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AI Won't Cause Unemployment

pmarca.substack.com

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Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#251

Post by staunton »

valenterry wrote: post #241
ChicagoDave wrote: post #212

This article is pure conservative BS. The stagnation of certain industries is because of tax policy and the insane greed injected into our healthcare systems when the HMO laws passed in the 1980's. I'm not even sure what pmarca is talking about here. It's like he's waving his arms, "look over here at my BS and don't look over there where AI is about to slam information workers." AI will absolutely change the way soft…

> will be able to write a detailed functional description of a system in natural language, domain models, with data points, and an AI will write, test, integrate, and deploy production level code. Yes, once math is also done in natural language, this will be the next step. I don't believe I will experience this in my lifetime unfortunately, but it will eventually happen.

Math has been done in natural language since the very beginning. Whatever math writing is not in natural language serves a specific purpose, such as being more precise than usual. In time, a jangon develops naturally as people with a lot of shared background knowledge optimize communication within their ingroup.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#253

Post by dogcomplex »

jalapenos wrote: post #196

You have to remember both sides of the balance sheet. AI can offer a path to reduced costs, threatening jobs, but it also offers a path to increased profitability, which creates jobs. It's hard to tell which force wins out on net, but there's always more work to do, no matter how good our tools are.

Too limited scope. It's entirely possible increased profitability will not create jobs if it outperforms most people.

However, reduced costs and increased profitability do mean increased/easier quality of life. Even if robots are outperforming people in the business sphere, you're still gonna be seeing the externalities of incredible abundance at the local level. Hard to say how that wins out on net when people can't get jobs to pay for the (very cheap) goods and services though. This is typically where government/community should step in.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#254

Post by ookdatnog »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #212

This article is pure conservative BS. The stagnation of certain industries is because of tax policy and the insane greed injected into our healthcare systems when the HMO laws passed in the 1980's. I'm not even sure what pmarca is talking about here. It's like he's waving his arms, "look over here at my BS and don't look over there where AI is about to slam information workers." AI will absolutely change the way soft…

I'm also tired of how market fundamentalists always keep comparing their opponents to the Luddites, as if the Luddites were irrational fools with eternal egg on their face for their inability to see the blessings that technological advancement would bestow upon society.

No, the Luddites actually lost their livelihoods in the early Industrial Revolution, and they would reap none of the eventual benefits of technological advancement. Their quality of life decreased suddenly and dramatically because they were replaced by technology.

If you'd be told that some technology will make you obsolete and you will become a homeless pauper by next year, but it's ok: decades from now the improved technology will lead humanity towards a post-scarcity paradise; would you be ok with that?

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#256

Post by dogcomplex »

temp123789246 wrote: post #173

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).

And the purely-digital "robot slave" will likely be $0 (albeit probably a little lower quality than the premium corporate versions), if open source software patterns are any indication.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#257

Post by ETH_start »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #246
ETH_start wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The stagnation of certain industries is because of tax policy and the insane greed injected into our healthcare systems when the HMO laws passed in the 1980's. The growth of the healthcare bureaucracy is generally attributed to the increase in regulations: https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme... While somewhat better designed to constrain costs, other countries' central economic planning in…

The administrators are a direct consequence of insurance-mandated budgeting. You can't seriously argue that they're caused by "regulations" when front-line doctors are having to call insurance companies from their offices to get clearance for life-saving procedures. Or when patients having an emergency have no idea how much treatment will cost because their insurance company has to work out whether treatment will be…

Regulations make the provision of healthcare and health insurance more complex, so seem like the most probable culprit.

The decline in the share of healthcare spending constituted by out-of-pocket spending, due to growing insurance-mandated budgeting, could very well have played a role in the growth of healthcare costs, and I believe it did.

But two points:

1. Those mandates are regulations, so this development doesn't contradict the thesis.

2. Out-of-pocket spending declined from 44 percent of total spending, in 1965, to about 10 percent today.

That can't explain a 32X increase in the number of hospital administrators. It is probably one component, among the many that are responsible for the growth in the number of hospital administrators.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#258

Post by bakuninsbart »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #212

This article is pure conservative BS. The stagnation of certain industries is because of tax policy and the insane greed injected into our healthcare systems when the HMO laws passed in the 1980's. I'm not even sure what pmarca is talking about here. It's like he's waving his arms, "look over here at my BS and don't look over there where AI is about to slam information workers." AI will absolutely change the way soft…

Software Engineering is only one of the fields that will be revolutionized by this technology, and to agree with the article at least in one point, regulation will be the major inhibitor to how far it goes. The two big problems for our current AIs is a) copyright of training data and b) liability when adhering to the output.

In the case of self-driving for example, having cameras that film everything around the car can be a problem if handled incorrectly, there are some countries where it might be outright illegal (eg. Germany). There will also be huge legal battles on liability when things go wrong.

But speaking of legal; law is one of the industries outside of SWE that might see the biggest shift. The stakes here are also high, sometimes possibly as high as with decisions made by driving AIs, but for a lot of people getting free or very cheap legal advice will be an incredible blessing. Law firms might be able to cut out most non-partners if "legal assistant AIs" get sophisticated.

The chances for medicine are what excites me the most. Already, most doctors google a lot. (Personalized) Medicine is simply a field too complex for a human to fully encompass, and AI has the potential to sift through all the literature, and all the available medical data, to find possible relations in symptoms. And, again, free medical advice (even if dubious) would be a blessing for the billions of people without access to healthcare.

> AI is going to change humanity in dramatic ways. I just hope that in the process, someone builds an AI that figures out a path out of international conflict, through global food and water safety issues, and speeds up our ability to restore the planet's health so humanity can survive.

I agree with this, although I'm deeply scared of an AI that capable. Increasingly, I'm agreeing with the hawks who believe AI is one of the biggest existential threats of the ongoing century.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#259

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dmichulke wrote: post #224
Kiro wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Every article about this makes the comparison with the Industrial Revolution, including this one.

I think he means that the Industrial Revolution made a lot of human work obsolete, yet here we are almost without unemployment. Same for the invention of the wheel. So how was that possible? Turns out people didn't want to work less, they wanted more stuff. (Bigger houses, more houses, better food, health care, ...) The same will happen again with AI. Thanks to infinite human wants.

We're only "without unemployment" because most of the population is spectacularly underpaid. This makes it cheaper - so far - to use human labour than machine labour.

And we don't use human labour very efficiently. A lot of activities are pointless make-work or zero productivity wealth transfer.

Which is almost the point of AI. It's not just about partial mechanisation or automation, which is what happened during the first Industrial Revolution. It's about making all human activity obsolete. Including all forms of mental and physical labour. All forms of culture. And all forms of economic and political organisation.

There will be nothing humans can do which a machine won't do better.

We're like the dinosaurs. A few of us are looking up at the new light in the sky and thinking "Well, that's interesting" without much of an idea of what's actually incoming.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#260

Post by saycleearly »

zarzavat wrote: post #127
_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…

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.

> AI is going to come for the mathematicians and radiologists first.

As a mathematician I can see that 1) chatgpt is not able to make basic computations correctly. 2) there are not many gigabytes of information about how a great mathematician use his brain to develop a new theory or concept. 3) Common language, like that used to train chatgpt, is far from the pure concepts and intuitions used in math

From all of the above, I fail to understand on what basis are you suggesting that AI is going to replace mathematicians.

Perhaps new systems with new capabilities might emerge but what we have now are very simple systems that use some clues to perform the most simple computations.

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