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AI Won't Cause Unemployment

pmarca.substack.com

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Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#221

Post by dogcomplex »

cs702 wrote: post #210

This is a cynical piece with a political. Its argument is that AI won't cause unemployment in the US because regulations in industries like healthcare, education, and housing won't allow it. The centerpiece of the argument is this plot, showing how those sectors are becoming a greater and greater share of GDP over time: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... No one disagrees that healthcare,…

I would very-much love to see that chart with relative prices from other countries, with taxation accounted for in pricing.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#222

Post by tome »

john_the_writer wrote: post #114
BurningFrog wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have replaced human labor with machines that are way more efficient than a human for 250 years now. Mass unemployment has always been feared as a result, and it has always not happened. I strongly expect trends to continue.

The real difference is the pace. It took 20 years for self checkout to really catch on. It's not even fully there yet. It took months for Book and Magazine publishers to say. No more submissions please, we have enough content for a while. The winner of a massive photography comp in the US took no pictures, had no subjects and didn't write the back stories of his "subjects". He AI'd the lot.

These sounds interesting. I’ve never heard about them. Could you share some references please?

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#223

Post by gls2ro »

jalapenos wrote: post #196

You have to remember both sides of the balance sheet. AI can offer a path to reduced costs, threatening jobs, but it also offers a path to increased profitability, which creates jobs. It's hard to tell which force wins out on net, but there's always more work to do, no matter how good our tools are.

what if history is not always a good predictor of the future?

So what if AI will indeed increase profitability while also net reducing the number of jobs?

Who will buy those high margin products?

Imagine you could build with AI a new Amazon. It will take one person: you and then everything else is AI and AI robots. 90% margin on everything. a business running 24/7/365 every second, no need for rest.

But then suddenly you have 1.5 million people without any job or income. So your market will be reduced by at least that.

now imagine that just like you another rich capitalist builds a new Amazon to compete. the ssme process one person all AI down.

how do you imagine this market? Profit will be a meaningless word.

I think if AGI becomes reality only the first ones having it will profit. Then society as we know it will collapse (for better or worse) and we will need to find a new way to organize economical and political.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#224

Post by dmichulke »

Kiro wrote: post #184
thrashh wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very surprising when people talk about AI but not talk about the Industrial Revolution. The power loom hugely changed the world. You don’t have to write a substack about your opinions — just read a history book. Second, Marc quotes outsourcing but that’s not at all a relevant example. Outsourcing was not a technology. His other example is of robots but robots have not been revolutionary like the power loom or ev…

What do you mean? Every article about this makes the comparison with the Industrial Revolution, including this one.

I think he means that the Industrial Revolution made a lot of human work obsolete, yet here we are almost without unemployment. Same for the invention of the wheel.

So how was that possible? Turns out people didn't want to work less, they wanted more stuff. (Bigger houses, more houses, better food, health care, ...)

The same will happen again with AI. Thanks to infinite human wants.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#225

Post by frankreyes »

stult wrote: post #55

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://…

> 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

Because the USA is still using oil and petroleum derived products to produce energy, shale oil is the single best source of energy in the USA... regulations barely had to be updated, only for shale oil.

Compare that with Europe where they stopped using petroleum derived forms of energy.

Specifically, compare the natural gas prices in both regions:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Natural_gas_prices...

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#226

Post by dogcomplex »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #157
usgroup wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And reskilling makes much more sense when you’re replacing manual labour. Less sense when you’re replacing brains.

Most the reskilling will ironically be in knowledge workers who will be forced into skilled physical labor. AI plumbers are a lot further out than most other forms of AI workers. Morevec's paradox rearing it's ugly head again

Quite possibly. Though if you have that many cheap knowledge workers looking for work, that's quite a lot of brainpower to be dumped into the few remaining unsolved problems in robotics mass production (not that there are many - those robot dancing videos are terrifying, and Cobot arms are getting extremely versatile and affordable). i.e. digital work might be the first to go - but manual would follow quite quickly.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#227

Post by ActorNightly »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #212

This article is pure conservative BS. The stagnation of certain industries is because of tax policy and the insane greed injected into our healthcare systems when the HMO laws passed in the 1980's. I'm not even sure what pmarca is talking about here. It's like he's waving his arms, "look over here at my BS and don't look over there where AI is about to slam information workers." AI will absolutely change the way soft…

>All of those "things" will be plugged into an AI and one senior technologist will be able to write a detailed functional description of a system in natural language

I fully agree that this will be possible.

However, having worked in the industry, especially FAANG, Ive seen people getting hired and teams grow from 4 devs to 8 solely based on metrics of how long it takes those engineers to finalize projects, and when you look at the work that they do, so much of it is dealing with bullshit friction that doesn't need to be there.

One of the most memorable examples was people writing Cloudformation stacks. One of the issues that used to happen is that if you fucked up your template, and the stack started deploying a bunch of infra like EC2 instances, and then it ran into an error, it would take the time to delete all the instances it created, which took forever.I suggested that we just use python+boto3 to define our stacks to avoid this, and people looked at me like I was crazy.

So this developer rent-seeking behavior is going to exist for some time thats going to keep jobs in place.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#228

Post by frankreyes »

flangola7 wrote: post #218
frankreyes wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam locomotive(yes, for that many generations the effects of job losses are felt) In order to make money selling coal, someone has to buy that coal. They're selling something that nobody buys anymore. Try selling ice cubes in the North Pole. The purpose of those coal jobs was jobs creation, not problem solving. New g…

Government can also create solutions that solve problems. Hoover dam being one excellent on-topic example.

It's ok to give an example to show a contradiction, but it's a mistake to use an example to point a generalization.

Hoover dam is a bad example which can not be generalized into the "government is net positive problem solver" argument.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#229

Post by Gatsky »

joe_the_user wrote: post #132

The idea that technology is "illegal" in child care is kind of absurd. Has anyone developed an effective automation method for child care that's being held back? Just as much, "technology" is certainly not illegal with text books. Text book manufacturers use ever more sophisticated technologies to bolster their abusive monopolies. And lots of tech goes into reducing health care costs. It's simply failed so far and th…

The ‘last mile’ in healthcare isn’t really amenable to any technological cost reduction, especially for the most serious (and costly) illnesses. Any practising healthcare professional can tell you that. We are talking about actually seeing patients, trying to deal with their numerous problems across physical, mental and social spheres, supporting and advocating for them and their carers, tailoring treatment and investigation to their needs/preferences/beliefs, and participating in very difficult decisions about limiting treatment when that is appropriate. There is nothing to ‘optimize’ here. Good healthcare requires someone to take responsibility for the wellbeing of a patient.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#230

Post by dogcomplex »

camillomiller wrote: post #113
janalsncm wrote: post #104

> The jobs apocalypse is always right around the corner; just ask the Luddites. The obvious yet unaddressed point here is that automation was bad for the Luddites. They lost their jobs to machines. The implied retort is that people can and should be reskilled, but as people like Andrew Yang have said many times, reskilling has mixed results. It seems very weird that I, as a moderately knowledgeable layperson, should…

This is Mark Andreessen talking. Feels like Philip Morris telling you to stop worrying about smoking-induced cancer. He has also recently been particularly active in defending the massive inequalities generated by his favorite economic system, and by tech in particular. It’s as if he also indeed feels the pressure of a wider malcontent this time around. That said, I’m surprised he disses UBI as “communism” and inhere…

With AI-assisted production tooling, a lack of a UBI in the coming years should be basically treated as an act of war. The bar to achieve it is going to be ridiculously low - the only way it's not happening is if the powers-that-be are actively preventing it. At that point any mob could and should just spin up their own AI-powered factories for basic needs regardless of corrupted government/big business approval.
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