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Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

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Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#231

Post by tombert »

luke5441 wrote: post #178
tombert wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am arguing, and I thought this was obvious but I guess not, that that scope of work in general increases. My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”, I broadened the scope. I feel like people are making an incorrect assumption that “labor”, even white collar labor, is a fixed-size problem. I don’t agree with that: there’s never…

Is the scope is actually increasing, that would be the question. Are we re-allocating the labor from the work that got easier (let's assume SaaS) and reallocating it to something that needs doing, e.g. cancer research. To me looks like we aren't and your personal projects don't support the opposite.

I wasn’t going to be curing cancer regardless so I am not sure I fully understand your point. Like most people reading this forum I am a relatively normal person who has a comfortable life but will be doomed to obscurity with no notable achievements when I die.

I use Codex for work, and I feel like I accomplish more with it than I would have without it. I juggle a lot more projects concurrently and can broaden the scope of what I am doing.

Now we can argue what I do is “easy”, and you’re probably not wrong, but most white collar work is pretty easy and being able to accomplish more easy tasks is still potential productivity.

For that matter, if I am not distracted with the trivial tasks I can dedicate more of my time working on hard problems, maybe even ones we would call “important”.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#232

Post by theSherwood »

This article seems unreasonably optimistic.

If AI can truly replace human labor at a lower price point, then that's more or less the end for your median human. The economy will work by much the same principles as ever: those who can provide value will trade with others who can provide value. If that's not your median human, too bad for them. There may be some initial efforts by government to cushion people's irrelevance with UBI or other welfare schemes, but they won't be stable. Human rights and the political power of the median citizen are historically downstream of the value of the average citizen's labor.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#233

Post by jbxntuehineoh »

ihumanable wrote: post #20
Night_Thastus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...it does? This level of automation is recent, and industrialization is the blink of an eye in human history. If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'. That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.

CGP Grey has an older video now about what happened to horses over time. For a while every economic advance seemed to mean more and better jobs for horses. But then the automobile comes along and there's no more need for horses and we can see what happens to an animal that has no economic reason to exist. We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys…

The main difference is that horses are incapable of organizing a revolution

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#234

Post by bensyverson »

sp527 wrote: post #101
bensyverson wrote: post #40

Real question: who honestly believes that labor is going away? Throughout history, technologists have promised that increased efficiency will mean that people can work fewer hours—or not at all. But it has never materialized. Not during the Industrial Revolution, not in the 1950s, not during the dawn of the Information Age. What makes us so confident that "this time it's different?"

You sound blissfully ignorant. I'd honestly advise staying that way. The alternative is depressing af.

My bröther, I am burning so many tokens it is unimaginable. I do not think human employees are anywhere near becoming obsolete.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#235

Post by EGreg »

Apocryphon wrote: post #217
EGreg wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Bitcoin is one coin for everyone. The attempts to create "colored coins" back in 2013 fell flat, then it became a "store of value", and punted on being a "peer to peer payment system". https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ I started Intercoin in 2018 to try to fix this. Let every community have its own coin , and Intercoin acts like the internet of coins... interconnecting them. We raised abou…

Is it something like Great Depression scrip? https://www.depressionscrip.com

Yeah and something like https://scf.green/story-of-worgl-and-others/

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#236

Post by est31 »

fwipsy wrote: post #189
ihumanable wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CGP Grey has an older video now about what happened to horses over time. For a while every economic advance seemed to mean more and better jobs for horses. But then the automobile comes along and there's no more need for horses and we can see what happens to an animal that has no economic reason to exist. We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys…

Domesticated horses are chattel. They existed for the needs of humans. When the needs went away the horses did too. Many of the world's poorest already exist without anyone's tolerance, even though their economic contributions are a rounding error. I suppose it's possible that the world's wealthiest will decide to commit genocide (maybe to create nature preserves?) but it feels like a very far-fetched outcome. If the…

Well Bezos did actually state that he wants to turn Earth into a natural park.

But yeah, the robot armies don't need grain so why hike up the price of bread? Lack of grain makes those people resentful which means you need to deal with their anger. Sure, it can be dealt with but it's just cheaper to give the humans grain so they are docile. This is basic governance 101 that goes back to the romans (and further).

They also didn't slaughter all horses immediately. You can't eat that much horse meat anyways. It happened piece by piece.

The only good reason for an abrupt mass culling of the 99% (for a coldly calculating rich person with no empathy) would be game theory, i.e. them not being a contender for power any more. If there are no humans, there is nobody who can question the control of the 1%. It would be thus less about economics and more about power.

I am really rooting for the bottom 99%, myself being a part of it, but I really don't know what will happen to us.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#237

Post by EGreg »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #219
EGreg wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Bitcoin is one coin for everyone. The attempts to create "colored coins" back in 2013 fell flat, then it became a "store of value", and punted on being a "peer to peer payment system". https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ I started Intercoin in 2018 to try to fix this. Let every community have its own coin , and Intercoin acts like the internet of coins... interconnecting them. We raised abou…

There used to be a ton of competing currencies in the US. Banks regularly went bankrupt taking everybody's savings with them. Your suggestion doesn't really sound like anything new.

It's very new because it uses trustless technology at an entire community level, and UBI to put money into circulation, rather than letting the bank underwriters quietly choose winners and losers. You're not supposed to give banks the monopoly to issue the money. That's the whole point I just made.

Some communities will do better than others, but when they start running out of federal dollars, their local currency will ensure people can still eat, and plumbers will still get off their ass to fix leaks.

"Wildcat currency" was indeed a lot more unstable before the US blew them out of the water with "the greenback", which was issued to finance the civil war, backed by land taxes and tariffs, and then they passed laws making it "legal tender" for all debts, even the private ones.

Banks have been working with the US government hand in glove, if credit money is the vast majority of our M2 money supply, where do you think all that new money comes from that enables people and businesses to pay back all the loans with interest? Who do you think bails out those banks and forces them to buy treasuries? and so on.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#238

Post by tombert »

pj_mukh wrote: post #181
tombert wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sample size of one, so take this for what it is, but I was initially kind of depressed when I started using Codex and Claude Code, because it did kind of feel like I was being automated away. However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do. Suddenly, it became so much more interesti…

The Jevon's paradox of personal projects. Amazing.

Yeah, I always think of it as Gustafson’s Law but Jevon’s is probably more appropriate.

Tangential, but related.

When I first started my career, it was working for a company that used SVN as its version control (Git hadn’t quite won yet). Every Friday, we would do The Merge. We called it that, like a proper noun.

The Merge was almost always a 4-6 hour process because it would be taking every branch of every feature/bug we have worked on, and merged it into trunk. The day would be then spent fixing merge conflicts as they came up. I was the most junior engineer (borderline intern) and so that task generally fell on me.

Eventually, I found git-svn, and it brought a multi-hour task down to like 30 minutes, since the merging was so much quicker.

Fridays were always blocked out for me to do The Merge, but it’s not like when I got it done in 30 minutes they said “oh, umm, there’s nothing else to do, go home and forget being paid for today”. They just found other stuff for me to do and I did that.

There’s always more stuff that can be done. We won’t ever run out of potential shit we can do.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#239

Post by cyberax »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46
windexh8er wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to think that, if it comes to this scenario, the wealthy will have many things to worry about. Everyone will know, at that point, that *they" are the one who destroyed the global economy for short term wealth. I'm not sure they've actually thought any of this through because they will be in a prison of their own making at that point.

Any fantasies of that sort went out the window for me when Trump got elected, largely on the base of "left behind" voters who have done very poorly economically over the past 30 or so years. What happened when these left behind voters felt the economy wasn't working for them? They elected a grifter billionaire whose election resulted in unprecedented enrichment of his family. The idea that the masses will "correctly"…

Yup. And the disillusionment in Trump makes them a fertile ground for a _competent_ manipulator.

Trump is comically incompetent, old, and probably suffers from minor dementia at this point. Now imagine somebody like Mamdani or Rubio gaining control of these disillusioned people and telling them that it's all because of "corporations" or "liberal anarchists" (underline the correct answer).

The only way to fix it is to correct the underlying economic problems that are pushing all the wealth into a smaller and smaller number of dense city cores. Promote remote jobs, prohibit new dense housing, tax dense office space.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#240

Post by tombert »

treis wrote: post #197
tombert wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire tech industry has morphed into ponzinomics, and it’s been like that for at least my entire career. It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so tha…

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Nvidia, Cisco, Oracle, et al make a bajillion dollars a year. The faangs are the most profitable companies in the world (swap Nvidia for Netflix)

Even with those companies, the stock prices are stupidly inflated, but even granting them being profitable that’s still only like six companies. Thats like 1% of the s&p 500.

A ton of SV companies, and I think maybe the majority, especially startups are not profitable.

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