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I'm not worried about AI job loss

davidoks.blog

451–460 of 582 posts

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#451

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You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment. AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because: - Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline. - Quality bec…

Funny you ignored the third order effect where the efficiency really does enable lower cost

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#452
post #183

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…

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…

The problem with this "creative destruction" hand-wave is:

- there's no thought given to what happens in the interim. Forget the welfare of those displaced, consider what acts the desperation will lead them to.

- these replacement roles may very well never exist or will pay much, much lower than they do now.

- this disruption happens entirely in services, LLMs are not improving agricultural yield, most industries steeped in physical reality will mostly cut overhead for generating text.

- the gains from automation do not necessarily have to diffuse over us all, the capital can simply accumulate in the hands of the firms.

You cannot keep pointing to the past when you are suggesting an entirely new never before seen moment is upon us.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#453
I'm not worries about AI job losses...yet.

I am worried about when they start wanting to make a profit on AI. I'm assuming we either have to pay the actual price for these things (I have no idea what that looks like, but I'm pretty sure it isn't $20 or $200 per month), or we have to put up with the full force advertising. Or most likely, we have to do both.

It'll be another one of those "I remember when..." stories we get to tell our kids. Like "I remember when emails were useful and exciting" or "I remember when I could order a taxi and it was clean, reliable and even came with a bottle of water..." or "I remember when I could have conversations with strangers on the internet that didn't instantly descend into arguments and hate".

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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I don't think the communism club would disagree with you. Historically, labour was a right _and_ an obligation.

The floor being three square meals and a roof would be a vast improvement compared to now.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment. AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because: - Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline. - Quality bec…

Funny you ignored the third order effect where the efficiency really does enable lower cost

Which is never realized. Price points don't decrease. Profit taking increases.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah bro, its been three years. We are just beginning. We will replace the vast majority of professional service workers in 10 years including lawyers as Ai shifts to local and moves away from the cloud.

If we wipe out the vast majority of white collar jobs in just 10 years, we’re talking complete economic collapse. No society can possibly absorb that kind of disruption over such a short time. Also even assuming AI could completely replace lawyers. Lawyers control the legislature. They may not be able to stop your local model from telling you how to do something, but they can stop you from actually doing it without a…

Correct, which is why we will have the first worldwide revolution as people realize their democracies are fake, they are simply enslaved by capitalists; which is exactly what they told us Commies would do.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah bro, its been three years. We are just beginning. We will replace the vast majority of professional service workers in 10 years including lawyers as Ai shifts to local and moves away from the cloud.

Lawyers, doctors, and accountants aren't just paid to be knowledge workers. They're paid to accept responsibility for when they fuck up (even when it's not intentional). Programmers aren't held responsible for their screw-ups. If they were, software wouldn't be the buggy mess it is today.

Until you get firms willing to take on the risk and remove the human element. That is a hell of a war chest for fighting actionable incidents.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#458
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified. In many cases, this is a fallacy. Much like programming, there is often essentially an infinite amount of (in this case) bookkeeping tasks that need to be done. The folks employed to do them work on the top X number of them. By removing a lot of the scut work, second order tasks can be done (like verification, clarification, etc.) or can…

Well said. It’s like they think that the only thing automation is good for is cutting costs. You can keep the same staff size but increase output instead, creating more value.

"They" don't think the only thing automation is good for is cutting costs. Management thinks the only thing worth doing, at all, using any means, is cutting costs.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#459
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The 0.90 century old economicists were discussing the idea. https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...

Keynes was a different thing - that we could cut working hours to 15 a week rather than never have to work again. I think that would be quite possible with a drop of living standards - you could do it today by moving somewhere cheap and doing some remote work. I think it didn't happen due to human nature. We both quite like doing something useful with our time and like increasing living standards.

I inherited some money and don't need to work, but do work on stuff because I like doing it. I imagine that's what things will be like post agi.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#460

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This is exactly why I'm not that worried. I've noticed that AI is great at the parts of software engineering that I'm bad at, like implementing a new unfamiliar library, deploy pipelines, infra configuration, knowing specific technical details and standard patterns.

It's bad at the stuff I'm good at: thinking about the wider context, architecture, how to structure the code in an elegant, maintainable way, debugging complex issues, figuring out complex algorithms. I've tried using AI for those things, but it sucks at them. But I've also used it to solve configuration problems that I doubt I'd been able to figure out on my own.

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