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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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The steamroller is still many inches away. I'll make a plan once it actually starts crushing my toes." You are in danger . Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%, or you already have enough money to retire, or you expect that AI will usher in enough prosperity that your job will be irrelevant, it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.

My contingency plan is that if AI leaves me unable to get a job, we are all fucked and society as a whole will have to fix the situation and if it doesn’t, there is nothing I could have done about it anyway.

As a fellow chad I concur. Though I am improving my poker skills - games of chance will still be around

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still like the idea of clawing back mineral and water rights and paying for basic services out of the money payed by industry for the right to dirty our air and water. As a citizen you're entitled to compensation for the smoke you're breathing. People talk about how socially progressive Scandinavia is but they have a shitload of petroleum resources and that money goes into social programs.

> People talk about how socially progressive Scandinavia is but they have a shitload of petroleum resources and that money goes into social programs Of all the Scandinavian countries, only Norway has any oil resources of significance. The Scandinavian welfare model is primarily tax-funded.

My quick look at Swedish exports shows that the largest export is finished equipment at 14%, fuel exports at 7.1, 4.8% wood and paper, 3.6% iron and steel, of which I'm sure a lot of that equipment is made. 3.4% plastics, which is just oil in another form.

It looks like you're right and their oil exports are all import/export rather than domestic, but that's still a good bit of mineral wealth.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's your contingency plan? Buy a subscription to the revolution? I’ve been working on my contingency plan for a year-and-a-half now. I won’t get into what it is (nothing earth shattering) but if you haven’t been preparing, I think you’re either not paying enough attention or you’re seriously misreading where this is all going.

This ^ been a SWE for 20 years the market is the worst I have seen it, many good devs been looking for 1-2 years and not even getting a response, whereas 3-4 years ago they would have had multiple offers. Im still working but am secure in terms of money so will be ok not working (financially at least). But I expect a tsunami of layoffs this and next year, then you are competing with 1000x other devs and Indians who w…

That's called an economic crisis, it has nothing to do with AI, my friends also have trouble to find 100% manual jobs which were easily available 2 years ago.

Yes I said the word that none of these company want to say in their press conference.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#275
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creative destruction is a fundamental component of economic growth and has been happening since economies were part of humanity. You are thinking too linearly. When the price of goods and services go down because the cost to produce those goods are services decreases, that means things are cheaper. Now that things are cheaper we have more money to spend on other goods or services. Who knows what industries will be cr…

So why did are companies laying of 100s of thousands of people, 400k in SWE alone in 16 months during a bull market where equities and profits are at all time highs? How come the January jobs report was so terrible, January is historically the best month for jobs, its downhill from here. Do you walk around with a blindfold on? Are you extremely privileged? Sounds like it. Tell this to the 25% of new college grads tha…

People tend to vastly underestimate how much a functioning governmental model lead to the companies of 60 years ago not repeating what's happening now. And forget the blood shed to reverse the actions from the last time this tried to happen. The largest attack on US soil from the past century was from union busting attempts.

At best, some people expect all this to work out, so they sit back unaware of weight of these battles. Worst case is plain ol' ignorance of what's going on around them.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#276
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It could even be a fundamental rule of intelligent life, that one cannot create intelligence that surpasses its own. Well that is easily disproved by the fact that people have children with higher IQ's than their own.

That's not what I mean, rather than humans cannot create a type of intelligence that supersedes what is roughly capable from human intelligence, because doing so would require us to be smarter basically. Not to say we can't create machines that far surpass our abilities on a single or small set of axis.

Think hard about this. Does that seem to you like it's likely to be a physical law?

First of all, it's not necessary for one person to build that super-intelligence all by themselves, or to understand it fully. It can be developed by a team, each of whom understands only a small part of the whole.

Secondly, it doesn't necessarily even require anybody to understand it. The way AI models are built today is by pressing "go" on a giant optimizer. We understand the inputs (data) and the optimizer machine (very expensive linear algebra) and the connective structure of the solution (transformer) but nobody fully understands the loss-minimizing solution that emerges from this process. We study these solutions empirically and are surprised by how they succeed and fail.

We may find we can keep improving the optimization machine, and tweaking the architecture, and eventually hit something with the capacity to grow beyond our own intelligence, and it's not a requirement that anyone understands how the resulting model works.

We also have many instances in nature and history of processes that follow this pattern, where one might expect to find a similar "law". Mammals can give birth to children that grow bigger than their parents. We can make metals puter than the crucible we melted them in. We can make machines more precise than the machines that made those parts. Evolution itself created human intelligence from the repeated application of very simple rules.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#277
Yeah, YOU are not worried about the job loss, but just because SOME human will be needed doesn't mean that a particular human will.

There are humans that can't do any mental work that AI can't. Those humans are not useful for mental work and that's what can cause real AI job loss. The bar for being useful for mental work is increasing rapidly..

Jobs that are easy disappear and are replaced with jobs that are no longer as easy, either requiring more mental skills (that many people don't have) or are soul crushing manual jobs that are also getting harder constantly..

So yes, YOU are not worried, because you are privileged here.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#278

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I'm not very familiar with the field on a practical basis.

What parts of the job require judgement that is resistant to automation? What percentage of customers need that?

If the hours an accountant spends on a customer go from 4 per month to 1, do you reckon they can sustainably charge the same?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to hear if you've seen this work with 100k+ LoC codebases (i.e. what you could expect at a job). I've had some good experiences with high autonomy agents in smaller codebases and simpler systems but the coherency starts to fizzle out when the system gets complicated enough that thinking it through is the hard part as opposed to hammering out the code.

cloc says ours is ~350k LoC and agents are able to implement whole features from well designed requirement docs. But we've been investing in making our code more AI friendly, and things like Devin creating and using DeepWiki helps a lot too.

If you have agents that can implement entire features, why is it only 350k loc? Each engineer should be cranking out at least 1 feature a week. If each feature is 1500-2000 lines times 10 engineers that’s 20k lines a week.

If the answer is that the AI cranks out code faster than the team can digest and review it and faster than you can spec out the features, what’s the point? I can see completely shifting your workflow, letting skills atrophy, adopting new dependencies, and paying new vendors if it’s boosting your final output 5 or 10x.

But if it’s a 20% speed up is it worth it?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also fairly certain that if we do arrive at some abundant utopia where you can wish for anything can have it arrive, society will collapse. It's just bringing up 7 billion (probably more) spoiled brats at that point of time. Work on its own is also a form of "social control". Idle hands are the devil's tools etc.

Throughout history, big advances have come from humans having more "idle time", so we should be aiming for the population to be less busy as they can then hopefully focus on pursuing the arts or sciences.

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