Ask HN: What happens if 99% of jobs disappear to automation?
I'm going to throw some assumptions/ ideas I've been thinking about around this:
no matter how hard I try/train I can't do some jobs. (sports athlete, etc.) So I could see how AI could eliminate jobs to the point most humans can't earn money.
AGI if possible will evolve from a company not a software program. AKA company X makes Y revenue as the number of employees tends toward 0.
LLMs are probably just a component of AGI. So, the argument LLMs can't do X doesn't really mean much when it comes to the discussion of Jobs and AI.
What if the paper clip(in the optimizer problem) is AI compute.
It's possible that the low hanging fruit of AI will stop at some point. but I'm not sure there any indication it's any time soon.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 70.1 ms ] threadThis was the path society was on long before AI hit the scene. At this point, I'm kinda glad that a text generator is enough of a boogeyman to make tech workers into Luddites. If your existence feels threatened by a machine that can make money writing text, I suggest you reexamine your priorities to focus on broader impact or at least more meaningful personal fulfillment.
You me like the when farmland gets used up for solar to power AI.
or demand evaporates because all the white collar jobs disappear. Who buys all the blue collar workers and service workers stuff?
As you said, demand will eventually evaporate in a system without class competition. This is a good thing; basic life-sustaining commodities like food and shelter should not be sold at a markup or separated by class. These markets would "collapse" back into sustainability. A holocaust for the housing market, but a lifeline to the unhoused or those who otherwise couldn't afford housing.
It didn't take AI to set any of those wheels in motion. I didn't skip dinners before payday because my dad got priced out of overtime by a robot. The fact that we play this silly game of trade and barter is what put us here, and AI just lowers those ever-shrinking margins to nothingness. Now we're here, the capitalist apocalypse.
> when farmland gets used up for solar to power AI.
There is not enough demand, technicians, manufacturers or materials to make that a reality.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a tragedy because it is unavoidable. Polluting our planet has already happened, except not with solar panels but oil byproduct and greenhouse gases. Some lot of good all that "demand" did Mother Earth.
Marshall Brain's novella, "Manna" on the subject is pretty popular in tech circles.
Bill Joy (of Sun Microsystems, and the vi editor) wrote an article in Wired more than 20 years ago, [1] "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". He saw the same problem. All but extremely specialized intellectual labour may be automated and no one has any services or work they can sell. The people who own the capital no longer need the masses.
There are no easy answers. Maybe we avoid this crisis through a mix of busy work programs, service work (people will always want people to wait on them with a human touch, I suspect), taxation, social programs and, indeed, new jobs created by new technology. Maybe there is a revolution coming in the not so distant future. Capitalism that eliminates labour altogether is perhaps the ultimate contradiction and the resolution leads us to fully automated luxury space communism. Maybe society collapses from the unrest. Maybe AI and semiconductors run into a brick wall and machines two hundred years from now are no more impressive than an iPhone would have been to someone in 2005.
Speculating here, obviously. All anyone can do.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
those masses still have needs, even if they are very basic needs like roof, food or physical security... As long as whole world does not descent into global favela (and even then people will have to coexist which means some forms of trade...?)
The interesting thing is how do we get there and who is allowed to live in that society.
If their their breadwinning activity is rugged I'd say the majority would fare far worse.
I wouldn’t worry about any of this. Automation is only correctly achieved in small slow steps before achieving social replication.
There may not be any historical context to look back on.
If anything the current state of AI will do one thing painfully well: separate the hopelessly unoriginal people from everybody else. It a race to Dunning-Kruger where people too unaware cannot tell the difference in absolute astonishment to those who can.
The question is about the scenario where AI *is* a reality. AI being a reality today is not relevant to the question.
Amdahl's says you get a diminishing effect, and we're already seeing this as we get into the GPT-4 level of performance, where it doesn't quite perform better at some tasks as 3.5.
Gustafson's says that as power increases, you'll tackle problems that were previously untacklable, and this cycles into more productivity. So CPUs lead to web to cloud computing to social networks and things like people emailing a file from mobile to PC instead of using a data cable.
Gustafson's creates a whole line of other jobs and different bottlenecks.
It's the framework paradox as well - you think frameworks would reduce the difficulty and pay of jobs, but they only go higher. It's why tech people are more eager to get into AI.
I think the 99% lose all political power, at which point they get fed up, eat the rich, and society breaks down. With stockpiles of nukes distributed around the world, it could get very ugly.