I still don't think AI will displace a lot of jobs. Am I the only one left?
I'm sure it had had impact in copywriting/translation but I don't see a tsunami.
Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
61–70 of 151 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
#62> we aren't advancing humanity with AI, it is just focused on automating out jobs. We are doing both! You are assuming people like to work, and jobs are something good. Without jobs, people will have less stress and more free time. They will spend more time on leisure activities, with their families, and so on. Also jobs contribute to carbon emissions, we have to maintain cities, large offices, car makes CO2 for comm…
How will they pay the bills when the 1%-hoarders are keeping all the profits for themselves, and now that the Oligarchy is in full reign in the US, taxes and "big bad socialism" is out of the question?
Dole, servants to the oligarchy, policing and security (which will be more needed with a large discontented class)....
Re: Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
#63from Company perspective, I think the answer is yes but from individual perspective I don't think that is the case. Since AlphaGo first time was released and beat world-class players, have all these players gone? not really, but it even promotes more people study Go with AI instead. As a software engineer myself, am I enjoy using AI for coding? yes, for many trivial and repetitive works, but do I want it to take my c…
> have all these players gone? The guy that got beaten literally decided to retire immediately after explicitly because AI displaced him > On 19 November 2019, Lee announced his retirement from professional play, stating that he could never be the top overall player of Go due to the increasing dominance of AI. I do get your point though that overall player count is still fine
I can imagine how depress Lee felt when being beaten by AI the first time, but looking at the bright side, we see Shin Jin-seo as the rising star in the AI-era of Go by leveraing AI to help him training.
Re: Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
#64It's not going to happen over night. But even if something radical happens, it will probably play out like Marshall Brain describes in Manna - https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 Not all bad.
The first half feels far too realistic.
The second half feels like wish fulfillment.
I honestly don't see how you get there from here.
Re: Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
#65Let’s chat about lawnmowers. There was a time when cutting grass was done with scythes, specially shaped swords. All day back and forth swinging the blade to get grass just the perfect length. Swing, take a step, swing. It was backbreaking labor in the sun. So lawns probably were quite expensive and having your own was probably pretty flashy, or maybe they were public, provided by the state to the people, or maybe bo…
Thing is when manual jobs got replaced we escaped to knowledge work. This time there is no equivalent. These lawnmower/textile worker analogies fall flat because this time might actually be different
Knowledge work is too broad a definition. There’s immense potential to reduce the “creative drudgery” in work - think background art, music for malls, first drafts of company comms…
Some knowledge work has more leverage than other knowledge work. We don’t have a term for this distinction right now. But the low-leverage work will get automated, leaving us with more pleasant, higher-level, more creative jobs. This is just a continuation of the trend that saw most people leave the factory and sit down at air conditioned desks.
Knowledge workers can keep up if they stop thinking of themselves as workers and start thinking of themselves as automators of knowledge work.
Re: Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
#66If we assume that very many people will be unemployed there will need to be a complete change in political focus towards supporting society rather than the individual. That is, wealth will need to be directed to those who need it rather than those who can grab it. The USA is one of the least politically prepared for that, but contains the wealth to resolve it. We will live in interesting times.
> That is, wealth will need to be directed to those who need it rather than those who can grab it. That is a huge political change that will be strongly = resisted. Do you recognise the quote "to each according to his needs"? It is what you are suggesting, and the very opposite of the thinking that dominates the world (not just the US, these days). > We will live in interesting times. Certainly, but it will be very t…
> Do you recognise the quote
Yes, of course I did see the parallel, but I think raking over old quotes doesn't help keep a clear mind. Wikipedia - February Revolution describes Russia's failure to
...modernise its archaic social, economic, and political structures while maintaining the stability of ubiquitous devotion to an autocratic monarch.
Sounds familiar?
Re: Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
#67But how is an individual supposed to "prepare" for AGI? The outcome of further automation will be to move even more capital under the control of an even smaller number of hands. It's that increasing inequality which is the problem, not AGI.
You're right. It's tough, I'm not gonna tell you otherwise. I think there are 3 main things most people should try to do: 1) Mental preparation - understanding your current career is finite (be it 5 more years or 20, its not gonna last forever) and broaden and deepen other things in your life such as family, friends and hobbies. I've contemplated the loss of my career hundreds of times already if not thousands, I do…
> 3) Possible career pivot - there will be opportunities. Some parts of the labour market are starving for employees and I don't mean just the trades - there's a constant need for nurses, teachers, care etc. The problem is these jobs are notorious for burning their workers out; I don't have a solution for that.
These jobs are also not scalable and not directly profitable, they require money from other sources to even exist at a large scale. In this potential AI-dominated world where there is less money being earned by individuals, consequently less taxes being paid, who exactly is going to be paying for nurses, teachers, care, etc.?
Re: Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right. It's tough, I'm not gonna tell you otherwise. I think there are 3 main things most people should try to do: 1) Mental preparation - understanding your current career is finite (be it 5 more years or 20, its not gonna last forever) and broaden and deepen other things in your life such as family, friends and hobbies. I've contemplated the loss of my career hundreds of times already if not thousands, I do…
> 3) Possible career pivot - there will be opportunities. Some parts of the labour market are starving for employees and I don't mean just the trades - there's a constant need for nurses, teachers, care etc. The problem is these jobs are notorious for burning their workers out; I don't have a solution for that. These jobs are also not scalable and not directly profitable, they require money from other sources to even…
Good question. My hunch is most functioning governments will step in and create these jobs - because they are badly needed. .Even now at least half of economic activity is government created in many developed countries - so it will be more like 80%.
But I have no crystal ball, I'm just speculating.
Re: Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is, wealth will need to be directed to those who need it rather than those who can grab it. That is a huge political change that will be strongly = resisted. Do you recognise the quote "to each according to his needs"? It is what you are suggesting, and the very opposite of the thinking that dominates the world (not just the US, these days). > We will live in interesting times. Certainly, but it will be very t…
> Do you recognise the quote Yes, of course I did see the parallel, but I think raking over old quotes doesn't help keep a clear mind. Wikipedia - February Revolution describes Russia's failure to ...modernise its archaic social, economic, and political structures while maintaining the stability of ubiquitous devotion to an autocratic monarch. Sounds familiar?
I agree about not raking over old quotes, but people will. Any attempt to do what you are suggesting will be labelled "communism" or similar.
Of course communism is not the only value system I remember an Yes Minister episode (I cannot recall which one) in which some one quotes that and Hacker guesses the source of the quote is Jesus. Not an unreasonable guess.
The problem is that whatever values you base the justification of the change on, they have to be radically different from that of the current political consensus.
> Wikipedia - February Revolution describes Russia's failure to
The problem is what that lead to. Not something I want to live through, or want my children to live through.
Re: Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
#70All major technological advancements have eliminated some jobs and created others. In general, producing more with less human input is how society becomes richer. Is it a tragedy that we no longer need telephone switchboard operators, ice cutters, and lamplighters? There were surely countless mini-tragedies as the people who made their livelihoods that way struggled with stagnant wages and unemployment, but the next…
Well if we have machines that can think, plan and reason and also exhibit incredible amounts of infinite empathy and patience and an IQ of a PHD physicist wtf is there for us to do exactly? Sure, we'll have work for people taking care of children and the elderly (and even this might start to fade away as we get humanoid robots that become cheaper and more capable, staff losing it and beating up children is a frequent…
> For now - we're not there at all.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic think it’s a question of a couple of years at most. Gwern, who has a good track record of predictions, think so too. We’re pretty much here.
I arrived at the same conclusion independently. Not because I’m a genius like Gwern and Could Work at a Big Lab if I Wanted, but because it is in fact pretty obvious. People focus way too much on the current limitations of current models, not enough on their strength. The core strength of current LLMs are already superhuman (speed, memorization, ability to navigate long context) by a significant margin. Their overall ability is heavily constrained by their weaknesses (mainly planning — hallucinations is a non-story). There are known solutions to this. AlphaZero is "training to plan" and predates GPT-2, you just have to adapt it to the LLM paradigm. What did you think AlphaProof was ? An idle experiment just for fun ?
The only hope now is that there’s some non-identified and non foreseen weakness, where LLMs currently sit well below human-level but has been obscured by the lack of planning, that significantly limit capabilities of the planned models in the same way that planning limits current models, and that has no obvious solution. But at that point that’s just Copium.
Or that we collectively fucking wake up, realize that "we’re pretty much there" and "we don’t want this", and do something. But at that point that’s just Copium too: the governing elites got the memo and are okaying this (cue Andreessen on the Trump camp, the last Biden EO ordering to fast-track AI-scale datacenters on the Democrats camp).
The big issue is that people who don’t want this (the vast majority of people I believe) think we’re not here, and people who think we’re here want this (the labs, the two big parties).
It does not helps that usual human irrationality kicks in heavily on this topic. "I don’t like AI and its consequences" => "I enjoy disparaging AI and consuming content disparaging AI" (look at those 10 epic fails of ChatGPT !) => "I’m going to inflate their weaknesses and downplay their strength" (I can’t believe it can’t count the r in strawberry !) => "Yes AGI is Very Bad News but it’s not there, have you looked at where we’re at ?". Expect a lot of Pikachu Faces in the following months/years.
2028 was the initial timeline given by, I believe, Shane Legg. He recently said he’s on track. You better give some credence to that or wake up with some very, very nasty surprise very soon.