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I'm not worried about AI job loss

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Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#171

Post by flanked-evergl »

suzzer99 wrote: post #128
RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

As long as the owner class can leverage, "Hey, that {out group} is sitting around doing nothing and getting free money!" we'll never have anything close to UBI imo.

[flagged]

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#172

Post by parpfish »

iberator wrote: post #41
ddtaylor wrote: post #9

Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away. Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none…

I lost my job as a software developer some time ago. Flipping burgers is WAY more demanding than I ever imagined. That's the danger of AI: It takes jobs faster than creating new ones PLUS for some fields (like software development) downshifting to just about anything else is brutal and sometimes simply not doable. Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are comp…

There’s the issue of the job itself being more demanding, but also the managers in “low skilled” jobs being ultra-demanding petty dictators.

As a white collar computer guy, I can waste some time on Reddit. Or go for a walk and grab coffee. Or let people know that I’m heading out for a couple of hours to go to the doctor. There are a LOT of little freedoms tha you take for granted if you haven’t worked a shitty minimum wage job. Getting on trouble for punching in one minute late, not being allowed to sit down, socializing too much when you’re not on a break.

I’m pretty sure that most tech employees would just quit when encountering a manager like that

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#173

Post by gwern »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #30
simonw wrote: post #4

I read that essay on Twitter the other day and thought that it was a mildly interesting expression of one end of the "AI is coming for our jobs" thing but a little slop-adjacent and not worth sharing further. And it's now at 80 million views! https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403 It appears to have really caught the zeitgeist.

This is what they get for not reading our antislop paper (ICLR 2026) and using our anti-slopped sampler/models, or Kimi (which is remarkable relatively non sloppy) https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 I thought normies would have caught onto the EM dash, overuse of semicolons, overuse of fancy quotes, lack of exclamation marks, "It's not X, it's Y", etc. Clearly I was wrong.

Is Kimi still non-sloppy? When I switched to 2.5, it suddenly felt noticeably less creative and base-model-like, more sycophantic, and it hasn't gone aggro at all. Feels like a lot of the magic is gone.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#174

Post by lich_king »

dakolli wrote: post #165

When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs. LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a li…

Neither datacenters nor chip manufacturing employ a whole lot of people. But I think you're looking at it wrong. Jobs come from people with money wanting to pay for jobs. That's not going to change.

The jobs of the future may be that you're a court jester for Larry Ellison, or that you do something else that's fundamentally pointless but happens to be something that a person with money wants. Companion, entertainment, errands. Now, that may sound dystopian, but on some level, so are most white collar jobs today. Microsoft employs 200k people. How many of these are directly involved in shipping money-making products - five percent? Ten? The rest is there essentially for the self-sustaining bureaucracy itself. And there's no reason for that bureaucracy to exist except the whims of people with money and power - delegation, empire-building, pet projects, etc.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#176

Post by sparky_z »

9dev wrote: post #144
jjmarr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to live with no electricity, no running water, and a lack of refrigerated food, you could do so purely on welfare. In that sense, we already have the UBI that Marx predicted. However, most people want fruits and vegetables instead of getting rickets, goiter, and cholera from an 1800s diet. Many are even willing to work 80+ hours a week to do so.

Most non-banana republics across the world define the Minimum standard of living as having all of the things you listed, meaning welfare/social safety nets provide for that. As they should. We’re not animals.

Correct. Of course, that wasn't the case in 1750 or 1900. It wouldn't have been possible then.

Hence why prior technological changes that increased productivity didn't result in living lives of extended leisure, despite some predictions to that effect. Instead people kept working to raise the overall standard of living to what could be achieved when using the new tools to their fullest extent. Doing more, not doing the same with less effort. As you say, we're not animals. We can strive for better.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#177

Post by zrail »

Arainach wrote: post #145
gruez wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems pretty easy to work around with "UBI for citizens" only. There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.

There's been enormous pushback, pushes for privatizing (ruining) it, underfunding it from Congress, an absolute refusal to remove the criminally low income cap on contributions, etc.

One could make the argument that the modern Republican Party has in fact largely been shaped by this pushback.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#178

Post by sensanaty »

gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

I look through the backlog for my team consisting of 9 trillion ill-defined (if defined at all) tickets that tells you basically nothing.

The large, overwhelming majority of my team's time is spent on combing through these tickets and making sense of them. Once we know what the ticket is even trying to say, we're usually out with the solution in a few days at most, so implementation isn't the bottleneck, nowhere near.

This scenario has been the same everywhere I've ever worked, at large, old institutions as well as fresh startups.

The day I'll start worrying is when the AI is capable of following the web of people involved to translate what the vaguely phrased ticket that's been backlogged for God knows how long actually means

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#179

Post by rjbwork »

fourside wrote: post #163
RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

You also need a system that is ok with giving you some of said abundance without you working. Last year the US voted to hand over the reigns, in all branches of government, to a party whose philosophy is to slash government spending and reduce people’s dependence on the government. To all the US futurists who are fantasizing about a post-scarcity world where we no longer work, I’d like to understand how that fits in…

The thing a lot of people leave out is that literally billions must die for this to happen. In some fully automated world everyone except for a few tens of thousands of the owner class and their technicians will be unneeded. And then what to do?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#180

Post by globalnode »

9dev wrote: post #144
jjmarr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to live with no electricity, no running water, and a lack of refrigerated food, you could do so purely on welfare. In that sense, we already have the UBI that Marx predicted. However, most people want fruits and vegetables instead of getting rickets, goiter, and cholera from an 1800s diet. Many are even willing to work 80+ hours a week to do so.

Most non-banana republics across the world define the Minimum standard of living as having all of the things you listed, meaning welfare/social safety nets provide for that. As they should. We’re not animals.

So I can keep track of your wonderful comment, I'd like to add that looking up "banana republic", I realised Australia seems to fit that description perfectly! The latest crop they've come up with seems to be housing, but instead of fruit companies we have real estate cabals. With respect to the workers at the bottom of a banana republic, whats missing is the element of real choice. They say yes you can choose to not work harder but then you die early or suffer from disease, not much of a choice. Modern slavery is built on this idea of false choice.
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