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AI Won't Cause Unemployment

pmarca.substack.com

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Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#241

Post by valenterry »

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…

> will be able to write a detailed functional description of a system in natural language, domain models, with data points, and an AI will write, test, integrate, and deploy production level code.

Yes, once math is also done in natural language, this will be the next step. I don't believe I will experience this in my lifetime unfortunately, but it will eventually happen.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#242

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

rgmerk wrote: post #110
29athrowaway wrote: post #91

College textbooks are expensive simply because it's a cartel. A textbook could simply be a file that is copied infinitely for free.

And who’s going to write and update that textbook? If your answer is “the professor teaching the course”, that’s cost-shifting and in many cases less efficient than having one textbook author write a textbook used in many places. If your further suggestion is that LLMs will generate college textbooks, that seems like a gross overestimate of their current capabilities.

There are about 3,000 academic fields [1], give or take. US† could easily afford to spend 1,000,000 USD per year for a new/updated textbook in each field (absolutely overkill as many fields overlap) and it would barely be $3 billion per year: that's ~0.17% of the $1.73 trillion DOD budget for FY2023 [2]. We are keeping knowledge in chains in order for some parasitic losers to make 1 to 7 billion USD revenue per year [3]. And they are parasitic losers because (i) they prey on the authors (the authors can get even under 10% [4]), and (ii) they are capitalistically inefficient (under 10 billion USD per year is a rounding error for Apple and the likes).

† although it could be a worldwide effort.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_fields

[2] https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=...

[3] https://www.tckpublishing.com/top-publishers-by-revenue

[4] https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#243

Post by pharmakom »

TimPC wrote: post #232
pharmakom wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting meaning interesting to humans? If an AI is doing all of the work then maybe it doesn't matter what we consider interesting? You gave a prompt asking for 2023 nostalgia pop music in the care home, and the AI found novel theorems to generate it for you, but it didn't even notice or care! Maybe there will be some hobbyist human Mathematians and the AI can throw them a clue once in a while, like a good murder…

Interesting generally means having some sort of sufficiently broad applicability to be useful and sufficiently narrow applicability to have enough explanatory power. If you are too narrow you don’t get applied in many situations and if you are too broad you’re generally too watered down to prove anything significant about the situations in which you apply. Some exceptions which makes everything harder. 1+1=2 is a the…

You are defining useful relative to human understanding. My point is this may not matter in an AI future.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#244

Post by DoctorOW »

rgmerk wrote: post #110
29athrowaway wrote: post #91

College textbooks are expensive simply because it's a cartel. A textbook could simply be a file that is copied infinitely for free.

And who’s going to write and update that textbook? If your answer is “the professor teaching the course”, that’s cost-shifting and in many cases less efficient than having one textbook author write a textbook used in many places. If your further suggestion is that LLMs will generate college textbooks, that seems like a gross overestimate of their current capabilities.

It's the gatekeeping that's the problem. A royalty on a textbook for the actually author is very low, maybe like $10 on a $100 textbook? Replace the editors and layout designers with AI, the printing and binding with PDF, and the campus bookstore with Shopify or the like and make the same amount of money on $15 textbooks.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#245

Post by optimalsolver »

omnicognate wrote: post #191
zarzavat wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs stand to be much better at research mathematics than humans. Breakthroughs in mathematics often come from taking a concept from one area of mathematics and applying it to another area. Humans find this difficult because it's hard to be a research-level mathematician in more than a few areas, a human life isn't long enough to learn that much. Humans learn depth-first. LLMs learn breadth-first. You can go ask Chat…

LLMs aren't new and there has been no sign of them being able to automate maths research so far. If they do, I will acknowledge them as AGI as it has been my goalpost for over 30 years. I've never moved it once, and I won't. Computers were invented in large part for this purpose. The hope was to have a machine that could spit out interesting theorems. It turned out that generating theorems was trivial (you can just e…

That's kind of what PowerPlay does:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5309

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#246

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ETH_start wrote: post #234
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…

>>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. The growth of the healthcare bureaucracy is generally attributed to the increase in regulations: https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme... While somewhat better designed to constrain costs, other countries' central economic planning in…

The administrators are a direct consequence of insurance-mandated budgeting.

You can't seriously argue that they're caused by "regulations" when front-line doctors are having to call insurance companies from their offices to get clearance for life-saving procedures.

Or when patients having an emergency have no idea how much treatment will cost because their insurance company has to work out whether treatment will be in/out of network, what the co-pays and deductions will be, and other bureaucratic friction which has nothing to do with providing care and everything to do with profitability.

The US has the highest per-capita spending on health, and also the highest level of personal bankruptcies caused by health insurance.

It's quite a strange point of view to consider that latter point any kind of win.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#247

Post by dogcomplex »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #166

The main argument presented in the blog is flawed. The assertion that "regulated" industries perform worse than "unregulated" because of regulation is not backed by any evidence provided. The graphs only demonstrate that labor-intensive sectors experience a proportional increase in cost with an increase in average labor cost, which is not particularly surprising. Regarding the question of whether AI will cause unempl…

With the followup break down "Will AI decrease consumer prices on goods and services?" and "Will the balance of overall quality of life be negatively affected?" since simply focusing on jobs themselves without the externalities is too limited. ("Yes", and "Hard-No-in-long-term / Possibly-in-short-term")

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#248

Post by eastbound »

intellectronica wrote: post #240

This argument can be backtested, sort of. AI is novel technology, but information technology in general has been on a wild run for now 2~3 decades. One would expect the advances in information technology to result in significant productivity increases that would affect the entire economy and likely result in unemployment. None of that has happened. Productivity increases from digital technology growth are really hard…

> significant productivity increases that would affect the entire economy and likely result in unemployment. None of that has happened.

Of course. Some people believe that if some work is done by a cohort, then others can’t work. It’s the opposite that happens. If one person builds something, then others can work too. If more people work, then the entire society is richer and poor people can also find help more easily.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#249

Post by optimalsolver »

frankreyes wrote: post #228
flangola7 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For one thing, everyone in the West who's fallen on hard times has been pretty grateful their government didn't let them starve to death.

This general, wide-impact instance of problem-solving is why the public will never allow libertarians anywhere near power.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#250

Post by harvey9 »

frankreyes wrote: post #211
_448 wrote: post #101

This claim that AI won't cause unemployment baffles me. I understand the argument being made that new types of jobs will be created, but what the people making that argument miss is the massive level of up-skilling/re-skilling that is required of the population whose jobs are replaced. This has not worked out well. Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam…

> 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…

There were lots of buyers of coal at the time UK mines closed, but other sellers were able to supply at a lower price.

There continue to be buyers of coal now, and indeed the UK recently approved a new mine

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63892381

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