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

AI Won't Cause Unemployment

pmarca.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 362 posts

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#171

Post by dogcomplex »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #146
thatguy0900 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me all the money is just getting more and more concentrated. If Amazon succeeds in completely automating it's warehouses, who will see the bulk of that saved money, the customers or bezos?

> If Amazon succeeds in completely automating it's warehouses, who will see the bulk of that saved money, the customers or bezos? The answer depends on whether Amazon is a monopoly. If everybody else who sells goods on the internet also automates their warehouses and customers choose the retailer with the lowest prices, they have to pass the savings on to the customer or the customer will buy from Walmart or some oth…

Wholeheartedly agreed there. If (still an if) the automation tools are widespread (preferably open source), the vector of possible businesses that could compete in those areas also greatly increases. What once took a firm of thousands of people might be doable by a few nerds with some AI tools they copied from the internet. Yes, that means a lot of jobs lost at those firms, but it also means massive competition to drive prices down to their minimums - which benefits the consumer and enables entirely new second-order effects.

Regardless of how this all plays out... there's gonna a whole lot of Abundance of Things, and Services. As producers/workers - it's gonna be an awkward time. As Consumers? Ho boy baby - shit's gonna get crazy cheap

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#172

Post by zarzavat »

valine wrote: post #144
zarzavat wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not up-skilling but down-skilling. AI is going to come for the mathematicians and radiologists first and work its way down to the pizza delivery boys. This is because robotics is a couple of decades behind. Anyone with a desk job as a knowledge worker is most at risk.

Mathematicians are more than just number crunchers. Perhaps the most important part of a mathematicians job is formally defining problems. Even if the next generation of ChatGPT can solve any math problem you give it satisfactory, you still need a mathematician to ask the question. Presumably this AI won’t be omnipotent either, and there will be some limit to its mathematical prowess. I suspect most human effort will…

LLMs stand to be much better at research mathematics than humans. Breakthroughs in mathematics often come from taking a concept from one area of mathematics and applying it to another area. Humans find this difficult because it's hard to be a research-level mathematician in more than a few areas, a human life isn't long enough to learn that much. Humans learn depth-first.

LLMs learn breadth-first. You can go ask ChatGPT about literally any field of mathematics and it will give you an answer (probably a bad one). It's been trained on the entire Arxiv and (likely) library genesis. When they do become as good at humans at abstract reasoning, they will be as good at humans on all fields at once: an ultra-Tao.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#173

Post by temp123789246 »

It seems like if we want an answer to the question of “What impact will a human-like AI have on the economy?” then a relevant thing to look at would be historical times and places where slavery was prevalent. If we get to a point where the average person can spend a year’s salary to buy a human-like robot to work for them, well, that has been the case in many times and places before (it just wasn’t a robot).

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#174

Post by twelve40 »

idopmstuff wrote: post #62
twelve40 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no special love for this guy as he said some stuff that pissed me off in the past, but what is your specific argument against this post right here? > Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved"…

> This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved" here is so vague as to be meaningless. Let me rephrase: AI is better at human beings at the sort of pattern-matching work that radiology entails, so the majority of radiologists will be unemployed (I'll say in 20 years, if you want to check ba…

Got it. According to BLS, there are 29,530 radiologists out of 20,736,000 total employed in healthcare in the US. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes291224.htm

But, i get the gist of it, we can probably find many more niches that might suffer.

My take on the bigger point is, I wouldn't be so sure about the economy-wide apocalypse. I agree with what he said about the outsourcing scare of 2000's, and if pure cost+customization of education, for example, were an issue, you could conceivably hire a very good personal tutor (professor even) from a low-COL English speaking country, even like 15 years ago, or build yourself your own full custom curriculum for free from MIT videos and plentiful other information that has been around forever, mostly for free. Yet, colleges haven't been abandoned, people are taking on more and more debt every year just to be a part of that system. This is probably not technological in nature. Same for healthcare, there are so much money (and technology) getting poured into that but the system keeps getting more expensive and not too much more efficient, will probably start regressing at some point.

My personal point of curiosity was that autonomous driving, which 10 years ago was promised to have fully arrived 5 years ago, among other things would have turned 2,000,000 not-very-retrainable-in-such-numbers truck drivers in the US into basically near-homeless people. Well, it hasn't really happened:

> from 2020 you will become a permanent backseat driver

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/13/self-driv...

We've been, too, promised that AI will revolutionize healthcare, e.g. that Watson will replace your doctor (at least, according to the IBM and friends' pitches). Watson turned out to be less than a rounding error in the healthcare equation (i think they got rid of parts of it by now).

The point being, to me it's not very clear cut, and some of what MA pointed out seems really to be caused not by inferior pre-ChatGPT technology but for more societal/economical reasons and incentives (perverse or not).

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#176

Post by [deleted] »

cm2187 wrote: post #161
_448 wrote: post #101

This claim that AI won't cause unemployment baffles me. I understand the argument being made that new types of jobs will be created, but what the people making that argument miss is the massive level of up-skilling/re-skilling that is required of the population whose jobs are replaced. This has not worked out well. Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam…

If those communities were moving to London they would be doing fine. The unemployment rate in the UK is really low. It doesn't mean that a job will show up at your doorstep without having to do anything.

[deleted]

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#177

Post by yohannesk »

thomasahle wrote: post #159
valine wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematicians are more than just number crunchers. Perhaps the most important part of a mathematicians job is formally defining problems. Even if the next generation of ChatGPT can solve any math problem you give it satisfactory, you still need a mathematician to ask the question. Presumably this AI won’t be omnipotent either, and there will be some limit to its mathematical prowess. I suspect most human effort will…

Why does society have mathematicians right now? It's some mix of "the people find mathematics intellectually worthwhile" (public universities) and "we sometimes need to ask them to solve hard problems". If AI makes it less intellectually interesting, the first reason goes away. If engineers can just ask the AI to solve a hard problem instead of the mathematician, they don't need the mathematician as a middle man. So…

I am quite interested in this AI that can improve upon itself or come up with genuinely new and novel ideas. What are you referring to exactly? LLMs?

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#178

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jonathankoren wrote: post #170
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because there are new jobs doesn't mean the people whose jobs were automated out of existence will be able to take them. Yes it does, because those are the people whose labor will be available. They'll take whatever jobs they're qualified for, which may lower wages in those occupations until the lower price increases demand or reduces supply by driving anyone currently in those occupations who is qualified for…

> You get more production with less labor, so you on average need to do less labor to meet your cost of living. Citation Needed. This isn’t how it works out in practice though. If the predictions of the 1950s were to come true, we’d all be working 10 hours a week and bringing in the same wages. They weren’t wrong though. Efficiency did go up. It’s just that these efficiencies were never passed on to workers. Instead…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35027583

You're ascribing the evils of market concentration to automation. Automation isn't why housing and higher education are so much more expensive now than they were.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#179

Post by sklivvz1971 »

idopmstuff wrote: post #62
twelve40 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no special love for this guy as he said some stuff that pissed me off in the past, but what is your specific argument against this post right here? > Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved"…

> This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved" here is so vague as to be meaningless. Let me rephrase: AI is better at human beings at the sort of pattern-matching work that radiology entails, so the majority of radiologists will be unemployed (I'll say in 20 years, if you want to check ba…

The statement that "AI is better than human beings at the pattern-matching work of radiology, so the majority of radiologists will be unemployed" oversimplifies the role of radiologists. While AI can assist with pattern matching and improve scan quality, radiologists are doctors who diagnose pathologies based on multiple factors, not just scans. They also interact with patients, make important judgments, and determine when further investigation is necessary, for example.

While it is possible in theory for AI to handle these tasks, they are complex and difficult problems to solve. There is currently no evidence to suggest that AI will replace radiologists in the two decades. Therefore, it is important to recognize the valuable role that radiologists play in patient care and not underestimate the challenges that remain in developing AI technology that can effectively replicate their expertise.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#180

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Tanjreeve wrote: post #168
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because there are new jobs doesn't mean the people whose jobs were automated out of existence will be able to take them. Yes it does, because those are the people whose labor will be available. They'll take whatever jobs they're qualified for, which may lower wages in those occupations until the lower price increases demand or reduces supply by driving anyone currently in those occupations who is qualified for…

Outside of undergraduate economics 101 textbooks Labour is not perfectly fungible. - People have aptitudes, especially for creative work - Changing trades requires training/education which in itself requires capital - for most people their brains are less adaptable at older ages. Which worsens the other two effects.

> Outside of undergraduate economics 101 textbooks Labour is not perfectly fungible.

It wasn't claimed to be. That's why people whose skills are now in lower demand may make less money than other people. But that doesn't mean they can't find jobs.

Post reply on HN