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AI Won't Cause Unemployment

pmarca.substack.com

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Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#291

Post by dmichulke »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #259
dmichulke wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> because most of the population is spectacularly underpaid

Underpaid compared to what? I'll start assuming here, so please forgive me: it sounds like you mean "we have a right to not be underpaid" which would be nice but I don't think there's anyone that can bend economic realities to make this right meaningful.

It would be like "we have a right to eat meat" in prehistoric times which is simply a concept but it's not feasible simply because we call it a right. If we have a fixed amount of meat, someone will have to eat less if someone else eats more.

Yes, we can increase meat production but then someone else will again eat less than the others ("underpaid" in terms of meat).

> This makes it cheaper - so far - to use human labour than machine labour.

Yes, new technology is equivalent to putting a maximum salary on human work, eventually it's just not efficient anymore to use humans.

> It's about making all human activity obsolete

I think what you're describing is paradise and I don't see it happening anytime soon. And if it happens, well, no work all play sounds like Star Trek and there we still needed humans to work in politics, defense and research...

> All forms of culture

I think the artist that works in spite of his low income is a counter-example. There are people that like to be "productive", e.g. by making music, ...

> without much of an idea of what's actually incoming

I don't see it incoming anytime soon. But if it happens, I think must people will kill themselves by overdosing on endorphines (using drugs, social media, opioids, whatever else comes along)

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#292

Post by IanCal »

IanCal wrote: post #267
omnicognate wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs aren't new and there has been no sign of them being able to automate maths research so far. If they do, I will acknowledge them as AGI as it has been my goalpost for over 30 years. I've never moved it once, and I won't. Computers were invented in large part for this purpose. The hope was to have a machine that could spit out interesting theorems. It turned out that generating theorems was trivial (you can just e…

It would be interesting to try these things out. I've been experimenting with making art with ChatGPT - instead of telling it how to do it or even what to do specifically I'm asking it for ideas, to then pick its favourite and expand on why etc. It's worked surprisingly well. I've moved on to asking it how you'd make an art show of multiple images, then just asking it to "follow step one in your instructions", "now f…

I can't evaluate the results but here's my first chat, may be interesting: https://gist.github.com/IanCal/4426fdf81797c2800e8202a3b4f6c...

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#293

Post by UncleMeat »

thrashh wrote: post #117
_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…

It’s very surprising when people talk about AI but not talk about the Industrial Revolution. The power loom hugely changed the world. You don’t have to write a substack about your opinions — just read a history book. Second, Marc quotes outsourcing but that’s not at all a relevant example. Outsourcing was not a technology. His other example is of robots but robots have not been revolutionary like the power loom or ev…

Technologists making historical claims and arguments while not engaging with actual historians and also arguing that the humanities are a waste of time and money... name a better pair.

Like, Stanford has some world class History of Technology scholars just down the road from Marc's home. He could go speak to any of them.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#294

Post by ag3ist »

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…

[dead]

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#295

Post by slibhb »

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…

> AI will absolutely change the way software engineering is accomplished. We already use things like Cloud Formation templates to auto-build and scale cloud-based architectures. We have code generators to build microservices. We even have modeling techniques to simplify complex systems.

> All of those "things" will be plugged into an AI and one senior technologist 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.

Are you sure? Imagine someone saying the same thing about compilers: "Before we employed 20 programmers to write machine code but now we can employ 5 C programmers because C is so much more productive". Of course the opposite happened. Compilers increased the demand for programmers.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#296

Post by mythrwy »

AverageDude wrote: post #43

Disagree. AI will cause mass unemployment because it’s way more efficient than a human, doesn’t get sick (relatively less than humans) and costs less. Simple economics. I’ll give you one example. The checkout counters in supermarkets, if the supermarkets would have hired young people on those positions not only we might have less young people going towards drugs and hooliganism but it would have also made them better…

Cashierless checkout counters didn't really reduce labor though.

They just shifted it from a paid cashier to buyers doing it for free.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#298

Post by [deleted] »

frankreyes wrote: post #211
_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…

> Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam locomotive(yes, for that many generations the effects of job losses are felt) In order to make money selling coal, someone has to buy that coal. They're selling something that nobody buys anymore. Try selling ice cubes in the North Pole. The purpose of those coal jobs was jobs creation, not problem solving. New g…

[deleted]

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#299

Post by neilwilson »

dogcomplex wrote: post #263
neilwilson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is that it isn't communist. UBI is a free market belief utilising the money illusion to make capitalist extraction seem 'fair' to those who can't see past a dollar sign. Hence why Friedman made the case for it via 'negative income tax' In reality it is people who don't want to work for a living being fed and clothed by forcible extraction of time and output from those that do work for a living - with the…

It's not necessarily extraction from those that do work for a living if the tax to pay for the UBI is largely a wealth-tax taking the majority from wealthy investors (who, by the conventional wisdom of capitalism, do exactly what you accuse and extract time and output from those that do work for a living for the "hard labor" of managing an index fund). If that tax is balanced to offset the two, well - you've got a fa…

It’s always an extraction from the working person. The rich only have money. They don’t have or produce any stuff.

To believe otherwise is to fall for the money illusion.

The tax should be returned to the worker who has earned it, not redistributed to another person who expects to consume without producing.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#300

Post by asah »

ChatGTP wrote: post #282
staunton wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Handmade goods are another example of this The market ahare of handmade goods is going down. They are forming a parallel luxury sector with better quality in some items and equal or worse in others at significantly higher price. The analogy for music would be a lot of bands who don't write their own music and can't sing or play their instruments (assuming they even have instruments), relying on technology or other…

I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm not talking about luxury brands, I'm talking about the fact that regular people enjoy buying handmade niche products that are made by other people. Anyway I know people who work in fashion, pretty much all luxury brands are good made by hand, you just don't know it because it's happening in slave labor, sweat shops and the like. The analogy for music would be a lot of b…

I hope you're right but I'm friends with a number of second and third tier photographers, and work is already a struggle. Many are already moving to other professions.

The cost and hassle of a professional photo shoot is insane, the cost of a model agreeing to allowing her/his likeness be AI generated is pennies.

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