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AI Won't Cause Unemployment

pmarca.substack.com

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Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#341

Post by rgmerk »

DoctorOW wrote: post #244
rgmerk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's actually a long tradition of this kind of thing.

As an undergraduate, my first-year maths "course notes" were actually a textbook in all but name, produced by the Mathematics department and sold for a very modest cost, bypassing the publishers and the campus bookshop because the markups by both were outrageous

Even if you'd paid the authors $10 per copy it would have been a bargain.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#342

Post by ChatGTP »

asah wrote: post #300
ChatGTP wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm not talking about luxury brands, I'm talking about the fact that regular people enjoy buying handmade niche products that are made by other people. Anyway I know people who work in fashion, pretty much all luxury brands are good made by hand, you just don't know it because it's happening in slave labor, sweat shops and the like. The analogy for music would be a lot of b…

I hope you're right but I'm friends with a number of second and third tier photographers, and work is already a struggle. Many are already moving to other professions. The cost and hassle of a professional photo shoot is insane, the cost of a model agreeing to allowing her/his likeness be AI generated is pennies.

Do you think it might also have to do with a downturn in the economy or similar ? Post covid slump etc? Not saying it isn’t because of generative art by the way, just wondering if you’re sure about the reasons ?

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#343

Post by carom »

dmichulke wrote: post #224
Kiro wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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, ...)

Make smaller houses and density legal by removing zoning laws and we will see people's true preferences.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#344

Post by jjlustig »

00F_ wrote: post #85

if anyone else is worried about AGI and the singularity, and wants to help prevent these things, i think we should get in touch. as far as i know, there is no serious political group that is advocating for regulation of AI based on human redundancy. i think its really important to get this ball rolling as soon as possible.

I've been very interested in this space (political group for AI regulation). And actually, I just recently got an initiative I've been thinking of for awhile off the ground. How can I get in touch with you 00F_? You can reach me at lustig.jj@gmail.com

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#345

Post by theGnuMe »

LeonB wrote: post #339
theGnuMe wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And they saved money in lesson plans and materials.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#346

Post by abracadaniel »

slibhb wrote: post #295
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…

> AI will absolutely change the way software engineering is accomplished. We already use things like Cloud Formation templates to auto-build and scale cloud-based architectures. We have code generators to build microservices. We even have modeling techniques to simplify complex systems. > All of those "things" will be plugged into an AI and one senior technologist will be able to write a detailed functional descripti…

The improvements in efficiency for programming also occurred at the same time as it was undergoing explosive growth across every industry. How much room for growth is left is anybody’s guess.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#347

Post by 00F_ »

jjlustig wrote: post #344
00F_ wrote: post #85

if anyone else is worried about AGI and the singularity, and wants to help prevent these things, i think we should get in touch. as far as i know, there is no serious political group that is advocating for regulation of AI based on human redundancy. i think its really important to get this ball rolling as soon as possible.

I've been very interested in this space (political group for AI regulation). And actually, I just recently got an initiative I've been thinking of for awhile off the ground. How can I get in touch with you 00F_? You can reach me at lustig.jj@gmail.com

ive sent you an email. looking forward to talking to you.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#348

Post by neilwilson »

dogcomplex wrote: post #335
neilwilson wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' jo…

"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."

Which would then mean they could command more of their own output in competition with the rich and therefore not have to work Friday. The rich would then have to hire those currently without work to do the Friday shift, and those that don't want to work would have to work the Friday shift if they want to eat.

All of which is perfectly fair and reasonable on a quid pro quo basis.

What you want to do is force the current workers to work Friday for nothing, then take that output and give it to even more people who don't want to work for a living - adding to the existing rich who are currently doing that.

That's doubly unfair on the workers.

To stop that unfair extraction we need guaranteed jobs, not guaranteed income.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#349

Post by cabalamat »

neilwilson wrote: post #348
dogcomplex wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' jo…

"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." Which would then mean they could command more of their own output in competition with the rich and therefore not have to work Friday. The rich would then have to hire those currently without work to do the Friday shift, and those that don't want to work would h…

> To stop that unfair extraction we need guaranteed jobs, not guaranteed income.

How would you answer Scott Alexander's arguments against your position, as enunciated in his essay "Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia"[1] ?

[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#350

Post by carom »

chubot wrote: post #30

Honest question (willing to be consider new info): I always thought that housing, health care, and college are more expensive than TVs and cell phones because those things can't be OUTSOURCED to another country. - If an American/Westerner wants a TV or a cell phone, Samsung or Apple can manufacture it overseas and have someone ship it here cheaply. - If an American wants a house, they generally have to hire local lab…

Housing isn't very expensive to build. $350/sqft is on the high side for a house. The zoning is what prevents it from being abundant.
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