AI Won't Cause Unemployment
pmarca.substack.com
AI Won't Cause Unemployment
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Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#2I always say that.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#3Wow. I was hoping to read some interesting thoughts about AI overpanic, and instead got exposed to communist overpanic :-O
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#4> We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever.
How much of this economy and growth was real and how much was free money from the FED? We’ve still got all that same stuff now, but the only difference is the free money is gone and things look a lot different.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#5I partially agree on that - for example, I find it hard to believe the LLMs will make many lawyers or doctors redundant - not necessarily because of a lack of capabilities, but due to regulatory burdens.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#6How did this get so many points?
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#7Most of the recent AI advances and hype is around content creation, like generating essays or images. The big money is not content creation, but strategy, ranking visibility, etc. that arise from competition, like promoting a new product or outranking a competitor. Google is worth $1 trillion for this reason. Facebook $400 billion. Getty Images is worth $1 billion. Humans have to compete against other humans for an edge; AI does not stand a chance.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#8I can't help but think Andreesen's gone off the deep end a bit, especially after he started gushing over Adam Neumann's second run at a real estate company (“We think it is natural that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes.”).
> AI is simply already illegal across most of the economy, soon to be virtually all of the economy.
This just isn't true - AI won't necessarily be a product in the sectors he's talking about, but it'll absolutely improve them. Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology. College tuition? I suppose that depends on how much the value of higher education remains in scarce brand names vs. education, but clearly AI is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down.
And then AI will eventually (and to be clear, it might be a while) get us to general-purpose robots. He says "Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine." but in an industry like construction, if you accept what he's saying, all of that control is in the hands of the rich folks at the top. What he's suggesting is that they'll protect the jobs of construction workers when they can replace them with cheaper, more efficient robots who are exempt from safety standards.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#9How did this get so many points?
I'm going to bet it's because this was written by Marc Andreessen.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#10- Just a little bit of ideological over-simplification in this piece and , generally speaking, a false equivalence between technology and libertarian deregulation. There's plenty of room for technological authoritarianism, ask anyone who lived through zero-covid.
- I don't disagree at all that hospital costs are the direct result of regulatory failure. However, it has nothing to do with technology? Hospitals are actually bastions of advanced technology and AI? We just have no market on healthcare. I actually see plenty of room for AI to help make markets efficient, by helping poorly informed consumers be more aware of their options (such as seeking healthcare in places that DO have two-sided healthcare markets).
- One of the pathological 'red' lines is "college textbooks" some insignificant fraction of the economy, not really a relevant counter to "household furnishings".