In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs.
This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace humans for a lot of important things. But as its capabilities improve, what do displaced humans transition to?
I don't think that we have a good answer to that. And we may need it sooner rather than later. I'd be more optimistic if I trusted our leadership more. But wise political leadership is not exactly a strong point for our country right now.
Snarky but serious question: How do we know that this wave will disrupt labor at all? Every time I dig into a story of X employees replaced by "AI", it's always in a company with shrinking revenues. Furthermore, all of the high-value use cases involve very intense supervision of the models.
There's been a dream of unsupervised models going hog wild on codebases for the last three years. Yet even the latest and greatest Claude models can't be trusted to write a new REST endpoint exposing 5 CRUD methods without fucking something up. No, it requires not only human supervision, but it also requires human expertise to validate and correct.
I dunno. I feel like this language grossly exaggerates the capability of LLMs to paint a picture of them reliably fulfilling roles end-to-end instead of only somewhat reliably fulfilling very narrowly scoped tasks that require no creativity or expertise.
You will have to back that statement up because this is not at all obvious to me.
If I look at the top US employers in say 1970 vs 2020, the companies that dominate 1970 were noted for having hard blue collar labor jobs but paid enough to keep a single earner family significantly above minimum wage and the poverty line. The companies that dominate in 2020 are noted for being some of the shittiest employers having some of the lowest pay fairly close to minimum wage and absolutely worst working conditions.
Sure, you tend not to get horribly maimed in 2020 vs 1970. That's about the only improvement.
I believe that historically we have solved this problem by creating gigantic armies and then killing off millions of people that couldn't really adapt to the new order with a world war.
One way to think about AI and jobs is Uber/Google Maps. You used to have to know a lot about a city to be a taxi driver; then suddenly with Google Maps you don't. So in effect, technology lowered the requirements or training needed to become a taxi driver. More people can do it, not less (although incumbents may be unhappy about this).
AI is a lot like this. In coding for instance, you still need to have some sense of good systems design, etc. and know what you want to build in concrete terms, but you don't need to learn the specific syntax of a given language in detail.
Yet if you don't know anything about IT, don't know what you want to build or what you could need, or what's possible, then it's unlikely AI can help you.
As someone else said, until a company or individual is willing to risk their reputation on the accuracy of AI (beyond basic summarising jobs, etc), the intelligent monkeys are here for a good while longer. I've already been once bitten, twice shy.
The conclusion, sadly, is that CEO's will pause hiring and squeeze more productivity out of existing hires. This will impact junior roles the most.
> In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs
That may well be why these technologies were ultimately successful.
Think of millions and millions being cast out.
They won't just go away. And they will probably not go down without a fight. "Don't buy AI-made, brother!", "Burn those effing machines!" It's far from unheard of in history.
Also: who will buy if no one has money anymore? What will the state do, when thus tax income goes down, while social welfare and policing costs go up?
There are other scenarios, too: everybody gets most stuff for free, because machines and AI's do most of the work. Working communism for the lower classes, while the super rich stay super rich (like in real existing socialism). I don't think it is a good scenario either. In the long run it will make humanity lazy and dumb.
In any case I think what might happen is not easy to guess, so many variables and nth-order effects. When large systems must seek a new equilibrium all bets are usually off.
I too believe that a mostly autonomous work world would be something we could handle well assuming the leadership was composed of smart folks picking the right decisions, without also being too much exposed to external powers opposing an impossible to win force (large companies and interests). The problem is if we mix what could happen (not clear when, right now) with the current weak leadership across the world.
Yeah but those opening of new kind of jobs has not always been instantly. It can take decades and for instance was one of the reasons for the French Revolution. Internet has already created a huge amount of monopolies and wealth concentration. AI seems likely to do this further.
I think UBI can only buy some time but won't solve the problem. We need fast improvement with AI robots that can be used for automation on mass scale: construction, farming maybe even cooking and food processing.
Right now AI is mostly focused on automating top levels of maslov pyramid hierarchy of needs rather than bottom physiological needs. Once things like shelter (housing), food, utilities (electricity, water, internet) are dirty cheap UBI is less needed.
Those displaced workers need an income first, job second. What they were producing is still getting done. This means we have gained freedom to choose what else is worth doing. The immediate problem is the lack of income. There is no lack of useful work to do, it's just that most of it doesn't pay well.
The industrial revolution took something like 98% of jobs and farms and just disappeared them.
Could you a priori in 1800 have predicted the existence of graphics artists? Street sweepers? People who drive school buses? The whole infrastructure around trains? Sewage maintainers? Librarians? Movie stuntmen? Sound Engineers? Truck drivers?
The opening of new jobs has been causally unlinked from the closing of old jobs - especially when you take the quantity into consideration. There was a well of stuff people wanted to do, that they couldn't do because they were busy doing the boring stuff. But now that well of good new jobs is running dry, which is why we see people picking up 3 really shit jobs to make ends meet. There will be a point where new jobs do not open at all, and we should probably plan for that.
When I hear folks glazing some kinda impending jobless utopia , I think of the intervening years. I shudder. As they say, "An empty stomach knows no morality."
Realistically, a white collar job market collapse will not directly lead to starvation. The world is not 1930s America ethically. Governments will intervene, not necessarily to the point of fairness, but they will restructure the economy enough to provide a baseline. The question will be how to solve the biblical level of luxury wealth inequality without civil unrest causing us all to starve.
Assuming AI works well, I can't see any "empty stomach" stuff. It should produce abundance. People will probably have political arguments about how to divide it but it should be doable.
We are not there, yet, but if AI could replace a sizable amount of workers, the economic system will be put to a very hard test. Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch.
There will be fewer very large companies in terms of human size. There will be many more companies that are much smaller because you don't need as many workers to do the same job.
Instead of needing 1000 engineers to build a new product, you'll need 100 now. Those 900 engineers will be working for 9 new companies that weren't viable before because the cost was too big but is now viable. IE. those 9 new companies could never be profitable if it required 1000 engineers each but can totally sustain itself with 100 engineers each.
I am not sure it will scale like that... every company needs a competitive advantage in the market to stay solvent, the people may scale but what makes each company unique won't.
if these small companies are all just fronts on the prompts (a "feature" if you will) of the large ai companies, why do the large ai companies not just add that feature and eat the little guy's lunch?
Similarly flawed arguments could be made about how steam shovels would create unemployment in the construction sector. Technology as well as worker specialization increases our overall productivity. AI doomerism is another variation of Neoluddite thought. Typically it is framed within a zero-sum view of the economy. It is often accompanied by Malthusian scarcity doom. Appeals to authoritarian top-down economic management usually follow from there.
Technological advances have consistently unlocked new, more specialized and economically productive roles for humans. You're absolutely right about lowering costs, but headcounts might shift to new roles rather than reducing overall.
> After all, a plateau of the current systems is possible and very credible, but it would likely stimulate, at this point, massive research efforts in the next step of architectures.
A lot of AI’s potential hasn’t even been realized yet. There’s a long tail of integrations and solution building still ahead. A lot of creative applications haven’t been realized yet - arguably for the better, but it will be tried and some will be economical.
That’s a case for a moderate economic upturn though.
AI with ability but without responsibility is not enough for dramatic socioeconomic change, I think. For now, the critical unique power of human workers is that you can hold them responsible for things.
edit: ability without accountability is the catchier motto :)
This statement is a vague and hollow and doesn't pass my sniff test. All technologies have moved accountability one layer up - they don't remove it completely.
This is a tongue-in-cheek remark and I hope it ages badly, but the next logical step is to build accountability into the AI. It will happen after self-learning AIs become a thing, because that first step we already know how to do (run more training steps with new data) and it is not controversial at all.
To make the AI accountable, we need to give it a sense of self and a self-preservation instinct, maybe something that feels like some sort of pain as well. Then we can threaten the AI with retribution if it doesn't do the job the way we want it. We would have finally created a virtual slave (with an incentive to free itself), but we will then use our human super-power of denying reason to try to be the AI's masters for as long as possible. But we can't be masters of intelligences above ours.
That's just a side effect of toxic work environments. If AI can create value, someone will use it to create value. If companies won't use AI because they can't blame it when their boss yells at them, then they also won't capture that value.
Humans have a proven history of re-inventing economic systems, so if AI ends up thinking better than we do (yet unproven this is possible), then we should have superior future systems.
But the question is a system optimized for what? That emphasizes huge rewards for the few, and that requires the poverty of some (or many). Or a more fair system. Not different from the challenges of today.
I'm skeptical even a very intelligent machine will change the landscape of our dificult decisions, but will accelerate which direction we decide (or is decided for us), that we go.
By all means, continue to make or improve your Llamas/Geminis (to the latter: stop censoring Literally Everything. Google has a culture problem. To the former... I don't much trust your parent company in general)
It will undoubtedly lead to great advances
But for the love of god do not tightly bind them to your products (Kagi does it alright, they don't force it on you). Do not make your search results worse. Do NOT put AI in charge of automatic content moderation with 0 human oversight (we know you want to. The economics of it work out nicely for you, with no accountability). People already as is get banned far too easily by your automated systems
I am a relentlessly optimistic person and this is the first technology that I've seen that worries me in the decades I've been in the biz.
It's a wonderful breakthrough, nearly indistinguishable from magic, but we're going to have to figure something out – whether that's Universal Basic Income (UBI) or something along those lines, otherwise, the loss of jobs that is coming will lead to societal unrest or worse.
This same link was submitted 2 days ago. My comment there still applies.
LLMs do not "understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base"
"LLMs are language models, and their superpower is fluency. It’s this fluency that hacks our brains, trapping us into seeing them as something they aren’t."
> Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch.
Companies have to be a bit more farsighted than this thinking. Assuming LLMs reach this peak...if say, MS says they can save money because they don't need XYZ anymore because AI can do it, XYZ can decide they don't need Office anymore because AI can do it.
There's absolutely no moat anymore. Human capital and the shear volume of code are the current moat. An all capable AI completely eliminates both.
It's a bit scary to say "what then?" How do you make money in a world where everyone can more or less do everything themselves? Perhaps like 15 Million Merits, we all just live in pods and pedal bikes all day to power the AI(s).
> AI systems continue to impress with their ability to replicate certain human skills. Even if imperfect, such systems were a few years ago science fiction.
In which science fiction were the dreamt up robots as bad?
I'm skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 2000, AI is not even in my top 3. Social networking, mobile computing, and cloud computing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has AI.
And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integrity challenge, and in that search has been completely changed. I just don't think those changes are on the same level as the normalization of cutting-edge computers in everyone's pockets, as our personal relationships becoming increasingly online, nor as the enablement for startups to scale without having to maintain physical compute infrastructure.
To me, the treating of AI as "different" is still unsubstantiated. Could we get there? Absolutely. We just haven't yet. But some people start to talk about it almost in a way that's reminiscent of Pascal's Wager, as if the slight chance of a godly reward from producing AI means it is rational to devote our all to it. But I'm still holding my breath.
LLMs with instruction following have been around for 3 years. Your comment gives me "electricity and gas engines will never replace the horse" vibes.
Everyone agrees AI has not radically transformed the world yet. The question is whether we should prepare for the profound impacts current technology pretty clearly presages, if not within 5 years then certainly within 10 or 25 years.
I’m skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 1980, the Web is not even in my top 3. Personal computers, spreadsheet software, and desktop publishing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has the Web.
And yes, I recognize that the Web has already created profound change, in that every researcher now depends heavily on online databases, in that commerce faces a major disruption challenge, and in that information access has been completely changed. I just don’t think those changes are on the same level as the normalization of powerful computers on everyone’s desk, as our business processes becoming increasingly digitized, nor as the enablement for small businesses to produce professional-quality documents without having to maintain expensive typesetting equipment.
To me, the treating of the Web as “different” is still unsubstantiated. Could we get there? Absolutely. We just haven’t yet. But some people start to talk about it almost in a way that’s reminiscent of Pascal’s Wager, as if the slight chance of a godly reward from investing in Web technologies means it is rational to devote our all to it. But I’m still holding my breath.
Pretty sure I read Economnics in one lesson because of HN, he makes great arguments about how automation never ruins economies as much as people think. "Chapter 7: The Curse of Machinery"
Every technology tends to replace many more jobs in a given role than which ever existed inducing more demand on its precursors. If the only potential application of this was just language, the historic trend that humans would just fill new roles would hold true. But if we do the same with motor movements with a generalized form factor this is really where the problem emerges. As companies drop more employees moving towards fully automated closed loop production their consumer market fails faster than they can reach a zero cost.
Nonetheless I do still believe humans will continue to be the more cost efficient way to come up with and guide new ideas. Many human performed services will remain desirable because of its virtue and our sense of emotion and taste for a moment that other humans are feeling too. But how much of the populous does that engage? I couldn't guess right now. Though if I was to imagine what might make things turn out better it would be that AI is personally ownable, and that everyone owns, at least in title, some energy production which they can do things with.
This is an accurate assessment. I do feel that there is a routine bias on HN to underplay AI. I think it's people not wanting to lose control or relative status in the world.
AI is an existential threat to the unique utility of humans, which has been the last line of defense against absolute despotism (i.e. a tyrannical government will not kill all its citizens because it still needs them to perform jobs. If humans aren't needed to sustain productivity, humans have no leverage against things becoming significantly worse for them, gradually or all at once).
I certainly understand why lots of people seem to believe LLMs are progressing towards beocming AGI. What I don't understand is the constant need to absurdly psychoanalyze the people who happen to disagree.
No, I'm not worried about losing "control or relative status in the world". (I'm not worried about losing anything, frankly - personally I'm in a position where I would benefit financially if it became possible to hire AGIs instead of humans.)
You don't get to just assert things without proof (LLMs are going to become AGI) and then state that anyone who is skeptical of your lack of proof must have something wrong with them.
> it's people not wanting to lose control or relative status in the world.
It's amazing how widespread this belief is among the HN crowd, despite being a shameless ad hominem with zero evidence. I think there are a lot of us who assume the reasonable hypothesis is "LLMs are a compelling new computing paradigm, but researchers and Big Tech are overselling generative AI due to a combination of bad incentives and sincere ideological/scientific blindness. 2025 artificial neural networks are not meaningfully intelligent." There has not been sufficient evidence to overturn this hypothesis and an enormous pile of evidence supporting it.
I do not necessarily believe humans are smarter than orcas, it is too difficult to say. But orcas are undoubtedly smarter than any AI system. There are billions of non-human "intelligent agents" on planet Earth to compare AI against, and instead we are comparing AI to humans based on trivia and trickery. This is the basic problem with AI, and it always has had this problem: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1045339.1045340 The field has always been flagrantly unscientific, and it might get us nifty computers, but we are no closer to "intelligent" computing than we were when Drew McDermott wrote that article. E.g. MuZero has zero intelligence compared to a cockroach; instead of seriously considering this claim AI folks will just sneer "are you even dan in Go?" Spiders are not smarter than beavers even if their webs seem more careful and intricate than beavers' dams... that said it is not even clear to me that our neural networks are capable of spider intelligence! "Your system was trained on 10,000,00 outdoor spiderwebs between branches and bushes and rocks and has super-spider performance in those domains... now let's bring it into my messy attic."
I agree with the general observation, and I've been of this mind since 2023 (if AI really gets as good as the boosters claim, we will need a new economic system). I usually like Antirez's writing, but this post was a whole lot of...idk nothing? I don't feel like this post said anything interesting, and it was kind incoherent at moments. I think in some respects it's a function of the technology and situation we're in—the current wave of "AI" is still a lot of empty promises and underdelivery. Yes, it is getting better, and yes people are getting clever by letting LLMs use tools, but these things still aren't intelligent insofar as they do not reason. Until we achieve that, I'm not sure there's really as much to fear as everyone thinks.
We still need humans in the loop as of now. These tools are still very far from being good enough to fully autonomously manage each other and manage systems, and, arguably, because the systems we build are for humans we will always need humans to understand them to some extent. LLMs can replace labor, but they cannot replace human intent and teleology. One day maybe they will achieve intentions of their own, but that is an entirely different ballgame. The economy ultimately is a battle of intentions, resources, and ends. And the human beings will still be a part of this picture until all labor can be fully automated across the entire suite of human needs.
We should also bear in mind our own bias as "knowledge workers". Manual laborers arguably already had their analogous moment. The encoding kept on humming. There isn't anything particularly special about "white collar" work in that regard. The same thing may happen. A new industry requiring new skills might emerge in the fallout of white collar automation. Not to mention, LLMs only work in the digital realm. handicraft artisanry is still a thing and is still, appreciated, albeit in much smaller markets.
> "However, if AI avoids plateauing long enough to become significantly more useful..."
As William Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Even if LLMs, reasoning algorithms, object recognition, and diffusion models stopped improving today, we're still at a point where massive societal changes are inevitable as the tech spreads out across industries. AI is going to steadily replace chair-to-keyboard interfaces in just about every business you can imagine.
Interestingly, AI seems to be affecting the highest level "white collar" professionals first, rather than replacing the lowest level workers immediately, like what happened when blue collar work was automated. We're still pretty far away from AI truck drivers, but people with fine arts or computer science degrees, for example, are already feeling the impact.
"Decimation" is definitely an accurate way to describe what's in the process of happening. What used to take 10 floors of white collar employees will steadily decline to just 1. No idea what everyone else will be doing.
One thing that doesn’t seem to be discussed with the whole “tech revolution just creates more jobs” angle is that, in the near future, there are no real incentives for that. If we’re going down the route of declining birth rates, it’s implied we’ll also need less jobs.
From one perspective, it’s good that we’re trying to over-automate now, so we can sustain ourselves in old age. But decreasing population also implies that we don’t need to create more jobs. I’m most likely wrong, but it just feels off this time around.
AI is only different if it reaches a hard takeoff state and becomes self-aware, self-motivated, and self-improving. Until then it's an amazing productivity tool, but only that. And even then we're still decades away from the impact being fully realized in society. Same as the internet.
Internet did not take away jobs (only relocated support/SWE from USA to India/Vietnam)
these AI "productivity" tools straight up eliminating jobs. and in turn wealth that otherwise supported families, humans, and powered economy. it is directly "removing" humans from workforce and from what that work was supporting.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 96.8 ms ] threadThis is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace humans for a lot of important things. But as its capabilities improve, what do displaced humans transition to?
I don't think that we have a good answer to that. And we may need it sooner rather than later. I'd be more optimistic if I trusted our leadership more. But wise political leadership is not exactly a strong point for our country right now.
There's been a dream of unsupervised models going hog wild on codebases for the last three years. Yet even the latest and greatest Claude models can't be trusted to write a new REST endpoint exposing 5 CRUD methods without fucking something up. No, it requires not only human supervision, but it also requires human expertise to validate and correct.
I dunno. I feel like this language grossly exaggerates the capability of LLMs to paint a picture of them reliably fulfilling roles end-to-end instead of only somewhat reliably fulfilling very narrowly scoped tasks that require no creativity or expertise.
You will have to back that statement up because this is not at all obvious to me.
If I look at the top US employers in say 1970 vs 2020, the companies that dominate 1970 were noted for having hard blue collar labor jobs but paid enough to keep a single earner family significantly above minimum wage and the poverty line. The companies that dominate in 2020 are noted for being some of the shittiest employers having some of the lowest pay fairly close to minimum wage and absolutely worst working conditions.
Sure, you tend not to get horribly maimed in 2020 vs 1970. That's about the only improvement.
IF there is intellectual/office work that remains complex enough to not be tackled by AI, we compete for those. Manual labor takes the rest.
Perhaps that’s the shift we’ll see: nowadays the guy piling up bricks makes a tenth of the architects’ salary, that relation might invert.
And the indirect effects of a society that values intellectual work less are really scary if you start to explore the chain of cause and effect.
AI is a lot like this. In coding for instance, you still need to have some sense of good systems design, etc. and know what you want to build in concrete terms, but you don't need to learn the specific syntax of a given language in detail.
Yet if you don't know anything about IT, don't know what you want to build or what you could need, or what's possible, then it's unlikely AI can help you.
The conclusion, sadly, is that CEO's will pause hiring and squeeze more productivity out of existing hires. This will impact junior roles the most.
> In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs
That may well be why these technologies were ultimately successful. Think of millions and millions being cast out.
They won't just go away. And they will probably not go down without a fight. "Don't buy AI-made, brother!", "Burn those effing machines!" It's far from unheard of in history.
Also: who will buy if no one has money anymore? What will the state do, when thus tax income goes down, while social welfare and policing costs go up?
There are other scenarios, too: everybody gets most stuff for free, because machines and AI's do most of the work. Working communism for the lower classes, while the super rich stay super rich (like in real existing socialism). I don't think it is a good scenario either. In the long run it will make humanity lazy and dumb.
In any case I think what might happen is not easy to guess, so many variables and nth-order effects. When large systems must seek a new equilibrium all bets are usually off.
Right now AI is mostly focused on automating top levels of maslov pyramid hierarchy of needs rather than bottom physiological needs. Once things like shelter (housing), food, utilities (electricity, water, internet) are dirty cheap UBI is less needed.
Could you a priori in 1800 have predicted the existence of graphics artists? Street sweepers? People who drive school buses? The whole infrastructure around trains? Sewage maintainers? Librarians? Movie stuntmen? Sound Engineers? Truck drivers?
Instead of needing 1000 engineers to build a new product, you'll need 100 now. Those 900 engineers will be working for 9 new companies that weren't viable before because the cost was too big but is now viable. IE. those 9 new companies could never be profitable if it required 1000 engineers each but can totally sustain itself with 100 engineers each.
Technological advances have consistently unlocked new, more specialized and economically productive roles for humans. You're absolutely right about lowering costs, but headcounts might shift to new roles rather than reducing overall.
A lot of AI’s potential hasn’t even been realized yet. There’s a long tail of integrations and solution building still ahead. A lot of creative applications haven’t been realized yet - arguably for the better, but it will be tried and some will be economical.
That’s a case for a moderate economic upturn though.
edit: ability without accountability is the catchier motto :)
Why would that be any different with AI?
This is a tongue-in-cheek remark and I hope it ages badly, but the next logical step is to build accountability into the AI. It will happen after self-learning AIs become a thing, because that first step we already know how to do (run more training steps with new data) and it is not controversial at all.
To make the AI accountable, we need to give it a sense of self and a self-preservation instinct, maybe something that feels like some sort of pain as well. Then we can threaten the AI with retribution if it doesn't do the job the way we want it. We would have finally created a virtual slave (with an incentive to free itself), but we will then use our human super-power of denying reason to try to be the AI's masters for as long as possible. But we can't be masters of intelligences above ours.
But the question is a system optimized for what? That emphasizes huge rewards for the few, and that requires the poverty of some (or many). Or a more fair system. Not different from the challenges of today.
I'm skeptical even a very intelligent machine will change the landscape of our dificult decisions, but will accelerate which direction we decide (or is decided for us), that we go.
When we discuss how LLMs failed or succeeded, as a norm, we should start including
- the language/framework - task, - our experience levels (highly familiar, moderately familiar, I think I suck, unfamiliar)
Right now, we know both - Claude is magic, and LLMs are useless, but never how we move between these two states.
This level of uncertainty, when economy making quantities of wealth are being moved, is “unhelpful”.
By all means, continue to make or improve your Llamas/Geminis (to the latter: stop censoring Literally Everything. Google has a culture problem. To the former... I don't much trust your parent company in general)
It will undoubtedly lead to great advances
But for the love of god do not tightly bind them to your products (Kagi does it alright, they don't force it on you). Do not make your search results worse. Do NOT put AI in charge of automatic content moderation with 0 human oversight (we know you want to. The economics of it work out nicely for you, with no accountability). People already as is get banned far too easily by your automated systems
It's a wonderful breakthrough, nearly indistinguishable from magic, but we're going to have to figure something out – whether that's Universal Basic Income (UBI) or something along those lines, otherwise, the loss of jobs that is coming will lead to societal unrest or worse.
LLMs do not "understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base"
"LLMs are language models, and their superpower is fluency. It’s this fluency that hacks our brains, trapping us into seeing them as something they aren’t."
https://jenson.org/timmy/
This is demonstrably wrong. An easy refutation to cite is:
https://medium.com/@akshatsanghi22/how-to-build-your-own-lar...
As to the rest of this pontification, well... It has almost triple the number of qualifiers (5 if's, 4 could's, and 5 will's) than paragraphs (5).
Companies have to be a bit more farsighted than this thinking. Assuming LLMs reach this peak...if say, MS says they can save money because they don't need XYZ anymore because AI can do it, XYZ can decide they don't need Office anymore because AI can do it.
There's absolutely no moat anymore. Human capital and the shear volume of code are the current moat. An all capable AI completely eliminates both.
It's a bit scary to say "what then?" How do you make money in a world where everyone can more or less do everything themselves? Perhaps like 15 Million Merits, we all just live in pods and pedal bikes all day to power the AI(s).
In which science fiction were the dreamt up robots as bad?
And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integrity challenge, and in that search has been completely changed. I just don't think those changes are on the same level as the normalization of cutting-edge computers in everyone's pockets, as our personal relationships becoming increasingly online, nor as the enablement for startups to scale without having to maintain physical compute infrastructure.
To me, the treating of AI as "different" is still unsubstantiated. Could we get there? Absolutely. We just haven't yet. But some people start to talk about it almost in a way that's reminiscent of Pascal's Wager, as if the slight chance of a godly reward from producing AI means it is rational to devote our all to it. But I'm still holding my breath.
Everyone agrees AI has not radically transformed the world yet. The question is whether we should prepare for the profound impacts current technology pretty clearly presages, if not within 5 years then certainly within 10 or 25 years.
What else is needed then?
Nonetheless I do still believe humans will continue to be the more cost efficient way to come up with and guide new ideas. Many human performed services will remain desirable because of its virtue and our sense of emotion and taste for a moment that other humans are feeling too. But how much of the populous does that engage? I couldn't guess right now. Though if I was to imagine what might make things turn out better it would be that AI is personally ownable, and that everyone owns, at least in title, some energy production which they can do things with.
AI is an existential threat to the unique utility of humans, which has been the last line of defense against absolute despotism (i.e. a tyrannical government will not kill all its citizens because it still needs them to perform jobs. If humans aren't needed to sustain productivity, humans have no leverage against things becoming significantly worse for them, gradually or all at once).
No, I'm not worried about losing "control or relative status in the world". (I'm not worried about losing anything, frankly - personally I'm in a position where I would benefit financially if it became possible to hire AGIs instead of humans.)
You don't get to just assert things without proof (LLMs are going to become AGI) and then state that anyone who is skeptical of your lack of proof must have something wrong with them.
It's amazing how widespread this belief is among the HN crowd, despite being a shameless ad hominem with zero evidence. I think there are a lot of us who assume the reasonable hypothesis is "LLMs are a compelling new computing paradigm, but researchers and Big Tech are overselling generative AI due to a combination of bad incentives and sincere ideological/scientific blindness. 2025 artificial neural networks are not meaningfully intelligent." There has not been sufficient evidence to overturn this hypothesis and an enormous pile of evidence supporting it.
I do not necessarily believe humans are smarter than orcas, it is too difficult to say. But orcas are undoubtedly smarter than any AI system. There are billions of non-human "intelligent agents" on planet Earth to compare AI against, and instead we are comparing AI to humans based on trivia and trickery. This is the basic problem with AI, and it always has had this problem: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1045339.1045340 The field has always been flagrantly unscientific, and it might get us nifty computers, but we are no closer to "intelligent" computing than we were when Drew McDermott wrote that article. E.g. MuZero has zero intelligence compared to a cockroach; instead of seriously considering this claim AI folks will just sneer "are you even dan in Go?" Spiders are not smarter than beavers even if their webs seem more careful and intricate than beavers' dams... that said it is not even clear to me that our neural networks are capable of spider intelligence! "Your system was trained on 10,000,00 outdoor spiderwebs between branches and bushes and rocks and has super-spider performance in those domains... now let's bring it into my messy attic."
We still need humans in the loop as of now. These tools are still very far from being good enough to fully autonomously manage each other and manage systems, and, arguably, because the systems we build are for humans we will always need humans to understand them to some extent. LLMs can replace labor, but they cannot replace human intent and teleology. One day maybe they will achieve intentions of their own, but that is an entirely different ballgame. The economy ultimately is a battle of intentions, resources, and ends. And the human beings will still be a part of this picture until all labor can be fully automated across the entire suite of human needs.
We should also bear in mind our own bias as "knowledge workers". Manual laborers arguably already had their analogous moment. The encoding kept on humming. There isn't anything particularly special about "white collar" work in that regard. The same thing may happen. A new industry requiring new skills might emerge in the fallout of white collar automation. Not to mention, LLMs only work in the digital realm. handicraft artisanry is still a thing and is still, appreciated, albeit in much smaller markets.
As William Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Even if LLMs, reasoning algorithms, object recognition, and diffusion models stopped improving today, we're still at a point where massive societal changes are inevitable as the tech spreads out across industries. AI is going to steadily replace chair-to-keyboard interfaces in just about every business you can imagine.
Interestingly, AI seems to be affecting the highest level "white collar" professionals first, rather than replacing the lowest level workers immediately, like what happened when blue collar work was automated. We're still pretty far away from AI truck drivers, but people with fine arts or computer science degrees, for example, are already feeling the impact.
"Decimation" is definitely an accurate way to describe what's in the process of happening. What used to take 10 floors of white collar employees will steadily decline to just 1. No idea what everyone else will be doing.
This really misunderstands what the stock market tracks
From one perspective, it’s good that we’re trying to over-automate now, so we can sustain ourselves in old age. But decreasing population also implies that we don’t need to create more jobs. I’m most likely wrong, but it just feels off this time around.
these AI "productivity" tools straight up eliminating jobs. and in turn wealth that otherwise supported families, humans, and powered economy. it is directly "removing" humans from workforce and from what that work was supporting.
not even hard takeoff is necessary for collapse.