Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

nber.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 143 posts

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#121

Post by robjan »

sublinear wrote: post #44
xyst wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Instead of many people in a business (ie, accountants, lawyers, product owners, software engineers). The “workforce” can theoretically be reduced to specialists within a field: - “prompt engineer - accounting” who has vast history of accounting practices - “prompt engineer - lawyer”. No more farming out writing up complicated EULAs to Skadden. Have your general counsel do all of this for you with the help of “…

I don't know enough about the other disciplines, but the SWE one would be the other way around and serially dependent. The architecture comes first and then the implementation details can be handed off to the prompt engineer. Then the code review will still require a human senior developer and maybe the architect. The testing after that can be fuzzed by AI but will still need to be confirmed by a human senior QA spec…

I think it actually replaces an army of junior engineers or your offshore development house. The real engineering continues while the grunt work is farmed out to AI. It also kills the junior engineer since there will be years where they are less valuable than something with a marginal cost close to zero.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#122

Post by mschuster91 »

golergka wrote: post #80
mschuster91 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In modern societies the working man seems to get at least some benefit from productivity gains that don't come directly from him working harder. And even if you do believe Marx, note the caveat about "without state intervention". The modern state has many tools to intervene and is not afraid to use them: taxes, minimum wage laws, mandating bullshit jobs. That may have been the case 30, 40 years ago in the US. In re…

Why would you expect a person to be able to afford a family on minimum wage? Why would you even want that? If you raised a minimum wage to that level, you would eliminate a lot of low-level jobs completely, and leave people who don't aspire or need this non-trivial level of achievement without jobs.

> Why would you expect a person to be able to afford a family on minimum wage? Why would you even want that?

Society needs children to survive - someone has to pay the pensions after all, at least in common "societal contract" systems, otherwise people will have to literally work until they die.

For that in turn, society needs at least a replacement fertility rate, and usually there is a close negative correlation between wealth and amount of children (i.e. the wealthier people get, the less children they have), so it makes sense to strengthen the ability particularly of the lower classes to have children.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#123

Post by agentultra »

azinman2 wrote: post #52
agentultra wrote: post #39

Progressive social policies, better voter representation, and strong unions can restore middle class jobs.

How does that prevent costs from rising, and business staying globally competitive and thus afloat?

There was a middle class in the US and Canada when there was better union representation and progressive social policies. That regressed when neoliberalism came into power and gutted the social institutions in favour of corporate power and the rich. Now there is almost no middle class and rising inequality.

How long can this state of affairs stay afloat? Does a business require the ability to exploit workers in order to succeed and be useful?

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#124

Post by golergka »

mschuster91 wrote: post #122
golergka wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect a person to be able to afford a family on minimum wage? Why would you even want that? If you raised a minimum wage to that level, you would eliminate a lot of low-level jobs completely, and leave people who don't aspire or need this non-trivial level of achievement without jobs.

> Why would you expect a person to be able to afford a family on minimum wage? Why would you even want that? Society needs children to survive - someone has to pay the pensions after all, at least in common "societal contract" systems, otherwise people will have to literally work until they die. For that in turn, society needs at least a replacement fertility rate, and usually there is a close negative correlation be…

> Society needs children to survive

This is true. However, what society definetly doesn't need is

> the ability particularly of the lower classes to have children

That's how you breed poverty and other systemic problems that you later have to deal with. People should only have children when they can afford to invest into real care for them. If a person earns a low wage, he shouldn't be able to afford children because he shouldn't have them.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#125

Post by dencodev »

azinman2 wrote: post #50
xyst wrote: post #15

If AI truly does take over most jobs of today (low to mid tier level SWEs replaced with a couple of “prompt engineers”). I would be okay, but only if there were proper support pillars in place. Healthcare should be free for all. UBI. And of course continued education provided to train workforce into something else.

UBI means everyone is poor and on welfare. I don’t see why this is the ideal solution everyone points to. I guess better than everyone jobless and no net whatsoever, but I wouldn’t call it something to strive for.

I guess it depends on how you define "poor". If "poor" is never having to work, getting to chase your dreams and ambitions with your entire life, and never having to worry about food and housing and healthcare, then sign me up.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#126

Post by thfuran »

Animats wrote: post #64
thfuran wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement No, it wasn't. A company can't survive long paying all its employees more than they're worth. The goal of unions was, at least as far as pay is concerned, only to reduce the margin that was skimmed off of employee value by employers.

That assumes total victory by management over labor. Which is why workers need to be organized. Samuel Gompers, 1890, arguing for an 8-hour day. "What we want to consider is, first, to make our employment more secure, and, secondly, to make wages more permanent, and, thirdly, to give these poor people a chance to work. The laborer has been regarded as a mere producing machine ... but back of labor is the soul of man…

>That assumes total victory by management over labor.

No, it assumes that companies can't pull money out of the ether. There definitionally isn't enough value produced by the collective labor of all the employees for them to each be paid more than their value.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#127

Post by yourapostasy »

hscontinuity wrote: post #21
d--b wrote: post #19

This person assumes AI is going to stay in its current form: a technology that requires an expert operator to help accomplish tasks. Most people are afraid of “next-level” AI, where no operator is required. If trucks can be moved without anyone at the wheel, truck driving is a job that won’t exist anymore. As simple as that. Whether trucks can be 100% autonomous remains to see.

Not if but when. 100% autonomous ability is well within reach.

I’d like to see the strong case for autonomous driving being the harbinger of generalized AI laid out. Specialized AI, with varying hardware support, has yet to solve the last-mile of 5-10% of autonomous driving in favorable conditions. In snow, sleet, hail, dusty, smoky, foggy or some rainy conditions, progress has not been commensurate. Yet somehow this is the success template for generalized AI applications. I’m missing the chain of logic here.

A lot of this breathless talk surrounding this turn of AI is so uncomfortably reminiscent of what I’ve seen before in the mainstream the last turns around the 1970’s and 1980’s, and the potential failure mode might not be so different: solving the last 5-10% is tantalizingly close but remains stubbornly out of reach of calls for the “more cowbell” of each era or call to action by the sales legions (currently cowbells look like NVIDIA boards and various counts of AI models be it tokens or what have you), and the last 5-10% is the necessary advance to cross the chasm.

I love and use the tech myself every hour, but it has deep gaps I don’t see being resolved even incrementally between versions or competitors.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#128

Post by mschuster91 »

golergka wrote: post #124
mschuster91 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you expect a person to be able to afford a family on minimum wage? Why would you even want that? Society needs children to survive - someone has to pay the pensions after all, at least in common "societal contract" systems, otherwise people will have to literally work until they die. For that in turn, society needs at least a replacement fertility rate, and usually there is a close negative correlation be…

> Society needs children to survive This is true. However, what society definetly doesn't need is > the ability particularly of the lower classes to have children That's how you breed poverty and other systemic problems that you later have to deal with. People should only have children when they can afford to invest into real care for them. If a person earns a low wage, he shouldn't be able to afford children because…

> If a person earns a low wage, he shouldn't be able to afford children because he shouldn't have them.

The right to found a family is enshrined in Article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights [1] and Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [2].

I agree it's a bit of a stretch, but at least the UDHR definition explicitly states that "the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State"... for me, that clearly implies economic protection, i.e. a society has to make sure that people can actually exercise that right - because how useful is a theoretical right to something (be it to found a family, or to have the right to due process and fair treatment before the courts, or whatever else), when large swaths of the population cannot exercise that right, or have access to it effectively denied by circumstances outside of their but inside the government's control?

[1] https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/convention_ENG

[2] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#130

Post by pydry »

bumby wrote: post #108
pydry wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is paid according to their value. They are paid according to their leverage. PhDs provide an immense amount of value but have very little leverage. Workers who unionize and use their power effectively have more leverage than those who do not. Land owners contribute precisely 0 value but hold leverage in the form of a legal title.

I would agree, but your statement makes it sound as if they are disjointed. You need to have both. (I would also push back a bit that a PhD adds immense value. Many that do get paid well via IP and start-ups, but that’s a better interface with the economy. There are many in my experience that add little more than a credential)

>You need to have both.

For employment the most it does is set a ceiling on wages. Pushing up your ceiling doesn't necessarily push up your wages.

>I would also push back a bit that a PhD adds immense value.

Of course, that's a common opinion. Blue sky research is vastly underrated in the west. This is partly why the Chinese are overtaking us.

Post reply on HN