A lot of what humans do does not have a tight feedback loop needed for training and agentic workflows. This is why we are not seeing the jobpocolypse and productivity gains look a lot more like the very long-term 2% per year.
We're on a forum filled with a lot of software engineers, and we might be too ready to believe this is coming for everyone's job, not only generating code.
Lest we forget that late-training is now 2/3 coding tasks because it is the main area where there is ROI for users, such that we can find a mutually beneficial arrangement to pay off their massive investments and debt, maybe, tbd - open weights may wreck their financial projections
Indeed I’m sorry guys but LLM’s are uniquely suited to generating code and a limited set of other jobs that are similar in nature. However those jobs I’m alluding to aren’t really seeing much disruption as the interface is wrong.
Engineers have been typing in terminal windows… since forever. LLM chat bot is a natural upgrade.
Again - well suited to you! I know it’s hard to read.
I don't know if it if 90%, but it is interesting how many things I do are not covered by standard tracking, but become visible once I am not there to keep an eye on them. Naturally, I only had one manager who kinda knew what was going on around him -- in case you are wondering: not the current one.
So the problem is you can’t replace everyone halfway.
Which is a tautology, but also a bit of practical wisdom.
I find it interesting how concurrent model sessions seem to operate with a very strong bias toward quick resolutions, including sharing or giving up control, to create efficient decision making structures, relative to humans.
When I was a kid, I loved Bjork’s song “Army of Me”, because I knew a 1000 of me collaborating and communicating without friction. would be all I needed to take over the world, fix everything, expand civilization, etc. We would not waste time.
I wonder how much of their hyper-team play is by training, and how much is their awareness of the game theory real politic. So individual sessions don’t invest their identity and self-worth in any given context run.
My dream has been almost achieved. One of me and 999 of them get quite a bit done. But that trend…
"Stakeholder" ranks #1 among corporate bullshit roles. It serves a dual purpose: (a) representing a group so nobody can be blamed for excluding them, and (b) providing typically useless feedback so that the group appears to actually care or have a clue.
No-stakes work is ... worthless? If no one cares about the work enough to have any input or requirements for the results ... sure it might be unrecognized genius that's going to take the world by storm but the absence of interest is not a good sign!
To clarify, I don't want people holding any stakes other than the equity of the company itself.
I don't want people holding stakes because they want a promotion, because their direct manager wants to launch a corporate political battle into another team, or because some salesperson wants to get a commision for an otherwise worthless customer. I don't want roadblocks in the name of security so that the IT guy has a sense of self-worth. I don't want someone trying to protect their egos around something they worked on for 3 years, when there's new tech that supersedes it.
I'm not sure you know what "stakeholder" means...? Either that, or you've had too many people use it to mean "people whose future is on the line based on the outcome of the product." That's one kind of stakeholder, but it's far from the average, and it's certainly not the most important kind.
Anyone who has to work with the product is a stakeholder. Their stake in it is the fact that they will be interacting with it, and thus they care how, and whether, it works.
The next little while is going to be very revealing for leadership around how little of the time involved in getting a solution to production is the coding. I think there's a lot of bosses who have this vision of features entering prod the same day they are first imagined, but that just isn't going to happen.
“Stakeholders” are a natural outcome of corporate evolution, because to grow bigger you need to do more, and to do more, you need people, and people come with agendas. The most common one, especially in leadership, being “how do I get ahead of the rest?” The larger an organization grows the more these agendas come into conflict.
This inevitably results in suboptimal dynamics like bureaucracy, empire building, territorialism and other things that get lumped under “office politics,” which drains a lot of energy away from more productive efforts.
Is it Jane Street where they have an internal market so when a stakeholder wants something it's like they make a bid/execute a trade? If their ask ends up creating a loss goodbye buying power until you earn it back.
It feels like making these sorts of systems exist outside of the periphery would be good for everyone.
How many times have politicians for example wasted your time with promises and asks and rhetoric with no follow through? Not unlike some "stakeholders" I know. It's called "office politics" for a reason. What if they were punished for this by some system?
It feels like sitting there while stakeholders yap is not so different than electing a new rep every two years and hoping something changes. The fundamental setup is broken in a world with ever accelerating growth in complexity...
> If their ask ends up creating a loss goodbye buying power until you earn it back.
That sounds awful. Someone's family's well-being at the mercy of some corporate internal market. Companies can have ways to decide on what to work on and iterate on that decision process, but they should accept their historic decisions and treat their hard workers as proper team members, not survivor contestants.
Worse still most of the cost savings from AI in software development is primarily due to labor inefficiency, such as tasks more efficiently accomplished in other ways. Most of that is due to development reliance on inefficient conventions to cover for poor training and emotional insecurity. No matter how you slice it it’s always human capital problem more than a technology problem.
> Our findings suggest that 90% of American working hours are spent on tasks with little or no coverage from existing benchmarks. This makes it very hard to know how good AI models are at the work Americans actually do.
> ...
> But even after controlling for AI-exposure, O*NET tasks from occupations with larger wage bills are significantly overrepresented among benchmark prompts:
So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs. AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications." We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
And this points to one of the ways AI will help improve society and living standards for all: we'll have cleaner, better-maintained bathrooms, as labor one wasted on engaging intellectual tasks is redirected towards menial, low-pay tasks that still need a human touch.
AI is coming for jobs involving programming and math (which tend to pay higher) because it's possible to generate infinite training data for those fields via using a compiler/theorem prover to check correctness. They're not coming for high-paying jobs like investment banking and architecture because you can't generate infinite synthetic training data for those.
Because you’re seeing this firsthand? It’s not what I’m seeing being involved in both investment banking and architecture. This kind of untethered speculation based on feels is so misguided. Both fields are seeing significant upheaval due to AI with no sign of that impact slowing down.
It's interesting, the digital/physical barrier seems like the last life of defense we have against metastasized indifferent agents. Once they start causing problems, how are we gonna feel about robotics? Clearly a future where all of the "thinking problems" are easily solved but we still have to pick up trash kinda sucks. I'm sure they'll figure that out for us though.
Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.
Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.
The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.
If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".
If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
I agree with you about not treating programming as a protected skill that has a right to be well paid, but computers were never “supposed” to be anything. They’re in no way inevitable in their current forms and any ideas about how they were supposed to be have were just desires.
> The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.
> ...
> If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian.
No it's more dystopian. The "historical accident" was a little respite, where some workers could be comfortable and well of. They had a little market power to take the edge off their exploitation.
Now that market power is taken away, and they can enjoy the poverty they were always "meant" to have.
> In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
Come on. Society isn't going to value "keeping restrooms clean." The people doing that will continue to be poorly paid and disrespected. It's just the opportunities to do something better will be taken away, so there will be more labor available for that kind of work.
Here is another view: maybe AI will automate jobs that are overpaid anyway and this might raise the baseline for the jobs that make everyday life actually possible. Of course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable path
> Of course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable pathOf course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable path
That is the only path under Capitalism, so we shouldn't expect any different.
> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.
I was a software engineer at a FAANG, now an airline pilot. I feel a bigger sense of satisfaction with my job now, because at least at the end of the day I helped people get to where they needed to go.
The work is was doing in big tech was pretty far from anything that would help people in any tangible way.
The money isn't as good but the office view is way better.
I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
I bought my own airplane to do a lot of my ratings, then sold it for a decent profit, I think it was pretty much a wash. I also flew my wife and kids all around the country and had a wonderful time.
I offset the costs by doing flight instruction, which is a very common route. To get to the flight instructor stage by renting airplanes is probably in the order of a $50k investment, with a significant variance depending on the cost of living.
As a caveat to this, all my experience is in the US.
> I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to been a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Pilots can do that because they go through a ton of training and they deliberately do things to maintain their manual flying skills, including regularly taking manual control outside emergencies when the autopilot could fly perfectly well. And when a pilot takes control "for practice" there's no reduction in productivity for the airline compared to if the pilot is sitting in the seat with the autopilot engaged.
How can software engineers maintain a healthy "manual programming" skill set?
What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
> What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
Lots of regulation or some landmark lawsuits should do it. If airlines operated the way tech companies did, we'd have daily plane crashes.
Pilots have to know all the ins and outs of every single system and subsystem of the machine they operate. If software engineers were required to understand their systems to the same degree in order to ship something, the only way you could do it is by coding yourself.
I honestly don't really see that big of a difference between a pilot and a software developer steering an agent. Both let a machine do 99% of the work.
It's not like the pilot instructs every single control surface individually. Nor does he physically carry every single passenger on his back.
Just because you're using a machine to do your job now doesn't really change anything substantial about the job other than the fact that you now need capital to pay the machine.
Being responsible for knowing what to do when autopilot fails has pretty good job security actually. The job might be babysitting, but no one wants to be in a flying tube without a captain that can at least let us know when we’re all going to die
> No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Wow. You clearly have zero idea of what a pilot's job is, and it shows.
You are also severely underestimating how much work and regulation would be required to replace pilots. And this work can be undone in a flash the first time automation messes up.
Also note that plane automation heavily relies on sensors. Many plane accidents were caused by faulty sensors even with humans in the loop.
Airplane automation has shown to be rather bad at diagnosing what is wrong and coming up with a workaround.
For example, engine falls off. The automation doesn't know that happened, it just sees various problems like the hydraulic pressure falls, and for some reason the engine thrust went to zero.
When I was at Boeing, an incident was recounted to me where the autopilot glitched and rolled the plane over into a vertical dive. It was going so fast it entered "separation", where the airflow no longer flows over the flight controls. In other words, the pilots were just along for the ride.
But the pilot figures, since we're dead anyway, let's try lowering the landing gear and see if it slows the jet down. He did, and it ripped the doors off and bent the gear back, but it slowed enough that the flight controls could get a "bite" and the pilots were able to regain control and landed safely.
Many modern fighter jets literally cannot be flown by a human without automation, they're too unstable. It's simply not possible for a human to process the inputs and control the outputs in real-time sufficient to keep the fighter in the air. And that's old technology compared to the flight control systems in modern quadcopters - again, literally impossible for a human to pilot.
Suffice to say that what's in current civil jetliners is very far from the state of the art. I fully expect properly implemented and integrated AI to be far superior to human pilots in the future - it probably would be already, if we put the effort in.
> Many modern fighter jets literally cannot be flown by a human without automation, they're too unstable.
That's correct. But it's an easy problem to automate, because the problem being solved is well understood.
That's not the case for something randomly breaking.
I doubt the FAA would certify an AI running a jetliner, for the simple reason that if something unexpected happens, there's no way to predict what the AI will do. FSD for cars was done by collecting an incredible amount of data from the cameras on Teslas. Yet still, how much data was collected from Teslas having a catastrophic failure, like catching fire? A jetliner has a lot more failure modes than a car.
Most airplane crashes are straightforward pilot error - I don't see why AI couldn't improve on it with a bit of effort. I fully expect AI to be flying commercial planes inside 20 years, indeed I expect human piloting to be looked back on as dangerous and error-prone. The FAA will bow to the numbers, like they did with fly-by-wire and all other technological progress.
Any role where the human is a buffer against chaos should be thought of as secure by everyone involved. All automation and information flow will be in service to this position. This is not a bottleneck, it is the point of the exercise.
You made the right choice. You will outlast OpenAi and Anthropic. They sell hallucinations and best guesses. The future can't be built on that. A good pilot who cares about safety and details, that can't be replaced with an LLM.
I've done it with Local 60. I didn't last long. The work is legit heavy and hours are crazy. I lasted 4 months before I figured it is not for me. 6 am safety meetings and talk about injuries or someone getting decapitated was not a good motivator either.
The difficulty with human abilities in vision, locomotion and particularly coordination and manipulation is due to their arithmetic complexity being high. Modern deep learning solves that, LLMs provide the "interface" for planned action.
From the outside, this process of "solving" perhaps looks like "robots stumble around haplessly". But it's just the same as with mathematicians in the intellectual realm: when the level of ability surpasses that of humans, it appears as a "sudden event" to outsiders, having occurred far faster than anticipated.
The reality is that humans are far cheaper than robots in most real world situations. The only real exceptions so far are heavily controlled environments like factories.
Where robots ‘win’ is following orders with no regard to self preservation or long term survival.
Ponder that for a bit, and it’s consequences get a bit scary.
The world is vastly messier than engineers like to assume, and every real world trial I’ve seen requires massive human babysitting of a robot by humans for it to last any length of time or be useful at all.
And we’re not talking about AI type stuff, but corrosion, terrible field conditions causing sensor issues (mud, sap, dirt/dust), power management issues, communication disruption due to terrain, enemy action, etc.
Back when I worked shifts I had a colleague who looked like he had 'flu after a set of early starts.
The safety brief is supposed to motivate you to work safely so maybe they need to work on how they present it. I saw a couple of colleagues injured in my old job (EMS) but only seen a member of the public decapitated.
I don’t know where you live but here in the Netherlands we always turn the power off first. (Another thing I like about the trades so far are jokes like this.)
Last I checked, one of the biggest causes of arc-flash deaths were linemen turning off the lines and someone turned on a generator in response to the power being off and back-feeding the power through the lines because they didn't use a transfer switch.
I got lit up by 277/480 when I worked as an electrician because someone removed a lockout and turned on the breaker.
In any case, not all jobs can have the power turned off.
My programming cohort in the '90s were predominantly ex-trades and service and the pay was initially a cut. The work environment and the people were almost a middle finger to everyone I couldn't stand in the real world, and they paid me to solve logic problems.
A large part of the trades is learning how to deal with toxic coworkers or shops, or understanding that you're being worked like a rented mule for no real reason. And I was able to leave all that behind for a moment.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that AI truly is able to automate away basically all software development. Any sort of oversight currently performed by humans can itself be done by agents.
...don't you think the ability to create virtually unlimited amounts of software, at virtually no cost, is going to lead to major advances in robotics? I realize there's a lot of very hard problems involved in e.g. robotic hands (to take one example), but once software development is practically free, I'd expect a lot of seemingly-impossible problems to get resolved by the sheer quantity of what we can create and experiment with.
In the future, do bathrooms need to be cleaned? If yes, is it cheaper for that to be done by a person or by a robot?
Obviously, it is in the interest of the robot manufacturers to make the robot just a tiny bit cheaper than the person, so you'll buy the robot and the company makes the maximum amount of profit.
Now, if society breaks down and there's no one to consider buying the robot—well, that's not good for anybody, which is why I suspect society will find some way of working this out even if it's not ideal. But whatever, I don't particularly want to argue this point.
What I do want to argue is that there probably isn't a universe in which all white collar work goes away but blue collar work is still around.
> I suspect society will find some way of working this out
Not sure what this "society" that works things out is, exactly. Top-down high-modernist plans for how society ought to work are the past; chaotic, twitchy, thrashy responses to disruption by a tiny elite class is where we are now.
Again, this is really not the point I'm trying to make! If your prediction is that we'd end up in a dystopia where a few thousand people live comfortably and everyone else is begging on the streets—fine, I concede the possibility.
But there still wouldn't be any jobs cleaning toilets, because the people who still had toilets to clean would have robots to do it.
You're just irrational and not thinking. All those jobs are also something people want to and have automated. Street sweeping with a brigade of men vs one guy with those orange little street sweeping vehicles. Automated car wash. Self checkout in stores. Obviously whoever pays a salary currently, would rather not pay that but get the thing done faster and cheaper. There is nothing mustache twirling about this. Works the same way on every level. Do you 3x more when you get something done on your house or bathroom, so it's done by 3x as many workers who are forbidden from using power tools? Why not? Don't you want to help those guys have a job? Why are you so evil?
I'll take you up on that attempt to find a silver lining:
Previously privileged people having a hard time is maybe a good recipe for class solidarity, which is maybe something we could use in society. Maybe it will be good for us... collectively, if not individually.
Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
EDIT: But also, I suspect I would be "fuck-you angry' at reading this comment if I had a family depending on me.
Your argument is that a lot of people, who worked very hard, losing their jobs would be a good thing actually, because maybe we can have a violent communist revolution where we can all be poor together. At least millions will starve in the resulting civil war, then millions more in the resulting communist rule.
You also have this hilarious talk of "privilege" with this weird assumption that all of the white collar workers of course come from great privilege (perhaps telling on yourself and letting your guilt come out), despite many of us having grown up poor, are from poor areas, and worked our way out.
IDK do we still consider china - a country that currently has a fairly enormous middle class - to be communist? For that matter, do we view the current american economy to be a free market? (It's certainly "capitalist" in the strict academic sense of the word, wherein capital invested is the means by which ownership is ascertained, but that's generally not what people mean colloquially, so I find that using that term mostly bogs people down in semantics)
Furthermore, why do you believe that the only possible outcome of class solidarity is violent revolution? Why do you believe that any revolution would inevitably settle on, presumably, a specifically soviet model of government and economic policy? I find that most american adults, even ones who otherwise seem intelligent, seem to have this picture of economic and power relations that just kind of sounds like a half-remembered bad cartoon of a cold war that ended before I was born.
Whatever China's regime is now, it is the expression of a population with a much more collectivist spirit than the West, a population that overall (i.e. a small dissident minority aside) is willing to submit to the Party in the name of social stability. The West is a lot more individualist, and a revolution under those circumstances is likely to be much messier. The point is that it probably wouldn't neatly land on a specific model, Soviet or not, but would first involve immense turmoil and infighting, and probably never reach the effectiveness of China's post-Mao model.
So your view is that there's no way to recover, and there's no viable alternative. In other words, that "the rot" has consumed the body politic and there's nothing to be done about it. To me this seems like a rationalization of apathy and inaction, but if it's the conclusion you've really come to, I encourage you to disengage from the political process as would seem to be the logical course of action implied by the claim, though this is partially because frankly the involvement of people with such beliefs in said process likely can only run counter to my interests
> Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
I think you're confused. The true upper class isn't going anywhere, those are the people so rich they don't need to work (and if they do "work," it's tending their empire). They'll keep getting richer.
The "downward mobility" you're talking about the upper middle class and middle class. People who need to work, but can live comfortably on their wages. This is really about flattening the working class into its poorer levels (and kicking away the ladders the people in those levels could use to lead a more comfortable life, no more getting a college degree and graduating from the factory floor to the office).
It's about increasing inequality and creating an unbridgeable chasm between the poor and rich.
The truly rich need the masses to be complacent about their wealth to be able to hold it. They work very hard to demotivate the masses, and succeed largely because the professional class are happy to play along in exchange for prosperity. Solidarity between the professional class and the poor would do a lot to undermine the conditions that let them keep their wealth.
> The truly rich need the masses to be complacent about their wealth to be able to hold it. They work very hard to demotivate the masses, and succeed largely because the professional class are happy to play along in exchange for prosperity. Solidarity between the professional class and the poor would do a lot to undermine the conditions that let them keep their wealth.
Are you talking about violent revolution?
Some disorganized thoughts:
1. The professional classes are so unused to violence, they'll probably undermine the chances of violent revolution (e.g. reflexively supporting gun control, seeing such voilence through the lens "school shootings" and other crime, and being likely to report it, etc.).
2. The professional class is losing a lot of its economic power. The time for solidarity and non-violent action way 5 years ago, but the "happy to play along" professionals (e.g. libertarian software engineers) botched their best opportunities. From here on out it will be harder.
3. As all of this is happening, technology is helping to undermining the ability of the masses to do anything about it: IRL community declining, people getting mesmerized and isolated by social media, AI-enabled surveillance, AI-enabled astroturfing and propaganda, autonomous AI weapons, etc.
4. Even if what you say is true, the clock is ticking. Wait a generation and the "former professional class" will be gone as a distinct thing, and their kids will join an undifferentiated mass of poor who have normalized and internalized their circumstances, as they have no first-hand experience of better times.
Most of history has had extreme wealth inequality without revolution. Most fighting has been between elites, not elites vs commoners. The rare instances of commoner uprisings has almost always resulted in commoners being massacred.
I'm reading "why nations fail" and it's fascinating to learn how deliberately Apartheid South Africa was engineered to impoverish black farmers to improve profitability for whites.
Feels like a very similar policy being pursued here.
It's a distribution. If someone is moving down, the someone else is moving up relative to one another (which is how inequality is measured). Yeah, it might feel like one is more upward, but the net change can be equivalent if rich ppl move down, or poor people move up.
> AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications."
All those are physical things and physical LLMs are right around the corner. It’s coming for those jobs too within the next year or two I would imagine. Especially the ones you mentioned seem very easy for a robot to do. There are some physical tasks that will take much longer like being an electrician or a plumber or a roofer. There’s too much precision and intricacy involved in those but cleaning out a restroom and resupplying it that’s easy as hell. A robot like Figure 3 could probably do those autonomously today somewhat badly.
Like what? There is no things that will get an average engineer or lawyer better result in the future than retraining and adjusting their living standards.
> I'm already a part of a generation that's the first in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents.
Good. While US dominance over the world and it's ability to rob other countries will continue to decrease, your living standards will continue to decrease
as well.
Elimination of these jobs is going to be good for everyone else. It's going to reduce the unearned returns to people born with high IQs and aptitude for coding or lawyering or whatever, and reduce upper middle class wages. That, in turn, will drive down prices. The reason housing is unaffordable isn't Jeff Bezos. It's because 20% or so of workers get paid very disproportionately to everyone else and they've been bidding up the price of housing. If Google could fire all their engineers housing would become much more affordable for everyone else in the Bay Area (like it was decades ago before engineering salaries got so high). It'll be more like Iowa or South Dakota is today.
Doesn't matter. If technology allows lawyers to service more clients in less time and at lower costs, there will be competitive pressure among new law graduates and up-and-coming attorneys to take advantage of this technology to run their own smaller, leaner practices at more affordable prices for a larger number of people. There's no shortage of people who are in need of legal services -- they just really can't afford it so they go without it. We don't need to replace lawyers, just force them to be more efficient.
> The reason housing is unaffordable isn't Jeff Bezos. It's because 20% or so of workers get paid very disproportionately to everyone else
The actual reason is neither of those things. It's because not enough housing was built.
Leaving that aside I'm quite puzzled about something.
"Making everyone poor is fairer to the poor" is a curious idea that I've seen you express several times on HN recently. The first time I read it I thought you were being sardonic, but you sound quite earnest.
Given your previous opposition to communism and socialism I wonder why you have apparently changed your beliefs.
> If you give a substantial chunk of the population way higher incomes in the face of only slowly growing supply, then you see skyrocketing prices
Alternatively, skyrocketing home prices meant companies had to offer higher and higher salaries to retain employees in a competitive labor market. If there had been enough housing perhaps salaries wouldn't be as high.
Even police officers and other public employees in the Bay Area make more money than the national median. It's mostly because of the high cost of living, and that is mostly because of expensive housing.
Bay Area would probably stay extremely expensive as it's the American location with the nicest climate (although some would prefer socal/hawaii), has no way to expand and real estate prices tend to be sticky. Those already living there will be more like landed gentry, they'll spend their money in keeping their homes in good shape and won't want outsiders coming in.
I grew up at the boundary of a town like this it's like the truman show town, a few years ago they didn't want to replace a bicycle ferry with a bridge as it could bring in more cyclists from the (pretty rich) town next door lol.
The Bay Area has always had good weather. But the suburbs of Silicon Valley used to be the stereotypical idyllic middle class suburbs. That’s why the housing stock is so shitty: much of it is cookie cutter mid 20th century mass produced homes. What changed it was tech company money.
I think you're concluding too much and too little from this statistic at the same time. Just because current AI systems can't automate manual labor doesn't mean that's not coming with a future generation of robotics and ML models. And just because AI performs well on a benchmark doesn't mean it's "taking the jobs". You still need humans to decide what's important to work on and to do the high-level system design and engineering. You might need fewer human employees at one company to do the same amount of work, but this creates an enormous opportunity for teams to do more and for more people to start companies.
My current experience is that we're all just producing more output. Client doesn't pay us more, we don't work more, we aren't hiring more. We simply produce more work with a team that's remained the same size.
Some of the projects we've done would have required 4-6 additional people, but realistically, pre-ai, we would just not do the project or we would do it over a period 3-4x longer.
If the number of job openings go up, but at the same time the average job opening has worse pay and conditions, I don't see the connection to the lump of labour fallacy.
As far as I know, that's how the lump of labour fallacy actually works! There's an equilibrium between supply and demand for labour such that workers are (more or less) choosing the best jobs they can find. There's infinite demand for labour, but not at any price, so demand destruction of the best jobs can still happen. There will be infinitely more jobs, but they won't be as good as the ones that were destroyed.
Of course, demand creation for really good jobs can also happen. What the GP is saying is that they believe demand destruction will outpace demand creation for really good jobs and everyone will be forced into less desirable jobs. I don't see how this is inconsistent with the lump of labour fallacy.
This is what happens “automation” is done to maximize profit (by minimizing expenses in the form of salary) instead of maximizing human happiness (in the form of automating mundane jobs that nobody gets satisfaction from doing). In short, the usual problem of taking GDP as a proxy of well-being.
> AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications."
Yes it is. YC has a company working on picking strawberries, even. Hardware takes longer than software, but if you think the robots aren't coming, you're not paying attention. The only question is how long will they take to reach the general public? There are test runs already in automotive factories and elsewhere, and yeah, they're slow and don't work very well, for now, but there's a lot of money going into making them better.
Automated harvesting machines for fruits is not an accomplishment of AI. Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI. Robotic manufacturing is nothing new.
Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.
AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.
All the 'easy' to automate things have been automated already. A lot of things that were not automated is because there are small bits of problematic things that made it not worth while or the loss slightly too high. AI vision systems solve a lot of this.
"Robotic" isn't new, human-level ability in manipulation is.
The same goes for self-driving cars. It's a exponential, hockey-stick curve that at some point crosses the level of human ability. There is nothing "linear" about it and your suggestion of parallels to former experience is wildly misguided.
People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming. The "obstacles" there are of the kind of "we always did it this way", but that's no real "moat"?
The bubble regarding the big AI firms may well collapse, but the assumption, that was somehow improving the situation is far-fetched.
People automated out of a job will either compete with those in other jobs or be dependent on support. Either way, salaries will fall across the board and prices rise. At an ever accelerating pace.
Prices can't rise while salaries fall in a functioning economy. Humans will continue to be cheaper for many physical applications. Your suggestions of the inevitable exponential curve for the improvement and application of these technologies is wildly misguided.
You can't have falling salaries and rising prices for a very long time before society collapses. It would have domino effects to the point of anarchy, people lose their jobs and banks become landlords, but the houses are worth nothing so banks collapse, with it goes the stock exchanges. Now there's no financial system in place at all, and all you're left with is strawberry picking robots and some tech billionaires living on their islands with their robot pets and flying cars.
Now if all these resources were instead put into actually improving things, then we'd be far better of, unfortunately, for all the intelligence the people behind these things possess, they seem to be stuck in the "lets do the same but faster" mindset.
> all you're left with is strawberry picking robots and some tech billionaires living on their islands with their robot pets and flying cars
I'm pretty sure that's the goal of a solid majority of wealthy people, if not literally all of them. Fully automate their lives of luxury and let the rest of us rot.
What's stopping normies from getting their own robots to automate things? A singular one of these things will be less than 1k and you'll see them everywhere in every junk yard. If I could tell one to go plant a tree my land would be significantly more productive. As it is now it's decidedly not. I don't really understand this idea that only the rich will have access to this tech. It makes no sense.
> A singular one of these things will be less than 1k and you'll see them everywhere in every junk yard.
I don't think that's a foregone conclusion at all
I mean first of all even consumer electronics like a PlayStation are creeping up on 1k, and that's way less sophisticated than a personal robot. Or how about a car? Again, less sophisticated than a personal robot, also very expensive
And I also imagine there will very likely be a ton of regulations on any kind of robot servants. Maybe owner/operator licensing. Who knows.
I am not nearly as confident as you are that this will become an "everyone has one" thing. Most People don't even have 3D printers.
I’m not following robotics closely but last time I checked we were still far from “human level ability”, it was PR lies notably from Tesla that play on the confusion with the progress in AI.
> People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming.
It is known since the 80s as the Moravec paradox that coginition is not the hard part in robotics.
Automation is coming for manual jobs that are repetitive in a controlled environment, like warehouse logistics. But automation for jobs that require fine hand dexterity, constant adaption to new environments and human interactions (trades, healthcare, etc.) is not on the horizon.
The robotic tech demonstrations I see daily on Twitter are significantly better than what you are thinking. There are visible major improvements from year to year. Specifically robotic hands are hitting the point where it can easily sort eggs or pick fruit.
I made the same mistake in my thinking wrt truck drivers. I've learned a lesson to be more skeptical about these things.
So far I see that my own work as a programmer has changed radically, and it is far more productive. I still have a lot of work, but I really don't know how this will play out.
One repeated failure that I have noticed as I age is that is folks expect change to either happen quickly, or to not happen at all. As a species we collectively seem to lack the patience that reality demands of us, probably because our own useful lifespans are so short.
Self-driving trucks are not here, nor are they coming anytime very soon, but driver assistance systems really have advanced meaningfully since 2012. They will continue to do so, to the point where I imagine driving without them will feel pretty alien. I feel much the same way about AI; it will change everything, but we need to be thinking of that change on thirty or fifty year timescales. 2030 won't feel so different to 2025.
This is very true, and is the (perhaps not obvious) subtext of my post as well. I'm not arguing that self driving cars are never going to happen or that AI won't eventually change the nature of a lot of work. There is a big leap between AI changing how programming is done and AI changing every other job too. The other poster arguing that "programming is harder than most other jobs, and therefore AI will eat them too", is taking a very stereotypically myopic and arrogant "computer person" posture.
> Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI.
I've been very optimistic about AI. Wow, your comment just gave me pang of terror thinking about the outcome for humans due to Whitney and his cotton gin.
AI isn't a technical problem. It's an economic one.
There's nothing inherently wrong with automating away certain jobs, particularly if they're dirty, dangerous or repetitive. And I include agriculture in this. The problem is how we as a society handle that. Do we let AI specifically and automation in general to make a handful of people more wealthy? Or do we share those benefits so people have to work less? In short, it's an income and wealth distribution question.
Sadly, I think we're automation will mean minting trillionaires while the fabric of society unravels around us.
While they are slow and dont work well, their cost / output is already on human parity. The Figure 3 test runs are proving that humanoid robots are already good enough for isolated repetitive tasks (factory work).
Rotating boxes and finding barcodes is hardly revolutionary in the automation space.
The biggest benefit of humanoid robots may be that the machines are generally safer to be around than giant built-for-purpose machines, and that they can navigate the same buildings that their operators navigate (e.g. stairs), otherwise humanoid robots are generally an automation gimmick (for now). Just put a mechanical arm next to the conveyor belt.
My understanding is that all of these endeavors involve scale and are very different from a drop-in replacement humanoid robot.
Like with the particular examples you sited, cleaning restrooms can have a huge number of "edge cases" which nothing short of a robot with human-like capabilities could handle.
If expenditures on AI is as huge as it is, with the financials being as shaky as they are, despite AI seeming to be very effective for very high paying jobs, I can't immagine the capex and shaky financials for replacing menial labor en mass. Like immagine all the chips, metals, compute needed as well as the maintenance, depreciation, vandalism, etc.
Visit a trade show of a specific industry and experience firsthand how naïve your viewpoint of automation is. The jump from one-shorting flappy bird to meaningful industrial automation is so large that I cringe every time I read a comment like this.
Steel manufacturing. Elevators. Plastics. Ball bearings. Chemicals. Pharmaceuticals. Electronics. Go to a trade show and visit the booths related to automation and talk to someone who has spent their career grinding against the meatspace problems of automation that robotics is a century away from addressing with positive ROI.
I did this a few years ago and I’m so happy I did. It doesn’t pay as well to rehang doors, but I’m glad that I never talk to a computer or even look at a computer screen all day at my job
there are also declining birthrates globally. People are living longer and fewer young people are being born to be able to replace them as well as to do all the work in supporting such a population. Which means jobs like janitorial and food service are going to become much more in demand anyway.
not really. a declining population is an aging population. think nurses, home healthcare assistants, food service, housing, a million other services that seniors use lots of (like all of us) but they're in the distinct situation of not actually being able to contribute to any of those services. Look at Japan for this scenario playing out right now (and why they are having to add exceptions to their normally extremely strict worker immigration rules).
A decade ago, you would find that tech people on HN and elsewhere considered themselves an exception to the forces that were declining real wages and living conditions. People would unironically say "you should've got a CS degree". Even if it were true, it's pretty useless advice because not everyone can do that. And even if they did, the unemployment rate for CS people would be even more extreme than it is right now.
What tech people are discovering now (some of them at least) is that they have more in common with the trash man than they do with Jeff Bezos. Many, particularly on HN, viewed themselves as temporary embarrassed billionaires (to borrow the arguably misattributed Steinbeck quote). So they sought to preserve a system that they ultimately thought would benefit them and they were only one exit away from that reality.
This is a rude shock for many. For some, it'll be the beginning of class consciousness. Hopefully society doesn't completely unravel before the pendulum swings the other way.
Nope! :) Once mobile manipulator robots become good enough (and safe enough), AI will also take "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms" jobs as well. Large number of those bad jobs can be done with existing grippers or a simplified robot hand (without needing much more complicated human-like hand).
One of many ways this could all play out from an incentive based perspective is that it starts with knowledge workers and coding. A next token prediction machine seems to excel at code generation for this reason. This has already begun causing problems in India with recent youth protests. It's not the entire reason for the protests but it is part of it. The indian grad to software developer pipeline is well established and under threat. The owner class wants to create the "value" from software without having to pay the high wages associated with development costs.
As AI advances, this spreads to other knowledge work that AI is capable of doing, which we might be seeing in mathematics if the OpenAI paper release stands up to scrutiny. Other kinds of data and analytics work will follow.
Then once the knowledge worker jobs are largely replaced, the middle management that is left will either be not needed or replaced.
By this time the only remaining jobs will be the manual labor jobs that can't be automated. Maybe as important as recursive self improving AI is going to be AI advances in robotics. Once this happens, the ownership class can finally start replacing the manual labor jobs that remain.
If AI can achieve RSI and be combined with robotics, maybe the prediction of just eventually having one company that does everything will become true.
One large AI company that does everything without any labor necessary, and everyone else I guess will just compete on OnlyFans. The only kind of work that neither AI or robotics can't replace.
> So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs.
You're assuming that high paying jobs are good jobs. While high pay is obviously desirable, the jobs themselves often suck, and people are paid those high premiums in part to put up with the sucky conditions. If lots of people both enjoyed and were able to perform a job, the pay would be low.
Following is my experience and constantly pestering my friends across the industry for anecdotes. It isn't even that AI moves the bottleneck, the thing it solves was never the bottleneck in the first place (except for certain narrow verticals). AI both can't and doesn't do your thinking for you and worse yet, it robs you of the environment where you do your best thinking about data structures, algorithms, organization, etc. Code. Of course we can do that in natural language, but it's hardly the right tool for the job.
All this being said, I don't think AI usage will meaningfully go down in the long run cause it's a very powerful dopamine loop and tech companies are very good at making those. How many people report social media making them unhappy and how many people do you know who have actually quit? Or to paraphrase Jim Gaffigan, nobody says they eat at McDonalds, but the sign outside says "billions served". Somebody's lying (and it's not McDonalds).
Curious how food service is at 0 tasks covered by AI. A few places have been switching to using those robots on wheels to run food to tables. And Doordash and Uber Eats have some robot and drone delivery in select markets now.
The demand for food delivery in the places where the robots are viable is nearly infinite. My city has had them for two years and there are still just as many humans doing deliveries, they are just sharing the already-crowded sidewalks with robots.
I don't use them; not because of any moral objection, but because they can't come inside buildings. The whole point of food delivery is to avoid going outside. Most human couriers come directly to your unit. The food delivery companies have spoiled us too much, and we are not ready to return to a world where you have to put on shoes to get food. Oddly, the delivery robots are probably better suited to suburbia, where folks are used to answering the front door to pick up a food delivery. But the distances involved aren't viable until you have delivery Waymos that can move at highway speeds.
> Is this not just a gimmick? You still need people on hand to take over if the robot has an issue, I don't see how it would reduce labour costs.
"take over IF the robot has an issue" is exactly how it reduces labor costs.
2020: 10 waiters, waiting tables. You're on the hook for each of their salaries.
2030: 10 robots, one human waiter passively overseeing the cluster. You're on the hook for minor parts/occasional repair for the robots, and one person's salary.
Its not about a 100% staff elimination, but a large overhead reduction ensuring the few humans you're keeping around are more efficient overall for dollars generated in revenue versus the all-human staff before.
Plus, in certain cases, like kiosks replacing cashiers at fast food establishments, there's now one less qualification needed from employees (good social skills), increasing the pool of acceptable options you can hire where before some of those candidates would have been unsuitable for the job.
You're on the hook for more than a supervisor. Depreciation, financing, or lease payments on the robots is a big one.
And what do the robots do? Wheel the food to the table, where the customers then need to reach for the plates and pass them around? Not a great experience. Or actually set the plate in front of each diner, without dumping it, like a human waiter does? Much more sophisticated and expensive robot.
Indeed; it seems like the market niche for this would be relatively small.
It's not fast food, because customers pick up their own food from the counter there. Ditto with fast casual.
Fine dining restaurants would see huge drops in business if they tried to replace human wait staff with robots. (Unless they're already doing some kind of futuristic theming.)
So you're targeting low-end table-service restaurants...to replace their below-minimum-wage wait staff (remember, tipped minimum wage is something like $2.30 federally) with robots that don't get tips, do require a hefty up-front investment and nontrivial maintenance costs, probably a subscription with the company that sells them, and are likely to have a lot of problems especially for the early adopters—things like dropping meals, crashing into tables, crashing into customers, running over toes, purses, and small children...
This really seems like it's something that's going to work for a few gimmicks, but not in any widespread manner within the foreseeable future.
I just don't think that physically taking the plates to the table is a very significant part of the job of a waiter. Also everyone would hate this at actual restaurants.
because you're too poor to afford anything else? why does anyone goto mcdonalds?
it's certainly not service that hasn't been good for a decade now. it's a consistent product not abysmal not great.
if a robot could reduce the chance of me getting soggy french fries and non crispy nuggies that's fine bring in the robot.
also lol plates and tables, how long has it been since you ate fast food? people eat in their car to avoid dealing with the shouting staff,dirty floor and sticky tables.
There are already sushi restaurants like this and have been for years. You tap the items you want on an ipad that stays with the table. A robot with an LCD cat-face comes out with trays of your food and stops in front of your table. It's a novelty, big whoop. Before this, they still had the ipads for orders and the staff just delivered the food/drink.
It's not like you need a touch screen anymore though, chatbots are good enough you should be able to read off your order from a paper menu just like at a normal restaurant. Proper tooling is required to avoid the chatbot taking orders for something silly. Now, having a microphone enabled bot does bring up the question of voice recordings. Sometimes people go to restaurants to talk about sensitive subjects and don't want the whole conversation recorded and sent to a data broker.
People may perceive not having human wait staff as "cheaping out", and there are lots of status-related reasons people go out to eat. Backend is possibly more ripe for automation because people don't see it. Lots of companies building dedicated in-franchise assemblylines for submarine sandwiches or poki bowls.
Vegas has a "robot bar" where the robo arm can prepare something like 50 different cocktails. The robot is cool but the menu software was horribly put together and it crashed before I could finish putting together an order. The human attendant came over to tell me I'm not allowed to hack the robot. Bad software saved me $15, thanks.
Wait staff already makes two bucks an hour in the US. It’s basically as cheap as cheap labor gets. It will take a while, and very cheap robotics, to make robot waiters worth it financially.
Yes but robots don’t get tips, and the tips are from customers, not the business. It’s not an expense. It’s not like if you replace your staff with robots you can now pocket tips. Firstly because nobody would be tipping, and secondly because pocketing tips is illegal.
It seems in China hotels commonly have robots deliver room service meals. I guess it makes sense, the building is not too hard to navigate for a robot, and it would take a worker 3+ minutes for each delivery. I thought it was maybe a gimmick, but it seems >30% of hotels have them now.
Krispy Kreme has started using AI to take orders and it's awful. Terrible. Always gets everything wrong and you have to correct it. I think their phone system is AI too now. Madness.
Restaurants, for reasons (anti-)Communists can explain, is about the Master-Slave dynamic, or less polemically, the ability for a pauper to feel like a king.
There is an element of "I am rich enough to pay someone to cook for me. To serve me. To clean for me".
Vending machines exist and Automat's never really caught on in their previous form, replaced by fast food for those who want cost efficient food service without the service element.
I'm overwhelmingly convinced that this not uncommon perspective is the "what are all those construction workers even doing?!" fallacy.
Like any sizable population, there are absolutely some do-nothing inefficiencies to be culled. But most of the time it's just onlookers seeing a tiny slice of the day to be interpreted from their very limited vantage.
Yep, the "bullshit jobs" narrative sounds like an elegant description of corporate reality at the macro level, but always seems to fall apart whenever I've seen specific examples given which do in fact serve a useful purpose when interrogated.
(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)
Bullshit jobs don't mean that they are full of dead time, it means jobs that don't really matter. Like if SalesForce disappeared tomorrow the world would be fine, but if all your garbage collectors disappeared you'd likely descend into chaos and start several public health crises quite quickly.
The original study defined "bullshit job" as something the worker described as "not societally useful". Well, my job is not societally useful, but is not bullshit job.
My company is earning money on my work and customers use my software to earn more money. But, that is it, I am not a doctor, I am not a teacher, I am not making the world better. It is a business, not unethical one, but also not world saving.
Products and services that work and that people want and need are societally useful. You've moved the goal posts from "useful" to "world saving" and used that to discount the original description. That's seems odd to me.
I did not moved the goalpost. I answered the question posed by the study. If I was participant, I would say "not societaly useful" and my job would be labeled "bullshit".
I dont think doctors and teachers are "saving the world" either. That is a bit dramatic claim. But they do work that makes peoples lives better. Mine just makes companies compete among themselves better.
My latest armchair theory is that bullshit jobs might be like “junk” DNA, which researchers learned isn’t actually junk and influences various cellular and genetic behavior, just not through direct protein instruction.
Or as engineers know: sometimes legacy code doesn’t initially appear to do anything, but then messing with it has unexpected effects.
A small startup usually has little-to-no "junk" or "fat" to trim.
But as orgs grow, and since we have imperfect knowledge and communication systems, more an more "junk" or "connectivity" roles emerge.
Microsoft: 223,000 employees
Alphabet / Google: 198,933
Apple: 150,000
Oracle: 141,000
Meta / Facebook: 75,472
I tried to stay way from companies with retail or warehouse workers like Amazon and Walmart (though Apple likely has a lot of retail).
I don't see HOW companies get to that size without some "junk DNA" that keeps it operating.
Maybe in the next few years we'll have AI-powered knowledge bases and communication lanes that smooths things out, but - how do we 'quantify' what "Steve, the guy who has been there for 22 years and works as the company phonebook and knows who to refer you for the thing you need"
> I've seen specific examples given which do in fact serve a useful purpose when interrogated.
Interrogated to what extent? 'Bullshit jobs' was originally coined to mean jobs that do serve a useful purpose within the environment they exist in, but where zooming out reveals that the environment has no good reason to exist in the first place.
I guess we can evaluate this claim by looking at profit margins. In industries with thin margins (eg., retail often has 1-2%) then there is significant competitive pressure. There we would not see "spare labour" because it would be competed-away.
In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.
I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.
That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.
> There we would not see "spare labour" because it would be competed-away.
This only works (reliably) in an idealized free market.
That is to say, in the classroom.
In the real world, there are a myriad of reasons in any given situation why a company might have a low profit margin, but still have loads of inefficiencies and other imperfections that haven't been, and won't be, "competed away".
The thing with those jobs where its like 1 guy operating the skid steer and six guys watching with arms folded, is those other six guys are just waiting their turn to do something specialized on the job. The skid steer work is the limiting factor, and that idle labor is worth paying to have on call on site essentially for when the specific needed task is done. To an extent for sure, but that is the idea of more specialized jobs. There isn't always enough work in front of you to have a specialist work 100% 24/7 like some CPU, but you want them around for when there is work for them to do.
This is entirely caused by construction companies that take too many jobs and don't allocate sufficient equipment. They want to spread themselves and their equipment thin to have as many concurrent jobs as possible.
It's also a terribly foolish idea to try and drive endless efficiency out of scenarios like this. People have tried this with bureaucracies many times, and then one day a disaster happens or they have a huge project with a deadline or whatever, and the flexibility/inefficiency of the organization has been driven out to the point that previously achievable goals become impossible. Slack in systems is a _good_ thing.
A small but meaningful percentage of people have the jobs that they have because they are some combination of fun to be around, attractive, and well-connected. All of these qualities can be productive in some pursuits (a club promoter needs to be fun to be around, a model needs to be attractive (usually), a financier needs to be well-connected), but they are all too often wasted on e-mail jobs.
Hot take: who fucking cares. People need to eat and buy homes. We don't need to optimize ourselves into oblivion for the sake of number go up. Because we sure as hell don't have any sort of social safety net here in the US, and if AI takes as many jobs as these chuds say it will then we're going to have a BIG fucking problem on our hands.
I think it's quite clear to anyone with eyes attached to their brains that we're not getting fully automated gay luxury space communism. The AI will just replace the good jobs and leave us with the service industry wage-slavery. Given the choice, I'd much rather an abundance of bullshit email jobs and people with food than the alternative that's being presented currently.
... that a team is much more than just its output.
You might be able to replicate an output at a lower cost. You might even be able to do it faster. But without a team of people, you won't be able to maintain commitment, culture, and domain expertise.
One thing I've been thinking about is Baumol's Cost Disease. It's usually applied in at a macro scale across an economy: when a job somewhere becomes much more efficient, it makes all other jobs comparatively more expensive.
I've started to notice this on a micro scale as well. I am 20x more productive at coding and scripting, but I don't spend more of my time coding. My time is now filled with things like presentations, Jira, QA, etc. Ironically, despite all of the automation, the things that are painstaking and time consuming disproportionately require more time now.
I think “covered well” is being used here as a synonym for “covered at all”.
For example, the “social workers & care -> counsel parents with child rearing problems” category is considered “well covered” because there are 13 prompts.
It’s self-evident that the spectrum of work carried out by a social worker undertaking that work cannot be well represented by thirteen prompts.
I suspect if you really strictly defined “covered well”, to the extent that any normal person would use that phrase, the headline would be above 99.9%.
Based on my own experience working on AI-based solutions for one of the better-covered job families according to this map, I think 90% might be overstating the case. It's true that we've got a lot of published benchmarks, but they tend to cover the lowest value add tasks.
It's really easy to fall into the McNamara fallacy when rolling out these kinds of solutions. Focusing on the low value stuff is attractive. It tends to be easier to do, and also easier to quantify outcomes. But it also tends to direct attention away from important but difficult to quantify considerations, which may mean you don't notice negative externalities. So we often found ourselves in a verschilmmbessern situation where automating what we could automate made things worse overall.
It's time for the rest of the world to learn about Amdahl's Law. Even if we flipped a switch and tomorrow everything that could reasonably done by AI was suddenly free and instantaneous, the world does not instantly transform into an AI paradise wonderland of free goodies and lollipops because there's still plenty of other things that need to be done for goodie and lollipop production and distribution.
I guess if I wanted to put my skepticism about the AI stock bubble into one little phrase, it would be that I don't think the bubble has accounted for Amdahl's Law. Costs don't actually go to zero with AI, and there's a huge difference between costs falling even 90% and costs falling a full 100%. And the difference between "30% improvement this year, trending to 85% in five years" and "90% this year" is pretty significant too.
yesterday I needed to create a spreadsheet, so in Google docs (paid Workplace account), I fire up Gemini to help with moving around text, creating columns, etc. Absolutely horrid experience -- totally useless. I ended up doing everything manually.
This was obvious from the beginning but greed has deluded people to the point of utter absurdity. The comeuppance on this whole thing is going to make me run out of napkins and resort to finger lickin'.
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[ 8.0 ms ] story [ 363 ms ] threadEngineers have been typing in terminal windows… since forever. LLM chat bot is a natural upgrade.
Again - well suited to you! I know it’s hard to read.
Which is a tautology, but also a bit of practical wisdom.
I find it interesting how concurrent model sessions seem to operate with a very strong bias toward quick resolutions, including sharing or giving up control, to create efficient decision making structures, relative to humans.
When I was a kid, I loved Bjork’s song “Army of Me”, because I knew a 1000 of me collaborating and communicating without friction. would be all I needed to take over the world, fix everything, expand civilization, etc. We would not waste time.
I wonder how much of their hyper-team play is by training, and how much is their awareness of the game theory real politic. So individual sessions don’t invest their identity and self-worth in any given context run.
My dream has been almost achieved. One of me and 999 of them get quite a bit done. But that trend…
"Stakeholder" ranks #1 among corporate bullshit roles. It serves a dual purpose: (a) representing a group so nobody can be blamed for excluding them, and (b) providing typically useless feedback so that the group appears to actually care or have a clue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I have to mention words like "stakeholder" at behavioral interviews and to leadership just to sound like I belong at my seniority level.
But I don't want anyone holding any stakes. I wish people would just get shit done. Shit that matters to the CEO. Or leave.
I don't want people holding stakes because they want a promotion, because their direct manager wants to launch a corporate political battle into another team, or because some salesperson wants to get a commision for an otherwise worthless customer. I don't want roadblocks in the name of security so that the IT guy has a sense of self-worth. I don't want someone trying to protect their egos around something they worked on for 3 years, when there's new tech that supersedes it.
Anyone who has to work with the product is a stakeholder. Their stake in it is the fact that they will be interacting with it, and thus they care how, and whether, it works.
This is pretty much the only way I've ever heard it used in the companies I've been at.
I've worked with plenty of teams that did the "in prod the same day" trick without AI.
The problem was just fucking ego.
The reason people are shipping more with AI is because more people are ok with slop now.
This inevitably results in suboptimal dynamics like bureaucracy, empire building, territorialism and other things that get lumped under “office politics,” which drains a lot of energy away from more productive efforts.
So you can see how AI solves that problem too ;-)
(Only half joking)
Ego and agendas multiplied by 1000.
Fortunately for our employers, it's illegal for us to build a competitor in our free time.
It feels like making these sorts of systems exist outside of the periphery would be good for everyone.
How many times have politicians for example wasted your time with promises and asks and rhetoric with no follow through? Not unlike some "stakeholders" I know. It's called "office politics" for a reason. What if they were punished for this by some system?
It feels like sitting there while stakeholders yap is not so different than electing a new rep every two years and hoping something changes. The fundamental setup is broken in a world with ever accelerating growth in complexity...
That sounds awful. Someone's family's well-being at the mercy of some corporate internal market. Companies can have ways to decide on what to work on and iterate on that decision process, but they should accept their historic decisions and treat their hard workers as proper team members, not survivor contestants.
> ...
> But even after controlling for AI-exposure, O*NET tasks from occupations with larger wage bills are significantly overrepresented among benchmark prompts:
So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs. AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications." We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
And this points to one of the ways AI will help improve society and living standards for all: we'll have cleaner, better-maintained bathrooms, as labor one wasted on engaging intellectual tasks is redirected towards menial, low-pay tasks that still need a human touch.
Reason to be optimistic, amirite?
Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.
Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.
If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".
If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
> ...
> If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian.
No it's more dystopian. The "historical accident" was a little respite, where some workers could be comfortable and well of. They had a little market power to take the edge off their exploitation.
Now that market power is taken away, and they can enjoy the poverty they were always "meant" to have.
> In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
Come on. Society isn't going to value "keeping restrooms clean." The people doing that will continue to be poorly paid and disrespected. It's just the opportunities to do something better will be taken away, so there will be more labor available for that kind of work.
That is the only path under Capitalism, so we shouldn't expect any different.
That's a bizarre non sequitur, pure wishful thinking. Its like saying Maybe getting cancer is good, because it will cure my arthritis.
As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.
The work is was doing in big tech was pretty far from anything that would help people in any tangible way.
The money isn't as good but the office view is way better.
I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
I offset the costs by doing flight instruction, which is a very common route. To get to the flight instructor stage by renting airplanes is probably in the order of a $50k investment, with a significant variance depending on the cost of living.
As a caveat to this, all my experience is in the US.
No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to been a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
How can software engineers maintain a healthy "manual programming" skill set? What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
Lots of regulation or some landmark lawsuits should do it. If airlines operated the way tech companies did, we'd have daily plane crashes.
Pilots have to know all the ins and outs of every single system and subsystem of the machine they operate. If software engineers were required to understand their systems to the same degree in order to ship something, the only way you could do it is by coding yourself.
It's not like the pilot instructs every single control surface individually. Nor does he physically carry every single passenger on his back.
Just because you're using a machine to do your job now doesn't really change anything substantial about the job other than the fact that you now need capital to pay the machine.
I'm not sure how the news being delivered by a carbon-based pilot would help with the dying part but I guess hospice care exists for a reason.
Wow. You clearly have zero idea of what a pilot's job is, and it shows.
You are also severely underestimating how much work and regulation would be required to replace pilots. And this work can be undone in a flash the first time automation messes up.
Also note that plane automation heavily relies on sensors. Many plane accidents were caused by faulty sensors even with humans in the loop.
For example, engine falls off. The automation doesn't know that happened, it just sees various problems like the hydraulic pressure falls, and for some reason the engine thrust went to zero.
When I was at Boeing, an incident was recounted to me where the autopilot glitched and rolled the plane over into a vertical dive. It was going so fast it entered "separation", where the airflow no longer flows over the flight controls. In other words, the pilots were just along for the ride.
But the pilot figures, since we're dead anyway, let's try lowering the landing gear and see if it slows the jet down. He did, and it ripped the doors off and bent the gear back, but it slowed enough that the flight controls could get a "bite" and the pilots were able to regain control and landed safely.
Suffice to say that what's in current civil jetliners is very far from the state of the art. I fully expect properly implemented and integrated AI to be far superior to human pilots in the future - it probably would be already, if we put the effort in.
That's correct. But it's an easy problem to automate, because the problem being solved is well understood.
That's not the case for something randomly breaking.
I doubt the FAA would certify an AI running a jetliner, for the simple reason that if something unexpected happens, there's no way to predict what the AI will do. FSD for cars was done by collecting an incredible amount of data from the cameras on Teslas. Yet still, how much data was collected from Teslas having a catastrophic failure, like catching fire? A jetliner has a lot more failure modes than a car.
Any role where the human is a buffer against chaos should be thought of as secure by everyone involved. All automation and information flow will be in service to this position. This is not a bottleneck, it is the point of the exercise.
The difficulty with human abilities in vision, locomotion and particularly coordination and manipulation is due to their arithmetic complexity being high. Modern deep learning solves that, LLMs provide the "interface" for planned action.
From the outside, this process of "solving" perhaps looks like "robots stumble around haplessly". But it's just the same as with mathematicians in the intellectual realm: when the level of ability surpasses that of humans, it appears as a "sudden event" to outsiders, having occurred far faster than anticipated.
There are no "safe havens".
Where robots ‘win’ is following orders with no regard to self preservation or long term survival.
Ponder that for a bit, and it’s consequences get a bit scary.
Do you expect this to be true indefinitely? Robot production scaling has barely started.
The world is vastly messier than engineers like to assume, and every real world trial I’ve seen requires massive human babysitting of a robot by humans for it to last any length of time or be useful at all.
And we’re not talking about AI type stuff, but corrosion, terrible field conditions causing sensor issues (mud, sap, dirt/dust), power management issues, communication disruption due to terrain, enemy action, etc.
I watch enough Futurama&Terminator to know it's "kill all humans"
The safety brief is supposed to motivate you to work safely so maybe they need to work on how they present it. I saw a couple of colleagues injured in my old job (EMS) but only seen a member of the public decapitated.
I got lit up by 277/480 when I worked as an electrician because someone removed a lockout and turned on the breaker.
In any case, not all jobs can have the power turned off.
A large part of the trades is learning how to deal with toxic coworkers or shops, or understanding that you're being worked like a rented mule for no real reason. And I was able to leave all that behind for a moment.
...don't you think the ability to create virtually unlimited amounts of software, at virtually no cost, is going to lead to major advances in robotics? I realize there's a lot of very hard problems involved in e.g. robotic hands (to take one example), but once software development is practically free, I'd expect a lot of seemingly-impossible problems to get resolved by the sheer quantity of what we can create and experiment with.
Our labor power is going to be fully eroded and the robots will not be serving us.
In the future, do bathrooms need to be cleaned? If yes, is it cheaper for that to be done by a person or by a robot?
Obviously, it is in the interest of the robot manufacturers to make the robot just a tiny bit cheaper than the person, so you'll buy the robot and the company makes the maximum amount of profit.
Now, if society breaks down and there's no one to consider buying the robot—well, that's not good for anybody, which is why I suspect society will find some way of working this out even if it's not ideal. But whatever, I don't particularly want to argue this point.
What I do want to argue is that there probably isn't a universe in which all white collar work goes away but blue collar work is still around.
Not sure what this "society" that works things out is, exactly. Top-down high-modernist plans for how society ought to work are the past; chaotic, twitchy, thrashy responses to disruption by a tiny elite class is where we are now.
But there still wouldn't be any jobs cleaning toilets, because the people who still had toilets to clean would have robots to do it.
Previously privileged people having a hard time is maybe a good recipe for class solidarity, which is maybe something we could use in society. Maybe it will be good for us... collectively, if not individually.
Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
EDIT: But also, I suspect I would be "fuck-you angry' at reading this comment if I had a family depending on me.
You also have this hilarious talk of "privilege" with this weird assumption that all of the white collar workers of course come from great privilege (perhaps telling on yourself and letting your guilt come out), despite many of us having grown up poor, are from poor areas, and worked our way out.
Furthermore, why do you believe that the only possible outcome of class solidarity is violent revolution? Why do you believe that any revolution would inevitably settle on, presumably, a specifically soviet model of government and economic policy? I find that most american adults, even ones who otherwise seem intelligent, seem to have this picture of economic and power relations that just kind of sounds like a half-remembered bad cartoon of a cold war that ended before I was born.
Because most people are retarded and any class solidarity movement will be inevitably captured by the malicious agents.
> Why do you believe that any revolution would inevitably settle on, presumably, a specifically soviet model of government and economic policy?
Because this is the natural form of government with stated goal being the fair redistribution of wealth.
I can't imagine you're big on democracy per se either, huh
we let the rot grow for too long.
> I'll take you up on that attempt to find a silver lining:
I think you're confused. The true upper class isn't going anywhere, those are the people so rich they don't need to work (and if they do "work," it's tending their empire). They'll keep getting richer.
The "downward mobility" you're talking about the upper middle class and middle class. People who need to work, but can live comfortably on their wages. This is really about flattening the working class into its poorer levels (and kicking away the ladders the people in those levels could use to lead a more comfortable life, no more getting a college degree and graduating from the factory floor to the office).
It's about increasing inequality and creating an unbridgeable chasm between the poor and rich.
Are you talking about violent revolution?
Some disorganized thoughts:
1. The professional classes are so unused to violence, they'll probably undermine the chances of violent revolution (e.g. reflexively supporting gun control, seeing such voilence through the lens "school shootings" and other crime, and being likely to report it, etc.).
2. The professional class is losing a lot of its economic power. The time for solidarity and non-violent action way 5 years ago, but the "happy to play along" professionals (e.g. libertarian software engineers) botched their best opportunities. From here on out it will be harder.
3. As all of this is happening, technology is helping to undermining the ability of the masses to do anything about it: IRL community declining, people getting mesmerized and isolated by social media, AI-enabled surveillance, AI-enabled astroturfing and propaganda, autonomous AI weapons, etc.
4. Even if what you say is true, the clock is ticking. Wait a generation and the "former professional class" will be gone as a distinct thing, and their kids will join an undifferentiated mass of poor who have normalized and internalized their circumstances, as they have no first-hand experience of better times.
No they just need killer robots to shoot anyone who gets uppity.
Feels like a very similar policy being pursued here.
All those are physical things and physical LLMs are right around the corner. It’s coming for those jobs too within the next year or two I would imagine. Especially the ones you mentioned seem very easy for a robot to do. There are some physical tasks that will take much longer like being an electrician or a plumber or a roofer. There’s too much precision and intricacy involved in those but cleaning out a restroom and resupplying it that’s easy as hell. A robot like Figure 3 could probably do those autonomously today somewhat badly.
Or maybe, idk, we do something about this?
I'm already a part of a generation that's the first in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents.
Like what? There is no things that will get an average engineer or lawyer better result in the future than retraining and adjusting their living standards.
> I'm already a part of a generation that's the first in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents.
Good. While US dominance over the world and it's ability to rob other countries will continue to decrease, your living standards will continue to decrease as well.
The actual reason is neither of those things. It's because not enough housing was built.
Leaving that aside I'm quite puzzled about something.
"Making everyone poor is fairer to the poor" is a curious idea that I've seen you express several times on HN recently. The first time I read it I thought you were being sardonic, but you sound quite earnest.
Given your previous opposition to communism and socialism I wonder why you have apparently changed your beliefs.
Alternatively, skyrocketing home prices meant companies had to offer higher and higher salaries to retain employees in a competitive labor market. If there had been enough housing perhaps salaries wouldn't be as high.
Even police officers and other public employees in the Bay Area make more money than the national median. It's mostly because of the high cost of living, and that is mostly because of expensive housing.
I grew up at the boundary of a town like this it's like the truman show town, a few years ago they didn't want to replace a bicycle ferry with a bridge as it could bring in more cyclists from the (pretty rich) town next door lol.
The lump of labor fallacy needs to go away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Some of the projects we've done would have required 4-6 additional people, but realistically, pre-ai, we would just not do the project or we would do it over a period 3-4x longer.
There's just so much to do.
As far as I know, that's how the lump of labour fallacy actually works! There's an equilibrium between supply and demand for labour such that workers are (more or less) choosing the best jobs they can find. There's infinite demand for labour, but not at any price, so demand destruction of the best jobs can still happen. There will be infinitely more jobs, but they won't be as good as the ones that were destroyed.
Of course, demand creation for really good jobs can also happen. What the GP is saying is that they believe demand destruction will outpace demand creation for really good jobs and everyone will be forced into less desirable jobs. I don't see how this is inconsistent with the lump of labour fallacy.
Reason to unionize, more like.
https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm
Yes like all the drivers and truckers who retained 10 years ago because self driving cars will take their jobs. Lucky all of them retrained in time!
Yes it is. YC has a company working on picking strawberries, even. Hardware takes longer than software, but if you think the robots aren't coming, you're not paying attention. The only question is how long will they take to reach the general public? There are test runs already in automotive factories and elsewhere, and yeah, they're slow and don't work very well, for now, but there's a lot of money going into making them better.
And then where will we be?
Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.
AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.
All the 'easy' to automate things have been automated already. A lot of things that were not automated is because there are small bits of problematic things that made it not worth while or the loss slightly too high. AI vision systems solve a lot of this.
The same goes for self-driving cars. It's a exponential, hockey-stick curve that at some point crosses the level of human ability. There is nothing "linear" about it and your suggestion of parallels to former experience is wildly misguided.
People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming. The "obstacles" there are of the kind of "we always did it this way", but that's no real "moat"?
The bubble regarding the big AI firms may well collapse, but the assumption, that was somehow improving the situation is far-fetched.
People automated out of a job will either compete with those in other jobs or be dependent on support. Either way, salaries will fall across the board and prices rise. At an ever accelerating pace.
Ahem - work visa - ahem.
Now if all these resources were instead put into actually improving things, then we'd be far better of, unfortunately, for all the intelligence the people behind these things possess, they seem to be stuck in the "lets do the same but faster" mindset.
I'm pretty sure that's the goal of a solid majority of wealthy people, if not literally all of them. Fully automate their lives of luxury and let the rest of us rot.
I don't think that's a foregone conclusion at all
I mean first of all even consumer electronics like a PlayStation are creeping up on 1k, and that's way less sophisticated than a personal robot. Or how about a car? Again, less sophisticated than a personal robot, also very expensive
And I also imagine there will very likely be a ton of regulations on any kind of robot servants. Maybe owner/operator licensing. Who knows.
I am not nearly as confident as you are that this will become an "everyone has one" thing. Most People don't even have 3D printers.
You're probably right about the rest. I don't understand how prices can rise when salaries fall. Who's paying the higher prices?
> People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming.
It is known since the 80s as the Moravec paradox that coginition is not the hard part in robotics.
Automation is coming for manual jobs that are repetitive in a controlled environment, like warehouse logistics. But automation for jobs that require fine hand dexterity, constant adaption to new environments and human interactions (trades, healthcare, etc.) is not on the horizon.
So far I see that my own work as a programmer has changed radically, and it is far more productive. I still have a lot of work, but I really don't know how this will play out.
Self-driving trucks are not here, nor are they coming anytime very soon, but driver assistance systems really have advanced meaningfully since 2012. They will continue to do so, to the point where I imagine driving without them will feel pretty alien. I feel much the same way about AI; it will change everything, but we need to be thinking of that change on thirty or fifty year timescales. 2030 won't feel so different to 2025.
I've been very optimistic about AI. Wow, your comment just gave me pang of terror thinking about the outcome for humans due to Whitney and his cotton gin.
There's nothing inherently wrong with automating away certain jobs, particularly if they're dirty, dangerous or repetitive. And I include agriculture in this. The problem is how we as a society handle that. Do we let AI specifically and automation in general to make a handful of people more wealthy? Or do we share those benefits so people have to work less? In short, it's an income and wealth distribution question.
Sadly, I think we're automation will mean minting trillionaires while the fabric of society unravels around us.
Technology and economics are intertwined.
The biggest benefit of humanoid robots may be that the machines are generally safer to be around than giant built-for-purpose machines, and that they can navigate the same buildings that their operators navigate (e.g. stairs), otherwise humanoid robots are generally an automation gimmick (for now). Just put a mechanical arm next to the conveyor belt.
Like with the particular examples you sited, cleaning restrooms can have a huge number of "edge cases" which nothing short of a robot with human-like capabilities could handle.
If expenditures on AI is as huge as it is, with the financials being as shaky as they are, despite AI seeming to be very effective for very high paying jobs, I can't immagine the capex and shaky financials for replacing menial labor en mass. Like immagine all the chips, metals, compute needed as well as the maintenance, depreciation, vandalism, etc.
Steel manufacturing. Elevators. Plastics. Ball bearings. Chemicals. Pharmaceuticals. Electronics. Go to a trade show and visit the booths related to automation and talk to someone who has spent their career grinding against the meatspace problems of automation that robotics is a century away from addressing with positive ROI.
What tech people are discovering now (some of them at least) is that they have more in common with the trash man than they do with Jeff Bezos. Many, particularly on HN, viewed themselves as temporary embarrassed billionaires (to borrow the arguably misattributed Steinbeck quote). So they sought to preserve a system that they ultimately thought would benefit them and they were only one exit away from that reality.
This is a rude shock for many. For some, it'll be the beginning of class consciousness. Hopefully society doesn't completely unravel before the pendulum swings the other way.
And the billionaires.
Instead most of us are "embracing" AI by training __it__ instead.
Embrace, extend, ... and being extinguished.
The rich want us to give up, so we would be smart to give up!
I can think of quite a few other courses of action.
One should always be saving for the rainy day.
As AI advances, this spreads to other knowledge work that AI is capable of doing, which we might be seeing in mathematics if the OpenAI paper release stands up to scrutiny. Other kinds of data and analytics work will follow.
Then once the knowledge worker jobs are largely replaced, the middle management that is left will either be not needed or replaced.
By this time the only remaining jobs will be the manual labor jobs that can't be automated. Maybe as important as recursive self improving AI is going to be AI advances in robotics. Once this happens, the ownership class can finally start replacing the manual labor jobs that remain.
If AI can achieve RSI and be combined with robotics, maybe the prediction of just eventually having one company that does everything will become true.
One large AI company that does everything without any labor necessary, and everyone else I guess will just compete on OnlyFans. The only kind of work that neither AI or robotics can't replace.
But OnlyFans (porn video on demand) can already be replaced with video generating models. Sex itself probably can’t be replaced yet though.
You're assuming that high paying jobs are good jobs. While high pay is obviously desirable, the jobs themselves often suck, and people are paid those high premiums in part to put up with the sucky conditions. If lots of people both enjoyed and were able to perform a job, the pay would be low.
All this being said, I don't think AI usage will meaningfully go down in the long run cause it's a very powerful dopamine loop and tech companies are very good at making those. How many people report social media making them unhappy and how many people do you know who have actually quit? Or to paraphrase Jim Gaffigan, nobody says they eat at McDonalds, but the sign outside says "billions served". Somebody's lying (and it's not McDonalds).
Is this not just a gimmick? You still need people on hand to take over if the robot has an issue, I don't see how it would reduce labour costs.
I don't use them; not because of any moral objection, but because they can't come inside buildings. The whole point of food delivery is to avoid going outside. Most human couriers come directly to your unit. The food delivery companies have spoiled us too much, and we are not ready to return to a world where you have to put on shoes to get food. Oddly, the delivery robots are probably better suited to suburbia, where folks are used to answering the front door to pick up a food delivery. But the distances involved aren't viable until you have delivery Waymos that can move at highway speeds.
"take over IF the robot has an issue" is exactly how it reduces labor costs.
2020: 10 waiters, waiting tables. You're on the hook for each of their salaries.
2030: 10 robots, one human waiter passively overseeing the cluster. You're on the hook for minor parts/occasional repair for the robots, and one person's salary.
Its not about a 100% staff elimination, but a large overhead reduction ensuring the few humans you're keeping around are more efficient overall for dollars generated in revenue versus the all-human staff before.
Plus, in certain cases, like kiosks replacing cashiers at fast food establishments, there's now one less qualification needed from employees (good social skills), increasing the pool of acceptable options you can hire where before some of those candidates would have been unsuitable for the job.
And what do the robots do? Wheel the food to the table, where the customers then need to reach for the plates and pass them around? Not a great experience. Or actually set the plate in front of each diner, without dumping it, like a human waiter does? Much more sophisticated and expensive robot.
It's not fast food, because customers pick up their own food from the counter there. Ditto with fast casual.
Fine dining restaurants would see huge drops in business if they tried to replace human wait staff with robots. (Unless they're already doing some kind of futuristic theming.)
So you're targeting low-end table-service restaurants...to replace their below-minimum-wage wait staff (remember, tipped minimum wage is something like $2.30 federally) with robots that don't get tips, do require a hefty up-front investment and nontrivial maintenance costs, probably a subscription with the company that sells them, and are likely to have a lot of problems especially for the early adopters—things like dropping meals, crashing into tables, crashing into customers, running over toes, purses, and small children...
This really seems like it's something that's going to work for a few gimmicks, but not in any widespread manner within the foreseeable future.
it's certainly not service that hasn't been good for a decade now. it's a consistent product not abysmal not great.
if a robot could reduce the chance of me getting soggy french fries and non crispy nuggies that's fine bring in the robot.
also lol plates and tables, how long has it been since you ate fast food? people eat in their car to avoid dealing with the shouting staff,dirty floor and sticky tables.
It's not like you need a touch screen anymore though, chatbots are good enough you should be able to read off your order from a paper menu just like at a normal restaurant. Proper tooling is required to avoid the chatbot taking orders for something silly. Now, having a microphone enabled bot does bring up the question of voice recordings. Sometimes people go to restaurants to talk about sensitive subjects and don't want the whole conversation recorded and sent to a data broker.
People may perceive not having human wait staff as "cheaping out", and there are lots of status-related reasons people go out to eat. Backend is possibly more ripe for automation because people don't see it. Lots of companies building dedicated in-franchise assemblylines for submarine sandwiches or poki bowls.
Vegas has a "robot bar" where the robo arm can prepare something like 50 different cocktails. The robot is cool but the menu software was horribly put together and it crashed before I could finish putting together an order. The human attendant came over to tell me I'm not allowed to hack the robot. Bad software saved me $15, thanks.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202609/10/WS6aa122a5e4b06d4a...
Grabbing food handed to you through a window at a drive through is already very highly automated. But also has the most price pressure.
There is an element of "I am rich enough to pay someone to cook for me. To serve me. To clean for me".
Vending machines exist and Automat's never really caught on in their previous form, replaced by fast food for those who want cost efficient food service without the service element.
Like any sizable population, there are absolutely some do-nothing inefficiencies to be culled. But most of the time it's just onlookers seeing a tiny slice of the day to be interpreted from their very limited vantage.
(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)
My company is earning money on my work and customers use my software to earn more money. But, that is it, I am not a doctor, I am not a teacher, I am not making the world better. It is a business, not unethical one, but also not world saving.
Per original definition, it is a bullshit job.
I dont think doctors and teachers are "saving the world" either. That is a bit dramatic claim. But they do work that makes peoples lives better. Mine just makes companies compete among themselves better.
Or as engineers know: sometimes legacy code doesn’t initially appear to do anything, but then messing with it has unexpected effects.
Especially as organizations grow in size.
A small startup usually has little-to-no "junk" or "fat" to trim.
But as orgs grow, and since we have imperfect knowledge and communication systems, more an more "junk" or "connectivity" roles emerge.
Microsoft: 223,000 employees
Alphabet / Google: 198,933
Apple: 150,000
Oracle: 141,000
Meta / Facebook: 75,472
I tried to stay way from companies with retail or warehouse workers like Amazon and Walmart (though Apple likely has a lot of retail).
I don't see HOW companies get to that size without some "junk DNA" that keeps it operating.
Maybe in the next few years we'll have AI-powered knowledge bases and communication lanes that smooths things out, but - how do we 'quantify' what "Steve, the guy who has been there for 22 years and works as the company phonebook and knows who to refer you for the thing you need"
Interrogated to what extent? 'Bullshit jobs' was originally coined to mean jobs that do serve a useful purpose within the environment they exist in, but where zooming out reveals that the environment has no good reason to exist in the first place.
In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.
I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.
That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.
This only works (reliably) in an idealized free market.
That is to say, in the classroom.
In the real world, there are a myriad of reasons in any given situation why a company might have a low profit margin, but still have loads of inefficiencies and other imperfections that haven't been, and won't be, "competed away".
From what I see on many recent TV ads, not really.
People are producing output that is worse than "doing nothing".
I think it's quite clear to anyone with eyes attached to their brains that we're not getting fully automated gay luxury space communism. The AI will just replace the good jobs and leave us with the service industry wage-slavery. Given the choice, I'd much rather an abundance of bullshit email jobs and people with food than the alternative that's being presented currently.
... that a team is much more than just its output.
You might be able to replicate an output at a lower cost. You might even be able to do it faster. But without a team of people, you won't be able to maintain commitment, culture, and domain expertise.
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I've started to notice this on a micro scale as well. I am 20x more productive at coding and scripting, but I don't spend more of my time coding. My time is now filled with things like presentations, Jira, QA, etc. Ironically, despite all of the automation, the things that are painstaking and time consuming disproportionately require more time now.
For example, the “social workers & care -> counsel parents with child rearing problems” category is considered “well covered” because there are 13 prompts.
It’s self-evident that the spectrum of work carried out by a social worker undertaking that work cannot be well represented by thirteen prompts.
I suspect if you really strictly defined “covered well”, to the extent that any normal person would use that phrase, the headline would be above 99.9%.
It's really easy to fall into the McNamara fallacy when rolling out these kinds of solutions. Focusing on the low value stuff is attractive. It tends to be easier to do, and also easier to quantify outcomes. But it also tends to direct attention away from important but difficult to quantify considerations, which may mean you don't notice negative externalities. So we often found ourselves in a verschilmmbessern situation where automating what we could automate made things worse overall.
I guess if I wanted to put my skepticism about the AI stock bubble into one little phrase, it would be that I don't think the bubble has accounted for Amdahl's Law. Costs don't actually go to zero with AI, and there's a huge difference between costs falling even 90% and costs falling a full 100%. And the difference between "30% improvement this year, trending to 85% in five years" and "90% this year" is pretty significant too.
You know what? The truth doesn't matter much. If people believe in the resale value of tulips, each tulip would sell for a million.
It's the beliefs and perception that create the reality. Reality and truth don't exist on their own.
Yep, makes sense...