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AI Won't Cause Unemployment

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Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#51

Post by asah »

Sorry, but there's so many things wrong with this...

- nobody cares about "unemployment" - they care about investing decades of their lives and losing their jobs and not being able to replace them quickly at the same level of income and quality of life, including a million photographers, models, makeup artists, etc. who are looking at diffusion model results and wondering who'd pay for their work next year, let alone in 10. "employment" is a made up number that could be 100Ms prospering and optimistic about the future, or 100Ms terrified of the future and millions giving up and disappearing from the employment stats: https://www.google.com/search?q=working+age+men+employment

- nobody cares about average prices by category - they care about what they pay for the goods they buy, and the baskets of goods used for these surveys are comically different from what actual consumers experience. Notably, the "TV" from 20 years ago is not the same "TV" as today, let alone cellphones or even healthcare. Also, healthcare has seen continuous improvement e.g. cancer therapies, while the TV innovations that consumers care about have sometimes zoomed forward (thin displays, larger displays, 4K, HDR) and failed to take hold (3D, long-throw projectors).

- MA is not an expert on employment and neither am I, but I'm not prognosticating.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#53

Post by readthenotes1 »

93po wrote: post #31

His data is meaningless without actually saying the sources for these numbers. BLS inflation data is highly criticized and it may make his entire point moot if the cost of those industries hasn't actually increased.

Are you really questioning whether the price of disease care or university in the United States has risen higher than overall inflation rate?

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#54

Post by zerocrates »

bfdm wrote: post #11

You could also argue that the "red" categories align more closely with "needs" people have little to no choice but to pay, and are ripe for predatory pricing. It's true there are monopoly problems here, but the answer isn't to remove regulation it's to strengthen it. A return to real anti-trust in particular. The blue items lean more towards luxury items and discretionary spending, so pricing can't be so exploitative…

Even the American Enterprise Institute, where he's getting the chart from, frames it more in terms of globalization, competition, and of course given the source, regulation. Their preferred talking points on it are a little dubious as well: e.g., cars are subject to substantial regulation on all sorts of axes and yet are flat and therefore "blue" on the chart, while college textbooks aren't really meaningfully regulated at all and are one of the worst categories. (AEI's post also without irony points to the influence of open and free textbooks as something sure to bring down prices in the future, brought to you thanks to the free market).

Anyway, regardless of your view on AEI's gloss on those numbers, it's much more reasonable than Andreesen's claim that "technology is banned" in all the red sectors.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#55

Post by stult »

What an incredibly, idiotically reductionist interpretation of cherry-picked data this is. First of all, he selected a fairly random, non-representative set of goods and services. I can immediately think of a glaringly obvious counter-example that his dataset excludes: energy. It's one of the most highly regulated industries in the US and yet energy inflation has been barely positive over the last 20 years (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/energy-inflation), completely contradicting Andreesen's hypothesis. So basically all of his conclusions are unsubstantiated and likely false on that basis alone. But there's more stupidity here.

He also does not define "heavily regulated" or how one can measure the level of regulation applicable to a given good or service in a way that allows for apples-to-apples comparisons to other goods and services. But even just taking a colloquial understanding of what the term means, car manufacturing is incredibly highly regulated. Perhaps not so much as medical services, but certainly far more than household furnishings or clothing. And yet the inflation curves for those goods are nearly identical to the one for new cars. If regulation is the sole explanation for the differing inflation trajectories between each of these goods and services, then why is such a highly regulated good performing identically to substantially less regulated goods?

There are many more flaws in his thinking but I won't bother digging into it because this is a childishly stupid article that would never have made it to the front page of HN if it weren't written by an especially wealthy idiot.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#56

Post by rsaesha »

Blah blah blah government law and regulations bad give back my laissez faire slaves - this is what I hear.

Some industries are more regulated than others - a simple fact. What are the reasons behind these regulations?

To discuss which of these reasons no longer hold might be a better argument. But no, the writer would rather cry 'muh entry barrier communists gov' on the webs. What is the purpose here, to go viral or actually improve the world we live on?

For the case in point: innovation historically changes which professions are required for production of value. In the 19th century, if you were skilled in iron smelting and forging you would put food on your families table. Nowadays, I'd advise against running a coal furnace in your apartment kitchen.

The fear of ai caused unemployment is very real for people who are too old to learn and apply an entire new skillset. If it's hard to understand this, put yourself in the shoes of a newspaper journalist. He or she might have worked 15 years at the news, and he listen to sales people commenting that sales are dropping like a cannonball. Anxiety and fear overload. Maybe he gets a new job at the newer and hotter online webpage that seems to be hiring good writers. Maybe not.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#57

Post by [deleted] »

phillipcarter wrote: post #12
idopmstuff wrote: post #8

I can't help but think Andreesen's gone off the deep end a bit, especially after he started gushing over Adam Neumann's second run at a real estate company (“We think it is natural that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes.”). > AI is simply already illegal ac…

Yeah, his whole post is thinly veiled anti-regulations blather. I suppose it’s a nice break from his web3 nonsense and his deranged anti-“woke” posting.

[deleted]

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#58

Post by rocket_surgeron »

LOL

The red lines are lines where (PRIMARILY) skilled labor is required for products and services essential to human life.

The blue lines are lines where unskilled labor in Shenzhen factories in pump out unnecessary consumer goods.

Medical costs are rising because people like him are pumping money into hedge funds and they are squeezing every red cent out of the systems they have captured-- not because doctors have to have licenses.

Housing costs are rising because people like him are pumping money into hedge funds and they are robo-buying every property they can while simultaneously lobbying state and local governments to restrict building-- not because you need to follow safety standards.

>In 2022, Andreessen advocated against the construction of 131 multifamily housing units in their affluent Atherton, California town. In a letter, Andreessen and his wife wrote that they opposed permitting more than one house on a single acre of land.

What the fuck is wrong with libertarian tech bros? Were they dropped on their heads as children?

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#59

Post by twelve40 »

idopmstuff wrote: post #8

I can't help but think Andreesen's gone off the deep end a bit, especially after he started gushing over Adam Neumann's second run at a real estate company (“We think it is natural that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes.”). > AI is simply already illegal ac…

I have no special love for this guy as he said some stuff that pissed me off in the past, but what is your specific argument against this post right here?

> Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology

This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved" here is so vague as to be meaningless.

> clearly AI is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down

It may be crystal clear to you that AI will bring the cost of popular education down, but it is not clear to me at all, and adding "clearly" and "obviously" to some future claim does not make it any more convincing. He's trying to work with existing trends and data, you are saying "clearly the trend will reverse just because".

I realize the original post was written by somebody who has a reputation for saying one thing and doing something completely different, etc. etc.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#60

Post by twelve40 »

thenerdhead wrote: post #40

I don’t get the argument of tech not being able to affect prices. Having an AI research assistant or tutor surely should reduce the ridiculous prices of college textbooks and the need for TAs no? Also how does virtual and reimagined medical care not disrupt this? Go look at OneMedical and Amazon and they seem to be bringing costs down significantly. Didn’t Charlie Munger say something about how high prices create the…

> Having an AI research assistant or tutor surely should reduce the ridiculous prices of college textbooks and the need for TAs no?

Not clear: the textbook prices have been detached from reality for many years now not because there weren't alternative ways to get the knowledge all along. But because they are a part of a bloated system that works to extract more and more money by gatekeeping (formal degrees), upselling, cross-selling, making deals. That this system will disappear or become irrelevant overnight because of better tooling is not obvious. MIT had a bunch of classes online forever, a determined person could get all the content for a full degree almost for free for many years, yet people still flock to colleges and pay more money than ever to be a part of that (broken) system.

> Go look at OneMedical and Amazon and they seem to be bringing costs down significantly

If this was happening industry-wide, it would probably be noticeable on his "Medical care services" graph line, which instead is shooting way up? Maybe it's crap and I don't have any better data, but do you?

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