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AI Won't Cause Unemployment

pmarca.substack.com

331–340 of 362 posts

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#331

Gotta admire the cognitive dissonance when four of the biggest corporate investors in AI are doing mass layoffs.

Why? Are they replacing those they let go with AI? I highly doubt it.

If AI is really going to make people more productive without causing unemployment why can’t the biggest investors in AI make their own employees productive enough to not need to lay them off?

Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI simultaneously with laying off 10,000 people. The money MSFT was spending on employing those people was redirected to AI.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#332

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…

> Outsourcing was not a technology He's likely referring to not just the general concept of outsourcing, which has been around forever, but the programming offshoring scare of the early 2000's (which - the scare - was very real, having worked through it). It was very much caused by technology - messaging, Webex (before Skype even), source control and issue tracking getting mainstream adoption (Bugzilla, CVS, Subversi…

Still, technology didn’t make for a significant productivity gain. One human wasn’t getting more done — one human was simply being paid less for the same work (arguably worse work).

IMO it’s more of an example of globalization and specifically where globalization works and where it doesn’t.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#333
post #67
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://…

His interpretation of “industries that are allowed to innovate vs those where it’s illegal” is laughable. Has Marc considered that there might be some other fundamental difference between the inflation-positive sectors of health, education, food and housing, vs the inflation-negative ones of TVs, cars and software subscriptions? I’ll give you a hint Marc: some of these are essential to life and society and some are n…

Possible alternative reason: you can't outsource housing (proximity), education (language), healthcare (proximity and language).

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#334
post #270

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…

> This article is pure conservative BS Just based on how the entire article is structured, and the way it links in supporting evidence that normal people don't do, its like a delusional rant almost, but there's something off, honestly, the inconsistency in certain areas makes it looks like a number of articles that were generated by chat-GPT. Anyone else getting that vibe? Aside from that, it completely ignores the d…

OpenAI's own ai text classifier (https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier) says "The classifier considers the text to be very unlikely AI-generated."

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily extraction from those that do work for a living if the tax to pay for the UBI is largely a wealth-tax taking the majority from wealthy investors (who, by the conventional wisdom of capitalism, do exactly what you accuse and extract time and output from those that do work for a living for the "hard labor" of managing an index fund). If that tax is balanced to offset the two, well - you've got a fa…

It’s always an extraction from the working person. The rich only have money. They don’t have or produce any stuff. To believe otherwise is to fall for the money illusion. The tax should be returned to the worker who has earned it, not redistributed to another person who expects to consume without producing.

Due to the nature of poor people having no economic option except to do labor, the above system would effectively only return the money back to the workers. Anyone with enough wealth accumulated to no longer need to work would be paying more in taxes than they receive by UBI

As for whether the entire system of investing materials/capital when a project is risky should be rewarded at all (ostensibly the rich class' job) - mine is a conservative take. It could be rewarded less, certainly (via a wealth tax). Completely removing that mechanism ("money illusion") seems like a recipe for a society where there is little point in taking any risky venture.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most cynical take, but also sadly the most true to history and therefore probably the future. Sure, the future might have every one of us with the ability to boot up with a command a self-assembling automated factory that previously took a supply chain of thousands of workers to run, but due to the suddenly enormous cost of land and raw materials relative to our make-work wages, nobody can afford to build…

> There's a breaking point of widespread democratized (runnable by like 1-5 people, or a small community) technology where these companies don't have the same ability to absorb all these gains That is actually a technological solution for a societal problem that I see as a way out: A device that produces food, water, energy and does sanitation for a family of 4-5 people. This device would make it possible to give fam…

Yep, exactly. I hope and expect to see automated vertical farm systems as cheap consumer products soon enough, for one. Though I also don't think we necessarily need to reinvent the wheel with this stuff - it doesn't have to be some independent micro system (which are typically much less convenient than mass-produced systems). We can still use standard farming/water/energy-production/sanitation - we just need to reduce the bottom-line cost of those services (which I am still strongly betting AI will impact hard) and make it so creating a competing system takes much less capital to boot up, in case existing services decide they want to try and charge the same consumer prices while eating up all the efficiency gains from AI.

We don't need to settle for lower quality, or convenience. We just need to ensure capitalism does what it's supposed to, and pass on the efficiency gains down to the consumer.

Though also, for my money - water, energy, sanitation? Those are already very cheap, and will get cheaper naturally. And food is cheap if you keep to basics. Automated housing construction and automated high-quality-meal kitchens (not just basics) seem like the areas to tackle for real cost savings. Ultimately the last bastion will be rent seeking on land though - which could be alleviated by creating housing alternatives off the conventional grid, or uplifting the quality of services in much of the developing world so there are much more options of safe areas to live (which again, is happening fast already and will happen much faster with a rapid improvement from AI tooling).

My argument is this is the natural way capitalism works - or is supposed to work - and we should treat that with hearty skepticism. But the only way this doesn't happen seems to be if there are monopolistic forces actively holding it back. Otherwise there really should be an abundance of cheap options for living coming to consumers in the near future, which would effectively be close to a UBI, and a "living off the land" alternative to wage labor.

(P.S. for housing, my bets are more on modular housing production in a factory setting becoming highly automated - the quality level of those builds is already quite high. But also just automation on the materials production all the way down the stack. There's hope for in-place construction savings (robots!) but I think that'll come much later. Logistics transportation was already due for some major improvements before AI reared its head - cheap electric engines just enable some very different structures that effectively have a net-0 cost of operation when combined with solar. Any innovation on that front would dramatically reduce the cost of everything else.

Dark kitchens are already a thing, and expect them to keep growing - especially as the tools improve. You could probably supply a whole city with the same wide variety of well-cooked dishes from a single facility with efficient transport. There's an element of dystopia there as cook jobs disappear and thus the personal touch, but the consumer reality (should be) basically-free meals at the same quality we expect from restaurants, on demand.)

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#337
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His interpretation of “industries that are allowed to innovate vs those where it’s illegal” is laughable. Has Marc considered that there might be some other fundamental difference between the inflation-positive sectors of health, education, food and housing, vs the inflation-negative ones of TVs, cars and software subscriptions? I’ll give you a hint Marc: some of these are essential to life and society and some are n…

Because housing is essential to life does not mean it should double in price every ten years. Because education is valuable it doesn't mean the amount of student debt in the country needs to double like it has in the last two decades. At least in these two examples, these "industries" are flying off the charts in the last two decades not because of how essential they are, or how technologically progressive they are,…

> Because housing is essential to life does not mean it should double in price every ten years.

I agree, and didn’t mean to imply that the price rising is inherent to these services. What I should have spelled out is that a capitalist market can only self regulate when the buyer has the ability to say no. Largely a customer of health, housing and food has limited ability to opt out.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#338

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.

You’re applying what I would call the fallacy of scale. Your take is correct as long as these singularity happen at relative scales. We don’t know at all what happens when massive scale becomes a factor. Computers and the internet allowed virtualization and we now base our economies largely on virtualization and abstraction. That also means almost infinite replicability. In turn, infinite replicability allows levels…

My steelman of what you're saying is that "this time it's different" because this will be a much bigger change than the normal yearly loss of 2-4% of all jobs.

I'd add that it's different in that it will hit us college educated professionals who are not at all used to this, instead of the usual blue collar industries. We as a group are not ready and will scream very very loudly if/when this happens :)

It's important to remember that a society consumes as much as it produces. This is how "rich" it is in aggregate. And job losses like this come from being able to produce as much as before with fewer people. So even if no one finds a new job, the society is as rich as before.

All experience is that those losing their jobs find/create new ones after an adjustment period. Maybe this adjustment period will be longer, but it will clear in time.

Unless, of course, Eliezer is right and AI kills us all.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#339
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not denying it, but the cost of educating 1 child - has that fallen or risen?

Well the thing with education is that there is always more to learn since knowledge keeps increasing. So arguably what you want to measure is productivity. Has television, say PBS increased educational productivity. I would say yes. I remember watching Nova shows in science class and so forth. So yes TV has reduced costs. Books also increased productivity in the same way. Would remote learning reduce costs? Yes. Will…

> I remember watching Nova shows in science class and so forth. So yes TV has reduced costs.

What cost did the school save themselves here? The paid for televisions, so TV increased costs.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#340
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that you have nothing to do with an animal that you encounter in the wild. That’s just hubris. Why is it hubris? they will be locked in competition for resources What are you actually talking about? The singularity won’t erase the concept of scarcity or evolution. You have no idea what it will do, no one does, know one even knows if it will happen for sure...maybe such an entity will love you like you love yo…

[flagged]

not literally you idiot

Nice. Goodbye.

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