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I'm not worried about AI job loss

davidoks.blog

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Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#241
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…

>such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century.

I'm 0.6 centuries old and have never heard that said for existing tech. Human level AI could presumably do human work by definition but that's not the case before we get that, including now.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#242
post #189

I think that, for possibly a very long time, AI will just increase the quality bar and scale of expectations when we produce things. We might take the same amount of time (or longer) to produce something, but with significantly better outcomes. Ultimately human preferences and tastes prevail and the world is full of problems that are not simple I/O, that are not repeatable, and that require human taste to improve. Th…

If anything, I see a decrease in the quality bar. Code is sloppier, there are more bugs, more outages, more security issues. Whatever alpha AI provides is being spent on feature velocity and AI integrations at the cost of those other things.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What land prices? There's plenty of cheap land, it's just a bit far away from where most people live. But guess what, population densities were also lower a century ago.

Sure, just like less desirable products of every category cost less essentially by definition. But that’s not really a retort to someone asking by why land prices have risen so much.

Population increases through immigration or birth and the area (a city) staying the same size. Plus covid people valuing a house more.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#245
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…

[deleted]

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#246

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…

> Are we supposed to just all go work at a datacenter or in the semiconductor industry (until they automate that too)? Datacenters are very automated. They already don't require many people and they're going to be needing less and less humans in them going forward. Semiconductor manufacturing is also very heavily automated.

Datacenters were very automated when RAM was infinite. As the world becomes compute-constrained, the economics may increase the demand for smart hands mixing-and-matching server components to turn two broken servers into one working server.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#247
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 are painting this like it’s a bad thing. The workers decided that they would rather have higher working time to buy more things!

A lot of people would not choose to work for half the time as they do now because they do actually like to buy things.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation made the TV inexpensive, but if you look at a chart on inflation almost everything that cannot be easily automated has risen in price. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cpichart2019-...

Surely U.S. housing was not twice as automatable 12-13 years ago as it is now.

No, that rose in price for different reasons

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#250
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 are painting this like it’s a bad thing. The workers decided that they would rather have higher working time to buy more things! A lot of people would not choose to work for half the time as they do now because they do actually like to buy things.

How can you say that when workers don't have a choice? What accessible job has professional level pay and is part time?
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