What the author is describing is simply employers resetting their expectations of employable skills. I've personally seen this happen about 3-4 times over the course of my 30 year career as a software developer. Frankly, the author's tone strikes me as alarmist (and a bit whiny).
Yes -- it's uncomfortable. But it's also necessary.
Learn the tools well enough to be comfortable with them.
And get ready for more change. ChatGPT is already iterating: https://youtu.be/C_78DM8fG6E and it's not the only General AI tool widely available.
> Last week, at its annual I/O conference, Google spent hours detailing how large language models would help the knowledge workers of the world unload their busywork onto a legion of eager, capable neural networks.
The google that added AI and turned their search results to an unusable adspam?
The google that released Bard which can't even reproduce a fact that can be simply looked up by their AI adspam search ?
The google that had a motto of "Do no evil" and later they decided to just sweep it under the rug ?
Whether AI comes for our jobs or not is not really relevant. Whenever there is technical revolution some jobs will vanish, new jobs will be born and some existing jobs will remain but they will also change.
In regards to software engineering, automation and abstraction in our industry (compilers, high level languages etc.) has always increased the demand for software and people working in the industry. This is very unlikely to be any different unless we'll come up with ultimate general purpose AI that can solve any problem humanity can ever face.
There may be more jobs overall but I think inequality will grow even more. Since the 70s we were seeing a disconnect between worker productivity and worker wages and I see this trend to accelerate with tools like AI.
Most people don't seem to mind inequality (the difference between the lowest-earning and the highest-earning cohort) as long the average (or more likely the median) person is able to prosper and even grow wealthier over time.
When you look at housing we already have reached the pint where things have gotten worse for the median due to inequality. We have a few percent of the population that can afford very high prices and raise the prices for everybody that way. This is clearly a problem of inequality.
> Whether AI comes for our jobs or not is not really relevant. Whenever there is technical revolution some jobs will vanish, new jobs will be born and some existing jobs will remain but they will also change.
Except that one of the major problems is that the people who built their lives and careers around those jobs are historically hung out to dry.
It is looking like software and most white collar work will be replaced before the trades. How many 45-yr senior software workers will be happy to give it all up to become a plumber? Don't forget they will be competing with all of the other displaced workers which will drive down wages. Will they be happy begging for minimum wage jobs unclogging sewers?
More points:
Reskilling will become increasingly impossible as it becomes faster and faster to train an AI model than a human on new types of work.
Net job creation is far from guaranteed. Most law work is competed by paralegals and other staff, but replacing them doesn't mean there will be a natural growth in legal cases. A lawyer might be able to process cases 10x as fast, but that doesn't mean there 10x as many lawsuits and criminal cases will magically appear - at least I certainly hope not.
> The easier our labor becomes, the more of it we can do, and the more of it we’ll be expected to do.
I think it's a red herring to focus on the "quantity" of work. If I can push a button and a thousand things are produced, I am not inconvenienced as a worker to the point that I should feel slighted by my employer for expecting more than if that button only produced one thing at a time.
The output quantity possible per unit of time isn't the thing that stops employers overworking or abusing their employees, that's what the law is supposed to be for.
AI adds very little to the conversation of increased productivity not increasing leisure time of employees. No amount of increased productivity through technological gains is going to suddenly make this happen. We need to decide as a society that the physical and mental health of all citizens is more important than maximum economic output and enact laws that enforce these limits.
This. The issue isn’t about productivity. It’s about the constructed emergent reality we’ve constructed where the moral life is the life of toil, and that labor in any form is next to godliness. It doesn’t seem necessary that pushing a button all day for someone else’s benefit is more moral than building a realm in Minecraft all day, but our culture is replete with admonishments that time spent laboring is the only time well spent.
People say it’s “the man” that encourages this out of their own avarice and greed, but my observation (partially by having been the man for some time now) is “the man” is a product of the system of beliefs, and is more subsumed by the delusion than most people. They certainly do encourage the belief in labor for labors sake - but more so because they do whole heartily believe in it themselves to the core of their being that they can’t see a functional society without everyone emulating the life they’ve led and that has rewarded them so heartily.
There was a time up until about the 70’s that universal basic income and a dream of a post labor oriented society was vibrant and fairly mainstream, with even presidents advocating for it. It got lost, particularly (IMO) in the conservative backlash against social programs that equated “welfare,” racism, and a bunch of other touch points, to drive out the notion we can function without an overwhelming need to toil. We firmly tied health care and housing and any form of security to a life of unending toil. Retirement has been eaten away to ensure people toil long after they would have. As productivity improved, we demanded more toil. What our feckless leaders diverted away can be regained, and I hope that AI ushers in an era of human toil that’s so utterly pointless we finally can see the fnords en masse.
In the history of humanity, we have observed, time and time again, the discord and misery sown by men of means with too much idle time on their hands. I agree with you that, in the absence of guidance, most people would waste their idle time on activities that bring them pleasure. But if only takes one, or a few, usually the intelligent ones, to find a flaw or chink in the system and exploit that flaw for their own personal gains, and the intelligent individual can maximize the scope and scale of the exploit.
It's important to guide smart, intelligent people towards meaningful work for the betterment of society. There isn't much separating a clever scientist from a clever criminal, beyond ethics and discipline. To produce for the betterment of society is ultimately a moral goal. The notion that work is its own reward is not poisonous to society in and of itself, rather it's beneficial. When taken to excess, of course it is harmful as are most things taken to excess. But the complete absence thereof would be equally harmful to society.
That's rather out of place with the rest of the thread then. The wealthy are personally unaffected by employment rates because they never have to compete in the labor market.
Yet despite full employment we still see criminals exploiting chinks. See: SBF arguably smart dude, took the guise of meaningful work for the betterment of society. Was a criminal.
I think the paternalistic view that people need jobs pushing a pointless button to keep them from degenerating into Lex Luthor assumes evil is the natural state of man, and we need a constructed hamster wheel of society to keep the bad guys at bay. It hasn’t kept the bad guys at bay so far, and I believe the bad guys are very visible but a stark minority. We all have to spin wheels just in case there’s a bad guy that is stuck in a wheel somewhere too?
As we move to an era where, potentially, production improves without human input, maybe the betterment of society can be achieved in other ways than toiling in pointless corporate salt mines. Maybe artists can have health insurance? Maybe people can pursue labors of love for their lifetime, not laboring a lifetime in jokes they have enough money, health, lifespan, and soul left to do what they love briefly before they die.
Some people already do what they love. Great! Do it. But look around you more carefully and look at the culture of derision about modern work life. Almost no one loves modern work life across all callings. It burns us out. And when its done it casts us into a public retirement home or worse and hopes we die faster for actuarial efficiency. If we can’t fit into the corporate mold, it relegates us to poverty, disenfranchisement, food and shelter insecurity, and lack of basic medical care.
So, as a post scarcity society is possible, will we construct fake work to keep people chasing health care and other basics, or will we move beyond that? Will we open the door to full autonomy? Or will we do a PPP/WPA style guided employment by the state model? Or will we just turn a blind eye and let massive segments of society rot unaided until it falls apart? I suspect in 20 years we will know the answer.
"It doesn’t seem necessary that pushing a button all day for someone else’s benefit is more moral than building a realm in Minecraft all day, but our culture is replete with admonishments that time spent laboring is the only time well spent."
It depends what happens when you push the button. Is all that happens really that you boss makes a profit, what is your company's business? Does it not have customers? Does it not do anything of benefit to anyone other than your boss? How could that even work, where does the revenue come for your salary?
It's called productivity because it's about producing. Somebody somewhere is paying for that. There's no mystery here, we know how this works. If productivity goes up, the product gets cheaper and demand goes up. The customer benefits, the company benefits and your society is now better off. That means in aggregate it can afford more stuff, including services, which generates jobs. That's how progress works. It's why we don't have thousands of unemployed horse drawn buggy drivers on every street corner because people can drive their own cars.
That’s how it’s worked when production scaled with human labor input. As we potentially enter an age where that’s not true, will we make fake buttons to keep the charade going?
Production does scale with human labour input. At small increments it scales linearly, but you get scale efficiencies as you ramp up. Then you satisfy demand at a certain price point and reach equilibrium.
But if you can dramatically increase productivity per worker and for a given capital investment, your costs stay the same but your production is now higher and you can cut prices. That stimulates demand which mops up the available supply. Now very broadly several things can happen, it's more than the below but this isn't an essay.
One effect is the price of production drops, you raise margins a bit and cut prices which increases demand. The company makes more money and society gets more stuff at a cheaper price. If your product is itself productive, like it's a tool, then your customers can produce more with it more cheaply. Your company is more profitable, your society gets even more stuff. Your customers are better off, so they can hire more people, buy more products, pay people more. It's great all round.
Another possibility is demand goes up so much that in addition to the above your company can expand, increasing production further with more scaling effects, hiring more people, maybe also developing new products because it can invest more.
So productivity increases can wash through the economy raising all boats. That's partly what GDP growth is, and it's one reason why for example the lowest 10% by income in the UK now earns twice as much in purchasing power parity than they did in the early 80s. That sounds great, and it is, but middle incomes have stagnated the most and inequality has risen. Fairness matters, but raising all boats is worth doing. Let's not let the real social issues we do have blind us to economic reality.
True human level AI yes, but we’re still a long way from that IMO. For the singularity to really kick in AIs need to start optimising and improving AIs faster than we can. Then we’ll be in a feedback loop that is beyond our ability to forecast.
I don’t think that’s correct. There’s an awful lot of human intelligence that’s entirely orthogonal to productivity, despite all social and cultural constructs telling us our only purpose is to produce. All that has to happen is for AI to be able to expand its own production based on demand and improve in the tasks it’s got at hand. That doesn’t require the AI to improve itself - or be able get a girl to go to the prom with it. It just requires it adapt and observe it’s environment in a way that allows it to improve things. I think in some ways we already have that ability to develop into AIs. What we are missing until now was something that can navigate an abstract semantic space and interpret the environment in non trivial and in ways that can adapt to unexpected situations. LLMs lack agency, the ability to plan, the ability to optimize, reason concretely, etc. But we have already have that tools. LLMs can do the other stuff. By constraining and informing and putting them in the mix as a glue between different models and techniques, multimodal LLMs can provide much of what’s needed to build agent based AIs that can autonomously produce at increasing scale independent of human input.
Certainly once AI takes the task of improving AI, things go off the rails. But there’s a lot of steps along the way and the materiality of human labor I think is an early thing to go.
>If productivity goes up, the product gets cheaper and demand goes up.
Only if I have money to buy it. That's why monetary velocity is a very important economic measure. If I have a 1 trillion dollar economy, and 999 billion is in the hands of one person, and the last billion is spread across 1000 million people, then the average monetary velocity is apt to be both low and only exchange between a few actors. It will be a very unhealthy economy.
That’s not how wealth works though. Billionaires don’t literally have tens of millions of $100 notes in their hands. So where is all that money? Almost all of it is in the form of shares and bonds, which represent control of and investments in the economy. The control is in the form of deciding what products are produced, where and how. Those investments create jobs and produce goods and services.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet don’t have huge money piles in warehouses. Their wealth is active in the economy.
Wealth is actually economic control. The people who have it run large chunks of the economy. Historically there have been two answers to the question of who do we want running most of the productive forces in the economy and directing investment in it, private citizens or politicians and government bureaucrats? The former is capitalism and the latter is socialism. Even the Chinese Communist Party eventually went with option 1. Who should run Microsoft or Ford, investors and professional managers, or the federal government?
Actually there is another option, Russian style oligarchy. That’s what real corruption looks like. Every system has some corruption and waste, the question is how we manage and limit that.
Money in this construction is a means of allocating scarce items. Post scarcity means money is less relevant. But, as we need little bits of paper to give meaning, universal basic income speaks directly at monetary velocity. By giving everyone money, everyone participates in the economy at some basic level. But it really depends on whether we can get over the industriousness is godliness meme.
I would hope that with tools like AI/LLM, we could spend the same amount of time working but building better things rather than more things. If tools like this allow us to be more productive, we could create richer, deeper and better products.
Think about shoes. Tens of thousands of years ago, it was just some animal skin wrapped around your foot. Maybe a wooden sole if you're advanced enough. Now we have incredibly comfortable shoes that you can use to run a marathon. I know this is a simple analogy but I'm hopeful that more advanced tools allow us to have more advanced products and services, which benefits everyone.
> We need to decide as a society that the physical and mental health of all citizens is more important than maximum economic output and enact laws that enforce these limits.
And how does AI fit into that equation? Will we regulate the use of all kinds of technology that doesn't clearly improve "all citizens' physical and mental health"? Surely the expiration date for that initiative passed eons ago...
I can't think of a single example where the adoption of AI does not involve diminishing a cost, like a avoiding a threat to human health or life. What's the role of AI if not to increase reward to the owner of the 'bot?
>If artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs, its plan is to turn us all into middle managers of overlapping, interacting AI systems. The only problem? Middle management is stressful, grinding, usually thankless work. People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain.
That's a leap. Chances are you'll still be seen as a producer and not a manager, so your job won't look like a middle manager of humans. In this case, your output is defined, and quality would be correlated with your prompting skills and any edits you make. You'll likely be in less meetings than middle managers, but maybe we'll have AI secretaries (avatars?) that go to those meetings for us. And yes, the pay will be way less than middle managers.
All that rebuttal to illustrate that job enhancement is a far more likely outcome for most of us, with only a small amount of lower skilled jobs at risk for complete obsolescence. You won't be joining the management caste unless you intentionally go for it. Plus you can still be a developer and glue things to AI systems. That's certainly not going away either.
I swear I haven't read an informative AI article in months, and in fact most of them could be written by drivel-driven AI's. But:
> People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain
I speak derisively about middle managers for being short-sighted, petty, political, outright crooked and lacking any interest in the success of the business. In the software development world they're at best useless and often so full of spite and contempt for employees as to be net negative. I've had a few first-level managers that I really appreciated - genuinely good people - but the middle is just about all garbage. I think a lot gets blamed on executives when the middle managers are where the actual toxicity is coming from. However little or much your employees might care about your business, your middle mgmt almost always cares less.
" I think a lot gets blamed on executives when the middle managers are where the actual toxicity is coming from. "
Executives are hiring these middle managers and they don't do anything about the dysfunction although they have the power to do something. "The fish rots from the head".
That's not been my experience at all. What I've seen is that top management far too often prioritizes short term (i.e. quarterly) profitability above all else. And poo flows down hill. Middle management is stuck in the "middle," as it were - unable to meaningfully impact decisions but being held responsible for carrying them out and taking all the heat for them.
I'm bottom tier management so I work with middle management directly a bit. All of this is just the organisations Ive been in, I'm sure there are every possible kind.
Top level management is often driven by short term incentives, they want dramatic big bang 'transformative change', while middle management is largely in it for their career. So they're pressurised for short term goals, but their actual career stability and advancement depends on middle to long term success.
What's really important is making sure the signal from the ground level gets to middle management. A lot of reporting process and bullshit is because middle management want to understand what the heck is going on and that's the only reliable way they have to get information. So politely and as constructively as possible go to them and tell them what you think they need to know. I'm not guaranteeing they will listen to you, but if you don't try then all they will have is reporting spreadsheets.
You know you’re wrong when you’re so entrenched and extreme on any topic, let alone one that is highly emotional. That there are plenty of toxic and useless middle managers, I don’t dispute that. But middle management is what makes or breaks any large organization.
I just love the fact that the people who have been automating our jobs out of existence for the last 20+ years are now starting to freak out that their jobs might be automated.
Software development will be the last of the last jobs to be automated.
Take Shopify which makes it so you don't have to hire devs for your ecommerce store. A lot of custom work for ecommerce stores dried up, but then developers moved on to things that could not be automated. Let's say AI gets so good it can handle ALL types of web development tasks. The tools for AI would have to be extremely advanced, so much so that a normal web developer now has super-powers.
You might not think a web developer has the ability to automate a construction workers job... but in a future where AI is so good that web development is obsolete? Robotics frameworks would be as easy to use as React by then.
Of course there are many edge cases in automating the real world, and that's why you'll need hoards of developers to iterate, debug and customize robots coded using AI. The job won't involve typing code in an IDE anymore, so maybe you can question whether it is actual "development." But the only jobs left in the future will technical people who understand how software and AI works.
All I can say is that being a data-inspired creative is going to make you exponentially better at your job while being a data-driven logistician may just make you a little bit better.
> The only problem? Middle management is stressful, grinding, usually thankless work. People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain.
Middle management is absolutely screwed though. Good ones will go back to some IC/lead work and bad ones will probably be squeezed out/kept around for political yes-manning.
I find it depressingly ironic that the jobs AI will destroy first were the exact jobs that for years we were told wouldn't be affected by ai. Creative jobs, high paid white collar work (lawyers, accountants, and soon programmers) and the like are the most exposed.
Whereas the difficult blue collar and menial jobs are the ones that are most protected simply because robotics and mobile power solutions are still too junior to replace fleshy meatsacks.
What are we going to do when 70% of a work forde gets made redundant and the remaining 30% becomes a thousand times more productive?
It already happened with graphic artists in China.
The future is not bright.
I'm personally looking forward to the day when every ambitious person isn't shepherded into a desk job. There's so much work out there that requires smart people and somehow we've convinced everyone with a college education that smart people belong at computers all day.
> simply because robotics and mobile power solutions are still too junior to replace fleshy meatsacks
No, it's more perversely ironic than that.
It's that the stuff we find "easy" and "boring" (like driving, walking around, picking up a cup and setting it back down) is just stuff eons of evolution has hardcoded into most of the neural network that compromises our brain.
The "hard" stuff we pride ourselves on is just the stuff we've begun to be able to do thanks to the smallest and newest addition to our brain, the neocortex. But the reason we think it's hard is because we suck at it, which is because it's an evolutionary novelty.
Our computers' evolution is inverted. The "easy", "boring" stuff we hoped robots would do for us, like collecting garbage, is the last thing they'll be able to do and perhaps the only thing left for us to do. :D
If something can be replaced by a better option, it will be. Earlier king/people used to send messenger/pigeon to deliver messages. Later came letters(postal services), then phone, then emails, then SMS, then current gen of IM.
We go backwards as a society all the time. Central vacccums are objectively superior to the kind that most people use in their house today, but they were a "fad" of the 70s and 80s.
Americans are not putting bidet toilet seats into their homes despite how cheap and easy it is.
Just because something is better doesn't mean we will start using it.
Ok that's a step too far! Central vacuums are definitely the inferior choice. The half-mile of hose you have to drag around, keep unplugging and replugging to different pneumatic outlets, and store is prohibitively troublesome. Folks I know who had such a system in the house they bought, immediately went out and bought a 'regular' vacuum.
>> Americans are not putting bidet toilet seats into their homes despite how cheap and easy it is.
Social proof related behavior are not changed easily, but they eventually. Despite availability of email, people were still writing letters. In longer time frame, people do adapt.
Its scary because it replaces the thinking jobs, which are the well-paying ones. It hits home to folks who have been lucky to survive the previous societal purges of employment.
All jobs are thinking jobs, with varying degrees of physical effort. E.g. From A senator/congressman have to physically present in senate/congress, to argue/vote their case/bill (which comes from feedback from their followers, requires physical interaction) to bricklaying/road building/whatever you can imagine to lowest level. Some require more thinking and some less.
Impact seems unimaginable. May be we need an AI to AI all imaginable/unimaginable scenarios.
I've been using ChatGPT to help me learn Golang. It has been an amazing learning tool. Almost like having a bespoke personal StackOverflow answering my exact questions. Is it right 100% of the time, no. Could it build my project autonomously, most definitely not. Has it accelerated my learning of Golang, yes.
AI is a tool (at least for now). And like many tools, when used proficiently, it can boost your productivity and therefore make you better, not redundant at your job.
I’ve been doing similar for various frameworks (Flink)
> is it right 100% of the time, no.
No human teacher is going to be right 100% of the time either. I suppose ChatGPT is a little more overconfident / doesn’t have a sense of tone or anything to assess confidence; even still, though, given how overconfidence is incentivized in the workplace, it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker.
> it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker.
100% agree. Its like having a coworker who you can constantly pester with technical questions. I really love how you can ask ChatGPT follow ups to earlier questions and it understand the context.
At some point, I expect companies to put their internal Wikis/documentation into LLMs so you can learn and onboard staff faster. You'd probably need a large amount of data to learn on, but I guess some of the large companies have that.
People that say this are outing themselves as un-engaged learners that are likely not going to get much in the way of lasting gains in skills due to AI coaching. All it is doing is regurgitating StackOverflow at you but reworded to fit into the box that your questions create. Since you are the learner here, it is likely that your questions aren't better structured than the original explanation content that ChatGPT was trained on, and since it will just hallucinate things at random and without you knowing, I would bet money that your understanding of the topic will be subtly wrong in places.
Basically, anyone who thinks that having a tutor-like experience with a robot is worth trading away correctness and consistency, is revealing that they care more about getting an answer in a form they can easily ingest than actually having any depth of understanding of the topic at hand.
And before someone makes the silly argument that "well your human tutor could be wrong too!", all of the training data that trained chatGPT was written by humans, and so the potential human error is still the same. ChatGPT is adding a new source of error that is unpredictable and based on dozens of anecdotes I have seen here and on Twitter, none of the enthusiasts are double checking it's output for bullshit
I don't have a human tutor available and to get one would represent a significant cost for me.
Slightly wrong and available is worth far more than always right and unavailable, especially at the early starting point where you're unsure of how much you want to invest into an endeavor.
No I'm not, this is a false dichotomy. The resources that chatGPT was trained on are available in their raw form and it is easy to google for official golang resources/search stackoverflow for golang problems. Before chatGPT you would go out and find these resources, read them in the form designed by the original author, and think through the gaps between your intuition and what the author has written.
You can still do this today without a financial cost, because the choice was never an either/or between paying for a human tutor and learning. And just because there are now nearly free and shitty tutors available, it doesn't mean learning should be done via these means / is effectively done via these means.
I'm guessing you don't get paid, therefore your time doesn't have a financial cost?
A recent example of this was some crap CSM my wife was working on that had piss poor documentation from the vendor. As in the vendor documentation was just flat wrong and would never work the way they wanted it implemented. We dumped a code snippet off in GPT4 and it came back with "This is wrong, do this instead" which worked.
The key point here is it solved a problem in a system that is rarely worked on. Going outside the vendor documentation to learn the python/js interaction the vendor obviously did not understand would have represented a huge investment over the payout of correcting the output of a single page.
You'd be surprised how well ChatGPT not only gives you code samples, but also gives very good explanations of how and why that code solves the problem. Its not spitting out hallucinations because the corpus of knowledge of Golang is pretty cut and dry (how many websites do you know that have crazy incorrect Golang code).
Try asking ChatGPT about more complex stuff. Design patterns, computer theory. I think you'll be impressed at the results.
This is the strength of ChatGPT, for some (and possibly many) topics, it does a really good job. If it didn't, it would not be getting all the attention it currently commands.
The question is, we know AI is going to do take over doing work, how will that change the system when like 80% of people have no means of earning their income.
How will those people abusing those machines earn theirs and who will generate input for those machines.
Will those machines be able to solve genuinely new problems?
Their knowledge comes from whqt people created.
When people are no longer creating because they can't afford to live, who will feed the machines?
And who will those few abusing those machines sell their machine generated products to?
It will lead to a revolution and it will be bloody. Already the 99% are discontent and it's brewing.
With the artificial price increases for the cost of living more will fall into social security.
AI replacing workers means the bloat in the IT sector will be reduced and a lot of unemployed people on social security will be left.
With steadily less money being available for the 99% they will either turn on themselves or, more likely cut the head off the 1% boiling their water steadily but surely.
There will always be people trying to defend their salve masters, if we learned anything from WW2 and even the invasions on Iraq and Afghanistan, it's people suck and want someone they can feel superior to.
To rephrase the question a little: What if technology (AI just being a recent addition) can produce enough value for everybody to live but the system we live in refuses to provide for them in even the most minimal way? The lower threshold of minimal to zero seems what be what our system seems to be optimizing for - that's what is causing unrest.
Does anyone think we couldn't right now, with our current tech, even without AI, provide food, shelter, and healthcare to everybody with everyone only working four or even three day weeks?
But the worse thing is that it's never rational for economic actors (e.g., employers) to pay out a "social dividend" by cutting everyone's hours but paying them the same.
30 workers got replaced by 1 worker at a computer? Cool, but are you gonna pay that 1 worker 30 times the wages of a laid off worker? No; otherwise, why lay the 30 off to begin with? Conversely, are you gonna NOT lay off the 30, pay them the same, but have them work 1/30th of their regular 8 hours because their base productivity just got achievable in 1/30th of the time by computerization? Economically, that's absurd.
The only thing that can force those economic absurdities is the government. (Not having slavery is also economically absurd. Voluntarily refuse to have literal, self-replicating, AGI automata working for you? That's crazy! But it's enforced by the government and international norms, so the absurdity is now normal.) The scary thing about that is how hard it would mess with the economy, having the government tell you how many people you can fire and how much to pay them based on some measure of productivity or just business profits.
In a future of "AI, math PhDs, and serfs", though, we really need to figure it out. If we're headed toward that, it's going to be insanely asymmetric cyber-feudalism where 9.9/10 people are GrubHub peasants OR The Culture's post-scarcity luxury space communism. The latter seems way better. On the plus side, I think we'd only be GrubHub peasants for like 15 years, max, before that kind of AI ignites the Singularity, at which point who knows what happens? GrubHub would probably be gone though.
Only if you're very greedy. The truth is just the opposite, it's not absurd at all to pay well.
Lets imagine a hypothetical economy where there is only one company. "Pool party supplies". That is they sell things like beach balls and pool floats. So in your economic system it would make sense for the company to get rid of many employees as possible, and have the ones remain work 16 hours a day...
...and then they go out of business???...
People that are working 16 hours a day don't go to pool parties. The small economic upper class doesn't buy enough pool party supplies to justify the companies existence. The unemployed don't buy party supplies. Economic profit maximization lead to less profit in this case!
In this derived scenario having more employees that earn well and have plenty of time off leads to more pool party supply sales.
I think the technology is there, but maddeningly the system is going the opposite direction in terms of utilizing the technology for human good, or even basic human needs - the system path utilization and distribution is not sustainable. AI will make it worse.
In contrast, in the early 19th century, when the western system was disrupted by labor unrest, it was 60+ hr work weeks were common and 40 hour weeks with weekends off was unthinkable. There were literal bloody fights to shift the system - and I hope we have progressed enough to not require that this time around, but it seems within the realm of possibilities in our modern day.
> The question is, we know AI is going to do take over doing work, how will that change the system when like 80% of people have no means of earning their income.
It will need to grow hands first. We’ve been “replacing” people with robots for a few decades now yet manual labour is still a thing. We have software that can literarily do all accounting tasks for us yet accountants are fine. I think will be an aid but not a replacement.
Eh, I think it's a little more complicated than that.
Most companies don't get rid of employees until economic pressure is put upon them. So companies will increase capability for some time into the future. Then we typically run into a trigger of some kind. For example a housing crash that causes a recession. Then mass unemployment occurs and we'll consider this 'normal'. Then we'll start to have an economic rebound, but white collar jobs just won't come back in mass (unlike eventually after 2008 which was very slow).
Then people will push hard into manual/blue collar labor, but the new influx of labor will drop pay significantly especially where low skill jobs are under pressure.
The economy can generate an unlimited number of jobs... The real question is can it generate 'paying' jobs that allow a person to survive the ever increasing cost of assets.
But I am wondering. Will we always want what we have today? Did we simply exhaust all need for travel once we developed cars? Or did we remove the need for food once we switched from hunting to farming?
My point being that new tech has always led to demand for new services and things.
Once everyone has access to ai and ai does everything for us would we not want new stuff?
And if as per your comment we have a couple of years until a possible replacement may have taken place wouldnt we have developed a demand for new services and jobs by then?
We had no clue we needed a tiktok app before we made the iphone and we had no clue we needed digital artists before we invented the computer.
There are a few systematic problems with how we're thinking about AI that present large risks...
For example the development of vehicles directly contributed to the scale of WWI. This then directly fed into the rapid expansion of flight and the development of city destroying nuclear weapons, which again lead to rocketry and civilization ending scale weaponry.
In that same time frame we went from an anti-fragile society to a very, very fragile one. In 1900 if the town next to you burnt down, at the end of the day it didn't affect you "that much". Today if the town that produces fertilizer for half the nation burns down, we'll there's a good chance you'll eventually have a bad day. You used to grow your food in your back yard. Now that food may be grown on the other side of the planet.
This is why can't just say "Well this worked in the past". When the underlying assumptions change you can have rapid destabilization. For example, world wide war because AI figures out how to disable nukes at launch time reliably undoing the last 70 years of MAD.
Indeed new tech led to new weapons and potentially more deadly conflicts.
But conflicts comparable to or worse than ww1 already occurred well before mechanised weaponry: in china, the mongol invasions, the colonisation of the americas, and so on.
MAD was mostly posturing, with few close encounters. In effect there was more anxiety than death.
Also i agree that there are far more single points of failure. Your example with fertilisers sounds plausible and logical. Both due to logistics and also due to losing farming skills. Yet somehow we suffer less from famine. Now theres more anxiety over it happening rather than it actually happening.
The pattern i see is that yes the risks are real and plausible but the odds of them occurring are slim.
And almost always (almost because i dont know of a specific counter example) technology only posed a risk due to politics rather than the tech itself.
There is no single example i am aware of technology posing an existential threat on its own - but at the same time we never created autonomous machines and software before at this level.
No matter what i do i keep getting back to the idea that the only danger is us. Our emotions, politics and instincts.
It's somewhat amusing how these "big scary AI' articles never address the likelihood of AI replacing a good chunk of upper management and shareholder representatives on corporate boards (and these are the people most likely to be massively overpaid in comparison to their contribution to the bottom line).
I think this possibility accounts for a good deal of the overblown hysteria about AI's potential impacts in the corporate media world. I wonder if any of these outfits (The Economist, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times) would ever explicitly discuss this, e.g.
"Here's How AI Will Come for Your Executive Bonus and Dividends"
AI might be able to do that in a is-it-capable sense, but upper management and board members are the ones that have the final say on who gets replaced so...
Context never mentioned in the "AI doom gloom" articles are that demographic trends lend this to being a good thing since the productive working age population will seriously decline. So in effect, we need less people to do more.
We also need to, in effect, generate more tax revenue per productive working age person to support the aging population. AI helps that (from a government standpoint) by essentially "1:Many" multiplying the work 1 person can do, and be paid, and taxed.
It is important to note this... but it's also important to note that AI is apt to gut the 'middle pay range' jobs. The very top tier paying jobs are apt to remain human because of the deep knowledge and skill needed that AI has not achieved yet, along with the human contact capabilities. At the low end of jobs there is a lot of physical labor that it will be very expensive to build a robot to do and not worth while putting an expensive robot in place.
Then you have the middle ground of expensive enough to replace with a robot and AI, overlapping a skill range that an AI and robot can replace.
This middle ground is what we commonly call middle class and further gutting it presents many risks to an economy.
For software devs some company will release a popular app and announce it was made most entirely via AI. Then the startup dev jobs will start vanishing. Transition for big corps may look a little different, relying on AI integration to be set up.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] thread- Beavis
Yes -- it's uncomfortable. But it's also necessary.
Learn the tools well enough to be comfortable with them.
And get ready for more change. ChatGPT is already iterating: https://youtu.be/C_78DM8fG6E and it's not the only General AI tool widely available.
The google that added AI and turned their search results to an unusable adspam?
The google that released Bard which can't even reproduce a fact that can be simply looked up by their AI adspam search ?
The google that had a motto of "Do no evil" and later they decided to just sweep it under the rug ?
Yeah no I dont trust that google, thanks.
In regards to software engineering, automation and abstraction in our industry (compilers, high level languages etc.) has always increased the demand for software and people working in the industry. This is very unlikely to be any different unless we'll come up with ultimate general purpose AI that can solve any problem humanity can ever face.
Except that one of the major problems is that the people who built their lives and careers around those jobs are historically hung out to dry.
It is looking like software and most white collar work will be replaced before the trades. How many 45-yr senior software workers will be happy to give it all up to become a plumber? Don't forget they will be competing with all of the other displaced workers which will drive down wages. Will they be happy begging for minimum wage jobs unclogging sewers?
More points:
Reskilling will become increasingly impossible as it becomes faster and faster to train an AI model than a human on new types of work.
Net job creation is far from guaranteed. Most law work is competed by paralegals and other staff, but replacing them doesn't mean there will be a natural growth in legal cases. A lawyer might be able to process cases 10x as fast, but that doesn't mean there 10x as many lawsuits and criminal cases will magically appear - at least I certainly hope not.
I think it's a red herring to focus on the "quantity" of work. If I can push a button and a thousand things are produced, I am not inconvenienced as a worker to the point that I should feel slighted by my employer for expecting more than if that button only produced one thing at a time.
The output quantity possible per unit of time isn't the thing that stops employers overworking or abusing their employees, that's what the law is supposed to be for.
AI adds very little to the conversation of increased productivity not increasing leisure time of employees. No amount of increased productivity through technological gains is going to suddenly make this happen. We need to decide as a society that the physical and mental health of all citizens is more important than maximum economic output and enact laws that enforce these limits.
People say it’s “the man” that encourages this out of their own avarice and greed, but my observation (partially by having been the man for some time now) is “the man” is a product of the system of beliefs, and is more subsumed by the delusion than most people. They certainly do encourage the belief in labor for labors sake - but more so because they do whole heartily believe in it themselves to the core of their being that they can’t see a functional society without everyone emulating the life they’ve led and that has rewarded them so heartily.
There was a time up until about the 70’s that universal basic income and a dream of a post labor oriented society was vibrant and fairly mainstream, with even presidents advocating for it. It got lost, particularly (IMO) in the conservative backlash against social programs that equated “welfare,” racism, and a bunch of other touch points, to drive out the notion we can function without an overwhelming need to toil. We firmly tied health care and housing and any form of security to a life of unending toil. Retirement has been eaten away to ensure people toil long after they would have. As productivity improved, we demanded more toil. What our feckless leaders diverted away can be regained, and I hope that AI ushers in an era of human toil that’s so utterly pointless we finally can see the fnords en masse.
It's important to guide smart, intelligent people towards meaningful work for the betterment of society. There isn't much separating a clever scientist from a clever criminal, beyond ethics and discipline. To produce for the betterment of society is ultimately a moral goal. The notion that work is its own reward is not poisonous to society in and of itself, rather it's beneficial. When taken to excess, of course it is harmful as are most things taken to excess. But the complete absence thereof would be equally harmful to society.
It is important for whom to guide these people? What are their motivations?
I think the paternalistic view that people need jobs pushing a pointless button to keep them from degenerating into Lex Luthor assumes evil is the natural state of man, and we need a constructed hamster wheel of society to keep the bad guys at bay. It hasn’t kept the bad guys at bay so far, and I believe the bad guys are very visible but a stark minority. We all have to spin wheels just in case there’s a bad guy that is stuck in a wheel somewhere too?
As we move to an era where, potentially, production improves without human input, maybe the betterment of society can be achieved in other ways than toiling in pointless corporate salt mines. Maybe artists can have health insurance? Maybe people can pursue labors of love for their lifetime, not laboring a lifetime in jokes they have enough money, health, lifespan, and soul left to do what they love briefly before they die.
Some people already do what they love. Great! Do it. But look around you more carefully and look at the culture of derision about modern work life. Almost no one loves modern work life across all callings. It burns us out. And when its done it casts us into a public retirement home or worse and hopes we die faster for actuarial efficiency. If we can’t fit into the corporate mold, it relegates us to poverty, disenfranchisement, food and shelter insecurity, and lack of basic medical care.
So, as a post scarcity society is possible, will we construct fake work to keep people chasing health care and other basics, or will we move beyond that? Will we open the door to full autonomy? Or will we do a PPP/WPA style guided employment by the state model? Or will we just turn a blind eye and let massive segments of society rot unaided until it falls apart? I suspect in 20 years we will know the answer.
It depends what happens when you push the button. Is all that happens really that you boss makes a profit, what is your company's business? Does it not have customers? Does it not do anything of benefit to anyone other than your boss? How could that even work, where does the revenue come for your salary?
It's called productivity because it's about producing. Somebody somewhere is paying for that. There's no mystery here, we know how this works. If productivity goes up, the product gets cheaper and demand goes up. The customer benefits, the company benefits and your society is now better off. That means in aggregate it can afford more stuff, including services, which generates jobs. That's how progress works. It's why we don't have thousands of unemployed horse drawn buggy drivers on every street corner because people can drive their own cars.
But if you can dramatically increase productivity per worker and for a given capital investment, your costs stay the same but your production is now higher and you can cut prices. That stimulates demand which mops up the available supply. Now very broadly several things can happen, it's more than the below but this isn't an essay.
One effect is the price of production drops, you raise margins a bit and cut prices which increases demand. The company makes more money and society gets more stuff at a cheaper price. If your product is itself productive, like it's a tool, then your customers can produce more with it more cheaply. Your company is more profitable, your society gets even more stuff. Your customers are better off, so they can hire more people, buy more products, pay people more. It's great all round.
Another possibility is demand goes up so much that in addition to the above your company can expand, increasing production further with more scaling effects, hiring more people, maybe also developing new products because it can invest more.
So productivity increases can wash through the economy raising all boats. That's partly what GDP growth is, and it's one reason why for example the lowest 10% by income in the UK now earns twice as much in purchasing power parity than they did in the early 80s. That sounds great, and it is, but middle incomes have stagnated the most and inequality has risen. Fairness matters, but raising all boats is worth doing. Let's not let the real social issues we do have blind us to economic reality.
Certainly once AI takes the task of improving AI, things go off the rails. But there’s a lot of steps along the way and the materiality of human labor I think is an early thing to go.
Only if I have money to buy it. That's why monetary velocity is a very important economic measure. If I have a 1 trillion dollar economy, and 999 billion is in the hands of one person, and the last billion is spread across 1000 million people, then the average monetary velocity is apt to be both low and only exchange between a few actors. It will be a very unhealthy economy.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet don’t have huge money piles in warehouses. Their wealth is active in the economy.
Wealth is actually economic control. The people who have it run large chunks of the economy. Historically there have been two answers to the question of who do we want running most of the productive forces in the economy and directing investment in it, private citizens or politicians and government bureaucrats? The former is capitalism and the latter is socialism. Even the Chinese Communist Party eventually went with option 1. Who should run Microsoft or Ford, investors and professional managers, or the federal government?
Actually there is another option, Russian style oligarchy. That’s what real corruption looks like. Every system has some corruption and waste, the question is how we manage and limit that.
Think about shoes. Tens of thousands of years ago, it was just some animal skin wrapped around your foot. Maybe a wooden sole if you're advanced enough. Now we have incredibly comfortable shoes that you can use to run a marathon. I know this is a simple analogy but I'm hopeful that more advanced tools allow us to have more advanced products and services, which benefits everyone.
And how does AI fit into that equation? Will we regulate the use of all kinds of technology that doesn't clearly improve "all citizens' physical and mental health"? Surely the expiration date for that initiative passed eons ago...
I can't think of a single example where the adoption of AI does not involve diminishing a cost, like a avoiding a threat to human health or life. What's the role of AI if not to increase reward to the owner of the 'bot?
That's a leap. Chances are you'll still be seen as a producer and not a manager, so your job won't look like a middle manager of humans. In this case, your output is defined, and quality would be correlated with your prompting skills and any edits you make. You'll likely be in less meetings than middle managers, but maybe we'll have AI secretaries (avatars?) that go to those meetings for us. And yes, the pay will be way less than middle managers.
All that rebuttal to illustrate that job enhancement is a far more likely outcome for most of us, with only a small amount of lower skilled jobs at risk for complete obsolescence. You won't be joining the management caste unless you intentionally go for it. Plus you can still be a developer and glue things to AI systems. That's certainly not going away either.
If one side of that is instead AI, you won't have that issue.
> People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain
I speak derisively about middle managers for being short-sighted, petty, political, outright crooked and lacking any interest in the success of the business. In the software development world they're at best useless and often so full of spite and contempt for employees as to be net negative. I've had a few first-level managers that I really appreciated - genuinely good people - but the middle is just about all garbage. I think a lot gets blamed on executives when the middle managers are where the actual toxicity is coming from. However little or much your employees might care about your business, your middle mgmt almost always cares less.
Executives are hiring these middle managers and they don't do anything about the dysfunction although they have the power to do something. "The fish rots from the head".
Middle management is hired by and incentivized by the structures the top management installs (from HR to pay to morality & culture).
If your middle management sucks, it's because your top management are setting priorities that drive that outcome.
Top level management is often driven by short term incentives, they want dramatic big bang 'transformative change', while middle management is largely in it for their career. So they're pressurised for short term goals, but their actual career stability and advancement depends on middle to long term success.
What's really important is making sure the signal from the ground level gets to middle management. A lot of reporting process and bullshit is because middle management want to understand what the heck is going on and that's the only reliable way they have to get information. So politely and as constructively as possible go to them and tell them what you think they need to know. I'm not guaranteeing they will listen to you, but if you don't try then all they will have is reporting spreadsheets.
Welcome to the 21st century, software developers.
Take Shopify which makes it so you don't have to hire devs for your ecommerce store. A lot of custom work for ecommerce stores dried up, but then developers moved on to things that could not be automated. Let's say AI gets so good it can handle ALL types of web development tasks. The tools for AI would have to be extremely advanced, so much so that a normal web developer now has super-powers.
You might not think a web developer has the ability to automate a construction workers job... but in a future where AI is so good that web development is obsolete? Robotics frameworks would be as easy to use as React by then.
Of course there are many edge cases in automating the real world, and that's why you'll need hoards of developers to iterate, debug and customize robots coded using AI. The job won't involve typing code in an IDE anymore, so maybe you can question whether it is actual "development." But the only jobs left in the future will technical people who understand how software and AI works.
> The only problem? Middle management is stressful, grinding, usually thankless work. People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain.
Middle management is absolutely screwed though. Good ones will go back to some IC/lead work and bad ones will probably be squeezed out/kept around for political yes-manning.
No, it's more perversely ironic than that.
It's that the stuff we find "easy" and "boring" (like driving, walking around, picking up a cup and setting it back down) is just stuff eons of evolution has hardcoded into most of the neural network that compromises our brain.
The "hard" stuff we pride ourselves on is just the stuff we've begun to be able to do thanks to the smallest and newest addition to our brain, the neocortex. But the reason we think it's hard is because we suck at it, which is because it's an evolutionary novelty.
Our computers' evolution is inverted. The "easy", "boring" stuff we hoped robots would do for us, like collecting garbage, is the last thing they'll be able to do and perhaps the only thing left for us to do. :D
If something can be replaced by a better option, it will be. Earlier king/people used to send messenger/pigeon to deliver messages. Later came letters(postal services), then phone, then emails, then SMS, then current gen of IM.
Any one doing/done some proper research ?
Americans are not putting bidet toilet seats into their homes despite how cheap and easy it is.
Just because something is better doesn't mean we will start using it.
Social proof related behavior are not changed easily, but they eventually. Despite availability of email, people were still writing letters. In longer time frame, people do adapt.
Impact seems unimaginable. May be we need an AI to AI all imaginable/unimaginable scenarios.
AI is a tool (at least for now). And like many tools, when used proficiently, it can boost your productivity and therefore make you better, not redundant at your job.
> is it right 100% of the time, no.
No human teacher is going to be right 100% of the time either. I suppose ChatGPT is a little more overconfident / doesn’t have a sense of tone or anything to assess confidence; even still, though, given how overconfidence is incentivized in the workplace, it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker.
100% agree. Its like having a coworker who you can constantly pester with technical questions. I really love how you can ask ChatGPT follow ups to earlier questions and it understand the context.
At some point, I expect companies to put their internal Wikis/documentation into LLMs so you can learn and onboard staff faster. You'd probably need a large amount of data to learn on, but I guess some of the large companies have that.
Basically, anyone who thinks that having a tutor-like experience with a robot is worth trading away correctness and consistency, is revealing that they care more about getting an answer in a form they can easily ingest than actually having any depth of understanding of the topic at hand.
And before someone makes the silly argument that "well your human tutor could be wrong too!", all of the training data that trained chatGPT was written by humans, and so the potential human error is still the same. ChatGPT is adding a new source of error that is unpredictable and based on dozens of anecdotes I have seen here and on Twitter, none of the enthusiasts are double checking it's output for bullshit
I don't have a human tutor available and to get one would represent a significant cost for me.
Slightly wrong and available is worth far more than always right and unavailable, especially at the early starting point where you're unsure of how much you want to invest into an endeavor.
You can still do this today without a financial cost, because the choice was never an either/or between paying for a human tutor and learning. And just because there are now nearly free and shitty tutors available, it doesn't mean learning should be done via these means / is effectively done via these means.
A recent example of this was some crap CSM my wife was working on that had piss poor documentation from the vendor. As in the vendor documentation was just flat wrong and would never work the way they wanted it implemented. We dumped a code snippet off in GPT4 and it came back with "This is wrong, do this instead" which worked.
The key point here is it solved a problem in a system that is rarely worked on. Going outside the vendor documentation to learn the python/js interaction the vendor obviously did not understand would have represented a huge investment over the payout of correcting the output of a single page.
Try asking ChatGPT about more complex stuff. Design patterns, computer theory. I think you'll be impressed at the results.
This is the strength of ChatGPT, for some (and possibly many) topics, it does a really good job. If it didn't, it would not be getting all the attention it currently commands.
The question is, we know AI is going to do take over doing work, how will that change the system when like 80% of people have no means of earning their income. How will those people abusing those machines earn theirs and who will generate input for those machines. Will those machines be able to solve genuinely new problems? Their knowledge comes from whqt people created. When people are no longer creating because they can't afford to live, who will feed the machines? And who will those few abusing those machines sell their machine generated products to?
It will lead to a revolution and it will be bloody. Already the 99% are discontent and it's brewing. With the artificial price increases for the cost of living more will fall into social security. AI replacing workers means the bloat in the IT sector will be reduced and a lot of unemployed people on social security will be left. With steadily less money being available for the 99% they will either turn on themselves or, more likely cut the head off the 1% boiling their water steadily but surely. There will always be people trying to defend their salve masters, if we learned anything from WW2 and even the invasions on Iraq and Afghanistan, it's people suck and want someone they can feel superior to.
Add to that the climate disaster...
Does anyone think we couldn't right now, with our current tech, even without AI, provide food, shelter, and healthcare to everybody with everyone only working four or even three day weeks?
But the worse thing is that it's never rational for economic actors (e.g., employers) to pay out a "social dividend" by cutting everyone's hours but paying them the same.
30 workers got replaced by 1 worker at a computer? Cool, but are you gonna pay that 1 worker 30 times the wages of a laid off worker? No; otherwise, why lay the 30 off to begin with? Conversely, are you gonna NOT lay off the 30, pay them the same, but have them work 1/30th of their regular 8 hours because their base productivity just got achievable in 1/30th of the time by computerization? Economically, that's absurd.
The only thing that can force those economic absurdities is the government. (Not having slavery is also economically absurd. Voluntarily refuse to have literal, self-replicating, AGI automata working for you? That's crazy! But it's enforced by the government and international norms, so the absurdity is now normal.) The scary thing about that is how hard it would mess with the economy, having the government tell you how many people you can fire and how much to pay them based on some measure of productivity or just business profits.
In a future of "AI, math PhDs, and serfs", though, we really need to figure it out. If we're headed toward that, it's going to be insanely asymmetric cyber-feudalism where 9.9/10 people are GrubHub peasants OR The Culture's post-scarcity luxury space communism. The latter seems way better. On the plus side, I think we'd only be GrubHub peasants for like 15 years, max, before that kind of AI ignites the Singularity, at which point who knows what happens? GrubHub would probably be gone though.
Only if you're very greedy. The truth is just the opposite, it's not absurd at all to pay well.
Lets imagine a hypothetical economy where there is only one company. "Pool party supplies". That is they sell things like beach balls and pool floats. So in your economic system it would make sense for the company to get rid of many employees as possible, and have the ones remain work 16 hours a day...
...and then they go out of business???...
People that are working 16 hours a day don't go to pool parties. The small economic upper class doesn't buy enough pool party supplies to justify the companies existence. The unemployed don't buy party supplies. Economic profit maximization lead to less profit in this case!
In this derived scenario having more employees that earn well and have plenty of time off leads to more pool party supply sales.
In contrast, in the early 19th century, when the western system was disrupted by labor unrest, it was 60+ hr work weeks were common and 40 hour weeks with weekends off was unthinkable. There were literal bloody fights to shift the system - and I hope we have progressed enough to not require that this time around, but it seems within the realm of possibilities in our modern day.
It will need to grow hands first. We’ve been “replacing” people with robots for a few decades now yet manual labour is still a thing. We have software that can literarily do all accounting tasks for us yet accountants are fine. I think will be an aid but not a replacement.
Most companies don't get rid of employees until economic pressure is put upon them. So companies will increase capability for some time into the future. Then we typically run into a trigger of some kind. For example a housing crash that causes a recession. Then mass unemployment occurs and we'll consider this 'normal'. Then we'll start to have an economic rebound, but white collar jobs just won't come back in mass (unlike eventually after 2008 which was very slow).
Then people will push hard into manual/blue collar labor, but the new influx of labor will drop pay significantly especially where low skill jobs are under pressure.
The economy can generate an unlimited number of jobs... The real question is can it generate 'paying' jobs that allow a person to survive the ever increasing cost of assets.
But I am wondering. Will we always want what we have today? Did we simply exhaust all need for travel once we developed cars? Or did we remove the need for food once we switched from hunting to farming?
My point being that new tech has always led to demand for new services and things.
Once everyone has access to ai and ai does everything for us would we not want new stuff?
And if as per your comment we have a couple of years until a possible replacement may have taken place wouldnt we have developed a demand for new services and jobs by then?
We had no clue we needed a tiktok app before we made the iphone and we had no clue we needed digital artists before we invented the computer.
For example the development of vehicles directly contributed to the scale of WWI. This then directly fed into the rapid expansion of flight and the development of city destroying nuclear weapons, which again lead to rocketry and civilization ending scale weaponry.
In that same time frame we went from an anti-fragile society to a very, very fragile one. In 1900 if the town next to you burnt down, at the end of the day it didn't affect you "that much". Today if the town that produces fertilizer for half the nation burns down, we'll there's a good chance you'll eventually have a bad day. You used to grow your food in your back yard. Now that food may be grown on the other side of the planet.
This is why can't just say "Well this worked in the past". When the underlying assumptions change you can have rapid destabilization. For example, world wide war because AI figures out how to disable nukes at launch time reliably undoing the last 70 years of MAD.
Indeed new tech led to new weapons and potentially more deadly conflicts.
But conflicts comparable to or worse than ww1 already occurred well before mechanised weaponry: in china, the mongol invasions, the colonisation of the americas, and so on.
MAD was mostly posturing, with few close encounters. In effect there was more anxiety than death.
Also i agree that there are far more single points of failure. Your example with fertilisers sounds plausible and logical. Both due to logistics and also due to losing farming skills. Yet somehow we suffer less from famine. Now theres more anxiety over it happening rather than it actually happening.
The pattern i see is that yes the risks are real and plausible but the odds of them occurring are slim.
And almost always (almost because i dont know of a specific counter example) technology only posed a risk due to politics rather than the tech itself.
There is no single example i am aware of technology posing an existential threat on its own - but at the same time we never created autonomous machines and software before at this level.
No matter what i do i keep getting back to the idea that the only danger is us. Our emotions, politics and instincts.
I feel conflicted.
I think this possibility accounts for a good deal of the overblown hysteria about AI's potential impacts in the corporate media world. I wonder if any of these outfits (The Economist, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times) would ever explicitly discuss this, e.g.
"Here's How AI Will Come for Your Executive Bonus and Dividends"
they're the ones ultimately deciding how AI gets used in a company.
As per The Dictators Handbook, I doubt a CEO with an inner circle replaced by AI could effectively direct a company.
We also need to, in effect, generate more tax revenue per productive working age person to support the aging population. AI helps that (from a government standpoint) by essentially "1:Many" multiplying the work 1 person can do, and be paid, and taxed.
Link to UN graphic on business insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/6-charts-explain-worlds-demo...
Then you have the middle ground of expensive enough to replace with a robot and AI, overlapping a skill range that an AI and robot can replace.
This middle ground is what we commonly call middle class and further gutting it presents many risks to an economy.