101–107 of 107 posts
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I currently work as a software engineer, but I've worked in the past in restaurants (dishwasher/prep cook), doordashing, as a musician, as moving help. If AI automates software I'll just do something else.
Good luck with physical labor when you reach your 50s.
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Isn’t this more a function of how the American construction market is just really messed up somehow (corruption?)? In China, actual things get built fairly cheaply and quickly. You just don’t see workers hanging around watching one guy dig a hole like you do in the states. I would guess that automation is the only way out of the mess we are in, since just throwing more money and people at the problem just seems to ma…
Could you expand on the corruption claim?
I think part of that is safety and labor cost, but I think another part is that construction is contracted almost always.
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So you work in one of these fields, right? Hydroponics, homebuilding, theatre construction, pothole repair?
I currently work as a software engineer, but I've worked in the past in restaurants (dishwasher/prep cook), doordashing, as a musician, as moving help. If AI automates software I'll just do something else.
If it were up to me, I'd be flipping burgers right now. But I literally can't do that, it doesn't pay enough for that to be a job I can take. Id have to, like, find roommates.
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The article is saying that the solution here isn’t to just throw up our hands and commit suicide as a nation, it’s to simply tax the AI, punishing the negative externality. Seems like the obvious answer to the prisoner’s dilemma problem where everyone wants to lay off their workforce, but expects that they’ll be the only ones to get this bright idea.
What’s a bit hard for me to rationalize here is why are market shifts considered a negative externality here? We didn’t tax moulding machines because they reduced the demand for sculptors. Don’t get me wrong, I think the end goal of “Tax those who can pay for it to build a social safety net” is reasonable, I just don’t buy the “negative externalities” argument.
It's kind of similar to how nobles fucked themselves in the middle ages. One would think having a lot of serfs is good, but no actually. Having a functioning economy would be better, and in the long run feudal economies stagnated.
And that's why I, today, am effectively much more rich than a feudal lord.
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I guess the argument would go that a new economic model will be required at that stage. There isn't much point in having people do jobs they don't like which are trivial to automate just for money, but at the point where there isn't enough economically useful things for everyone to do, the current system falls down. > What is the benefit exactly? Well one benefit would be international competitiveness. The country th…
> but at the point where there isn't enough economically useful things for everyone to do This assumes that for example a person who has been an artist for 20 years, can easily enough switch professions to a machinist, and the only reason for them not to do it is because the economy has no need for another machinist. An insane way to think. This is not how humans work. Let me see any HN dweller go from their cushy ho…
I think that's the reality of lots of people when they face any redundancy situation - People take up jobs that they wouldn't traditionally want to do in order to survive or look after their family. I don't necessarily see why people on HN would be different.
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I guess the argument would go that a new economic model will be required at that stage. There isn't much point in having people do jobs they don't like which are trivial to automate just for money, but at the point where there isn't enough economically useful things for everyone to do, the current system falls down. > What is the benefit exactly? Well one benefit would be international competitiveness. The country th…
The paper is suggesting such a new economic model. Do you have a another proposal?
I suspect if the 'AI-Maximalists' are true, it will need to be a more fundamental rewrite (e.g. UBI, Socialism etc)
neo-luddism dressed up in economic jargon. the authors suggest the only effective tool is to tax companies based on how much automation they achieve. Penalizing efficiency is a guaranteed recipe for stagnation and if we'd done this at any point in our past we would have not made it out of the dark ages
Everyone is efficient, thus, the efficiency has to support what we'd call our economy/society.
I can foresee a token tax in the future in some ways, but then that would kill private LLMs if hat came true so i'm not sure anyone has an answer, but neo-luddism seems short sighted.