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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#251

Post by badestrand »

closewith wrote: post #218
GoatInGrey wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snarky but serious question: How do we know that this wave will disrupt labor at all? Every time I dig into a story of X employees replaced by "AI", it's always in a company with shrinking revenues. Furthermore, all of the high-value use cases involve very intense supervision of the models. There's been a dream of unsupervised models going hog wild on codebases for the last three years. Yet even the latest and greate…

> instead of only somewhat reliably fulfilling very narrowly scoped tasks that require no creativity or expertise. This alone is enough to completely reorganise the labour market, as it describe an enormous number of roles.

How many people could be replaced by a proper CMS or a Excel sheet right now already? Probably dozens of millions, and yet they are at their desks working away.

It's easy to sit in a café and ponder about how all jobs will be gone soon but in practice people aren't as easily replacable.

Re: AI is different

#252

Post by torben-friis »

btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

>But as its capabilities improve, what do displaced humans transition to?

IF there is intellectual/office work that remains complex enough to not be tackled by AI, we compete for those. Manual labor takes the rest.

Perhaps that’s the shift we’ll see: nowadays the guy piling up bricks makes a tenth of the architects’ salary, that relation might invert.

And the indirect effects of a society that values intellectual work less are really scary if you start to explore the chain of cause and effect.

Re: AI is different

#253

Post by ares623 »

dsign wrote: post #227
ares623 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This pisses me off so much. So many engineers are so excited to work on and with these systems, opening 20 prs per day to make their employers happy going “yes boss!” They think their $300k total compensation will give them a seat at the table for what they’re cheering on to come. I say that anyone who needed to go the grocery this week will not be spared by the economic downturn this tech promises. Unless you have y…

Big fan of your argument and don't disagree. If AI makes a virus to get rid of humanity, well we are screwed. But if all we have to fear from AI is unprecedented economic disruption, I will point out that some parts of the world may survive relatively unscathed. Let's talk Samoa, for example. There, people will continue fishing and living their day-to-day. If industrialized economies collapse, Samoans may find it ver…

Won’t 8 billion people will have incentive to move to Samoa in that case?

Re: AI is different

#254

Post by yaur »

btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

I believe that historically we have solved this problem by creating gigantic armies and then killing off millions of people that couldn't really adapt to the new order with a world war.

Re: AI is different

#255

Post by ACCount37 »

andrewmutz wrote: post #201

Reading smart software people talk about AI in 2025 is basically just reading variations on the lump of labor fallacy. If you want to understand what AI can do, listen to computer scientists. If you want to understand it’s likely impact on society, listen to economists.

How does "lump of labor fallacy" fare when there is no job remaining that a human can do better or cheaper than a machine?

The list of advantages human labor hold over machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing.

Re: AI is different

#256

Post by krainboltgreene »

closewith wrote: post #218
GoatInGrey wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snarky but serious question: How do we know that this wave will disrupt labor at all? Every time I dig into a story of X employees replaced by "AI", it's always in a company with shrinking revenues. Furthermore, all of the high-value use cases involve very intense supervision of the models. There's been a dream of unsupervised models going hog wild on codebases for the last three years. Yet even the latest and greate…

> instead of only somewhat reliably fulfilling very narrowly scoped tasks that require no creativity or expertise. This alone is enough to completely reorganise the labour market, as it describe an enormous number of roles.

I promise you that your understanding of those roles is wrong.

Re: AI is different

#257

Post by ACCount37 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #234
morsecodist wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do feel that there is a routine bias on HN to underplay AI It's always interesting to see this take because my perception is the exact opposite. I don't think there's ever been an issue for me personally with a bigger mismatch in perceptions than AI. It sometimes feels like the various sides live in different realities.

Any big AI release, some of the top comments are usually claiming either the tech itself is bad, relaying a specific anecdote about some AI model messing up or some study where AI isn't good, or claiming that AI is a huge bubble that will inevitably crash. I've seen the most emphatic denials of the utility of AI here go much farther than anywhere else where criticism of AI is mild skepticism. Among many people it is…

Coping mechanisms. AI is overhyped and useless and wouldn't ever improve, because the alternative is terrifying.

Re: AI is different

#258

Post by ako »

aorloff wrote: post #181
schneems wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…

Every time someone casually throws out UBI my mind goes to the question "who is paying taxes when some people are on UBI ?" Is there like a transition period where some people don't have to pay taxes and yet don't get UBI, and if so, why hasn't that come yet ? Why aren't the minimum tax thresholds going up if UBI could be right around the corner ?

You also have to consider the alternative: if there’s no ubi, are you expecting millions to starve? This is a recipe for civil war, if you have a very large group of people unable to survive you get social unrest. Either you spend the money on ubi or on police/military suppression to battle the unrest.

Re: AI is different

#259

Post by thephotonsphere »

BoorishBears wrote: post #226
tfourb wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you live in a place with perfect weather year round? I don’t and I haven’t seen a robo taxi my entire life. I do have access to a Tesla though and it’s current self-driving capabilities are not even close to anything I would call „autonomous“ und real world conditions (including weather). Maybe the tech will at some point be good enough. At the current rate of improvement this will still take decades at least…

I've ridden just under 1,000 miles in autonmous (no scare quotes) Waymos, so it's strange to see someone letting Tesla's abject failure inform their opinions on how much progress AVs have made. Tesla that got fired as a customer by Mobileye for abusing their L2 tech is your yardstick? Anyways, Waymo's DC launch is next year, I wonder what the new goalpost will be.

Tesla uses only cameras, which sounds crazy (reflections, direct sunlight disturbances, fog , smoke, etc.

LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial

https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...

Re: AI is different

#260

Post by ben_w »

sneak wrote: post #200
leshow wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI is not a good solution because you still have to provision everything on the market, so it's a subsidy to private companies that sell the necessities of life on the market. If we're dreaming up solutions to problems, much better would be to remove the essentials from the market and provide them to everyone universally. Non-market housing, healthcare, education all provided to every citizen by virtue of being a hu…

You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere. The costs of what you propose are enormous. No legislation can change that fact. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Who’s going to pay for it? Someone who is not paying for it today. How do you intend to get them to consent to that? Or do you think that the needs of t…

> You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere.

Is AI slavery? Because that's where the value comes from in the scenario under discussion.

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