Good luck distributing gains justly when the masses have nothing of value to bargain with. Politics will likely continue to be co-opted by people who can pay; either directly or through other means of coercion.
There used to be a lot more horses… I’m finding 25 million in the US in 1920 compared with 3.8 million today. Of course, they can no longer occupy the niche in society they used to, and so like in nature; when the niche is removed; they can’t just find some other way to be productive or even survive. I don’t think we are so different. Based on the past, I think it’s dangerous to believe some few will keep the rest of us around. Dangerous, because unlike horses, this will cause significant unrest, and ultimately we can’t predict the outcome. My guess is ultimately, with fewer jobs, there will eventually be less people, for better or worse.
Yes, if some kings didn’t need the labor of their serfs, they would be gone in an instant. Middle class workers only have it so good now because the ruling class is strictly dependent on them for their empires. Once that goes out the window, we won’t be kept around in our positions of privilege since our labor has no value.
I imagine it looks like a transition of the middle class to the lower class (with some going to a higher class with specialized technology roles as class traitors), and then the lower class, having had their labor invalidated, being put on UBI and being sucked like cattle by corporations, eroding their rights and sovereignty. With social media addiction, rampant disinformation, newer generations won’t even have the faculties to conceptualize their fate and resist. I also don’t think unrest could ever reach a boiling point in the US with how addicted, misinformed, and manipulated most of the population is.
Eventually, we see a complete unification of the wealthy with the state and we transition back into serfdom. People trapped in debt, dependent on the state for sustenance, except this time the state has no dependence on their labor. What happens next is your choice of dystopian horror fiction.
I strongly, viscerally disagree with this. People (mostly) need to feel like they are capable agents and also like they are contributing to something larger than themselves. I’ve seen friends struggle to get a job and find their place in the world; sitting alone at home and watching TV for weeks straight is an inhuman way to exist, and that’s where a lot of people will end up without work, as the average person seems to be pretty terrible at stimulating themselves intellectually.
Note that this doesn’t strictly require capitalism or a 40 hour workweek or anything like that. Since AI is so great at solving everything, maybe one day it can organize the distribution of work to keep the remaining humans busy. I don’t know.
a person can be made to feel capable without requiring a living wage.
similarly : work exists outside of wages, as do co-operative and unpaid grand works.
the (probably fantastical) hope is that when a 'living wage' as a concept disappears it will free up people to pursue things that they're actually passionate about to form an identity and purpose.
put from another angle : do you think it's great that people can't find identity without employment?
it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology rather than something that we need to feed employment into. the human condition has lasted a lot longer than our current hyper-capitalism-centric ethos about work and passion; if people are becoming worse for it we should probably change the habits and motivations rather than providing their pacifier and acting as if it's a normal human thing for a psyche to dissolve when allowed to act as a free agent.
> put from another angle : do you think it's great that people can't find identity without employment?
That’s like asking me if I think it’s ‘great’ that people have two legs and a finite lifespan. It just is. What you choose to do under constraints is a big part of your identity.
> it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology
Man, is there anything that isn’t a pathology these days?
Your friends struggle because they live in a world that determines someone’s worth by their jobs. Also their ability to pay rent and food and such. So of course in such a world they would be depressed. That doesn’t mean we need some idiot with a higher rank in some office to give us meaningless tasks.
> sitting alone at home and watching TV for weeks straight is an inhuman way to exist
It is, but I'd argue that's a failure of imagination on their part to do anything else other than watch TV. There are many opportunities to volunteer somewhere and get engaged with a community, but they have to get off their couch to do it. (don't even need to get off the couch, given the right set of skills.)
Escaping reality is a time honored tradition, whether it be chemical, digital, or biological. Heroin addicts are looking to escape just as much as TV addicts. People are going to choose what they chose. Naively I choose to believe that people are eventually able to choose differently, and choose life.
I think you forgot about the other part of Wall-e.... where everyone left on the planet after the ship departed died a horrible death in a cloud of pollution.
> People (mostly) need to feel like they are capable agents and also like they are contributing to something larger than themselves.
100%, but that doesn't mean it has to be work. That doesn't have to be a job, especially one that you enjoy only 30% of the time. Purpose can come form lots of things, but we just push everyone to make that thing commercial, part of capitalism
It is illegal for me to get a second job. You can not do meaningful learning for that many hours. I was doing it in my free time anyway, that was enough for me.
Not to cry about my mental health, but it was very taxing for me. I was just sitting around doing random things occasionally.
I have yet to see a single example of AI replacing someone and doing their job. The vast majority of these cases are simply companies doing layoffs and blaming it on "AI" to deflect the bad press (and of course the media is eating it up). Meanwhile everyone remaining has 2x the work load and a useless $10/mo ChatGPT subscription spitting out garbage.
Remember how a decade and a half ago everyone was convinced that taxi drivers and truck drivers would be replaced by AI in the coming years? There were even mass protests over it, and governments started to make contingency plans and enact legislation. The topic was discussed to death non-stop all over the internet and news media, just like AI is right now. Meanwhile today not a single driver has lost their job, and in fact there are shortages in all these industries.
Don't try and solve a problem before it is even a problem. Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry, so I hope it can actually happen.
You haven't been paying attention. There are Waymo fully autonomous rides happening already in multiple very large cities. It exists every bit as much as AI voice acting platforms.
Also remember when Geoffrey Hinton famously predicted all radiologists would be out of a job by now in 2016? That also didn't happen. So yeah, I would take these predictions with a massive grain of salt. So far the employment numbers in the US are looking extremely good.
Many, many predictions about job losses came true. Jobs stop existing if they can be performed automated to a large extent, this has come true for many, many jobs over time. There is a great German video series about elderly people (in their 80s or even 90s) showing the trades they learned when they were young. They were doing stuff like carving troughs out of trees, making wooden wheels, operating water powered saws and similar stuffs. None of these jobs exist anymore.
In fact it is completely natural and healthy that there is a transformation in the job market, although it can easily be a tragedy for the individual.
>So far the employment numbers in the US are looking extremely good.
Voice actors are a tiny group. They don't really factor into nation wide statistics.
> Remember how a decade and a half ago everyone was convinced that taxi drivers and truck drivers would be replaced by AI in the coming years?
I remember that as an AI-car company driven hype cycle that was used to justify beta testing their cars on public roads. According to them, traffic Jams were supposed to be a solved problem and everyone would be making 20k/yr leasing out their car as a robotaxi.
With that said, the impact of AI is not equal across different industries.
Still need voice directing, and the voice director will have to act out the inflections, line delivery, etc before the voice gets switched out for another one.
I doubt very much it's going anyway. But the pool will be smaller. Same with actors replaced with AI. Same as MoCaP, sure an AI can do these things but a human is still better at being a human and human nuance - and much easier to direct.
I have a hunch the arts don't need to worry as much as they do now.
Celebrity is, has always been and will continue to be a draw.
Jon Stewart, in the original context, is concerned about the near future. That is not to say the impacts on the film/tv/screen-writing industry are not already being felt today.
The SAG-AFTRA strike was in large part about AI. The fact the strike happened, that approximately 200k people were that concerned about their livilhood that they went on strike is all quite strong evidence there is a real concern. At this juncture, I think the burden of proof would be on you for why those 200k people had no concerns, that they skipped paychecks and sold their homes for nothing.
A strike that was so painful to the union itself, seemingly would have been about something important. "the "harshest pain" was "perhaps felt among the below-the-line workers who've had to sell or mortgage their homes, and wipe through IRAs to survive." [1] If that strike was over nothing, that sure was a lot of pain to inflect for no cause of concern what-so-ever. I would trust those people to know their own industry far better than myself.
I don't see Devin or any other type of AI practically replacing a software engineer any time soon. I believe we agree there, and perhaps that was your original point. I think that point was incorrectly extrapolated to other industries. Further, the timeline for when jobs can be taken by AI is different for different industries. This article, where I was trying to see if I could find any raw numbers, summed up the concern pretty well for actors & screen-writers (in essence, AI is already there for them):
> Using AI to create performances that never took place is not just hypothetical. It is already happening. But AI-generated deepfakes, such as a series of convincing but totally fabricated videos of a Tom Cruise doppelganger, are mostly found on social media, not in movies or shows from the studios.
> But the same technology could easily be used to replace the actors in background roles in studio and streaming productions — the ones listed in the credits with titles like “second police officer” or “waiter in the restaurant.” These roles generate a huge number of the jobs that SAG-AFTRA members depend on to pay their bills. [2]
Which is to say, as a software engineer, when I look at Devin, I call BS that it can replace another software engineer. Though, if my trade were creating images, AI is already there were a film industry could decide they want pictures of 6 fingered people because it will boost their profit margin, that is already a reality. If I were shown an AI that did almost exactly my job, I would probably be concerned.
Is this all a bad thing, a good thing, avoidable, or even necessary? I don't know. Is it happening - yes, in different industries to different degrees. (Frankly, we in hacker news need to get our heads out of our asses, not everyone in the world is a software engineer)
Seriously, who cares? It is someone who knows nothing about AI, commenting on someone who knows nothing about AI talking to someone who knows nothing about AI, but who is CEO of a company who owns part of a company which has employees who know about AI.
Citations needed. Jon Stewart is in a place to speak on the impact of AI to his industry, considering he is an industry expert (he has what, 30 to 40 years in Hollywood. That makes him an expert of screenwriting/acting. You only need to know so much to then comment on the impact of AI on your industry. Further, we don't know his personal experiences and the data he is looking at. Let's also take into account recently there was the largest strike that was largely about AI. Given how long that lasted, we would think that there was a lot of extra research done on the topic. Further, Jon was wanting to do a series of segments about AI on his Apple-hosted show. He has a history of researching his topics. Given that history, I would guess that Jon Stewart actually knows quite a bit about AI at this point. He is not a fan-boy though and so that knowledge wouldn't show through him gushing about LLMs)
The mistake I see is we are applying Jon Stewarts comments to the software industry. Perhap that mis-application is due to recent biases from things like Devin. Mr Stewart OTOH is really more speaking about the impact of AI to the acting industry, his industry, for which he is an expert. Jon Stewart historically brings the receipts, he routinely researches the topics he speaks about. If you recall, he was in the habit of reading the books of many of his guests. Based on that history, I would flip your comment on its head.
A lot of dismissive comments in here already by people who aren’t trying to make a living doing writing, art, or voiceover. It will be music soon too. Tutoring is probably heavily affected already too
“But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say.
So it doesn’t count until it replaces programmer jobs? Because that’s coming soon too. Would you really encourage your kids to go into this field, expecting them to still have good prospects in 15 years?
Also, we used to have a middle class with lots of authors and musicians and artists before the internet commoditized everything
We also used to have a middle class consisting of horseshoers, elevator operators, and gas station attendants.
Many programmers do little more than glue together framework code, and make an excellent living doing it. Little sets them apart other than how fast they jump to the framework of the week. There's not a lot of separation from rent-seeking.
What would you do to change the direction of things? Make AI illegal, and hope there aren't companies that will just use it anyways?
yeah except serious people in governance and AI science are raising alarm bells.. so "what about the horse carriage drivers" gets pretty thin, like instantly..
Whether we can or cannot do something about is a wholly different question from whether it’s an issue at all.
I see so many people basically say “there’s nothing we can do about it therefore there’s no problem at all”. I don’t think this is a coincidence. This is a very deliberate effort by those in the tech space who want to capture and privatize all the benefits for themselves to make it seem like there are no alternatives to the current trajectory of a handful of companies hoarding all the benefits of AI.
Once you accept that there are possible problems one can do stuff to address those problems, such as maybe democratizing AI so it benefits anybody and not just a handful of people who happened to be at the right place at the right time.
Heck, even if you accept that there isn’t a problem you can still recognizing that the current trajectory may not be a good one.
No one is saying that. What people are saying is that technology has routinely made certain jobs irrelevant since the beginning of human civilization, and no one can do anything about it other than accept it and move on. Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place. Sharing and commenting on variations of the same article every single day is certainly not helping anyone's jobs.
Who says it will be 10 new jobs? Why not a thousand? Or a million?
Did the world end when weavers lost their jobs because of automated looms or elevator operators lost their job because of buttons? Just like all the times before, we will figure it out. The only thing that will make the outcome worse is forced government action based on a few loud voices and populist demands.
The closer to human abilities AI gets, the less space there will be for new jobs to appear. Just because new jobs appeared before doesn't mean they always will. It does make sense to slow down this progress if we don't have answers to what happens if jobs start disappearing faster than we can replace them.
Who is going to "slow down this progress"? Some mythical world government? The Illuminati? You can't legislate human thought and human ingenuity. Progress is happening, whether you like it or not. You either embrace it or get left behind.
If one major economy regulates and slows down AI the rest of them will ramp up their investment and gain a competitive edge. The jobs will be gone regardless, just this time to an AI company in China or India rather than the USA. That's how the world works.
When the robots can fix themselves, then no new jobs need be created to fix the robots. Then that time it'll be different. We're at the cusp of that. I can ask openinterpreter to fix python on my computer for me. it's only a matter of time before robotics catches up.
We find ourselves, in 2024, with unemployment levels (at least in the US) at near all-time lows. This is after centuries of mechanization and automation, decades of the computer and internet revolutions (which have barely any steam left, compared to the previuous ~70 years of rapid improvement), and with a global demographic shift that will actually require significant productivity improvements (as in "more output per worker") just to maintain existing quality of life with an increasingly aged population. China is probably losing 1M+ workers a year for the foreseeable future (their workforce actually peaked in 2015!). LLM-style AI is going to cause such a tidal wave of garbage that it's not even obvious to me that it will be a net increase to productivity at all, let alone make us all so productive that there will be a massive unemployment crisis. It's definitely going to affect some specific jobs, just the way other jobs have come and gone for centuries now, but I'm not convinced it will improve productivity as much as we actually need it to.
Yeah. A lot of people I know even have 2-3 jobs! Even combined, they don’t pay well enough to build retirement savings. It’s easy to find work when you’re being paid less than minimum wage as a contractor at 2-3 companies
We eventually will hit the point that technology replaces jobs and new jobs don’t popup. I hope by then we have our politics fixed enough to more equally distribute the automation bounty.
For most businesses, AI works basically the same as any other kind of automation:
1) increasing output for the same labor costs
2) reducing labor costs by replacing humans with machines or smaller numbers of humans that operate the machines
The interesting difference is that AI can automate a wide range of "creative" and "knowledge worker" jobs that formerly resisted automation, so many tech workers (and others) may have their jobs automated out of existence, much as cloud computing automated the work of human system and network administrators.
Instead of AI reducing my working hours and my chores so I can spend time on fun things like art and music, AI is making creating art and music obsolete so I can spend more time on my job and chores. What a time to be alive.
AI promises to be the antidote to the ills of the knowledge economy. Computer technology multiplied the productivity of a small class of high-IQ workers, leading to massive inequality between knowledge workers and other workers. AI, if it works, promises to level the playing field again. It’s not going to replace plumbers, nurses, and HVAC technicians. It’s going to replace the top 20% of mostly college educated knowledge workers whose incomes have grown at triple the median income over the last few decades: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-contract-with-the-m...
Everyone will be middle class again. The present societal consternation is coming from the gap between the middle class and the upper middle class. The middle class Virginia town where I grew up isn’t unaffordable for regular people because of Jeff Bezos. It’s because the town is now full of Google employees and lawyers. And soaring education costs are the result of an arm’s race trying to get into the upper middle class, since that’s what it takes to maybe be able to buy a house where you grew up.
Knowledge workers are the ones creating that gap, and places without them are a lot better for ordinary people. Consider somewhere like Iowa, which is very flat economically because there’s no knowledge work. The median income is a bit lower than say New Jersey. But in practice life is better. You can buy a house for 3-4x the median income, because there’s no Amazon engineers pushing you out of the way.
Those property prices are not going down any significant amount. The capital system in the US has realized it can buy up as much property as possible and use it to extract as much wealth as possible via literal rent seeking. Places that are not close to anywhere have had rent prices explode. Oh, and if there is a massive 2008 like housing crash, the banks themselves will hold on to the properties keeping prices high. Meanwhile the Bezeo's themselves that have the AI will be buying up as many real assets as possible.
> Those property prices are not going down any significant amount. The capital system in the US has realized it can buy up as much property as possible and use it to extract as much wealth as possible via literal rent seeking. Places that are not close to anywhere have had rent prices explode.
It's an unflattering take for many egos, but it's what's actually happening. It's not the "capital system" that's bidding up the price of housing. Only a fraction of housing is owned by investors, and only a fraction of those investors are large investors like "banks." The figure for "investor-owned" properties includes individuals who own rental properties--many of whom are the "minor rich" created by the knowledge industry. (Not Bezos, but his project managers and engineering managers.)
You could ban large corporations from buying investment properties, but it wouldn't address the basic problem resulting from the fact that you have 20% of the population engaged in knowledge work whose incomes are vastly outstripping those of the middle 60%. That's why normal people have been pushed out of places like the Bay Area.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadWorking for living is a problem to be solved.
The purpose of technology is to automate things, increase free time.
The purpose of politics is to distribute gains justly, whatever that is.
There used to be a lot more horses… I’m finding 25 million in the US in 1920 compared with 3.8 million today. Of course, they can no longer occupy the niche in society they used to, and so like in nature; when the niche is removed; they can’t just find some other way to be productive or even survive. I don’t think we are so different. Based on the past, I think it’s dangerous to believe some few will keep the rest of us around. Dangerous, because unlike horses, this will cause significant unrest, and ultimately we can’t predict the outcome. My guess is ultimately, with fewer jobs, there will eventually be less people, for better or worse.
I imagine it looks like a transition of the middle class to the lower class (with some going to a higher class with specialized technology roles as class traitors), and then the lower class, having had their labor invalidated, being put on UBI and being sucked like cattle by corporations, eroding their rights and sovereignty. With social media addiction, rampant disinformation, newer generations won’t even have the faculties to conceptualize their fate and resist. I also don’t think unrest could ever reach a boiling point in the US with how addicted, misinformed, and manipulated most of the population is.
Eventually, we see a complete unification of the wealthy with the state and we transition back into serfdom. People trapped in debt, dependent on the state for sustenance, except this time the state has no dependence on their labor. What happens next is your choice of dystopian horror fiction.
I strongly, viscerally disagree with this. People (mostly) need to feel like they are capable agents and also like they are contributing to something larger than themselves. I’ve seen friends struggle to get a job and find their place in the world; sitting alone at home and watching TV for weeks straight is an inhuman way to exist, and that’s where a lot of people will end up without work, as the average person seems to be pretty terrible at stimulating themselves intellectually.
Note that this doesn’t strictly require capitalism or a 40 hour workweek or anything like that. Since AI is so great at solving everything, maybe one day it can organize the distribution of work to keep the remaining humans busy. I don’t know.
similarly : work exists outside of wages, as do co-operative and unpaid grand works.
the (probably fantastical) hope is that when a 'living wage' as a concept disappears it will free up people to pursue things that they're actually passionate about to form an identity and purpose.
put from another angle : do you think it's great that people can't find identity without employment?
it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology rather than something that we need to feed employment into. the human condition has lasted a lot longer than our current hyper-capitalism-centric ethos about work and passion; if people are becoming worse for it we should probably change the habits and motivations rather than providing their pacifier and acting as if it's a normal human thing for a psyche to dissolve when allowed to act as a free agent.
That’s like asking me if I think it’s ‘great’ that people have two legs and a finite lifespan. It just is. What you choose to do under constraints is a big part of your identity.
> it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology
Man, is there anything that isn’t a pathology these days?
It is, but I'd argue that's a failure of imagination on their part to do anything else other than watch TV. There are many opportunities to volunteer somewhere and get engaged with a community, but they have to get off their couch to do it. (don't even need to get off the couch, given the right set of skills.)
Wall•E predicted a world of rich, fat humans amusing and eating themselves to death. It got the rich part wrong.
The people on the ship where the 1%ers.
100%, but that doesn't mean it has to be work. That doesn't have to be a job, especially one that you enjoy only 30% of the time. Purpose can come form lots of things, but we just push everyone to make that thing commercial, part of capitalism
I had a job where I got payed, but had no real work. It was genuinely awful.
Not to cry about my mental health, but it was very taxing for me. I was just sitting around doing random things occasionally.
All you need is a little push and good tooling around the software to make voice actors entirely replaceable.
Don't try and solve a problem before it is even a problem. Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry, so I hope it can actually happen.
>Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry.
And all other video game industries, which will also not be paying voice actors.
You haven't been paying attention. There are Waymo fully autonomous rides happening already in multiple very large cities. It exists every bit as much as AI voice acting platforms.
In fact it is completely natural and healthy that there is a transformation in the job market, although it can easily be a tragedy for the individual.
>So far the employment numbers in the US are looking extremely good.
Voice actors are a tiny group. They don't really factor into nation wide statistics.
I remember that as an AI-car company driven hype cycle that was used to justify beta testing their cars on public roads. According to them, traffic Jams were supposed to be a solved problem and everyone would be making 20k/yr leasing out their car as a robotaxi.
With that said, the impact of AI is not equal across different industries.
Can't go from text to the desired inflection yet.
I have a hunch the arts don't need to worry as much as they do now.
Celebrity is, has always been and will continue to be a draw.
The SAG-AFTRA strike was in large part about AI. The fact the strike happened, that approximately 200k people were that concerned about their livilhood that they went on strike is all quite strong evidence there is a real concern. At this juncture, I think the burden of proof would be on you for why those 200k people had no concerns, that they skipped paychecks and sold their homes for nothing.
A strike that was so painful to the union itself, seemingly would have been about something important. "the "harshest pain" was "perhaps felt among the below-the-line workers who've had to sell or mortgage their homes, and wipe through IRAs to survive." [1] If that strike was over nothing, that sure was a lot of pain to inflect for no cause of concern what-so-ever. I would trust those people to know their own industry far better than myself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_SAG-AFTRA_strike
-------------------
I don't see Devin or any other type of AI practically replacing a software engineer any time soon. I believe we agree there, and perhaps that was your original point. I think that point was incorrectly extrapolated to other industries. Further, the timeline for when jobs can be taken by AI is different for different industries. This article, where I was trying to see if I could find any raw numbers, summed up the concern pretty well for actors & screen-writers (in essence, AI is already there for them):
> Using AI to create performances that never took place is not just hypothetical. It is already happening. But AI-generated deepfakes, such as a series of convincing but totally fabricated videos of a Tom Cruise doppelganger, are mostly found on social media, not in movies or shows from the studios.
> But the same technology could easily be used to replace the actors in background roles in studio and streaming productions — the ones listed in the credits with titles like “second police officer” or “waiter in the restaurant.” These roles generate a huge number of the jobs that SAG-AFTRA members depend on to pay their bills. [2]
Which is to say, as a software engineer, when I look at Devin, I call BS that it can replace another software engineer. Though, if my trade were creating images, AI is already there were a film industry could decide they want pictures of 6 fingered people because it will boost their profit margin, that is already a reality. If I were shown an AI that did almost exactly my job, I would probably be concerned.
Is this all a bad thing, a good thing, avoidable, or even necessary? I don't know. Is it happening - yes, in different industries to different degrees. (Frankly, we in hacker news need to get our heads out of our asses, not everyone in the world is a software engineer)
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/18/business/ai-actors-strike/ind...
The mistake I see is we are applying Jon Stewarts comments to the software industry. Perhap that mis-application is due to recent biases from things like Devin. Mr Stewart OTOH is really more speaking about the impact of AI to the acting industry, his industry, for which he is an expert. Jon Stewart historically brings the receipts, he routinely researches the topics he speaks about. If you recall, he was in the habit of reading the books of many of his guests. Based on that history, I would flip your comment on its head.
“But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say.
So it doesn’t count until it replaces programmer jobs? Because that’s coming soon too. Would you really encourage your kids to go into this field, expecting them to still have good prospects in 15 years?
Also, we used to have a middle class with lots of authors and musicians and artists before the internet commoditized everything
Many programmers do little more than glue together framework code, and make an excellent living doing it. Little sets them apart other than how fast they jump to the framework of the week. There's not a lot of separation from rent-seeking.
What would you do to change the direction of things? Make AI illegal, and hope there aren't companies that will just use it anyways?
I see so many people basically say “there’s nothing we can do about it therefore there’s no problem at all”. I don’t think this is a coincidence. This is a very deliberate effort by those in the tech space who want to capture and privatize all the benefits for themselves to make it seem like there are no alternatives to the current trajectory of a handful of companies hoarding all the benefits of AI.
Once you accept that there are possible problems one can do stuff to address those problems, such as maybe democratizing AI so it benefits anybody and not just a handful of people who happened to be at the right place at the right time.
Heck, even if you accept that there isn’t a problem you can still recognizing that the current trajectory may not be a good one.
No one is saying that. What people are saying is that technology has routinely made certain jobs irrelevant since the beginning of human civilization, and no one can do anything about it other than accept it and move on. Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place. Sharing and commenting on variations of the same article every single day is certainly not helping anyone's jobs.
10 new jobs cannot be sufficient to replace 100 replaced jobs. What are other 90 going to do?
Did the world end when weavers lost their jobs because of automated looms or elevator operators lost their job because of buttons? Just like all the times before, we will figure it out. The only thing that will make the outcome worse is forced government action based on a few loud voices and populist demands.
Wait, what's that you say? AI can make hyper-realistic porn now too?
We're doomed.
1) increasing output for the same labor costs
2) reducing labor costs by replacing humans with machines or smaller numbers of humans that operate the machines
The interesting difference is that AI can automate a wide range of "creative" and "knowledge worker" jobs that formerly resisted automation, so many tech workers (and others) may have their jobs automated out of existence, much as cloud computing automated the work of human system and network administrators.
If AI replaces my job, I'll accept it. I don't want to do a job that could better be done by a machine.
Knowledge workers are the ones creating that gap, and places without them are a lot better for ordinary people. Consider somewhere like Iowa, which is very flat economically because there’s no knowledge work. The median income is a bit lower than say New Jersey. But in practice life is better. You can buy a house for 3-4x the median income, because there’s no Amazon engineers pushing you out of the way.
Those property prices are not going down any significant amount. The capital system in the US has realized it can buy up as much property as possible and use it to extract as much wealth as possible via literal rent seeking. Places that are not close to anywhere have had rent prices explode. Oh, and if there is a massive 2008 like housing crash, the banks themselves will hold on to the properties keeping prices high. Meanwhile the Bezeo's themselves that have the AI will be buying up as many real assets as possible.
It's an unflattering take for many egos, but it's what's actually happening. It's not the "capital system" that's bidding up the price of housing. Only a fraction of housing is owned by investors, and only a fraction of those investors are large investors like "banks." The figure for "investor-owned" properties includes individuals who own rental properties--many of whom are the "minor rich" created by the knowledge industry. (Not Bezos, but his project managers and engineering managers.)
You could ban large corporations from buying investment properties, but it wouldn't address the basic problem resulting from the fact that you have 20% of the population engaged in knowledge work whose incomes are vastly outstripping those of the middle 60%. That's why normal people have been pushed out of places like the Bay Area.
Some more discussion last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902217