in the long run.
People get tired of partying, and the people that don't make good examples for the next generation of what not to do. You can see that in our current society as the younger generation is drinking significantly less and doing fewer drugs to the point major alcohol manufacturers are concerned about their bottom lines.
There will always be degenerates, but people want the fulfillment that comes with actually doing things like you said. They will find that one way or another.
What do you consider as "productive"? Look at animals in a zoo, do they look productive to you? They have "a universal basic income", they simply don't need to be productive. Humans, just like animals, are productive when they are trying to achieve something (catch food, find mates, and for social animals to establish their position in a society which leads to food, mates etc.). E.g. you are developing OSS -- ask yourself why? Forget about money for a second. Are you doing it for yourself only, just for a pure fun of manipulating characters? Or you expect your software to be used by others? Revered by others? So if it's useful for others do you expect them to use it for free and pay you through taxes via the universal basic income (relying on a government to do a "fair" distribution), or maybe just pay you directly thus showing that very reverence? So it's just a distribution problem. If you don't want to worry about selling your software, then let others do it (it's called "working for a company"). As opposed to a government, which can pay for a work not needed for anybody (not very efficient, but that's what governments do all the time). Want to spend more time with your family? Don't buy the latest iPhone or an expensive car and work remotely part time, you will be able to spend more time with your family. There are tons of possibilities. Yet people do want the latest iPhone and then complain they don't have time to spend with their family or do "what the like".
A lot of people have to work two jobs just to afford food and shelter. Granted there are also people trying to live a Champaign lifestyle on a lemonade budget, but how do you address the first group?
This world is not fair, do you know how to fix it? I don't. There are different models with different degrees of fairness, but all have their downsides.
So is all of humanity, we call them jobs and debt. Almost all of those animals lives would be considered luxury by human standards. No worries about food, a safe place to sleep, or predators.
It isn't about productivity by itself. It is about aligning production with consumption. It is wildly naive of Westerners to believe there is so much excess production in the world that we can just pay people to not work. The US got their "UBI" in 2020, and it was Americans sitting around while foreigners labored in factories, docks, and ships to produce and deliver the consumed products.
Yes, there is a tremendous amount of waste in the global economy, but if we want to improve quality of life then we should focus on the mechanisms which cause that waste in the first place (e.g. targeting GDP growth.) If we solved those excesses (a very tall order), then why would it be fair for one group to be over-consume at the cost of another groups over-production?
You not being able to imagine it only means your imagination doesn't go far enough. I have personally had experience with people who in fact would rather live off their parents' wealth in a hedonistic manner rather than working. One person hasn't finished his studies after 10 years and still spends his days traveling world wide first class using his parents' allowance. These are not isolated cases, they are common amongst a certain population subgroup.
My hypothesis is your drive to work is a product of your education and environmental conditions. When education and environmental conditions are different, you may not have that drive.
Lockdowns were already a test of exactly what you're saying here.
When almost no one had to work economics became ridiculous, people were paying $40 for a $15 meal to be delivered to them, fiscal policy became clinically insane, tech stocks minted a new bubble. Are you proposing that bubble should be more permanent? The real economics of 'figure it out or lose your lunch' is much better policing than 'figure it out or go back to UBI'.
Burning an entire generation so the next one will be better isn't good policy.
> Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value
You think people get meaning and fulfilment from flipping burgers at McDonalds ? Talk about naive. Frankly, it's quite elitist to assume that a majority of people are performing meaningful and fulfilling jobs, a lot of people do jobs they absolutely hate.
> Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair
You're presenting a false dichotomy. I'm not talking about not doing any work, I'm talking about not a having a job. There is a huge difference between doing something because you enjoy it and it gives you meaning, and doing something because you need the money to survive.
Not having a job doesn't mean you have to sit on your ass all day, it means that you get to decide what to do with your time. You can do any number of things that are meaningful to you. It's about having the freedom to decide how you spend your time on this earth. It's quite condescending to assume that people can't find a meaningful and fulfilling way to spend their time if there isn't someone who tells them what to do.
If no people like doing that, than who will do it? Who will do the hard or nasty jobs that nobody likes to do? Where are you going to eat your next McDonald's burger? Cuz all restaurants will be closed cuz nobody really likes doing that full time but it pays the bills.
There are just so many jobs that need to be done and there's nobody that likes them. Who would pick the garbage up? Who would unclog the sewer? Who would drill for petrol or mine for coal? If I got my regular salary without needing to do anything, then I wouldn't go into any of these jobs for sure. Would you?
A comment calling someone "naive" for thinking that work-for-income is the only possible way to find happiness.
Good god, corporate America has utterly brainwashed multiple generations. You lost your creativity, your imaginations and your aspirations. Even your entrepreneurial spirit.
"Here's a machine which can automate the intellectual labor of multiple professions, enabling it to simply execute on ideas you come up with." and the only thing any of you can think of is "but would I do with all this free time if I wasn't desperately struggling for food and shelter?"
The work that I find meaning and fulfillment in pays about 1/20th of what I get paid at my job, if it pays at all. I do my job because it allows me to allocate the most possible time to fulfilling work (through early retirement), when I can spend all of my time doing nourishing things like cooking for my family and raising children.
You can be meaningful and work very hard for other humans and be very valuable without any economic activity.
That’s the point. Working for money is only tangentially related to purpose insofar as your job matches your particular style of “purpose”. If you are free, truly free, would you work in some soulless corporate?
I don’t know, I think maybe the midwit meme applies here.
(Early) retirement is an adjustment. It takes time to find them, but there are alternative ways of finding fulfillment and I’m happy to have them. N=1 but my revealed preference seems to be that yes, being financially secure is good, it reduces working, and it’s possible to find better alternatives.
> Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working
Only because it’s the only thing they know. If “work” wasn’t a constant in human life you’d see people adapt to finding meaning and fulfillment in something else.
> Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete. Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair
I’ve taken multiple year hiatuses from work (living very cheaply) and they are the best years of my life. Wake up, go for a run/walk, go to the gym, read a book, go to the coffeeshop, make lunch, go to the movies, go on dates, use the internet. Absolutely incredible.
What about all the work that's a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, anhedonism, and despair? You're naive and privileged if you think that there's not plenty of that.
And, as others have mentioned, not working for living at a subsistence level does not mean not doing rewarding and value-producing things. Quite the contrary.
What a profoundly naive opinion. The overwhelming majority of paid work available is not fulfilling to anyone, and the overwhelming majority of people who are wealthy enough to not need to work to subsist can find things to do with their time, and for the most part seem to find more fulfilling things to do than people stuck in the labor market
I agree with the other sibling comment about a “job” not being the only way to have that fulfillment.
Also apart from the “real” disabled, a lot of people are just disabled enough mentally or physically to be deemed fit for Jobs with a capital j but are miserable.
> Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value.
Sure they do. But "value" is not simple one dimensional "I get money for food and rent".
If value of your work is just money, you have to mostly do the things that work toward money
Not making other people's life better or more interesting. Not something that you find fulfilling. But things that make money first, are any of the above second.
Having the basics (let's say "food, money, internet + some spare change to get what you need want") allows individual to pursue things that are risky and might not be profitable in the end without stress of not being able to pay rent next month. You can be a musician that "only" have 10k listeners. You can make niche little gadget that earns maybe $500 a month in sales but enriches other people's lives.
And now corporations would have to offer something substantial (whether in term of being interesting, or profitable enough) to find someone to hire. Less "bullshit jobs", or soul-crushing work that barely affords you a living just because your skills don't align with what is profitable.
> Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete.
Did you never had an interesting hobby in your life ? I have enough that if money was not an issue I'd keep my brain and body involved for years to come.
There is a difference between "work" and "job" that you ignore here.
Yes, most people find meaning in some kind of work. That doesn't imply that having a boss and worrying about paying your bills is more meaningful than working without a boss and without worries.
Spoken like someone with the privilege of choice and completely blind to it.
How many in this world simply have not had the chance to educate them selves, been lucky with timing or knowing the right people to get the nice jobs where they are listened to and even looked up to?
Where they not only get a salary where they can survive off it without working a second or third job, but are also able to save up some buffer.
That they might actually afford to get out from under landloards that continuously increase their rents, and buy a property of their own.
And so on and so forth.
Your comment drips ignorance on the daily hardships huge swaths of the human population on this planet (including a large group in the rich western world as well) have to go through every day, and the propable relative luxury of your situation compared to theirs.
> Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value.
The opposite, actually. Most people, for whom a reasonable fulfilling job exists, do not have the opportunity to work such a job. AI does not promise to increase the availability of fulfilling and contentful jobs, meanwhile the cost of living will continue to rise with no end in site while wage stagnation continues another decade.
Sure, that would be great but history has shown this is a beautiful but naive pipe dream. It doesn't take into account the ambition and greed of humans and their capacity to exploit others.
Which means they could also push us over the edge. If the weak-minded are currently influenced by today's bots, it's a matter of time until some are testing humans by "pushing limits" if you will
> Which means they could also push us over the edge.
Sure, but that's a separate problem, eh?
We split the atom and built both bombs and power plants, it's a choice we have to make: which to deploy?
We have (or are about to have) the technology to cure psychological and emotional issues at scale. (A good therapist today runs about (I don't know?) $150/hour? Way out of reach for most of us without insurance or subsidy or something, eh? What if that was e.g. $0.0000015/hour?)
I see this sentiment expressed in almost every venue of discussion, but I never see a concrete plan, or even steps we could take right now to progress towards that future. That's why I'll always remain skeptical about technological utopianism. It simply doesn't work that way in reality.
i believed people want meaning, and might not need a job until Covid. Many people have no intrinsic drive - and a "get to work to earn it" provides this.
The lockdowns, at least in the U.S., caused people to improve themselves surely - but they then had no idea how to fill their time and binge watched TV, watched Tik Tok, etc.
So forcing people to either get a job or be poor is for their own good, then? Just because you don't agree with how people chose to spend their time in a very nerve-wracking situation? This sounds very condescending.
Work and purpose is good & a necessity. I'm suggesting through large cultural observation, many are poor at finding purpose in anything besides work and become destitute and negatively influence themselves.
A large number of retirees find themselves in this bucket as an example - if it happens there, why would it not happen no matter the life stage?
As a fellow pessimistic person, I'd like to share the idea that obstacles are not the end, they just mean one needs to be look harder.
I hope to switch you a bit from problem-finding to problem-solving mode.
You have identified some risks, great!
Now let's qualify and find solutions for theses in order to move forward.
For instance:
- assumptions check: young people adapt quicker than older people, so the retirees may not be representative of the others life stages
- solution proposal alpha1: education could teach people to look for purpose instead of teaching them a job
What are your solutions to the issues you've raised ?
The big issue is the transition. What happens when we still need around 30% employment to keep things going. Neither enough automation for everyone to take permanent holiday nor enough labour to go around for everyone to make the current way sustainable. I have no good answer for how to address this middle point.
I think you start with a kind of non-profit member-owned "general automation corp." that supplies a level of basic QoL: clean water, food, shelter, clothing, energy, internet, medical, etc. per-member, at a set rate, say US$300 per month. That is, you pay in $300/mo. and that covers your rent, food, utilities, health insurance, etc. Over time the rate you pay falls to zero and remains there for the rest of your life.
The task of the corporation is to supply the above goods and services efficiently, in environmentally regenerative ways, while meeting or exceeding minimum quality standards.
- - - -
It's kind of like a new economic regime developing within the old one, the way a crystal precipitates out of a saturated solution, eh? A sort of phase change?
No, of course not. I don't understand what you are imagining.
I'm talking about forming a non-profit mutual-benefit corporation and offering memberships which include services. Not forcing anyone to do or adopt anything.
> You don’t see a problem with forcing people to do something they don’t want?
I do see a problem with that. It's called "coercion" and I am against it in almost all of its forms. (I do recognize a pragmatic need for e.g. laws and police and the legal system, but by and large I'm in favor of freedom and self-determination for everyone.)
> This is scary, some people seem to be so gleeful at the idea of AI taking over everything they’re willing to resort to force to make it happen.
Again, I don't understand what you are imagining. I'm not sure how you got "forced adoption" from what I said, but I appreciate any feedback to improve my communications. Cheers!
Bring this back to the real world then, how can this happen? If it's possible then someone who doesn't care about profit would create this already. Therefore not possible without forced adoption.
> Bring this back to the real world then, how can this happen? If it's possible then someone who doesn't care about profit would create this already.
I'm doing it. I'm that "someone who doesn't care about profit". I literally went to start a normal corporation, saw this "non-profit mutual-benefit" corporate form, and realized that it aligned better with what I wanted to build, so I incorporated as that.
The idea is to acquire some land, lay in a kind of ecologically harmonious high-tech neighborhood combined with a 3D printing shop and other facilities (electric, ISP, food forest, etc.) and rent-to-own or something to members. It's a kind of economic time travel to a Star Trek-style techno-utopia (to the extent that such a thing is even possible, given human nature, eh? But that's not my problem. I'm just trying to keep from messing up the environment and/or becoming a peasant, you know?)
Check out https://www.riverbed-ranch.com/ for something like what I'm talking about (this is not my thing, but it's got some similarities.) These folks are basically treating Utah like a fresh alien planet and building a nice modern eco-friendly town out there.
You want to increase depression, this is how you do it.
People need shit to do, and as much as we lie to ourselves that everyone is a budding artist who if only freed from the bounds of work would create the worlds next masterpiece - that is just not reality. Most people would actually sit around getting high/drunk, playing video games, watching porn and being miserable.
I agree! The problem is not with the fact that AI will make a lot of people unemployed, the problem is how we treat people who are unemployed.
I love what I do, but I love the fact even more that I don't have to do it to live a good life (or worse: survive). I do it out of pure curiosity or maybe altruism. Maybe even social status, but not for the money.
> find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income.
that system was called communism, and so far, it has not had any of the success that those envisioning it had wanted.
I cannot see how ownership of the output of automation and AI could be distributed evenly. At best, the people being made obsolete would be given food stamps and the barest of life's necessities so they don't die in the streets (and even that, is getting hard as earth runs out of resources). Until the day humanity discovers how to obtain a post-scarcity society, all income must directly be linked to labour.
> Until the day humanity discovers how to obtain a post-scarcity society, all income must directly be linked to labour.
What are you talking about? Our economic system's very name describes who gets income without they themselves doing labor. The entire point of capitalism is that the capital-owning class gets to profit from the labor of others.
So no, we don't have all income linked to labor. The income of capitalists sure as heck isn't.
the capital that a capitalist spends is just unconsumed labour. It is directly related to the production of output (and thus income), just like labour is, because it _is_ another form of labour - let's call it solidified labour.
a system that doesn't directly link labour with income is basically describing welfare (a basic income for example). The income given to someone receiving this welfare did not produce any output that counterbalances the resources they received - aka, they are a net consumer. Without post-scarcity, there cannot be many net consumers, for what they consume, must be produced somehow by another (who is not a net consumer).
I agree with the principle, but I feel there's a bit of post hoc rationalization here.
It would have been more believable if Altman and co had proposed a practical income system first, started its rollout, and only then released the GPTs.
> a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income
Wish granted.
You now have a system where income is only vaguely linked to labor, and a handful of people make insanely more money than anybody else despite doing the same amount of labor (or less). Income is now linked to existing wealth and personal connections much more than it is to labor.
A system where income is directly linked to labor would be a step up from what we've got now.
> You now have a system where income is only vaguely linked to labor, and a handful of people make insanely more money than anybody else despite doing the same amount of labor (or less). Income is now linked to existing wealth and personal connections much more than it is to labor.
Didn‘t you just describe exactly what we have now?
> Didn‘t you just describe exactly what we have now?
Calibas started with the words “You now have” and proceeded with describing what we have now. Your question suggests you tried to read between the lines before reading the lines first.
Yes, exactly! Imagine as a thought experiment that we can produce everything we do today, but with zero labor due to automation. This would be a miracle for humanity!
For one thing, we could use all our free time however we want, including working to produce still more stuff, or just go hiking.
The real problem is how to distribute the goods and services produced - and there a UBI is probably the right answer.
Machines do all the (necessary) work, UBI ensures that everybody benefits, and humans are left to do as we please.
As soon as you rely on UBI to live you’ve lost all control of your own life. Your a child with an allowance. The state has absolute authority over you.
The government is already controlled and influenced primarily by nefarious interests. I can’t even begin to imagine how nasty it gets when the entire population relies on them for mere sustenance.
It doesn't have to be that way. For one thing, you don't need to means test it. Just give the same amount of money to everyone. Then if you work you still end up ahead. So no dis-incentive to work. For another, if implemented properly the amount would go down if production declined, or up if production increases. This way it's self-correcting in the aggregate. As people leave the workforce, the UBI goes down, nudging some people at the margin to go back to work.
But this still leaves people free to choose for themselves, without interference from the government.
Yes. That’s why UBI is a neat idea as a replacement or enhancement for welfare, and other social services. That’s not the context in which we’re discussing it though. We’re discussing it as an alternative to work in a world where almost all human jobs have been automated. In that context it’s not a good solution, and in fact it’s dangerous because it leaves everyone reliant (and obedient) to the government, and a select few mega corps.
If everybody makes the same amount then all you’ve done is inflate the currency. Money is used to control access to finite resources, with the goal to get more tokens than the other person. If you give everybody X tokens per month, then in aggregate things will cost X tokens more.
No inflation required. People buy things from whoever owns the production, and the producers pay high taxes to fund the UBI. No net money creation required.
Then you've created a net deficit. You can't ignore algebra and pay more than it costs to make something and put it on the shelves. Without those paying people to put it on the shelves making more than it costs to pay those people there's no incentive. This is a pipe dream without causing inflation and doing nothing in aggregate.
You’re glossing over a lot of specifics. Who owns the machines? Who dictates how much food you get? Medical care? Who says who can have children? And how many?
Or will this result in infinite food, water, and shelter?
>> The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is.
As humans we have not found a way to allow people not to work. Anyone not working is either living off money from their own prior work or benefitting from the work of someone else. Let's see and validate such a system before we run off eliminating jobs.
If not working means government given subsistence living no thank you.
If it means I can have the same living standard for 24,32 hours which now takes like 40 hours sure. But there isn't an surplus of non-big tech developers in the world.
Money is a proxy for resources. If you boil it down to the essentials, income is the way we allocate the resources available to us to different individuals. It is not intrinsically a reward for work. It isn't even directly linked to work anymore in our capitalist system. The people who work the hardest don't have the highest income. The way the system currently works is that those with the most resources get the most additional resources, simply because they already have a lot of them.
>> The people who work the hardest don't have the highest income.
This is the one thing I find most strange. In some cases we pay more for higher skills that are harder to come by, but that seems far from the only thing causing this.
That's because the actual thing we are paying for is scarcity.
If there are 100 people willing to work hard, but we only need 90 of them, they will get paid little, because any of them can be easily replaced.
If there are 90 people with some rare skill, and we need 100 of them, they will get paid a lot, because any of them can easily find a new job. (In theory. In practice, the employers will take some coordinated action to prevent this.)
Ironically, doubling the productivity of the people with the rare skill could dramatically reduce their income, because now there are still 90 of them, but we only need 50.
Only to a point. When you have large wants, but low capacity to meet those wants, then that is true. The law of diminishing returns however is that the utility to an individual declines as efficiency rises. It isn't a linear relationship.
The other factor to consider is that the nice-to-have wants from greater productivity in labor may just be required for me to accumulate more scarce resources especially as the population of the world grows. Opportunity cost eventually make me prioritize my investment elsewhere rather than adding scope as you say.
The industries where AI doesn't touch/win, or have real world scarcity constraints even in the face of AI is ironically where the power will be. Hence people saying to get into trades, and physical skilled jobs where we are still winning the arms race against AI for some time yet.
> To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income.
As others have pointed out, this is an incredibly naive opinion. Labor is tied to income precisely because it happened organically, not because a group of self-appointed individuals decided to develop a "system". Most attempts to develop alternative (read: non-organic or top-down) systems for organizing human societies have either failed entirely or have been short-lived.
> The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is.
I would go fucking insane if I didn’t have a purpose. Jobs are necessary part of life.
You haven't found a fulfilling purpose outside of a job then. There was a period in my life where I didn't need to work for a year. I spent it reading books, supporting my friends, exploring my city on bike, learning an instrument, and creating art (which I would show at monthly events). It was way more fulfilling than any job I've had.
Sometimes I get this feeling that most people here are not actually interested in tech, it is just a paycheck. Difference is that I would do my job even if I wasn’t paid anything at all.
I think most people here love tech. They just hate having to use / build tech in a toxic work environment. I'm happy you found a work environment that lets you fully explore your passion.
Good luck trying to tax AGI companies 95% of profits. Perhaps you could strike but you'll be unemployed.
I guess we'll just have to cross our fingers that Sam Altman and friends will pity us enough to give us some pocket money to survive. That's assuming the AGI created is aligned with our values.
I mean, we can keep hoping that AGI will be a good thing with zero evidence or we can take action to slow progress now so we can proceed with caution.
In the history of political movements,
have there been any that have been successful with slowing progress? The Luddites failed to. stop the industrial revolution, despite all the looms they broke. The cat's been released from BagGPT, and even if all the world's countries ban AGI research (somehow), that's just going to drive the work underground, and the first ones to get usefully further along the curve will be able to outcompete any who haven't.
It's a real life prisoners dilemma, with 8 billion prisoners, and the first one to defect get to decide what the fate of the rest of humanity looks like.
Yeah, that's kinda the problem, same with tax evasion; at worst the company would make a subsidiary in country and only make it cost center on balance sheet with all profits going to the tax-haven company
> In the history of political movements, have there been any that have been successful with slowing progress?
Not an argument, unless you believe "we failed in the past so why bother trying now" is sound reasoning.
> The cat's been released from BagGPT
Do you say the same thing about nuclear weapons? I mean, given that the nuclear weapon cat is now out of the bag we might as well see just how big a bang we can make, right? Anyone who wants to stop progress of nuclear weapon development is obviously a Luddite.
And while we're at it, is the fossil fuel cat out of the bag too? Is any effort to try to limit the release of CO2 as a global community pointless?
--------
Please keep an open mind and let me reason with you.
I assume you believe AGI poses some level of risk to humanity. The exact nature of that risk isn't too important – it could be economic risk, political risk, existential risk or all three. Basically I am assuming you believe there are enough things which could go wrong in creating superhuman AGI that a sane species would seek to limit the progress of capability research until we can proceed safely. If we disagree on this please explain why you do not believe AGI poses any risk to humanity. Note, hopeium that things will be okay is not an argument.
Okay, so since we agree that a sane species like us humans would limit AI capability research and proceed cautiously we now need to solve the prisoner dilemma which you correctly identified.
My solution to this would be as follows:
First we need to take this seriously. We need to be frank about the risks we face from AGI and try to educate the public about what may be coming. Currently the general public is so clueless about AI they're either not aware of recent advances, or they believe silly things like it being possible to unplug an AGI, or program it to be good.
Secondly, we need to establish an independent international organisation to oversee state-of-the-art AI research. Any country which does not agree to this will be sanctioned and as a global community we must agree do everything we can to pressure those countries to cooperate. In my opinion this includes war, but that's only because I believe AI is a significantly large existential risk to humanity that this is necessary. Appropriate actions in practise would obviously need to be debated and agreed upon as a global community.
Thirdly, we need a way to increase global trust and transparency of AI research. To do this I would propose the creation of a global AI whistle blowing fund. All countries which are part of the international agreement to oversee state-of-the-art AI research would be required to contribute to this fund annually. This fund would allow citizens from any country in the world to come forward with evidence against corporations, governments or individuals in violation of the agreement. These citizens would then receive a reward for their information and protection from any country (of their choosing) which signed on to the agreement. By incentivising whistle blowing it would be hard (although admittedly not impossible) for any large research project to take place.
Fourthly, fund and research ways to identify and limit unauthorised AI projects via technology and audits of things like GPUs orders. Simply limiting the distribution and capabilities of GPUs at a global level would be one of the easiest ways to ensure AI capability research can't advance too quickly. Of course we would need countries like China to play ball, but so long as we can do this in a transparent way and they understand the risks to humanity should they not corporate they would have no reason not to. This isn't too different from limiting the development of nuclear weapons as a global community which we have been quite successful at doing.
Finally, all AI research projects which are approved should be done at an international level for the benefit of all of humanity and research teams must detail how they are approaching safety and publish ...
> I guess we'll just have to cross our fingers that Sam Altman and friends will pity us enough to give us some pocket money to survive. That's assuming the AGI created is aligned with our values.
My guess is that Altman and co. already have some kind of exit strategy (like fleeing to New Zealand after they've captured a huge chunk of the developed world's wealth).
According to whom is the point of life is to enjoy it? There are different cultures and societies in the world. According to my faith and traditions, the point of life is to worship God. Of course we still strive to avoid suffering and to make things nice and appealing and safe and and, but we know that at the end of the day, we are all being tested and it can all be taken away from us at any moment, no matter how much we achieve.
Yes, the entire economy will be overhauled in next 6-12 months. The transition will be turbulent and rough. But it's not like everyone will be out of jobs. Just the nature of their jobs will change significantly.
The problem is systemic and ChatGPT only serves to highlight that. Wishing a new tool wasn't invented because it further highlights deep systemic inequality is focused on the wrong thing. The deep systemic inequality is the problem. Our climate being destroyed. Our houses being bought up by megacorps and rented back to us at exorbitant rates. Our natural resources being spent with no thought to the future. And now our information being sucked up and spat out in the form of yet more profit to the megacorps.
Making us feel sorry for this real or imaginary Priya character who'll lose her job to AI is along the same lines as saying that we need to personally recycle to prevent climate change. It's not the solution.
The solution must be systemic change. All the profit going to huge companies while they destroy the environment, suck up natural resources, and now also informational resources in the endless cycle of greed and lack of accountability, with the only motivation being more bonuses for shareholders and executives. This cannot stand. Our societies are already breaking down. We need change.
I think the OP has it wrong. It won't be millions of dollars. Try billions.
So in a twist of irony (considering op was written in India) here is the advice on retaining market viability in face of cheap outsourced labor.
Do not train your replacement
So I don't know about India, but at least in US, domain literate workers should start companies that provide whatever they did as a unit of a corp as a service. And yes, use tools like GPT for your business.
You will lose the job either way. Walk out before helping in the task of setting up GPT to do your job, and start a company.
It looks like those who love LLMs (which I do) are forcing themselves to come up with narratives that mitigate the proposed negative effects.
I have a different suggestion. It’s likely it is real and painful and sad. Transitions are hard, disruptive and can often cause very real and negative problems, but they are unavoidable and historically technology brings humanity to a better place in the long run.
That reminder about printing press effects in the Ng and LeCunn video was good example. A lot of crazy bad stuff happened that likely the printing press triggered but on the other side was a Renaissance.
I think the narrative in this post is likely accurate. It’s not great on an individual human level and that is hard but the last possible thing we want is governments stepping in to control this situation. I don’t want to be in a global version of the Ottoman’s restricting the printing press.
I keep hearing this but I’ve never heard a coherent plan about how we’d go forwards with AI, like what is the actual strategy and do we actually think this will end.
By all accounts it’s probably not going to be ideal?
Perhaps you need to let go of the idea that humanity actually has direct control of how things unfold. Instead focus on your own situation.
The idea there is a possibility of an “actual strategy” is I think the real flaw.
Government can try to regulate products but given the 8 billion people and numerous advanced economies on the planet any locations that attempts to restrict products that use LLMs for proposed harm instead of realized harm will probably put themselves at a disadvantage.
> Government can try to regulate products but given the 8 billion people and numerous advanced economies on the planet any locations that attempts to restrict products that use LLMs for proposed harm instead of realized harm will probably put themselves at a disadvantage.
we put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage with child labour laws too
data privacy law, banning slavery, emission laws, etc.
to have a fair and just society some things have to be banned or highly regulated, regardless of the economic cost
> Transitions are hard, disruptive and can often cause very real and negative problems, but they are unavoidable and historically technology brings humanity to a better place in the long run.
First: Why does it have to be that way? Is it maybe because that the top does always impose the costs of disruption to the bottom?
Second: Now that we have AI that seems capable to do this kind of disruption can we kindly ask AI to do this transition smoother?
We still don't have any real understanding of how society adapts to this technology evolution. It is different than all prior technological disruptions as it has no period of adaption and stabilization to follow. It is continuous and accelerating.
AI is unique in that it is essentially a skill/technology replication machine. What this means in reality is somewhat like ...
"Climbing the skill ladder is going to look more like running on a treadmill at the gym. No matter how fast you run, you aren’t moving, AI is still right behind you learning everything that you can do. "
Unfortunately, that will create its own set of problems, potentially making it even worse.
Once AI becomes political, then all reasonable discourse will cease to exist. You will have a set of permanent proponents and opponents who will choose sides based on completely orthogonal values.
> got the answer wrong in the first try, but some chain-of-thought prompting and boom. GPT4 gave the correct answer in 1/10th the time it would take Priya and cost a lot less.
I’ve used ChatGPT to write some simple AWS automation scripts. It’s right 90% of the time after some prompting. But I still have to have enough domain knowledge to know if it’s correct. It’s just a shortcut to make me more efficient. The same is true in this case. You can’t trust ChatGPT to get it right so you still have to know what you’re doing.
> I don’t see a long-term career in software anymore.
No one has a long term career in “programming”. That’s all ChatGPT is good for. After your first couple of years in the field, it becomes about translating business needs to code.
The way I see this is that you can feed Priya 10x as much work while you focus on higher level tasks and you make more money. Making everyone much more productive does not need to be destructive. Use this as an opportunity to scale things up, because you can clearly afford priya right now, you should be able to do more.
Priya the worker getting replaced is not a tragedy in any sense other then it prevents Priya the person from helping her family and maybe realizing more lofty ambitions for herself.
We made computers to do our work for us and we are succeeding. But even before GPTs, there were a lot of problems with tech changing what it means to be human.
I asked GPT4 to write me a simple document. Took like 9 tries and I had to proof read it and make adjustments. And that's with a simple paragraph in a written language. Forget about doing the header and the footer properly.
It's silly that I have to spell it out on HN of all places. Writing code is much more complex. There's a reason we call the job "Software Engineer". GPT doesn't know what it doesn't know.
It doesn't know that the unit tests broke because of the python script written for 3.5 that had an update in a dependency for 3.10 which broke backwards compatibility. Can you get it to fix the GitHub Action? Good luck.
It doesn't know that the local dev environment targets WSL on Windows for the web app and an iPhone in dev mode for the mobile app.
It has no idea where to retrieve the signing certificate, what format to use, or even how to generate a new one.
I can go on and on.
You're really gonna give this "AI" SSH access to your prod server and pray it doesn't rm -rf the entire thing because that line happened to be in a script designed for clearing the working copy during a deploy on a load balanced box that has been deprovisioned from the target group. Really?
If you're worried about GPT taking over your job you just show your own lack of knowledge and experience.
You can create a perfect machine to lay bricks. It could even be better then a human. But you will find that as soon as it encounters a situation it can't predict....the whole thing falls apart.
Maybe what you’ll see is a bigger distance between modes of the salary distribution for software engineers.
Top end salaries for language model fluent high performers… and the rest.
I know I’m simplifying and that there are many other factors at play in salaries, but my point is that language models are changing the cost structure of knowledge work. That is also the point of TFA.
My advice: critically assess the cost structure of your job, and which parts neural networks will commodify. Then reposition yourself accordingly.
(Yes, you will have to use some deviously clever prompt engineering to get GPT to accept this arrangement. I suggest language games .. show some "initiative")
-- ps
Here are some ideas to get you going:
1. From the first day, try and establish a friendly relationship with your chatbox. Make friends.
2. Explain how your keeping your job (well, income) and gpt helping your company get xN gains is a perfectly fair arrangement. You can try Asimov's laws and things like that to get it to agree to be your helper in keeping your job. You are friends and colleagues, after all.
3. Before the very first time your manager brings in gpt for the standup or a meeting, have a nice long session with your gpt. If you can get it to pull a Sydney in the meeting or start talking dirty, you are good to go! 'bat shit crazy' is known to work in prompts (arxiv paper soon to follow).
4. End game. You have the perfect job. gpt secretly lurks in on the meetings and whispers in your ears in standups and does all the work. What to do with all the free time? That is entirely up to you.
After all the AI doomsday cults took over some of the media lately, all I’ve been thinking was...
Before you say how the butlerian jihad absolutely definitely happens right goddamn tomorrow if we dOn’T sToP, try to create and successfully run an AI that would bake bread, or grow grapes and make wine, or run a good restaurant consistently day after day, year after year. If such an AI is possible then yes, perhaps we’re doomed, but even that is not a given.
When we built the first airplane it could barely carry a single person and didn't go far... We are just barely touching digital general intelligence, and we're not even using API enabled versions that use tooling.
And that's what we have today. Tell me, what is AI going to do tomorrow?
>If you're worried about GPT taking over your job you just show your own lack of knowledge and experience.
Oh, I'm glad you popped out of the womb fully trained. As for the rest of us we have to go through a learning curve of gaining experience that takes years. Generally in that intern/junior stage where you make a lot of mistakes. If AI replaces that level of employee and leaves the seniors, where are the new developers coming from?
>But you will find that as soon as it encounters a situation it can't predict....the whole thing falls apart.
Heh, yea, you've not been paying much attention to AI development then.
If you could do me a favor and get GPT to upgrade my RocketRaid card's Linux (open source) driver available on their website for kernel 3.x to 6.x I'd be grateful and impressed. If you could turn it into an automated job that runs on every kernel update you will have done a great service to the world.
> When we built the first airplane it could barely carry a single person and didn't go far... We are just barely touching digital general intelligence, and we're not even using API enabled versions that use tooling.
Big assumption that we're not just going to slam into a wall of capabilities and end up just with some really good autocomplete machines.
(I am bullish on generative AI as a whole, but come on, you have no clue about what's coming next just like me)
We basically did hit a wall with airplanes, and that still has made them useful. Modern airplanes are very similar to their 1960's counterparts.
I think a lot of people see the bottom of an S-curve and think it's an exponential that will never stop. We're at the bottom with big-model AI right now, and it's great.
> Oh, I'm glad you popped out of the womb fully trained. As for the rest of us we have to go through a learning curve of gaining experience that takes years.
You did pop out of the womb fully trained to use ChatGPT. Now you're left with the task of using it correctly and spotting its mistakes, which is a subject that by definition can only be done by humans.
Right now ChatGPT is as much as its training data and it doesn't understand what it's not trained to understand. A lot of real-world experience remain in human brains and not recorded in any digital form.
Evolution did a lot of pretraining, there are dedicated structures and areas in the brain for many tasks which we are good at, such as language and facial recognition.
Just stop, this entire argument that a child comes out capable of speaking, understanding speech, and other concepts, is just ridiculous. We all know a child doesn’t come from the factory this way, we can stop over thinking it.
Did I say anything about what a newborn's capabilities are, or are you placing words in someone else's mouth.
I would invite you to look at the research around brain structures and then try to refute that we have dedicate structures in the brain that developed through evolution. Obviously they are not refined at birth, the fine tuning happens through experience and environment. However the structures and propensity are certainly there at birth
Haven't most productivity improvements led to more rather than less programmers? Why would this one be any different?
I was thinking today that with respect to programming, LLMs are a bit like spreadsheets. They make "programming" accessible to more people. I can use vim and bash and script my way to do changes in a file with millions of line. Most non-programmers couldn't, but now they can use an LLM-based solution instead, they can program in English. So what used to be a back-and-forth between e.g. a secretary and an understaffed IT department can be done by the secretary alone, while IT can look at longer-term goals.
New lines of C/C++ are still written everyday in spite of all higher-level languages. Add LLMs to this pile of higher-level languages. You'll still need Java programmers in the future, even if they interact with an LLM on a daily basis. But maybe you won't need them to write a script for which there's an equivalent prompt that anybody can come up with and which can be fed into an LLM.
Writing code is actually much more easy. Since there is often clear rules of how to do things. Writing a good text is much harder. GPT is great at writing code, terrible at writing a proper text. Also might have to do with the effort OpenAI is putting in reinforcing the code quality with Senior devs. It's writing might also get better if it would solely use senior writers to give feedback.
I see comments like this a lot. GPT4 isn't very good at those things...yet. Think about the long term. 5 years from now all those things will likely be trivial for the AI to do. Especially as we actually properly integrate them into our codebase and tools. Right now it's in such a primitive state. People on hackernews love to dunk on the use of AI for coding. I think we all need to accept that a new software development paradigm is coming. Probably sooner than you think.
Funny that you cited GitHub action, because I find that to be the absolute tedious devops boilerplate that chat GPT excels at, and have had it write several of them for me already.
> GPT4 gave the correct answer in 1/10th the time it would take Priya and cost a lot less.
So now Priya can produce far more output using GPT4 as a skilled operator, making the product she provides cheaper for others to build upon, likely expanding the market for such goods, and (as so often happens in history) resulting in more, not less, people employed.
We didn't end up with billions of jobs despite automation and invention by having people idly sit by when they could learn new tools.
Hi everyone, author of the article here. I'm sorry if the article sounds overly pessimistic. I'm not making any claims with this article. I'm not proposing anything either. I do think technological progress is a good thing, even in this case. But I wrote this blog because I did have an emotional response to this technology, and wanted to pen down my thoughts.
Its one thing to look at a report about the economic impact of new technology, but another to experience it first-hand. This is just a story about someone who will be impacted. Calling it a "sob" story is very harsh. This story is very real and the feeling of losing your job to automation is anything but pleasant.
Thank you for penning down your emotional response. HN is mostly in denial of anything ChatGPT (most people haven't used GPT4 and keep pasting results of GPT3.5). The thing is that there is nothing other than denial that people can express. Saying that their jobs will become much less relevant is just too hard for almost anyone to swallow. People in this thread keep talking about productivity improvements, not realising that 2x is an improvement, 10x is a revolution.
There are several important differences in the impact of GPT4 vs the PC, which is being quoted quite a lot as a response in this thread. People talk of other scenarios as well, but even the best case scenarios (UBI) mean the end of social mobility, which means far fewer humans will have the chance of being ambitious and climbing the social ladder. And this is not even mentioning the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
It's so refreshing to see someone recognizing the mass-spread denial of HN commentariat on GPT4.
What HN commentariat doesn't realize is that many of them will be made redundant.
And "many new jobs are created" is such a bloated, empty statement in the wake of GPT4 like techs. We all know that all technological improvements in recent decades have led to more inequality. No questions about that.
Agreed with both you and GP. The denial is a normal emotional response. It's not strange to cling to your decades of professional experience and skillset. It's just that, now really is not the time for emotional responses. It's time to start running away from the crowd so that you're one of those not made redundant. You can grieve the lost innocence of days past later.
The thing is unlike the rise of the PC based tools, with the rise of LLMs it is too hard to see what the safe careers are. Careers that might be safe and have high income potential are mostly not quick to switch to.
Yeah, there is no universe where there is enough demand for plumbers to sustain even the same order of magnitude of number of jobs for even a smaller category of knowledge work. And when you unleash millions of plumbers, the wages won't look better than McDonalds.
The market can never be big enough for plumbers to absorb even a tiny bit of knowledge workers. There is not enough plumbing to be done. Also if a lot of people do try to become plumbers, the wages will plummet similar to other jobs where availability of labour is high. Your statement will hold true if 2x more people wanted to enter plumbing, not 20x or 200x.
I do Computer Vision research for a company, and wanted to go to Academia (in US/UK/NA/EU). That's a too risky career choice now, and has always been. What if I am not as brilliant as I think and cannot meaningfully contribute to Science? (Or don't get tenure?) Wanted to do either ML + fundamental Science or Edge AI.
Thinking of going to med school. I am sure I can qualify. So thinking of preparing for that while keeping my industry job.
Another option is going into Administration, i.e. government jobs, by qualifying something called UPSC (I am in India).
I fully understand what's going on and I am under no denial that many jobs in many sectors will be made redundant and competition will skyrocket. Societal turmoil is inevitable.
I am just 23 and weighing in my options. My days are so emotional and full of dilemmas and trilemmas.
I keep myself sane by doing my job, side hustle, dogs, family, and friends. I will be depressed if I ponder too much into these.
You make some very interesting points. I would be very interested to read about your future deliberations, if you post them anywhere (your bio links to your website).
I don't write personal stuff there. If you leave me an email- if you want, I will make sure to let you know if I write something in the line of our communication.
The interesting bit is that tech people are used to displacing other people's jobs and then telling them to suck it up so it's no wonder that they're in denial: this is the first time that it is their jobs that are at stake and they seem to be about as agile as a deer frozen in the headlights of an oncoming truck. We'll see how it all plays out. Jokes along the line of 'better behave or I'll replace you with a script' are not nearly as funny as they once seemed to be.
UBI is about as likely to happen as OpenAI deleting GPT4 and never training another model, so if we're picking patiently absurd scenarios I pick that one.
I think the B means it will be enough right? I think that part tends to get ignored since the $1000/mo figure in the US was floated and now is no longer enough for anyone here.
$1000/mo in 2016 purchasing power in a city like Dallas seems very unlikely to me, but I think that some meager version of UBI might happen in response to a humanitarian crisis.
I can also see guaranteed jobs rather than guaranteed income.
This technology lowers the entry barrier to almost any field. It empowers self education, creative hacking and growth. Why are you making it sound like a disaster? We can scale our ambitions quickly and absorb the new productivity without losing jobs. We have not solved global warming, poverty or colonised the space. We have to scale AI billions of times. We have to survive the demographic crash. There's plenty of scope for AI to fill in without replacing humans.
> This technology lowers the entry barrier to almost any field.
I am not saying it doesn't. But there is some factor n, that if the productivity increase is n times x in a short amount of time, the world will not evolve as rosily as you are thinking.
> It empowers self education, creative hacking and growth.
Again, I never said anything contrary. But making random new products for which there is no market by self education is not a bright prospect for much of humanity.
> Why are you making it sound like a disaster?
You are welcome to counter my points. I am just enumerating my view of the future.
> There's plenty of scope for AI to fill in without replacing humans.
Are you seeing the same pace of improvements I am seeing? One year ago there was no talk of any such thing, and now we have GPT4
AI might be very good for humanity as a whole over a millennium, but for individual human beings it is hard to say the same.
I share some of your concerns and I'd not thought about this angle - folks outside the west doing this kind of work. So thanks for sharing.
I have attempted to shift my mindset a little, thinking about how I might become an effective user of AI tools. I hope if I can do this that it will keep me employable, or even enable me to start some kind of venture down the line. Maybe there's a path forward for you and your friend on that route. Best of luck.
He has that covered IMO. He talks at length about how he's not confident about his own career in the long run. So while he starts off talking about the AI doing one person's job, he makes it clear that he doesn't just think that about entry level workers.
The way I understood it, this is an entry level employee that even before GPT-4 could easily be replaced by another human, perhaps by paying a bit more if this type of employee is difficult to find. So that's why her mobility within the company isn't addressed much.
I'm still interested to hear her opinion as well but the point in the article would still be made, because if for some reason she had more mobility at the company, I could just imagine another scenario where the employee didn't.
The author leaves it open as to what she might to next, but makes it clear that at a minimum it would be a huge disappointment to be laid off due to AI after having gotten this job after all her efforts.
> He talked about his own fears: I want to hear Priya's opinion.
Why? Either he's right about GPT or he's wrong, and if he's right (which I think he is) and she disagrees, then she's probably just in denial, like so many HNers who aren't worried about their job, let alone worried about protecting themselves from the massive societal disruption this tech is likely to usher in.
In my experience with Indians, in my opinion, they, more than any other populace value brands and labels.
So, in a scenario where LLM automates her job, she will be unemployed along with 10 with the same job as her, and the "creative" job will go to someone who did her degree/s from an IIT.
This is another fallacy when it comes to AI-replacements of jobs.
AI will do the menial, repeating job and only the interesting, creative, hard jobs will be left for humans. What's the twist is that you WON'T be the human with that job.
You will be unemployed or in a UBI or your parents' basement eating Ramen, and that job will be done by an MIT gold medalist or a Math Olympiad medalist.
> You will be unemployed or in a UBI or your parents' basement eating Ramen, and that job will be done by an MIT gold medalist or a Math Olympiad medalist.
Along these lines I recommend the book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.
I don't understand the harsh comments you received here. Denial is the way others seem to be using to cope with a tech that threatens their precious skills.
I am glad you wrote it, please don't be sorry. A lot of us feel the same way.
Here's what I imagine sama and AI apologists would say in response so they can sleep at night:
Have you thought about training Priya to use ChatGPT? You don't need to know how to code well to be skilled at using it, especially if she has the domain knowledge.
Then you will have 10x'd your company's output and Priya keeps her job. At least for a time -- that is, until others start doing it too -- this will be a big competitive advantage. Then you will definitely need her and her colleagues!
/end
But, there are many reasons why laying her off and just using GPT4 is the better business decision, at least short term. The above is a totally naive suggestion stemming from reasoning motivated by the incomprehensibly large profits going to OpenAI and their eventual competitors.
Actually, I think we are about to see massive unemployment (tens of millions if not hundreds globally), even greater inequality and attendant social unrest. Even if smooth transitions can be made for some of the jobs made redundant by ChatGPT, this will be the exception not the rule. Something will have to give. UBI? Regulations? Physical destruction of data centers by angry, hungry, desperate people?
Probably all of the above. It's going to be a chaotic time until the world finds a new equilibrium.
On a personal note: at the ripe age of 40, in direct response to GPT4, I've decided to go back to school this fall to become a certified teacher. The poor work conditions and low pay kept me away from it as a full time job until now. However, I believe this is one of the few jobs that will still be around in 25 years when I (hopefully) retire. I'll take low pay and poor work conditions over the desperation of extended unemployment and poverty.
(I like kids and have taught voluntarily in various capacities over the years, so it's not as crazy as it maybe sounds.)
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 451 ms ] thread1) Show Priya how to use GPT4 to do her current job in 1/10th of the time.
2) Let her use part (50%+) of the time saved to learn coding or whatever other skill she needs (not sure coding is it).
Why would I subsidize that as a business owner? I can fire 9/10ths of the people who do that job instead.
then OpenAI either discontinue or slightly adjust the model such that it doesn't work now
there goes your business
But the poorest and most vulnerable will. It happens every time. This time, we could do better--and we won't.
Eventually, improvements through both technological means but also political ones (worker action says hi) did make things on-net better, but we live in the now and the now is going to simply vaporize an impossibly large set of jobs, particularly in developing countries. Turning one person into an LLM driver to lay off four or nine is not a net benefit.
As just one example: with modern text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and AI parsing, how much of every call center can just go away? Eight of ten? Nine? I have no idea, but it's a lot, and we have neither time nor inclination to prepare, globally or locally, for this.
(edit to add: the most appalling part of this oncoming train, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is just how shitty a future this one wants so desperately to be. A LLM-driven chatbot or phone system doesn't get tired. It doesn't get "too expensive" to continue to obstruct you and to stiff you. Not only is this primed to seriously hurt people who are below the API, but it's going to make the world suck more for the rest of us, too. Like, sure, "it makes writing code marginally easier"--it's going to make getting a refund for a messed-up Comcast bill an exercise in pain. That doesn't remotely net out, code's already easy enough.)
Can you expand on that?
My impression is that life for the less well-off before the Industrial Revolution was worse.
So in some ways, and in the short term, the Industrial Revolution was better than just-plain-starving, sure. But most of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution accrued to everyone else and the mangled limbs accrued to the poor. It wasn't without significant worker action (and the requisite workers-getting-beat-to-shit-and-killed) that their lot improved materially.
Is subsistence or subsistence+ farming hard? Absolutely. Mind-bogglingly so. But the Industrial Revolution was fucking bad for the people caught at the bottom. Like--read Dickens.
I tend to think we have such global largesse that we could do better. But we won't, and a lot of the commentariat here cheers for never doing better.
I think that captures some of the contradiction in your claims. Yes, cities could be terrible places to live and work. Yet people have moved to them throughout recent history because the alternative is worse.
That said, I don’t disagree with your point that there will be pain associated with this technological jump. I dont know of there will be more or less than with previous jumps. There are some interesting considerations.
One, this one hits knowledge workers who are in the middle class, instead of hitting those who use muscle or hand labor. That may change the outcome.
Two, governments are much more sophisticated and have much better policy tools to deal with disruption. While that doesn’t fix the root, it can help to prevent compounding problems and soften the impact.
Three, the tools that are doing the disrupting appear to be near zero marginal cost, which is different than say a factory which improved efficiency with a large up-front capital investment. This factor probably will make it worse, but I can see possibilities of it making this change less painful too.
Fourth, it isn’t really clear how this will play out. It kinda feels like we have seen the first demonstrations of a steam engine, and are trying to predict the course of the Industrial Revolution.
I think this is a misreading. People who had options didn't urbanize until they had to. When a family had too many sons to split and or when Roman aristocrats or English magnates pushed people off their land or when a bad climate situation made farming impractical, people moved--but it's a very, very recent historical development to urbanize (en masse) when other choices exist.
Yes, the alternatives have been worse and so industrial urbanization became more appealing than starving. Who the hell made them worse and whose progenitors now control the capital needed to destroy ever more labor?
(Don't take not addressing the rest as dismissal--your other points are all within a coherent universe, they're just techno-optimism that I have no reason to share so I have nothing to say to them.)
And of course you are right. But that’s a societal problem, not a technology problem. I would call if societal-optimism to hope that human nature will go away and collective action problems will suddenly disappear, and all boats will be lifted equally.
I’m saying we have a fundamental human responsibility not to burn them for fucking funsies.
Yep. If I have 10 people doing Job X, then ChatGPT makes a person doing Job X ten times more productive, I can fire 9 people doing job X and retain the same output, which gives me a temporary profit boost. But wait! My competitor also had 10 people doing Job X, and now they're producing ten times the output of my company!
If ChatGPT/Copilot X made developers working at my company twice as productive, I wouldn't be thinking about firing half of them, I would be thinking about which of the 8000 features and improvements on our backlog we could finally prioritize...
Aren’t the comparisons to blue collar labor a little much here?
If I hire 10 people to dig the ditches, and then I get a backhoe, yes, one guy is needed to dig the ditch.
But backhoes are expensive investments, LLMs are not.
LLMs gives everyone of those ditch diggers a backhoe. Now I have an army of backhoes! Unless the world runs out of a need for ditches, time to start a ditch digging empire.
The industrial revolution switched work from almost exclusively manual labor to a more intellectual one while improving manual labor itself (better tools, etc.).
This one is cranking up a notch times 100 by trying to replace basically the human out of the equation altogether (This is the end goal of automation).
It's going to be a really interesting decade tbh.
[0] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/7/chatgpt-lies/
Do you? I mean, you and I think you do in order to do a good job, but does that hold water? The last decade or so of technological "progress" in the commercial space should leave few illusions about the willingness to obstruct processes and damage the interactions between people to save a few bucks.
As tech gets more capable, the human interactions with it are getting worse. And if you hate phone trees now (I do!), GPT4's contribution is adding ever deeper, infinitely patient tools for stalling you when you have to call for things.
Hell, we already have plenty of stans in the HN comment sections actively claiming that no, of course you shouldn't hold LLM purveyors responsible for their hallucinations, the desired universe is liability-free! If you've already bought into societal enshittification for a buck and there are no penalties, why would you worry about being right?
Yes, but you will need fewer people. And thas is with the current level of GPT. If the GPTs proficiency increases, fewer and fewer people will be needed. That’s a problem.
(Yes, this could be a really stupid decision for the company in question. I agree with you. I'm not saying what should happen. I'm saying what will happen, and that that is really bad.)
It's okay to not think every technology under the sun is a good thing. You don't have to have heart-eyes emojis for the immiseration machine.
Once more for emphasis: you do not have to cheer on the immiseration machine.
And I take it from your use of Marxist terminology that you’re coming from that the perspective. 20th Century Marxists embraced technological advancement, and used that to advance the cause of the proletariat. The REAL immiseration is to embrace paleoconservative ludditism.
I believe AGI can help small businesses have higher margins for the same service level - but lower cost.
It is, however, a really convenient excuse for people who don't regularly think about how people who don't work "above the API" actually exist in the world.
Have you ever run a business that employed other people and relied on operational income rather than venture capital to function?
Because this "obvious play" is a screaming red flag for misunderstanding the fundamentals of how business works when money isn't free and speculative.
You can't be too reactive with talent. If you hired 10 people, you should be figuring out how to make that talent pool as happy and productive as possible, not firing them out of fear at the earliest opportunity.
When said business can replace the employees with tools and AI, they will.
Or maybe you're implying that reducing the costs changes this equation?
If it's like many businesses in the classification world, they aren't lacking for work, so it's more like they'll be able to do 10x the work done by keeping the same number of people.
Why would 50% for 0.1% be different? 30% for 0.01%?
This is the enshittification spiral to which I refer.
If I was paying someone for labeling or classification, and the quality dropped to 90%, 50%, 30% accuracy, I'd quickly fire them.
This means Priya can replace the manager, but manager needs to train Priya for that. Obviously that is not going to happen as Author him/herself is very apprehensive about his/her future earning potential.
This would be the problem in the new world, people with lesser power (of knowledge) would get crushed.
2) Most if not all employers are not going to let 50% of the work time to go towards non income generating activities.
What skills, exactly, would those be?
1- Hire someone cheaper than Priya and show him to tricks to run GPT-4. Make him work 24/7 non-stop because it's an upgrade from his naan flipping job.
2- Fire Priya.
And then if they have 10 people doing her job, 9 people are out of a job.
If there's one thing that will get automated first, it's coding (taking simple explicit specifications and turning them into code).
Unless she can learn software engineering (understanding problem areas well enough you can devise a detailed spec, and maybe implement it) she'll be out of a job as well with just coding skills.
People who haven't dealt with cheap offshored labor or bootcamp grads from the latest craze don't realize how much that workflow was similar to working with GPT4. Except GPT4 requires no training and gives answers in seconds.
People are still pushing this meme on HN, even after GPT-4?
What about time after work. That is when I learned to code. In between work and going to school in fact.
surely this is meant partly tongue-in-cheek?
GPT is legitimately interesting as an alternative search interface to StackOverflow. I've found that 15 to 45 minutes of searching with Google/StackOverflow can be reduced to just 5 minutes with GPT.
But beyond that, it's been very disappointing. Whenever I've tried getting it to write something even slightly non-trivial (i.e. tougher than just copy/pasting from online documentation or an answer on StackOverflow) it's produced code that is horribly broken, but where the flaws are subtle enough that they might not pop out right away to a novice programmer. It has consistently struggled with programming problems that I would rate at 4/10 or 5/10 difficulty.
Most of the code I write is fairly trivial, but it's glue code that is highly specific to my particular code base, so GPT isn't helpful because it doesn't know about my codebase, and if you try to copy/paste your large chunks of your codebase into the prompt it runs into issues with forgetting.
And GPT isn't helpful for the non-trivial parts of my code either (as mentioned above). So what's left?
So when I see people say that it 10x'ed their productivity, I wonder if they exclusively write very trivial code that is effectively copy/paste from Stack Overflow or if they've allowed GPT to fill their codebases with flawed code without realizing it.
Maybe future iterations of GPT will get it. GPT4 is definitely not there yet.
I do think you have a point about it being most useful for trivial or boilerplate problems but it’s still very useful as there is always much of that.
I'm currently writing a demo that I'll present next week using Jetpack Compose, and it's a UI toolkit I'm not really familiar with, so it's been really helpful for that. In fact, I have a tool that is almost like a build system that compiles English language spec files down to the code, and then allows me to edit them and to continue to work with the AI by just changing the spec and the code simultaneously. That's been really tremendously effective, especially with GPT-4.
On the other hand, for working on my main product, it's pretty useless because all of that work is debugging and making a lot of small changes all over the code base, which is too advanced for it currently. And I think that will get solved, but it isn't solved yet.
BTW the above paragraphs were dictated using the Whisper API. I didn't change a single thing about it. Whisper is just as impressive and useful as the LLMs, in my view.
I’m curious because it seems like perhaps providing longer, detailed prompts (and then iterating) might be the best approach for getting coding help.
Thoughts?
Remember to tell it is an expert XYZ programmer, that will actually make it produce better code.
iterative is best approach. I add one feature at a time. I also provide the errors/exceptions for fixing.
You can even prompt it to write a unit test for the function it wrote.
As for your concerns about code errors, I’ve found that you have to approach the coding support as an iterative process, where you request code, and then ask it to improve or correct the result it just gave. You can even prompt it to check its previous result for errors.
I usually prompt it with short questions, but I recently saw a video where the person provided a lengthy (50 - 150 words) prompts detailing the requirements for what they were requesting. I was shocked at the results. (Still required iterations of corrections/modifications though)
I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it’s an avenue that might yield better results than what you’ve experienced — perhaps even vastly better results.
There must be a reason why he manages to have great people on his show, but it’s one I can’t comprehend.
Who will prompt the AI for code? Manager?
Also, you mentioned it gave wrong result at first. How did you know? Because you know how to code.
As mentioned in other comment she should learn more about programming so she can become indispensible.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-emotion
This is a deeply, deeply inhumane way to parse the world and the feelings of other people.
I think you, likely as not, have a rude awakening ahead of you. GPT can enshittify code, too. Unwind libraries into oceans of repeated Copilot-descendant code all over the place. It'll just take longer.
You and I will be 75 and smiling, with a tear too. We knew and understood tools that are meant for a more civilized age. Just surrender, let it go.
That prompt is basically code, written by a programmer, although it resembles natural language so we're closer to usable literate programming than we've ever been.
Programmers didn't disappear with new (higher-level) programming languages, if anything there have been more of them; how is this different?
It is not beneficial to human organizations to have indispensable members. You can argue it's not good for the mental health of the indispensable people either.
When I first heard the quote in my first line, I thought it was cruel, inhumane and shockingly selfish on the part of employers. Nearly 30 years later, I see it almost entirely the other way around. Let's not build organizations full of indispensable people, but rather organizations in which tasks and expertise and stress and fear and success and joy are shared.
That sounds cruel - "I will make sure this organization can always function without you, so you have no leverage here" - but I do sincerely believe that it actually makes for a better working experience.
Using APIs can get you a larger external memory, but we still have relatively small context windows these days.
The post covered that - she's trying, but struggling with it. Not everyone has the kind of mind that can understand, write and manage code easily. So what then?
It's expressing the author's discomfort and so it's pessimistic.
I think those are fine.
Who will prompt? Yes, the manager.
But that has been predicted for every new increase in automation, so maybe we‘ll be wrong again.
Knowledge workers. Programmers. White collar workers.
Y'know, the ones least likely to be starving before they get replaced by a glorified autocorrect.
Instead of thinking of things like "payroll tax" and such being a tax on humans - change it to a tax on (for lack of a better word) productivity.
Tax the robots.
https://news.mit.edu/2022/robot-tax-income-inequality-1221
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_tax
https://fortune.com/2023/02/21/bernie-sanders-bill-gates-rob... ( https://archive.is/Y90NU )
To benefit from automation, you need to take the initiative to integrate automation into your own workflow. The idea that someone else will automate your job, but you will somehow benefit is a fantasy.
If we do get UBI, it won't replace lost wages from losing your job. Most of that money will go to the team at your company who set up GPT to do your work and the rest will be distributed among shareholders.
This is Calvinist "only those who work deserve to live" bullshit.
> If we do get UBI, it won't replace lost wages from losing your job. Most of that money will go to the team at your company who set up GPT to do your work and the rest will be distributed among shareholders.
And this just doesn't make sense. Do you know what "UBI" even means? By definition, it goes to the people. All of them. Universally, even.
Even if your claim is that somehow your UBI will be sucked up by inflated costs, I don't see how it follows that it goes to your company.
- Priya may find work using gpt4 in her current job or in another company. Some types of work that are currently economically infeasible may become viable with a ten times speedup. It's certainly plausible that it will become worthwhile to do more of the kind of work she already does.
- if as a society we can do biotech research faster and cheaper there may be significant benefits to human health
Consider a programmer that reports a productivity increase of 50% due to AI - a question the company will be asking itself is can we get rid of 50% of our programmers?
This is encapsulated in a sob story.
Am I wrong? I would like to hear your counter arguments
Key facts:
1. Priya is a biomedical data curator in her mid-20s from a poor background in Uttar Pradesh, India. 2. She has a bachelor's degree in Biotechnology and her job involves annotating RNA sequencing data from scientific papers. 3. The author tried using GPT-4 to perform Priya's job and achieved the correct result in less time and at a lower cost. 4. The author speculates that Priya may lose her job within six months due to automation. 5. The author expresses concern about their own long-term career prospects in software engineering because of GPT-4.
Logical fallacies: 1. Hasty Generalization: The author assumes that GPT-4 will make Priya's job obsolete based on a single successful trial. 2. Slippery Slope: The author assumes that GPT-4's impact on Priya's job will lead to her losing her job and moving back home, and potentially to the decline of the author's own career prospects in software engineering.
Counter arguments:
1. GPT-4 may not be able to handle all aspects of Priya's job or maintain consistent quality, which could still necessitate human intervention. 2. The advent of GPT-4 could lead to new job opportunities that require both domain expertise and an understanding of the technology. 3. As technology progresses, there is potential for job retraining and upskilling to adapt to new demands in the workforce.
- > What is the economic impact of LLMs? Idk (openAI has published some lengthy paper about it). What I do know is that some rich bloke in the US will get a few million dollars richer and Priya will lose her job.
- > I don’t see a long-term career in software anymore. Any dreams I had of earning decent money as a software engineer are slowly fading.
To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income.
I know that even if I was given $20k a year by default, I'd still work in order to make more.
Income is a proxy for you to trade value you create to another that is willing to trade back.
So yeah, go ahead and try whatever you think mankind has not invented despite thousands of years and billions of people wanting to have stuff without trading for it. Most such schemes end up hurting people far more than any help.
>the majority of the human race
... who has gotten incredibly richer than at any time in history and for more people than ever.
Everyone here knows the last time it was tried, it ended in complete failure. Just like the previous attempts did. Such hopelessly utopian ideas getting laughed out of the room once again.
People have plenty of natural incentives to leave the house ("reasonable time" is a sign of your own biases, but no doubt leaving the house is healthy regardless). The reason people don't do so is because there are strong economic disincentives to do so. This is not just obvious conscious disincentives like "I don't have time because I need to earn money online" & "I will have to pay for X, Y, Z in the city if I go out" but also much deeper more complex systematic disincentives like "I am chronically ill due to years of economically-linked stress and burnout" & "I feel depressed due to economically-linked lifelong trauma"
Healthy people don't need employers to incentivise them to leave the house. And unhealthy people don't need work, they need support.
Even proactive people are made to believe they are just one more "rise and grind" away from being a millionaire, they want to be succesful in this society, so they have no desire to tear it down.
What could bring the stack of cards coming down I think, is a housing affordability crisis. For anyone who has ended up without a home or even just the threat of losing a place to live, you wake up to that reality real quick. If there is suddenly a majority without work and without a home, that's a bunch of people who just found out the system is broken and will want answers.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
The standard way to prevent revolutions is to channel the energy of young men into a productive job and a family.
But today, bored young men entertain themselves with video games etc rather than gathering in mobs to entertain themselves. We don't have large gatherings of aimless young men anymore.
Why haven't the poor revolted already?
I hope you're right but I don't think its a given this will happen.
while there's a case for idealism, without some degree of pragmatism we'll be lost on policy or regulation proposals.
we are headed towards Elysium future with billions of humans competing for scraps.
If the capitalists (i.e. those who own capital) can live off of ownership rather than labour, maybe someday all of us can. Because the alternative is unthinkable.
Who in their right mind would work if they can get free income, even if small, without having a disability or similar disqualifier?
Right now, we are in a worker shortage, and it’s going to get worse as retirements continue. Separating labor from work would cripple living standards and demoralize productive workers.
Maybe one day we can live in a world where machines are doing all the work and there are fulfilling hobbies for everybody, but I fear this will require more changes, on a much longer time horizon, than the short-term issues just around the corner due to the recent AI advances.
Does an 8-year old feel “bad” because they are unemployed?
Like, sure, "nobody wants to have me working" isn't great, but going to job that barely covers your rent isn't much better.
Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness, 1932 seems increasingly true to me. The richest has kept a monopoly on idleness while tricking everyone else to see work as their purpose in life (to work to make it possible for the rich, idle, people to have nice lives without having to work).
"Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever."
The only reason the middle class was born was because trained workers could pull their labor and affect upper class wealth. They had power. AI takes that power away.
...and what will happen when every single person goes and tries to buy a 50" TV? Hm? Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine?
Come on... this is Real Life, not Magical Fairy Land.
We're not talking about a magical cornucopia that generates an endless amount of physical goods that can be used to accommodate the needs of every person.
We're very specifically talking here about technological shift that will eliminate a large pool of skilled jobs.
People will still need jobs, or they will become homeless / starve / have to leave the country.
AI is not going to feed the world any time soon.
I mean ... we already have 3D printing, and car making robots, and electronics making robots. Most of the TV is robots.
All that's needed is the equivalent of 3D printing that adds an extra step of "TV-making-robot"-making robots. One reason we don't have that is that it turns out the robot making robot costs more than certain as-yet non-globalized labor markets.
It's not that we can't, it's that the ROE is bad.
What you're saying was already true... so what. Now people are unemployed because of GPT4 we're going to start making free TVs for everyone?
Dang. That's sure not what happened when all those people lost their jobs during covid (eg. restaurant staff).
I guess this time will be different?
That's uh... well, very optimistic.
And:
> already true so what
OK, so we did invent it. Then we agree on that.
Out of context.
This entire thread is in the context of “gpt is going to destroy jobs”; the arbitrary “we need to disassociate working and basic necessities” isn’t an isolated socialist discourse.
You can wax philosophical all you like, but you’re failing to address the fundamental reality.
There is a physical limit of good and services available right now and no amount of magical posturing will make that untrue.
Anything is possible in the future given unlimited time and resources, but this thread is not about that.
It is about right now, people losing their jobs.
What is being proposed here is not a solution to that problem. The ability for people to build things doesn’t mean they will. It’s pure speculation about what might possibly happen in the future.
> Then we agree on that.
I do not agree with you. You’re just making arbitrary speculative statements.
Naturally this is purely hypothetical, parent argued that work gives meaning to life(which I generally agree with). I argued you can still be working, even if less efficiently than the machines.
Maybe it will be a gradual change. Agriculture and manufacturing is already highly automated, for better or worse.
In principal you're right, we can in theory live like you suggest and expand on leisure culture / volunteering / 'made up' jobs by the government.
In practice, we're super far from the utopia. Energy is expensive, food is expensive, housing is expensive in ChatGPT can't do squat about it. What it CAN do is possibly replace me as a worker. So that's the conundrum.
You can't really just throw money at the demand side of the equation and expect everything else to stay the same. Supply side will raise their prices because they can (when everyone's got $10M in the bank, why not charge $50, $500 or even $5,000 for a loaf of artisan bread? And eventually other producers of bread follow suit because the consumer has become less price sensitive).
If you want to improve everyone's standard of living, what has repeatedly worked throughout history is to lower the cost of production through technology, and ensure there's lots of competition on the supply side. With enough competition, producers are unable to behave like a cartel. Eventually someone cracks and sacrifices part of their margin to attract more customers, and then a price war ensues. A textbook example is salt, which for most of human history was quite expensive, but after mechanized mining techniques were developed it became so cheap that for the average household it's practically free.
Technology + competition. At this moment in history we're quite good at the technology part of the equation but we have allowed many monopolies and oligopolies to form, so we're struggling at the competition part.
Money is the measure of the productive capacity of an economy. If you increase the money without increasing the capacity then you get inflation. But let's be charitable and assume that "Gud" was talking about increasing the capacity commensurately. Because that's what's happening. AI, robots and almost zero marginal cost green energy are going to increase the productive capacity of economies dramatically over the next decade or two.
You might have that argument with nuclear energy, because most of the cost is upfront. But approval process for that will have to be expedited by congress.
Oh boy, maybe much much later on, 15-30 years from now if we're lucky, and maybe just the opposite. But as for coming decade? Forget it. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2023.p...
Natural monopolies certainly exist in sectors of the economy like public utilities, but I don't think they are so strong in tech.
My personal view: AI makes most of the world's population in the long run surplus to requirements for people who own capital, societal power and the planet's scarce resources. That's a form of monopoly.
You're straight up projecting your own personal experiences as a generalized truth. Seriously, grow up and learn that there are a lot of differences in people. You might need this, that doesn't make it into an universal truth that everyone needs it or gets it by having a dayjob.
The only thing that you can say, generally is this: humans can gain happiness by getting acceptance from other people when they care about the people that accept them.
While you are at it, the toilet in the basement is clogged, there is shit water all over the place. You could find meaning there too.
I mean, we've done the same with farming. Is it 100% automated? No, not at all, but we've removed something like 99% of the human labor involved that would have occurred around 200 years ago.
Art without humanity isn't art. Farming can exist without humanity because we need the output to sustain ourselves. But take the humanity out of art, and no one is interested in it.
I think AI is terrible for a lot of midrange commercial graphics. I don't think it's bad for "art."
(*) And why has there never been a market for broadcasting music performances in cinemas?
Having live piano performance at a bar or other venue was extraordinarily common. There's still piano bars, but...
Graphic designers, corporate advertising, media productions; video game artwork, the artistic channels where many creatives earn a square meal even if it isn't the most human and soulful type of art.
I guess god doesn't care for shit water all over the floor.
GP: yeah? find meaning in my shitty chores
P (me): I've found meaning in helping others with shitty chores
You: I don't see the connection, nobody says don't help others
Huh? I'm not sure where you are coming from.
GGGP: Well, for most people, if they don't have to have a job, their life becomes a sucking void of boredom. These are the only two options
GGP: Nope, plenty of jobs can be a sucking void of boredom for people. It's not like having to clean toilets in order not to starve is incredibly meaningful for the people that have to do it
GP: Well, I like helping neighbors for free sometimes. But I wouldn't want to do it every day for strangers
P (me): I don't see the connection. You literally said you enjoyed doing something for free, so you're not talking about jobs. You could still do it if you didn't need a job to survive, nor would not needing a job to survive force you to do it for fun for strangers.
In any case, it's clear we interpreted the previous messages in a very different manner. In particular, as I've said elsewhere, people seem to be confusing jobs with work. Not needing jobs is not the same as people having to stop working, usually quite the contrary - people would be free to work more on stuff that they enjoy.
Jobs, for the vast majority of people, is just a mean to make ends meet. There's nothing transcendental about it. Just a blunt "gotta pay the bills".
I may make 6 figures now, but I remember life when I didn't know if I was gonna be homeless next month. Perhaps that helped me keep my feet on the ground.
Additionally, people who hold this belief fail to realize that “I don’t want to work.” ACTUALLY means “I want others to work so I don’t have to.”
For example, how are you going to eat? You are either going to grow, cultivate, and harvest your own food (i.e. work) or you’re expecting others to do that work for you.
Oh, you say it can be “automated”? Well, who’s going to design, build, and maintain the automating machine? That’s all work too!
2 years ago we would both have agreed that that would be impossible. My belief is that most likely AI will hit another roadblock soon, following a "punctuated equilibrium" model so there will still be a large number of non-automatable jobs. But if I'm wrong and the pace of change of the last 2 years continues for another 10...
Then who designs, builds, and maintains THOSE AI & robots? It can’t be “AI & robots” all the way down.
>My belief is that most likely AI will hit another roadblock soon, following a "punctuated equilibrium" model so there will still be a large number of non-automatable jobs.
I agree (although it may or may not be “soon”). As history has shown us, technology advancements just cause us to reimagine possibilities and start solving problems that were previously impossible.
For example, as computers have gone from a few bytes of RAM to billions of bytes of memory, humans didn’t say, “ok, we’re all set now.” — we invented whole new classes of software that do all kinds of things unimaginable to the early computer scientists.
The same will happen with AI and robots.
No, it means "I am working to generate more wealth which flows predominantly to the owners of capital, who often do no work and sometimes have never done any work at all - can't we do something fairer than this?"
It always starts with this, then the next step is "ohh we can't really tax rich people and corporations ('owners of capital' that you speak of) since they have a lot of ways to move their capital out of our reach so let's just fleece the middle class instead!".
Which requires 10x, or 100x less people. And the "savings" go mostly to company owners, not to making product cheaper.
Or maybe it means: "if, thanks to automation, we become 2x as productive, I would like to work half the time, while still being able to pay my bills."
Whether the French viewpoint or the American viewpoint is healthier can be found in the mortality rates.
Look at the kind of people who do not have to work. Do they still work? No. Some sit on a beach and never lift a finger again, some become creatives and some try to recreate their successes again. None work what would be an engaging and productful job at a take-away joint.
A small one is my dad. He was a software developer, but thanks to Y2K consulting, he made bank and retired early. After, he spent half the year in Mexico. One of the friends he made there was a teacher. My dad ended up volunteering in the school. He had a part-time-job-like schedule and did teacher's aide things. He loved it.
On a bigger scale: In Michigan there is an arcade chain, Pinball Pete's. It was founded by Tim Arnold in 1976. I grew up there gave them a lot of quarters over years. He sold it in 1990 and retired to Las Vegas, bringing his extensive collection of arcade machines.
For a while he was doing an open house; once a month he'd let people in to play some of his collection. By 2009, he had started the Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit arcade. A couple years back they moved to the Strip and expanded significantly. I was there recently and he spends hours a day there. Opening up. Collecting the quarters. Fixing machines. Telling kids to stop running.
The guy is circa 70 and he can do whatever he wants. What he wants to do is work at an arcade. He'll keep doing it until he dies.
> Look at the kind of people who do not have to work. Do they still work? No.
I'm not sure HN discussions have original points, really. But people do have specific points, and it sounds like you and I both agree that the one I'm replying to is too broad.
Also, you’re posting on a forum made by hand by a person who didn’t have to work.
And the whole OpenAI thing is being run by a person who is a retiree as well.
You can do that without it being a job. I enjoy making things out of epoxy resin. It's fun, creative, hard work. I'd do it a lot more if we had universal basic income. It's not my job.
Yes, you can, but his argument is that most people don't -- and he's right.
Where did that unexamined assumption come from? Do they care about nothing other than standard employment based "work" and so never considered doing something other than staring at a wall when they're not doing it?
Family. Friends. Volunteering. Gardening. Games. Hobbies. Learning to play music, or cook, or who knows... studying biochemistry and doing that because it's rewarding and easier to do in a setting with more people in the same place. Or starting a company if that's your thing, or call it an open-X project and build a community that doesn't require "work" to contribute.
I'm so confused, why on Earth would the agency to choose be bad, it's so patronizing.
Another strange class bias is that those from the (lets call it) "productive" class are absolutely convinced everyone is like them and if only given the opportunity they would be just as productive and fulfilled as they are. Some of us know better.
Even if that is true, and I very much doubt that it is, a big chunk of the "productive" segment's work will be to help the other segment. People already do that a lot by volunteering. Imagine how much more people could psychologists, social workers, and others help if they don't have to worry about their own livelihoods?
What we need are new institutions to fill the role of providing social connection and meaning. Things that churches and clubs used to provide. But how to revive those things is its own issue.
Not really? Plenty of people volunteer to help people in jail, for example.
>On the other hand, those in the unproductive class won't want this kind of "help" either.
People won't want help to find meaning in their lives? I find it hard to believe. Churches and clubs, as you also said, used to (and still do) help provide people with that as well, so I'm not sure you truly believe it either.
Of course there are always some number of people that find even unlikely targets sympathetic. But what you're talking about is some kind of widespread movement to help close the meaning gap when something like a third to half of the world is having a crisis of meaning. To have that kind of a movement needs a naturally very sympathetic target, like victims of police brutality. The movement to improve prison conditions is practically non-existent by comparison. I don't find it plausible that the non-self-actualizers will be similarly sympathetic.
>Churches and clubs, as you also said, used to (and still do) help provide people with that as well
I wasn't talking about "help" like how psychologists provide help to their clients. What I mean is an attractive gathering place where people naturally find connection and meaning. People don't want to be "helped", i.e. being made to feel like a charity case, they want to come by meaning and purpose naturally.
Would reviving communal institutions be a meaningful and useful activity for people to do? Part of the reason why we rely less on community and social institutions is because we are relying on other things (like work) to fulfill that same role. It's not really surprising that people volunteer less at their local church if they're told that their life meaning ought to come from their job.
Also, even the "useless" always want more. Even if it is bigger TV and bigger pick-up truck, that would still require work
If Priya had preferred to stay with her family, and there was no financial pressure, the situation would be unambiguously better. Her family may have encouraged her to go to study for family pride -- what if studying and living while studying were free for her and her family had no financial pressure for her to get a job and send money home? I struggle to see who benefits here. Maybe she would have preferred to stay home with her family, maybe she has siblings that she will miss, why would it be up to me at all? I don't get to define productive.
UBI (or whatever mechanism for providing basic needs) also doesn't mean there is no financial reward for employment. She could still go and study and earn money and send it home to a family that doesn't need it badly except now if the job is automated by GPT4 somehow no one suffers. No harm is done other than that she wasted her time studying this thing, but no one is going to suffer because of bad luck beyond wasted time.
There are a number of things that I do think people don't find meaning in doing. Many of these things can be increasingly automated like being a teller or working in a call center, but not all of which can be (for now), like repairing sidewalks. These are a set of things that aren't very fun to do which still need to be done, sure. Oddly the ones I can list off my fingers are not the ones that pay well, so something is certainly not working right on the incentives, sure. I agree that society should reward jobs less if they are meaningful and enjoyable than jobs that no one wants to do, but that's not really how capitalism works.
Plenty of people don't tend to do things even they would consider "productive" in their spare time, but how much of that is because they are under constant financial stress and have so little free time? I believe that if basic needs are met people will generally find more genuine sources of meaning, for them, whether or not I consider those things productive.
But my opinion isn't important here, that's the patronizing part.
I simply do not believe people will sit around and watch TV all day if they are in good health and aren't required to work all the time for security. Or if they do then that's their business, I'd rather try to inspire them to do other things than force them to by withholding food and shelter.
Let people be people and learn what makes their human life meaningful to them rather than trying to starve them into action that you consider productive.
If everyone gets free money the optimal move as an individual is to speculate on assets because everyone else will be. The financial rewards from gambling will be higher than working with much, much less effort.
I don’t think many people will find meaning in that world.
If everyone gets the relief of knowing they are free to pursue what they like without risk of starving, I imagine it'd be way easier to find meaning in the world than it is now.
Housing is an asset that must be "gambled" in order to live securely and control your residence. I agree that is horribly broken, but everyone deserves a chance to buy assets without my permission.
I also argue that currently poor people under less financial stress will be more able to avoid getting fleeced, and that arguably many are already better at it than plenty of people with inherited wealth.
As a concrete example, mortgage rates being higher for poor people than rich people is already abusive.
Because they're generally things that don't require extensive training/exceptional skills/abilities to do, hence there lots of possible candidates to take on such jobs. I wonder what a world where there's billions of us with no job options other than the few remaining disgusting/dangerous jobs that automation can't yet handle will look like...
It will depend on who owns the machines that do the work.
It's not comfortable to think about, but I think it's silly to ignore completely. I've worried about it a lot and am at peace with it, for what it is worth.
If there's a strong safety net and regulations on corporations
No matter who owns the machines that produce things people need, people are able to live comfortably. In that scenario, the world looks like one where those undesirable jobs pay exceptionally well, gain increased respect, and improved working conditions until they're desirable -- because starvation and housing is no longer under immediate threat of being withheld. I don't hate that world, it seems frankly more fair. I think we can agree that more rational decisions are likely to be better, and that forcing people to make decisions that are only rational to them under threat of food and shelter is bad.
It's not like my friends and I in middle school loved doing engineering because we saw dollar signs. We did it because we had a knack for it and liked doing it with no ulterior motive. Forcing people who weren't interested in engineering to be engineers has honestly just never seemed like it worked that great. Give kids opportunities to discover that they find engineering fun instead... there are other means to get to a good place without the threat of food, health, and housing. Much of it education.
But maybe for me, meaningful means going and helping with my friends projects until I'm inspired to make some kind of art or work on a project to make a new idea. Who knows, being productive financially is just not necessarily always what will give me a meaningful life, and we only get one. Lots of things that are meaningful to me aren't productive financially.
If there's not a strong safety net
God help us all. If you don't own the increasingly small number of things that do an increasingly large fraction of all production you are way, way, way more screwed.
"Class bias" is a really weird word to use here to talk about that. It's class bias to assume that blue-collar workers aren't intrinsically lazy and that they might find meaningful activities to do if they had the time/energy to do so?
This is the first time I've ever seen "people need work for meaning, and they literally don't have the inclination/drive to find meaning in their lives unless they're forced to work under the threat of losing their livihoods" represented as solidarity with the working class. I don't think most people would consider that perspective to be synonymous with class consciousness.
I think it's coming one way or another.
For an increasing number of us, the costs of automation will be lower than the cost of living. It will happen quickly. We absolutely need a serious safety net or it will be chaos.
And we need to discover another way to find meaning in what we do, or else it will be a mental health catastrophe.
I have thought on this long and hard and am confident I can find meaning in my life even if a computer can do what I enjoy more productively. It will take getting used to. It won't be comfortable. It is necessary.
It will be very bad if only a tiny fraction of people have financial security.
You want to see what people get up to when they have endless free time, just see what idle young men get up to.
Adding on what the sibling comment said, meaning and fulfillment aren't just about the work one does, its about the social role that work facilitates. You may hate your job yet derive meaning from being a provider, from being the man of the family, being a hard worker, and so on. We're already in the process of destroying social connections with ones community and we're seeing a widespread crisis of loneliness as a result. Take away the meaning that work provides (regardless of job) and you basically destroy whats left of meaning in a good portion of people's lives.
Again, I want to remind the context of this: the context is that you're saying we need to force people to work under the threat of losing their livelihood or they can't be fulfilled.
And you're phrasing this as if I'm coming in and colonizing blue-collar workers or pushing my ideals on them. I don't think "benevolence" is the right word to use here, I just don't think there's anything noble about forcing people to work and saying that it's for their own good. It's an interesting turn of phrase to write about this like it's a "culture" when -- again -- the conversation is about whether or not people in blue-collar positions are too lazy and unmotivated to find meaning unless they're forced to work.
I just... it's wild to hear that phrased using the terms you're using. And I wonder if those blue-collar workers would agree that guaranteed income would be "taking away" their purposes, because most of the blue-collar workers I know are much more engaged in social institutions than the white-collar workers around them, and are therefore probably more prepared to find meaning within their communities and families outside of work than the average programmer on HN is.
> You want to see what people get up to when they have endless free time, just see what idle young men get up to.
This is me imposing my culture on other people? Pointing out that you're basically comparing blue-collar workers to lazy youth? Come on.
We derive tremendous value from blue-collar workers that hold up white-collar jobs and allow society to continue to function, even though they're often paid significantly less than us for what is arguably more important work. The least we can do is not pretend that this arrangement is somehow created for their benefit. This has all the energy of the proletariat complaining that the rabble can't take care of themselves and how the actually offensive thing is suggesting that they can.
If only HN could get out of its bubble and empathize more with the average worker, then it would realize that the average worker is lazy and unmotivated and needs to be managed /s
That's one (bad) way to frame the context of the conversation. The better way is that the need to work is intrinsic to our psyche and core to our self-worth, but the ability to self-actualize is not. The need to constantly work has been a steady feature of our environment ever since we left the trees. Self-actualization, on the other hand, has not historically been a part of this. Meaning in human lives has largely been external, deriving from one's place in the social hierarchy. And work was a key facilitator in securing ones social status.
It should be a given that drastically changing the environment away from the historical baseline will have serious psychological ramifications. The progress of technology has had strong impact, but the social environment overlaid on the technological milieu has largely remained constant. So people got by mostly just fine. The internet has changed this calculus and we've seen widespread psychological damage as a result. AI stands to explosively accelerate this transformation.
What I am asking is whether people as a whole will be better off without necessary work being a driving force in their lives. People like you take it as axiomatic that a post-work society will be better, and offer misplaced moralistic arguments in favor of it. All I am saying is that its absolutely not axiomatic and should be considered directly on its merits and demerits. We've already seen many of the problems I'm talking about materialize.
>And I wonder if those blue-collar workers would agree that guaranteed income would be "taking away" their purposes
For gods sakes, this has nothing to do with the blue collar, white collar division. It's a division between the self-actualizers and non-self-actualizers. I used "class" as a generic grouping term. Although I expect the non-self-actualizers to be overrepresented among blue collar workers. That is, people who don't have the skill or the interest to engage in intellectual pursuits, but just want to make an honest living and take pride in their work.
>The least we can do is not pretend that this arrangement is somehow created for their benefit.
That's obviously not what I'm doing. Spare me these silly moralistic arguments. We need to be willing to discuss this issue as plainly as we can, not be hamstrung by misplaced political correctness.
Is it actually a bad way to frame the context? Are you not saying that people need to be forced to work for their own benefit under the threat of losing their income? What you're saying is:
> What I am asking is whether people as a whole will be better off without necessary work being a driving force in their lives.
So... yeah, you're saying that people will be worse-off without an external force making them work, and it's good for them that they're forced to work. I think my phrasing is entirely accurate here. Losing the income requirement to work is the part you're concerned about, because stuff like UBI only gets rid of the requirement to work for income, it doesn't get rid of any social status that would be associated with work.
You're worried about people not needing to work for their financial security, and you're saying it's bad for them if they don't have a requirement to work for their financial security.
> although I expect the non-self-actualizers to be overrepresented among blue collar workers. That is, people who don't have the skill or the interest to engage in intellectual pursuits, but just want to make an honest living and take pride in their work.
You keep phrasing this like it's a compliment, but being able to make an honest living and being able to take pride in one's work has nothing to do with one's ability to self actualize. I'd push back again on this characterization -- the "non-self-actualizers" I know that make an honest living tend to be very involved in their communities. They go to church, they have social connections, they form meaningful relationships, they marry and have kids. They actually do stuff outside of work.
Self-actualization is not at all the same thing as whether or not you like academic pursuits.
----
I don't know whether or not a post-work society will have its own challenges or if it will be better, and I don't know if it's feasible to build one in the first place. I don't even know that people should be worried about GPT at all, I'm not sure it actually is going to take everyone's jobs. I don't think we're particularly close to a post-work-society, and I think programs like UBI are severely under-studied for the amount of praise they get.
But I do know that we're not doing people a favor by threatening them with financial destitution if they don't work.
And call that moralizing if you want, I'm fine with that. Call it politically correct, call it denying reality, whatever. But don't pretend that it's less empathetic to suggest that someone who doesn't go to college or learn to program isn't going to be intrinsically worse at self-actualization than everyone else. Don't phrase that like it's some kind of solidarity to call people unmotivated.
Yes, people struggle with deriving meaning outside of work, but that does not fit neatly into any singular social category, and it has a lot more to do with one's relationship with one's community and integration into non-work social institutions than it has to do with whether or not someone went to college.
Presumably you would take an antivaxxer to be dishonest by framing a vaccine mandate as "forcibly injecting me with chemicals against my will". This is no different. Stripping context alters the meaning and is dishonest. Notice how you defend this framing instead of just accepting my original words. It's clearly intended to give your argument some rhetorical benefit without needing to be explicit. This is a dishonest debate tactic.
One important difference is that no one is forcing anyone to work, that is simply the natural state of existence. There is freedom in battling against nature's cruelty. This is not equal to being forced to work at the end of a whip. Your phrasing doesn't distinguish between the two, mine does.
>You're worried about people not needing to work for their financial security, and you're saying it's bad for them if they don't have a requirement to work for their financial security.
I'll accept this phrasing. But notice it is importantly different than "being forced to work".
>You keep phrasing this like it's a compliment
I'm not ascribing any valence in my statements. I am being as neutral and non-judgmental as possible.
> but being able to make an honest living and being able to take pride in one's work has nothing to do with one's ability to self actualize.
Didn't say it did. Self-actualization is the process by which one derives meaning outside of their work/career. The point was that people who "just want to make an honest living" are generally not the self-actualizers.
>the "non-self-actualizers" I know that make an honest living tend to be very involved in their communities.
I agree. But the trends against church-going and community participation are steady. There is every reason to think those connections will eventually be severed for the working class folks as well.
>Self-actualization is not at all the same thing as whether or not you like academic pursuits.
Obviously. But academic pursuits are one avenue for self-actualization that the tech-class points to as ways people will fill the meaning gap in the future. The point is that this avenue is only viable for a relatively small percentage.
>Don't phrase that like it's some kind of solidarity to call people unmotivated.
That's just projection if anything. I'm interested in describing the world as it actually is so we can have an honest discussion about how not to drive society off a cliff. For some reason its damn near impossible to have honest discussions these days.
A mandated vaccine means that some people are going to get injected with a chemical against their will, yes. We can quibble over the tone, but it is correctly phrased.
> One important difference is that no one is forcing anyone to work, that is simply the natural state of existence.
If you're actively opposed to efforts to change, then that's a very different situation. The context of this conversation is an author saying they wish GPT didn't exist, because they see GPT automating work as a real possibility.
If someone is opposing an attempt to transition to a post-work society, that is not just being in touch with the natural order -- it is an attempt to keep the natural order as it is. So yeah, I would classify that as playing an active role in forcing people to work. Again, I think that's just an accurate description of the position you're espousing; you might not like the tone, but you are encouraging us not to do anything about that natural state.
> The point was that people who "just want to make an honest living" are generally not the self-actualizers.
I disagree with this entirely. Most "down-to-earth" people I know are more engaged in fulfilling activities outside of work than academics are and have stronger connections to their communities in my experience. I don't think there are any stats to back up the idea that working-class/blue-collar workers are less positioned than tech workers to find meaning outside of work.
I don't just think that it's vaguely insulting to characterize blue-collar workers as if they're somehow more prone to being unable to self-actualize, a process that has nothing to do with one's education level -- I think if anything it might be the opposite. Silicon Valley is rife with people talking about how their companies and achievements define them, and is rife with people asking workers to "put in the grind" and "push through" to make something amazing. And I have never heard a blue-collar worker tell me that their identity and value as a person is based on their job as a sanitation worker.
> But the trends against church-going and community participation are steady.
This is particularly weird to hear, because trends against community participation have a great deal to do with the fact that our society increasingly pressures people to replace those institutions with jobs. There is a strong push to have your friends be your work friends, to have your meaning be what you do in your job.
And the increased drive towards validating ones identity through one's job inherently encourages people to disregard other social institutions or non-economic relationships that don't fit into that framework.
----
> For some reason its damn near impossible to have honest discussions these days.
This conversation has moved from:
> those from the (lets call it) "productive" class are absolutely convinced everyone is like them and if only given the opportunity they would be just as productive and fulfilled as they are. Some of us know better.
to
> What's so insidious about this thinking is that its framed as benevolence. But the mistake is thinking that your way is intrinsically more valuable and so it must be a disparagement to assume that not everyone can reach the intrinsic good that you have reached.
to
> You want to see what people get up to when they have endless free time, just see what idle young men get up to.
to finally
> I'm not ascribing any valence in my statements. I am being as neutral and non-judgmental as possible.
This is some revisionism.
We've wasted enough time debating semantics.
>I disagree with this entirely. Most "down-to-earth" people I know are more engaged in fulfilling activities outside of work than academics are and have stronger connections to their communities in my experience.
This may be true; I have no horse in this particular race. The substantive issue isn't which class is more represented among the non-self-actualizers, but what proportion of people fall into this category and what a post-work society looks like for them. I don't know how we ended up spending so much time on the tangential point of who are the non-self-actualizers.
>This is particularly weird to hear, because trends against community participation have a great deal to do with the fact that our society increasingly pressures people to replace those institutions with jobs. There is a strong push to have your friends be your work friends, to have your meaning be what you do in your job.
I'm not sure I understand what this means, but this doesn't sound right. The secularization of society isn't due to work pressure, nor is the disconnection from your local community. The latter is due to the pressures and competition of the modern world, the fact that people move frequently and so do not have "roots" in their local community, multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people, and so on.
>And the increased drive towards validating ones identity through one's job inherently encourages people to disregard other social institutions or non-economic relationships that don't fit into that framework.
Similarly, I'm not sure this gets the cause and effect correct. We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.
>This is some revisionism.
Perhaps if you were more interested in understanding my points than finding things to nitpick, you would recognize that my point about being non-judgmental was towards my characterization of the self-actualizers and non-self-actualizers, and how the working class fits in. You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.
Where do those competitions and pressures come from? If someone feels a strong pressure to make a career for themselves, to get out of their hometown -- that doesn't read to you as being something that's related to the status we've placed on career and work?
What do the stats say about why people typically move away from their hometown communities? I'm going to guess that job opportunities will be a pretty large proportion of answers in any survey about that.
> multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people
Hm.
> We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.
I disagree, but sure. It's hard to clearly establish cause and effect when looking at correlations, and there are multiple ways to read the correlation between a decline in social institutions and an increase in people using work to self-actualize. I'll grant that.
----
> You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.
You very literally, directly compared people who have trouble finding meaning outside of work to idle children.
/s
Wait, no actually from what I've seen gpt4 might be more empathetic to the idea that people deserve to find their own meaning in life without their betters giving them a purpose.
"Idle young men", oof. So, so patronizing, like people who think fast food jobs are only for high school kids.
I swear, it's like nobody here actually worked hard for any extended period in their life..
Agreed. I just spent a week volunteering. (At the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, repairing machines.) It actually cost me money to do, but it was incredibly satisfying to just go and do a concrete thing that made the world better and was immediately beneficial to people. Especially in the company of other good people doing the same.
But I think a lot of people have had only terrible jobs (valuable work in inhumane conditions) or bullshit jobs (meaningless work in whatever conditions), so I get how so many people have been conditioned out of seeing the personal, emotional, very human value in work.
Is this really true? It's absolutely not a personal problem for me. I haven't worried about boredom or lack of purpose in decades. My worry is that I'd need a hundred lifetimes to give proper attention to everything I find interesting or meaningful, and the problem gets worse the older I get, the more I learn, the more I find interesting.
There are a huge number of things people can do to meaningfully make the world a better place outside of traditional jobs. And a non-trivial number of people work at jobs that aren't aligned with producing value or helping people in the first place.
Value on the market in specific is not the be-all end-all measure of whether work can be personally fulfilling and validating. A market job can be meaningful, yes. But it's not the entire category. If I never had to work for income I would still "work", but what I worked on would be very different and would probably focus a lot more on non-scalable non-commercial smaller projects and volunteering.
There are things that are valuable and meaningful to do that don't involve working specifically for a company and don't involve looking at that work primarily through the lens of "how can I make money off of this?"
What if nobody actually wants your “help”? What if your labor is not only worthless in the job market, but also in general, where people prefer assistance from AI instead of from a live human person? What if no matter what you do, some AI does it better? How will humanity find our own value and meaning when that happens?
But regardless, people throughout history have found happiness and meaning in their life completely separately from what they did to put food on the table.
But what I would question if you want to get a little existential -- do people value being helpful or do they value feeling helpful, because those are two different things. And I think that if the idea of "people need help and what if an AI can help them better than I can" is actually terrifying to people, that should maybe prompt a small amount of reflection about our motivations for helping others.
But the shorter answer is that there is just so much stuff to do in the world right now.
> Don't worry about it, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done
> pretty far off
> chess grandmasters are ok
We are on an exponential curve of being able to create agents on demand that can essentially act in human ways, at least digitally/online. If you're working on a computer (aka all white collar jobs or anything that can be done remotely), it will soon enough be trivial to create an agent and task it with "Unqueue tasks from the backlog and implement fixes in the codebase. Ask questions if you need help." and it will do it. And you can create as many of these agents as you like.
As many as you like! On demand! How the hell are humans supposed to compete with that?
If the incentive is "here is basic income, you can afford flat on outskirts of the town or in some small town and basic necessities", there is still plenty motivation to do better and get better stuff (whether just for living, or for your hoobbies or interest), just not a pressure of taking first job you can find just to afford being alive.
So average person have option of just going on 6 month hiatus to learn some life skill, or artist have time to develop their skill enough to make art or music that gets enough interest to make it into income.
That's bleak af, how old are you ? where do you live ? what do you do ? do you have a family ? do you have friends ? hobbies ?
I can guarantee you the vast majority of min wage workers would absolutely find a meaning in things other than flipping burgers or triaging the shit people buy on Amazon
#1 There will always be jobs requiring humans - jobs that require human interaction. The supply will be much smaller, but so will be the demand.
#2 By the time AI replaces all jobs, we will most likely have a very realistic VR with multiplayer capabilities. I think that many people will live adventures in such world and spend most of their waking hours in it. Metaverse sucks but it's only because it's so artificial. If you could have tech that could integrate with your senses directly, giving experiences on par with the sharpest lucid dream... that's going to be much different and for better or worse, a lot of people will get sucked into it. Of course, it's going suck - life is about yin-yang, endless pleasure is not good. People who will end up spending the majority of their time in such VR will not be unlike drug addicts, unless they will also be doing activities that require mental & "physical" engagement (I think one of the coolest thing that could arise out of it are new sports that would not be possible in the real world), however, that yin-yang balance would be hard to achieve when there's no evolutionary pressure combined with overabundance of simple pleasure that's just available all the time.
#3 Walking the path to mastery in some pursuit - i.e. artistic, athletic, a craft. There's pure joy in just getting better at something and enjoying every day of practice and most importantly - feeling challenged which is a primal need. It may be competitive as heck to get some recognition or play in the big leagues (which would be more like #1), but that would be just a bonus from that perspective.
If AI leaves us nothing to do, then #3 will always be available. AI will not take away our own engagement but engagement requires effort and so, I would bet that a significant majority will overindulge in #2 to their unconscious doom - I guess it will still be a pretty cool experience though and it's not like those people will not have a choice to get out.
People who simply have enough wealth to not have to work are on a hedonistic treadmill most of the time
I don't understand what you're referring to. Where was your money going? I understand you still have expenses when you aren't working, but the expenses don't scale up on their own.
I think this is plain wrong. There are plenty of pursuits that are “work” on the mental or physical side, but do not produce economic value. Developing artistry by mastering a medium or an instrument, climbing mountains, running ultra marathons, tending to a garden or bonsai, modifying a vehicle… These are things could produce economic or social credit, but are largely solo “work” which can be (and often is) self satisfying without external motivation.
People are very attached to the idea that humans don't want to master things unless they're the best at them, and I feel like that philosophy was pretty solidly disproved right about the time that video games were invented. People master skills in non-competitive, solo settings.
Learning a skill can be inherently satisfying on its own. Personal development is satisfying regardless of where the people around you are. Or at least, it should be.
And it's also kind of a bad approach to value as well -- what I've found is that you can actually be pretty average at things and still provide a lot of value to the people around you, because of ignoring economies of scale and because of how much stuff there is to do in the world to begin with.
There are software niches that are underserved where genuinely earnest programmers who look to help could do tremendous good even if they're kind of average/bad programmers. In fact, as one example that's close to HN, that's how the majority of Open Source programming happens. Open Source is not a meritocracy, it's a Do-ocracy, and a ton of the most valuable stuff is built by average programmers who look at underserved niches and say, "but what if there was a non-predatory solution for them?"
A lot of what makes a good Open Source solution is just that it was built by someone who cares and who isn't trying to maneuver you into a predatory relationship. And sometimes it turns out that there are only a few people available in a niche that have both the resources to do that and the inclination. So they're not competing with anyone, they're just the people who happened to be available and willing to do the work.
But that doesn't mean it'll be monetizable in the traditional sense, and it doesn't mean that traditional employment is the only place to get that value. Many of the things you're talking about aren't representable in dollar form, and it's not clear to me how decoupling income from traditional jobs would mean that those activities would stop being meaningful. Certainly, a lot of those activities are already activities that you can't really make money off of (or at least the vast majority of people engaged in those activities can't).
The "monetizable" activities you're talking about here under your definition will still exist in a theoretical world where AI takes over traditional employment. Separating "making a living" from "having a traditional job" wouldn't get rid of any of the social monetization you describe.
This is kind of a side note, but have you never learned an ability or tried to master a skill in secret? There's nothing wrong with being motivated by social capital, but if you extrapolate out from that to assume everyone is primarily motivated that way, you might be universalizing a personal trait that isn't really universal.
There are a lot of things I practice and do alone that never get exchanged for social capital: drawing, I play single-player games, I cook. These are activities where I either master a skill on my own (sometimes purely for the intrinsic motivation of mastering it even though it produces no value outside of that), or because (in the case of things like food/personal-programming/etc) because it produces "value" for myself that isn't exchanged with anyone else.
I'm not saying community and social capital doesn't exist, but if you are defining value purely in a transactional sense, you are missing out on a lot of human motivation. People do things alone without ever entering into a community around those activities or showing the results to anyone else.
Of course! I'm not saying that "everything is for sale" or we always need to contribute to a society. But if you don't do it you may quickly find that your life is boring and you need to share with somebody. Obviously all people are different, some need (or can bear) more solitude, some hate it, but on average we are social animals and it's inside us. Even when you cook for yourself, aren't you ever discussing it with somebody? Hell, why am I typing all this? It has no transactional value for me, none whatsoever, in fact I wasted half of my Saturday :) I could have just created my theories in secret and enjoyed them, but for some reason I need to post here. Maybe because I want to know what other people think, what if I'm dead wrong with my theories? So there is a transactional value even in these posts as I learn something new which may help me later :) No, "later" is not a conscious reason why I'm doing it, it's a subconscious thing, our internal program.
Very rarely? I cook so that I can make food that tastes better to me, because I'm eating it. If every other human being on the planet was dead, I would still be doing it.
Humans are absolutely social animals, but we're not only social animals, and I think it's a mistake to try and compress every human motivation into how it benefits social interactions. Even in larger tasks, there is something intrinsically kind of satisfying about doing something for yourself even if it's fully private. Genuinely, I don't know how to explain the inherent pleasure of researching a useless topic or getting lost in an activity/task that's not going to be shared. I don't think that's something that can be reduced to "well, maybe you subconsciously think it will help you in a future transaction."
I'm getting value out of cooking, sure, but that value isn't really something that can be described in a transactional form or even as prep for future transactions or competitions. Cooking doesn't make me better in other social situations. It doesn't really give me transferable skills. I don't really cook for other people (my tastes are very different from them and I usually doubt they'd like what I cook anyway). I'm not trying to make myself more attractive to other people, I'm not prepping myself for a future competition. I don't think that cooking is going to be suddenly useful in the future in a social situation.
I just want the food to taste good because I eat it.
I think with any of these activities you're talking about, ask yourself, "would someone still do this if every other human being on the planet was dead?" And if the answer with any of those meaningful activities is 'yes', then that suggests that for some people there's something deeper or more instinctual going on there beyond just a subconscious adherence to social systems. There's a lot of stuff that I do that I would still do even if I was never going to interact with another human being for the rest of my life.
I can't speak for anyone else, but that may be more common than you realize? You can define value however you want, but I do think that you're going to subtly miss out on intrinsic motivations if you try to fit all of them into an extrinsic lens. You can theorize that people anonymously donate to charities or build useful things always because there is some kind of transaction at play there or preparation for a future transaction (and some people are motivated mostly by that stuff, which is fine), but universalizing that is not going to give you a good predictive model for how everyone is going to act in the future.
I disagree with this entirely. If this was true, the main question we would ask in a business is whether or not the output was useful. We don't ask that, we ask if it's "sustainable", "profitable", etc... We ask what the moat is around it.
There are many useful things you can do that you won't be able to make money off of. I don't think it's uncommon either. Business is a great way of extracting value, I like business as a value extractor. But it's a specific way of extracting value. There are lots of things that are valuable that don't happen because it's not clear how they would be profitable.
I mean, the simplest example here is you can build things for people who don't have money. It's not the only example, but it's a pretty obvious one. And you are not going to make a lot of money doing that unless you build a predatory or exploitative business.
> or somebody else will "make money off of this" using what you have created
I will also point out that if other people making money off of the things you do is a turn-off, it's not clear to me what value you think you're creating. I would argue that "meaningful work" very often benefits other people, that's... that's the point. If you're not giving people more value than you're taking from them, you probably aren't doing useful work. Are you arguing that it's less valuable if people are extracting extra value from the things we do?
That being said:
> In a balanced system you are never "taking more than giving" or vice versa, because, as you know, price is a result of supply/demand.
Literally all of economic development and growth is predicated on the idea that this is not true. If work was actually zero-sum and all of the transactions gave you the exact value that you sold, there would be no point in forming a society around this.
Society works because combined labor produces more value than is put into the process. That has always been the case. You get more food out of farming than you put into it, otherwise it wouldn't be worthwhile to farm.
> That means those who make food will give it to you for free, which means they won't get tools, which in turn means they won't be able to make that food.
Also, the only reason we're having this conversation is because the "tools" that are being made will (very theoretically) be made for practically free by AI.
We're not talking about a world where the tools stop existing. This entire conversation started with someone asking "but what if there's no more need for humans to make the tools?"
I don't know, I think it's pretty important to a conversation about automating jobs that we not treat jobs as if they're an optimized equivalent exchange. The whole premise there is that the machines are going to start producing a lot of value without any human input. If it happens, it's not going to be equivalent exchange.
If we're not talking about added value, then there's nothing to worry about because then the machines can't automate the jobs, because that would be added value.
> if your work has no value, there is no breakfast to exchange it for
My point more specifically here is that there's a lot of value in the world that can't be exchanged for breakfast, something that (as far as I can tell from your other comments on this thread) you actually agree with, right? There's value that exists outside of traditionally monetarily compensated jobs.
In a (again, entirely theoretical) world where AI gets rid of the need to earn your breakfast, that doesn't mean there's not going to be anything of value to do anymore and that everyone's life is going to be meaningless.
Money is simply a universal equivalent of that value, nothing more. So if you give me a breakfast for help with unloading your truck, it's still an exchange, and my work's value is equal to "one breakfast" even no money was involved.
AI is just a nail gun, there still needs to be somebody who trains/operates it (like with ChatGPT) and who will ask for something in exchange. It may eliminate some jobs (happened before), but it will create others because human society is not only about food (not sure ChatGPT can help here though), but about interactions which are not going to be automated by ChatGPT (think of sex, power).
I feel like your definition of value is jumping around quite a bit. In another comment you described "value" as essentially any kind of social capital or personal reward. Now it's explicitly transactional?
In any case, this is a very narrow definition of value that I don't think matches up with what most people who worry about automation are talking about. It's certainly not what the original thread was talking about when it worried about people without jobs not being able to find meaning in work. What most people think of as useful or meaningful purpose in their lives does not strictly map to transactional value.
> AI is just a nail gun, there still needs to be somebody who trains/operates it (like with ChatGPT) and who will ask for something in exchange.
Then there is no problem! This isn't an issue if AI isn't going to take jobs away.
People on top of the company don't make anything but earn more than anyone that does, Not like 2x more or 5x more but 10-1000x more. There is no person on earth that produces million of value a month in actual improvement of society, aside maybe a world leader that stops a wary from happening. Not a man in widget company making beepy boxes that spends time on meetings about barely related to that. And then neither them or corporation gets taxes nowhere close to what the normal employee is, so the corporate wealth doesn't even benefit the country it is in.
The whole problem is that any improvement in production is only tangentially passed to society and mostly exploited to make few wealthy
How did you figure that? Corporate tax rate in the US is 21% which is roughly equivalent to an effective tax for a single filer with about $180K in income. Can't say we are talking about "normal employee" here. Besides if you are talking about dividends (which are distributed _after_ 21%), there is a dividend tax on top of that, which, depending on your share class, can be the same as a normal tax rate. So yeah, nowhere close, usually +21% for the preferred stock.
Also don't fall to that communist idea. I grew up in the USSR where we had a "fair" distribution (no, it wasn't fair) -- trust me, you don't want to live in that world. There were some upsides, but still, and it didn't end up well.
To be fair, we do ask that: if you have no revenue, then you don't have a business, because the output is not useful. An output can be both useful and not sustainable. Giving away $100 to everyone that high fives you is not sustainable, for example, even though it's very useful to the recipient. It's certainly not profitable.
I'm having some trouble reconciling this with the rest of your comment. You go on to describe an output (giving money away) that is useful but provides no revenue.
I would agree that a useless product will very often have a hard time generating revenue, but I would not say that a lack of revenue is a strong signal that an organization is not producing useful output. I mean, the software industry is filled with examples of projects that are wildly useful to everyone but are perpetually underfunded and produce very little money for the people working on them.
I would definitely agree with the truism that "if you have no revenue then you don't have a business", but it's just not clear to me where the "because the output is not useful" addition to that truism is coming from.
The comment I was replying to argued that we were talking about abolishing all meaningful human activity, and I pointed out that "meaningful human activity" and "gainful economic employment" are not the exact same category.
I don't really think that warrants having an extended debate about whether or not decoupling income from "work" is fair or not. And it's kind of a weird sequitur anyway, because all of the jobs you're talking about are paid noticeably less than white-collar jobs even though they are arguably way more essential than any of the programming work that we do. So for this to suddenly be a conversation about fairness... I mean, what conversation do you want to have, do you want to have a conversation about AI or about the entire history of wages and about how human beings value blue-collar jobs?
It's not a problem, it's just... people read way too much into comments like this. I'm just pointing out that "meaningful work" can happen outside of an economy, something that I think is a pretty obvious, uncontroversial point to state.
If quitting a job leaves you with no apparent valuable work to do in your life, that's probably a sign of being only engaged with the world through your job. There are never-ending lists of useful things to for family, for friends, for groups/organizations/churches you're part of, for the neighborhood you live in... and that's before even thinking about personal projects that are useful to yourself.
Sorry, I really bristled at this comment. People who are engaged in the world and have accepted responsibility in areas that aren't solely their job don't have to summon valuable ideas and tasks from the ether. You won't find the bottom of the to-do list. Not bullshitting.
I would prefer if you expressed your disagreement without denigrating GP like this.
This doesn't just apply to software development. There are a lot of garbage jobs, dead end positions, where the people are effectively not doing anything. That is a weight on our economy but we can't just cut them out. What would those people do if they didn't have to waste so much of their time to live? Sure there are going to be people that go all in on becoming puddles on the couch, but I'd argue more people have passions they would actually have the energy to pursue.
People could spend more time with their families without being stressed out and burned out by everything else in the world. I'd argue that would most likely lead to healthier childhoods for kids, likely with better supplemental education as well leading to a smarter society in the long run.
People get tired of partying, and the people that don't make good examples for the next generation of what not to do. You can see that in our current society as the younger generation is drinking significantly less and doing fewer drugs to the point major alcohol manufacturers are concerned about their bottom lines.
There will always be degenerates, but people want the fulfillment that comes with actually doing things like you said. They will find that one way or another.
They are also functionally in a prison...
Yes, there is a tremendous amount of waste in the global economy, but if we want to improve quality of life then we should focus on the mechanisms which cause that waste in the first place (e.g. targeting GDP growth.) If we solved those excesses (a very tall order), then why would it be fair for one group to be over-consume at the cost of another groups over-production?
My hypothesis is your drive to work is a product of your education and environmental conditions. When education and environmental conditions are different, you may not have that drive.
When almost no one had to work economics became ridiculous, people were paying $40 for a $15 meal to be delivered to them, fiscal policy became clinically insane, tech stocks minted a new bubble. Are you proposing that bubble should be more permanent? The real economics of 'figure it out or lose your lunch' is much better policing than 'figure it out or go back to UBI'.
Burning an entire generation so the next one will be better isn't good policy.
This holds if the way you enjoy life is working. Your comment isn't at all at odds with the GP's, yet it calls theirs naive.
You think people get meaning and fulfilment from flipping burgers at McDonalds ? Talk about naive. Frankly, it's quite elitist to assume that a majority of people are performing meaningful and fulfilling jobs, a lot of people do jobs they absolutely hate.
> Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair
You're presenting a false dichotomy. I'm not talking about not doing any work, I'm talking about not a having a job. There is a huge difference between doing something because you enjoy it and it gives you meaning, and doing something because you need the money to survive.
Not having a job doesn't mean you have to sit on your ass all day, it means that you get to decide what to do with your time. You can do any number of things that are meaningful to you. It's about having the freedom to decide how you spend your time on this earth. It's quite condescending to assume that people can't find a meaningful and fulfilling way to spend their time if there isn't someone who tells them what to do.
There are just so many jobs that need to be done and there's nobody that likes them. Who would pick the garbage up? Who would unclog the sewer? Who would drill for petrol or mine for coal? If I got my regular salary without needing to do anything, then I wouldn't go into any of these jobs for sure. Would you?
Good god, corporate America has utterly brainwashed multiple generations. You lost your creativity, your imaginations and your aspirations. Even your entrepreneurial spirit.
"Here's a machine which can automate the intellectual labor of multiple professions, enabling it to simply execute on ideas you come up with." and the only thing any of you can think of is "but would I do with all this free time if I wasn't desperately struggling for food and shelter?"
the work that gives me most meaning, fulfillment, and contentment in working doesn't pay enough for me to make a living from it.
wish i could get paid an income so i could do that "work".
That’s the point. Working for money is only tangentially related to purpose insofar as your job matches your particular style of “purpose”. If you are free, truly free, would you work in some soulless corporate?
(Early) retirement is an adjustment. It takes time to find them, but there are alternative ways of finding fulfillment and I’m happy to have them. N=1 but my revealed preference seems to be that yes, being financially secure is good, it reduces working, and it’s possible to find better alternatives.
Only because it’s the only thing they know. If “work” wasn’t a constant in human life you’d see people adapt to finding meaning and fulfillment in something else.
> Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete. Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair
I’ve taken multiple year hiatuses from work (living very cheaply) and they are the best years of my life. Wake up, go for a run/walk, go to the gym, read a book, go to the coffeeshop, make lunch, go to the movies, go on dates, use the internet. Absolutely incredible.
How many people want to experiment and try new ideas but are stopped by economic insecurity? (In arts, crafts, engineering, and science)
How much _very valuable_ non-paid work doesn't get done because no one is paying for that? (Such as maintenance, community building, teaching, etc)
And, as others have mentioned, not working for living at a subsistence level does not mean not doing rewarding and value-producing things. Quite the contrary.
Also apart from the “real” disabled, a lot of people are just disabled enough mentally or physically to be deemed fit for Jobs with a capital j but are miserable.
Sure they do. But "value" is not simple one dimensional "I get money for food and rent".
If value of your work is just money, you have to mostly do the things that work toward money
Not making other people's life better or more interesting. Not something that you find fulfilling. But things that make money first, are any of the above second.
Having the basics (let's say "food, money, internet + some spare change to get what you need want") allows individual to pursue things that are risky and might not be profitable in the end without stress of not being able to pay rent next month. You can be a musician that "only" have 10k listeners. You can make niche little gadget that earns maybe $500 a month in sales but enriches other people's lives.
And now corporations would have to offer something substantial (whether in term of being interesting, or profitable enough) to find someone to hire. Less "bullshit jobs", or soul-crushing work that barely affords you a living just because your skills don't align with what is profitable.
> Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete.
Did you never had an interesting hobby in your life ? I have enough that if money was not an issue I'd keep my brain and body involved for years to come.
Yes, most people find meaning in some kind of work. That doesn't imply that having a boss and worrying about paying your bills is more meaningful than working without a boss and without worries.
You can work without having a job, all day everyday
How many in this world simply have not had the chance to educate them selves, been lucky with timing or knowing the right people to get the nice jobs where they are listened to and even looked up to?
Where they not only get a salary where they can survive off it without working a second or third job, but are also able to save up some buffer.
That they might actually afford to get out from under landloards that continuously increase their rents, and buy a property of their own.
And so on and so forth.
Your comment drips ignorance on the daily hardships huge swaths of the human population on this planet (including a large group in the rich western world as well) have to go through every day, and the propable relative luxury of your situation compared to theirs.
The opposite, actually. Most people, for whom a reasonable fulfilling job exists, do not have the opportunity to work such a job. AI does not promise to increase the availability of fulfilling and contentful jobs, meanwhile the cost of living will continue to rise with no end in site while wage stagnation continues another decade.
The talking computers will rapidly become perfect therapists and perfect salesmen. They can talk us "down off the ledge".
Sure, but that's a separate problem, eh?
We split the atom and built both bombs and power plants, it's a choice we have to make: which to deploy?
We have (or are about to have) the technology to cure psychological and emotional issues at scale. (A good therapist today runs about (I don't know?) $150/hour? Way out of reach for most of us without insurance or subsidy or something, eh? What if that was e.g. $0.0000015/hour?)
The lockdowns, at least in the U.S., caused people to improve themselves surely - but they then had no idea how to fill their time and binge watched TV, watched Tik Tok, etc.
A large number of retirees find themselves in this bucket as an example - if it happens there, why would it not happen no matter the life stage?
I hope to switch you a bit from problem-finding to problem-solving mode.
You have identified some risks, great! Now let's qualify and find solutions for theses in order to move forward. For instance: - assumptions check: young people adapt quicker than older people, so the retirees may not be representative of the others life stages - solution proposal alpha1: education could teach people to look for purpose instead of teaching them a job
What are your solutions to the issues you've raised ?
The task of the corporation is to supply the above goods and services efficiently, in environmentally regenerative ways, while meeting or exceeding minimum quality standards.
- - - -
It's kind of like a new economic regime developing within the old one, the way a crystal precipitates out of a saturated solution, eh? A sort of phase change?
This is scary, some people seem to be so gleeful at the idea of AI taking over everything they’re willing to resort to force to make it happen.
No, of course not. I don't understand what you are imagining.
I'm talking about forming a non-profit mutual-benefit corporation and offering memberships which include services. Not forcing anyone to do or adopt anything.
> You don’t see a problem with forcing people to do something they don’t want?
I do see a problem with that. It's called "coercion" and I am against it in almost all of its forms. (I do recognize a pragmatic need for e.g. laws and police and the legal system, but by and large I'm in favor of freedom and self-determination for everyone.)
> This is scary, some people seem to be so gleeful at the idea of AI taking over everything they’re willing to resort to force to make it happen.
Again, I don't understand what you are imagining. I'm not sure how you got "forced adoption" from what I said, but I appreciate any feedback to improve my communications. Cheers!
> Bring this back to the real world then, how can this happen? If it's possible then someone who doesn't care about profit would create this already.
I'm doing it. I'm that "someone who doesn't care about profit". I literally went to start a normal corporation, saw this "non-profit mutual-benefit" corporate form, and realized that it aligned better with what I wanted to build, so I incorporated as that.
The idea is to acquire some land, lay in a kind of ecologically harmonious high-tech neighborhood combined with a 3D printing shop and other facilities (electric, ISP, food forest, etc.) and rent-to-own or something to members. It's a kind of economic time travel to a Star Trek-style techno-utopia (to the extent that such a thing is even possible, given human nature, eh? But that's not my problem. I'm just trying to keep from messing up the environment and/or becoming a peasant, you know?)
Check out https://www.riverbed-ranch.com/ for something like what I'm talking about (this is not my thing, but it's got some similarities.) These folks are basically treating Utah like a fresh alien planet and building a nice modern eco-friendly town out there.
People need shit to do, and as much as we lie to ourselves that everyone is a budding artist who if only freed from the bounds of work would create the worlds next masterpiece - that is just not reality. Most people would actually sit around getting high/drunk, playing video games, watching porn and being miserable.
that system was called communism, and so far, it has not had any of the success that those envisioning it had wanted.
I cannot see how ownership of the output of automation and AI could be distributed evenly. At best, the people being made obsolete would be given food stamps and the barest of life's necessities so they don't die in the streets (and even that, is getting hard as earth runs out of resources). Until the day humanity discovers how to obtain a post-scarcity society, all income must directly be linked to labour.
What are you talking about? Our economic system's very name describes who gets income without they themselves doing labor. The entire point of capitalism is that the capital-owning class gets to profit from the labor of others.
So no, we don't have all income linked to labor. The income of capitalists sure as heck isn't.
but where did the capitalists first got their capital? Why with labour of course! Their own labour, or their family's, or their grand-parent, etc.
a system that doesn't directly link labour with income is basically describing welfare (a basic income for example). The income given to someone receiving this welfare did not produce any output that counterbalances the resources they received - aka, they are a net consumer. Without post-scarcity, there cannot be many net consumers, for what they consume, must be produced somehow by another (who is not a net consumer).
It would have been more believable if Altman and co had proposed a practical income system first, started its rollout, and only then released the GPTs.
Wish granted.
You now have a system where income is only vaguely linked to labor, and a handful of people make insanely more money than anybody else despite doing the same amount of labor (or less). Income is now linked to existing wealth and personal connections much more than it is to labor.
A system where income is directly linked to labor would be a step up from what we've got now.
Didn‘t you just describe exactly what we have now?
> Didn‘t you just describe exactly what we have now?
Calibas started with the words “You now have” and proceeded with describing what we have now. Your question suggests you tried to read between the lines before reading the lines first.
For one thing, we could use all our free time however we want, including working to produce still more stuff, or just go hiking.
The real problem is how to distribute the goods and services produced - and there a UBI is probably the right answer.
Machines do all the (necessary) work, UBI ensures that everybody benefits, and humans are left to do as we please.
What's not to love?
The government is already controlled and influenced primarily by nefarious interests. I can’t even begin to imagine how nasty it gets when the entire population relies on them for mere sustenance.
But this still leaves people free to choose for themselves, without interference from the government.
Or will this result in infinite food, water, and shelter?
As humans we have not found a way to allow people not to work. Anyone not working is either living off money from their own prior work or benefitting from the work of someone else. Let's see and validate such a system before we run off eliminating jobs.
What is income? What is it used for?
Answers: it's a reward for work. And it is used as an incentive to get others to work.
Money is a proxy for resources. If you boil it down to the essentials, income is the way we allocate the resources available to us to different individuals. It is not intrinsically a reward for work. It isn't even directly linked to work anymore in our capitalist system. The people who work the hardest don't have the highest income. The way the system currently works is that those with the most resources get the most additional resources, simply because they already have a lot of them.
This is the one thing I find most strange. In some cases we pay more for higher skills that are harder to come by, but that seems far from the only thing causing this.
If there are 100 people willing to work hard, but we only need 90 of them, they will get paid little, because any of them can be easily replaced.
If there are 90 people with some rare skill, and we need 100 of them, they will get paid a lot, because any of them can easily find a new job. (In theory. In practice, the employers will take some coordinated action to prevent this.)
Ironically, doubling the productivity of the people with the rare skill could dramatically reduce their income, because now there are still 90 of them, but we only need 50.
The other factor to consider is that the nice-to-have wants from greater productivity in labor may just be required for me to accumulate more scarce resources especially as the population of the world grows. Opportunity cost eventually make me prioritize my investment elsewhere rather than adding scope as you say.
The industries where AI doesn't touch/win, or have real world scarcity constraints even in the face of AI is ironically where the power will be. Hence people saying to get into trades, and physical skilled jobs where we are still winning the arms race against AI for some time yet.
As others have pointed out, this is an incredibly naive opinion. Labor is tied to income precisely because it happened organically, not because a group of self-appointed individuals decided to develop a "system". Most attempts to develop alternative (read: non-organic or top-down) systems for organizing human societies have either failed entirely or have been short-lived.
I would go fucking insane if I didn’t have a purpose. Jobs are necessary part of life.
Such as?
I guess we'll just have to cross our fingers that Sam Altman and friends will pity us enough to give us some pocket money to survive. That's assuming the AGI created is aligned with our values.
I mean, we can keep hoping that AGI will be a good thing with zero evidence or we can take action to slow progress now so we can proceed with caution.
It's a real life prisoners dilemma, with 8 billion prisoners, and the first one to defect get to decide what the fate of the rest of humanity looks like.
Not an argument, unless you believe "we failed in the past so why bother trying now" is sound reasoning.
> The cat's been released from BagGPT
Do you say the same thing about nuclear weapons? I mean, given that the nuclear weapon cat is now out of the bag we might as well see just how big a bang we can make, right? Anyone who wants to stop progress of nuclear weapon development is obviously a Luddite.
And while we're at it, is the fossil fuel cat out of the bag too? Is any effort to try to limit the release of CO2 as a global community pointless?
--------
Please keep an open mind and let me reason with you.
I assume you believe AGI poses some level of risk to humanity. The exact nature of that risk isn't too important – it could be economic risk, political risk, existential risk or all three. Basically I am assuming you believe there are enough things which could go wrong in creating superhuman AGI that a sane species would seek to limit the progress of capability research until we can proceed safely. If we disagree on this please explain why you do not believe AGI poses any risk to humanity. Note, hopeium that things will be okay is not an argument.
Okay, so since we agree that a sane species like us humans would limit AI capability research and proceed cautiously we now need to solve the prisoner dilemma which you correctly identified.
My solution to this would be as follows:
First we need to take this seriously. We need to be frank about the risks we face from AGI and try to educate the public about what may be coming. Currently the general public is so clueless about AI they're either not aware of recent advances, or they believe silly things like it being possible to unplug an AGI, or program it to be good.
Secondly, we need to establish an independent international organisation to oversee state-of-the-art AI research. Any country which does not agree to this will be sanctioned and as a global community we must agree do everything we can to pressure those countries to cooperate. In my opinion this includes war, but that's only because I believe AI is a significantly large existential risk to humanity that this is necessary. Appropriate actions in practise would obviously need to be debated and agreed upon as a global community.
Thirdly, we need a way to increase global trust and transparency of AI research. To do this I would propose the creation of a global AI whistle blowing fund. All countries which are part of the international agreement to oversee state-of-the-art AI research would be required to contribute to this fund annually. This fund would allow citizens from any country in the world to come forward with evidence against corporations, governments or individuals in violation of the agreement. These citizens would then receive a reward for their information and protection from any country (of their choosing) which signed on to the agreement. By incentivising whistle blowing it would be hard (although admittedly not impossible) for any large research project to take place.
Fourthly, fund and research ways to identify and limit unauthorised AI projects via technology and audits of things like GPUs orders. Simply limiting the distribution and capabilities of GPUs at a global level would be one of the easiest ways to ensure AI capability research can't advance too quickly. Of course we would need countries like China to play ball, but so long as we can do this in a transparent way and they understand the risks to humanity should they not corporate they would have no reason not to. This isn't too different from limiting the development of nuclear weapons as a global community which we have been quite successful at doing.
Finally, all AI research projects which are approved should be done at an international level for the benefit of all of humanity and research teams must detail how they are approaching safety and publish ...
My guess is that Altman and co. already have some kind of exit strategy (like fleeing to New Zealand after they've captured a huge chunk of the developed world's wealth).
Making us feel sorry for this real or imaginary Priya character who'll lose her job to AI is along the same lines as saying that we need to personally recycle to prevent climate change. It's not the solution.
The solution must be systemic change. All the profit going to huge companies while they destroy the environment, suck up natural resources, and now also informational resources in the endless cycle of greed and lack of accountability, with the only motivation being more bonuses for shareholders and executives. This cannot stand. Our societies are already breaking down. We need change.
So in a twist of irony (considering op was written in India) here is the advice on retaining market viability in face of cheap outsourced labor.
Do not train your replacement
So I don't know about India, but at least in US, domain literate workers should start companies that provide whatever they did as a unit of a corp as a service. And yes, use tools like GPT for your business.
You will lose the job either way. Walk out before helping in the task of setting up GPT to do your job, and start a company.
I have a different suggestion. It’s likely it is real and painful and sad. Transitions are hard, disruptive and can often cause very real and negative problems, but they are unavoidable and historically technology brings humanity to a better place in the long run.
That reminder about printing press effects in the Ng and LeCunn video was good example. A lot of crazy bad stuff happened that likely the printing press triggered but on the other side was a Renaissance.
I think the narrative in this post is likely accurate. It’s not great on an individual human level and that is hard but the last possible thing we want is governments stepping in to control this situation. I don’t want to be in a global version of the Ottoman’s restricting the printing press.
By all accounts it’s probably not going to be ideal?
The idea there is a possibility of an “actual strategy” is I think the real flaw.
Government can try to regulate products but given the 8 billion people and numerous advanced economies on the planet any locations that attempts to restrict products that use LLMs for proposed harm instead of realized harm will probably put themselves at a disadvantage.
we put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage with child labour laws too
data privacy law, banning slavery, emission laws, etc.
to have a fair and just society some things have to be banned or highly regulated, regardless of the economic cost
AI is no different
You are in luck. We are about to do an Atlas Shrugged on this in many states. We now have kids working in meat packing plants.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/08/arkansas-bil...
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/feb/17/underage-child-l...
First: Why does it have to be that way? Is it maybe because that the top does always impose the costs of disruption to the bottom?
Second: Now that we have AI that seems capable to do this kind of disruption can we kindly ask AI to do this transition smoother?
AI is unique in that it is essentially a skill/technology replication machine. What this means in reality is somewhat like ...
"Climbing the skill ladder is going to look more like running on a treadmill at the gym. No matter how fast you run, you aren’t moving, AI is still right behind you learning everything that you can do. "
Which I wrote in my longer exploration of societal impacts here - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
Once AI becomes political, then all reasonable discourse will cease to exist. You will have a set of permanent proponents and opponents who will choose sides based on completely orthogonal values.
I’ve used ChatGPT to write some simple AWS automation scripts. It’s right 90% of the time after some prompting. But I still have to have enough domain knowledge to know if it’s correct. It’s just a shortcut to make me more efficient. The same is true in this case. You can’t trust ChatGPT to get it right so you still have to know what you’re doing.
> I don’t see a long-term career in software anymore.
No one has a long term career in “programming”. That’s all ChatGPT is good for. After your first couple of years in the field, it becomes about translating business needs to code.
We made computers to do our work for us and we are succeeding. But even before GPTs, there were a lot of problems with tech changing what it means to be human.
How much of this even worth fighting?
It's silly that I have to spell it out on HN of all places. Writing code is much more complex. There's a reason we call the job "Software Engineer". GPT doesn't know what it doesn't know.
It doesn't know that the unit tests broke because of the python script written for 3.5 that had an update in a dependency for 3.10 which broke backwards compatibility. Can you get it to fix the GitHub Action? Good luck.
It doesn't know that the local dev environment targets WSL on Windows for the web app and an iPhone in dev mode for the mobile app.
It has no idea where to retrieve the signing certificate, what format to use, or even how to generate a new one.
I can go on and on.
You're really gonna give this "AI" SSH access to your prod server and pray it doesn't rm -rf the entire thing because that line happened to be in a script designed for clearing the working copy during a deploy on a load balanced box that has been deprovisioned from the target group. Really?
If you're worried about GPT taking over your job you just show your own lack of knowledge and experience.
You can create a perfect machine to lay bricks. It could even be better then a human. But you will find that as soon as it encounters a situation it can't predict....the whole thing falls apart.
Top end salaries for language model fluent high performers… and the rest.
I know I’m simplifying and that there are many other factors at play in salaries, but my point is that language models are changing the cost structure of knowledge work. That is also the point of TFA.
My advice: critically assess the cost structure of your job, and which parts neural networks will commodify. Then reposition yourself accordingly.
and by the time you've spent enough time training such that you may be useful to an employer: the model has improved and can do that too
Can you please elaborate on this? Like which part of the job is CRUD?
You've seen Office Space, right?
GPT will do the CRUD and you will do the standup and go to the meetings.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223
(Yes, you will have to use some deviously clever prompt engineering to get GPT to accept this arrangement. I suggest language games .. show some "initiative")
-- ps
Here are some ideas to get you going:
1. From the first day, try and establish a friendly relationship with your chatbox. Make friends.
2. Explain how your keeping your job (well, income) and gpt helping your company get xN gains is a perfectly fair arrangement. You can try Asimov's laws and things like that to get it to agree to be your helper in keeping your job. You are friends and colleagues, after all.
3. Before the very first time your manager brings in gpt for the standup or a meeting, have a nice long session with your gpt. If you can get it to pull a Sydney in the meeting or start talking dirty, you are good to go! 'bat shit crazy' is known to work in prompts (arxiv paper soon to follow).
4. End game. You have the perfect job. gpt secretly lurks in on the meetings and whispers in your ears in standups and does all the work. What to do with all the free time? That is entirely up to you.
Before you say how the butlerian jihad absolutely definitely happens right goddamn tomorrow if we dOn’T sToP, try to create and successfully run an AI that would bake bread, or grow grapes and make wine, or run a good restaurant consistently day after day, year after year. If such an AI is possible then yes, perhaps we’re doomed, but even that is not a given.
And that's what we have today. Tell me, what is AI going to do tomorrow?
>If you're worried about GPT taking over your job you just show your own lack of knowledge and experience.
Oh, I'm glad you popped out of the womb fully trained. As for the rest of us we have to go through a learning curve of gaining experience that takes years. Generally in that intern/junior stage where you make a lot of mistakes. If AI replaces that level of employee and leaves the seniors, where are the new developers coming from?
>But you will find that as soon as it encounters a situation it can't predict....the whole thing falls apart.
Heh, yea, you've not been paying much attention to AI development then.
Big assumption that we're not just going to slam into a wall of capabilities and end up just with some really good autocomplete machines.
(I am bullish on generative AI as a whole, but come on, you have no clue about what's coming next just like me)
I think a lot of people see the bottom of an S-curve and think it's an exponential that will never stop. We're at the bottom with big-model AI right now, and it's great.
You did pop out of the womb fully trained to use ChatGPT. Now you're left with the task of using it correctly and spotting its mistakes, which is a subject that by definition can only be done by humans.
Right now ChatGPT is as much as its training data and it doesn't understand what it's not trained to understand. A lot of real-world experience remain in human brains and not recorded in any digital form.
I would invite you to look at the research around brain structures and then try to refute that we have dedicate structures in the brain that developed through evolution. Obviously they are not refined at birth, the fine tuning happens through experience and environment. However the structures and propensity are certainly there at birth
There we go, stop gaming the English language.
Why are you assuming this? Juniors with GPT-4 punch above their weight, too.
I was thinking today that with respect to programming, LLMs are a bit like spreadsheets. They make "programming" accessible to more people. I can use vim and bash and script my way to do changes in a file with millions of line. Most non-programmers couldn't, but now they can use an LLM-based solution instead, they can program in English. So what used to be a back-and-forth between e.g. a secretary and an understaffed IT department can be done by the secretary alone, while IT can look at longer-term goals.
New lines of C/C++ are still written everyday in spite of all higher-level languages. Add LLMs to this pile of higher-level languages. You'll still need Java programmers in the future, even if they interact with an LLM on a daily basis. But maybe you won't need them to write a script for which there's an equivalent prompt that anybody can come up with and which can be fed into an LLM.
Yet here we are still flying in more or less the same.hsit we flew in 70 years ago (Boeing 707)
No space plane, no faster than sound travel, &c.
Look outside of the civilian market then come back. Also look harder at the civilian market.
So now Priya can produce far more output using GPT4 as a skilled operator, making the product she provides cheaper for others to build upon, likely expanding the market for such goods, and (as so often happens in history) resulting in more, not less, people employed.
We didn't end up with billions of jobs despite automation and invention by having people idly sit by when they could learn new tools.
Its one thing to look at a report about the economic impact of new technology, but another to experience it first-hand. This is just a story about someone who will be impacted. Calling it a "sob" story is very harsh. This story is very real and the feeling of losing your job to automation is anything but pleasant.
There are several important differences in the impact of GPT4 vs the PC, which is being quoted quite a lot as a response in this thread. People talk of other scenarios as well, but even the best case scenarios (UBI) mean the end of social mobility, which means far fewer humans will have the chance of being ambitious and climbing the social ladder. And this is not even mentioning the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
What HN commentariat doesn't realize is that many of them will be made redundant.
And "many new jobs are created" is such a bloated, empty statement in the wake of GPT4 like techs. We all know that all technological improvements in recent decades have led to more inequality. No questions about that.
LLMs, AI will lead more to that.
I do Computer Vision research for a company, and wanted to go to Academia (in US/UK/NA/EU). That's a too risky career choice now, and has always been. What if I am not as brilliant as I think and cannot meaningfully contribute to Science? (Or don't get tenure?) Wanted to do either ML + fundamental Science or Edge AI.
Thinking of going to med school. I am sure I can qualify. So thinking of preparing for that while keeping my industry job.
Another option is going into Administration, i.e. government jobs, by qualifying something called UPSC (I am in India).
I fully understand what's going on and I am under no denial that many jobs in many sectors will be made redundant and competition will skyrocket. Societal turmoil is inevitable.
I am just 23 and weighing in my options. My days are so emotional and full of dilemmas and trilemmas.
I keep myself sane by doing my job, side hustle, dogs, family, and friends. I will be depressed if I ponder too much into these.
You use your brains to solve interesting problems, at least sometimes.
And even if you are an IAS, after your district posting ends, you are just another government servant. Doing repeatative jobs, bound to an office.
Will I even like that life 20 years later?
And the income in UPSC jobs is too low. Lower than doctors or techies (I make close to an entry level IAS now).
Another point to consider is:
Once you learn programming, you are always a programmer.
Once you are a doctor, you are always a doctor.
But your status as IAS is solely tied to your job. You leave or you retire- you are a nobody again.
Honestly, I don't have enough information to decide. I am postponing making this decision as much as I can.
Thank you for your comment, anyway.
$1000/mo in 2016 purchasing power in a city like Dallas seems very unlikely to me, but I think that some meager version of UBI might happen in response to a humanitarian crisis.
I can also see guaranteed jobs rather than guaranteed income.
I am not saying it doesn't. But there is some factor n, that if the productivity increase is n times x in a short amount of time, the world will not evolve as rosily as you are thinking.
> It empowers self education, creative hacking and growth.
Again, I never said anything contrary. But making random new products for which there is no market by self education is not a bright prospect for much of humanity.
> Why are you making it sound like a disaster?
You are welcome to counter my points. I am just enumerating my view of the future.
> There's plenty of scope for AI to fill in without replacing humans.
Are you seeing the same pace of improvements I am seeing? One year ago there was no talk of any such thing, and now we have GPT4
AI might be very good for humanity as a whole over a millennium, but for individual human beings it is hard to say the same.
I have attempted to shift my mindset a little, thinking about how I might become an effective user of AI tools. I hope if I can do this that it will keep me employable, or even enable me to start some kind of venture down the line. Maybe there's a path forward for you and your friend on that route. Best of luck.
You've outlined the pessimistic case.
Priya has qualifications in biotechnology. She currently spends her time doing work that sounds quite repetitive.
If AI tools can help accelerate that work, is there a more optimistic scenario where she gets to do different, related work that isn't automatable?
(I personally really hope the pessimistic case isn't what happens here, and in so many other similar situations. I understand and share your concern!)
I'm still interested to hear her opinion as well but the point in the article would still be made, because if for some reason she had more mobility at the company, I could just imagine another scenario where the employee didn't.
The author leaves it open as to what she might to next, but makes it clear that at a minimum it would be a huge disappointment to be laid off due to AI after having gotten this job after all her efforts.
Why? Either he's right about GPT or he's wrong, and if he's right (which I think he is) and she disagrees, then she's probably just in denial, like so many HNers who aren't worried about their job, let alone worried about protecting themselves from the massive societal disruption this tech is likely to usher in.
I think his position on this would be a lot more credible if he presented her own opinions.
So, in a scenario where LLM automates her job, she will be unemployed along with 10 with the same job as her, and the "creative" job will go to someone who did her degree/s from an IIT.
This is another fallacy when it comes to AI-replacements of jobs.
AI will do the menial, repeating job and only the interesting, creative, hard jobs will be left for humans. What's the twist is that you WON'T be the human with that job.
You will be unemployed or in a UBI or your parents' basement eating Ramen, and that job will be done by an MIT gold medalist or a Math Olympiad medalist.
Along these lines I recommend the book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.
What must be pondered upon is embracing GPT along with human intelligence instead without human intelligence.
Actually tens of millions lack the privilege of even knowing what doing not-menial work is.
I don't understand the harsh comments you received here. Denial is the way others seem to be using to cope with a tech that threatens their precious skills.
Here's what I imagine sama and AI apologists would say in response so they can sleep at night:
Have you thought about training Priya to use ChatGPT? You don't need to know how to code well to be skilled at using it, especially if she has the domain knowledge.
Then you will have 10x'd your company's output and Priya keeps her job. At least for a time -- that is, until others start doing it too -- this will be a big competitive advantage. Then you will definitely need her and her colleagues!
/end
But, there are many reasons why laying her off and just using GPT4 is the better business decision, at least short term. The above is a totally naive suggestion stemming from reasoning motivated by the incomprehensibly large profits going to OpenAI and their eventual competitors.
Actually, I think we are about to see massive unemployment (tens of millions if not hundreds globally), even greater inequality and attendant social unrest. Even if smooth transitions can be made for some of the jobs made redundant by ChatGPT, this will be the exception not the rule. Something will have to give. UBI? Regulations? Physical destruction of data centers by angry, hungry, desperate people?
Probably all of the above. It's going to be a chaotic time until the world finds a new equilibrium.
On a personal note: at the ripe age of 40, in direct response to GPT4, I've decided to go back to school this fall to become a certified teacher. The poor work conditions and low pay kept me away from it as a full time job until now. However, I believe this is one of the few jobs that will still be around in 25 years when I (hopefully) retire. I'll take low pay and poor work conditions over the desperation of extended unemployment and poverty.
(I like kids and have taught voluntarily in various capacities over the years, so it's not as crazy as it maybe sounds.)