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

I'm not worried about AI job loss

davidoks.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 582 posts

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#311

Post by quantummagic »

cyanydeez wrote: post #231
RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

See, we have enough food to feed the entire world, every year. It's not our production capabilities that keep people hungry; it's either greed or the problem of distribution. Automation will definitely amplify production but it'll certainly continue to make rich richer and poor, well, the same. As inequality grows, so too does the authoritarian need to control the differential.

Maybe we only have enough food to feed the entire world, because of greed. Every time we've tried to impose a system that spreads the wealth to the masses, rather than it resulting in equality, it has led to suffering and bloodshed. And ironically, in the Soviet Union and China, the death of millions from starvation.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#312

Post by slopinthebag »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #276
slopinthebag wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I mean, rather than humans cannot create a type of intelligence that supersedes what is roughly capable from human intelligence, because doing so would require us to be smarter basically. Not to say we can't create machines that far surpass our abilities on a single or small set of axis.

Think hard about this. Does that seem to you like it's likely to be a physical law? First of all, it's not necessary for one person to build that super-intelligence all by themselves, or to understand it fully. It can be developed by a team, each of whom understands only a small part of the whole. Secondly, it doesn't necessarily even require anybody to understand it. The way AI models are built today is by pressing…

> Think hard about this. Does that seem to you like it's likely to be a physical law?

Yes, it seems likely to me.

It seems like the ultimate in hubris to assume we are capable of creating something we are not capable of ourselves.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#313

Post by slopinthebag »

small_model wrote: post #230
slopinthebag wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I mean, rather than humans cannot create a type of intelligence that supersedes what is roughly capable from human intelligence, because doing so would require us to be smarter basically. Not to say we can't create machines that far surpass our abilities on a single or small set of axis.

Given SOTA models are Phd level in just about every subject this is clearly provably wrong.

Are humans just Phd students in a vat? Can a SOTA model walk? Humans in general find that task, along with a trillion other tasks that SOTA models cannot do, to be absolutely trivial.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#314

Post by lich_king »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #224
lich_king wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither datacenters nor chip manufacturing employ a whole lot of people. But I think you're looking at it wrong. Jobs come from people with money wanting to pay for jobs. That's not going to change. The jobs of the future may be that you're a court jester for Larry Ellison, or that you do something else that's fundamentally pointless but happens to be something that a person with money wants. Companion, entertainment…

The examples you give for jobs of the future don't sound appealing or very numerous. It seems like you're saying that people will be employed as personal assistants to the uber wealthy. But there aren't a lot of uber wealthy - certainly not enough to employ large amounts of the economy.

I mean, there's always the job of building pyramids. But no, seriously, I don't think it's just about the ultra-wealthy. Basically, anyone better off than you. Which is basically what's going on today: you effectively work for your boss, they work for their boss, and their boss (possibly after some extra hops) works for the ultra-rich CEO.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#315

Post by coldtea »

ArchieScrivener wrote: post #287
jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

Yeah bro, its been three years. We are just beginning. We will replace the vast majority of professional service workers in 10 years including lawyers as Ai shifts to local and moves away from the cloud.

That's 70% of the population living in ghettos and the economy collapsing through lack of people with disposable income with extra steps.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#316

Post by chrisweekly »

roenxi wrote: post #284
jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

> The bookkeeper is still there, still needed, but now they're doing the part that actually requires judgment. The argument might be fundamentally sound, but now we're automating the part that requires judgement. So if the accountants aren't doing the mechanical part or the judgement part, where exactly is the role going? Formalised reading of an AI provided printout? It seems quite reasonable to predict that humans…

By what logic are the "manual labor" jobs available? And if you're right and they somehow are, isn't that just another way of saying humanity is enslaving itself to the machines?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#317

Post by coldtea »

zozbot234 wrote: post #127
RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

> I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

>That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work

That's more because we are never given the chance. We only get to keep working or fall of the rat race and at best be delegated to Big Lebowski style pariah existance.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#318

Post by lich_king »

dakolli wrote: post #253
lich_king wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither datacenters nor chip manufacturing employ a whole lot of people. But I think you're looking at it wrong. Jobs come from people with money wanting to pay for jobs. That's not going to change. The jobs of the future may be that you're a court jester for Larry Ellison, or that you do something else that's fundamentally pointless but happens to be something that a person with money wants. Companion, entertainment…

Lmao, you need to go read up on the french revolution. This is the craziest comment I've read on this site in a long time. And I know datacenters and semiconductor manufacturing don't employ a lot of people, thats my point, the advent of llms replaces more jobs than it creates.

> french revolution.

A bunch of revolutionaries who carried a campaign of murder that ultimately had little bearing on the economic standing or job prospects of French citizens?

I'm not saying that people will be content or that there will be no revolutions in the future. There might be. But most jobs are a social construct. A relatively small fraction of employed people are essential to the well-being of mankind. For every construction guy, there are office managers, assistants to the office manager, municipal form-pushers, etc. It's not that these jobs are completely pointless, but we could do without them and the damage would be probably less than the cumulative payroll.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#319

Post by Bayko »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #281
jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment. AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because: - Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline. - Quality bec…

> AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context

This is why (personal experience) I am seeing a lot of FullStack jobs compared to specialized Backend, FE, Ops roles. AI does 90% of the job of a senior engineer (What the CEOs believe) and the companies now want someone that can do the full "100" and not just supply the missing "10". So that remaining 90 is now coming from an amalgamation of other responsibilities.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#320

Post by nine_k »

sarchertech wrote: post #301
ArchieScrivener wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah bro, its been three years. We are just beginning. We will replace the vast majority of professional service workers in 10 years including lawyers as Ai shifts to local and moves away from the cloud.

If we wipe out the vast majority of white collar jobs in just 10 years, we’re talking complete economic collapse. No society can possibly absorb that kind of disruption over such a short time. Also even assuming AI could completely replace lawyers. Lawyers control the legislature. They may not be able to stop your local model from telling you how to do something, but they can stop you from actually doing it without a…

Even subway train operators in NYC, whose job can be safely automated away, and has been for like 20 years, were able to legally mandate their jobs. I bet lawyers will, too. But the numbers of junior partners, and of paralegals, will dwindle.
Post reply on HN