AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#41

Post by d--b » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 9:05 PM UTC

hscontinuity wrote: post #21

d--b wrote: post #19

This person assumes AI is going to stay in its current form: a technology that requires an expert operator to help accomplish tasks. Most people are afraid of “next-level” AI, where no operator is required. If trucks can be moved without anyone at the wheel, truck driving is a job that won’t exist anymore. As simple as that. Whether trucks can be 100% autonomous remains to see.

Not if but when. 100% autonomous ability is well within reach.

Not in all conditions. The devil really is in the details.

A truly 100% autonomous vehicle requires a much higher level of intelligence than a self driving vehicle with a driver able to take the wheel when necessary.

Take the case when some work is happening on the road and workers make signs with their hands to tell you to go this or that way. But on the same road there is also someone who is dressed up as a policeman cause it’s Halloween, and he’s waving at some friends.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#42

Post by asdff » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 9:05 PM UTC

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #14

asdff wrote: post #4

The problem with the concept of a middle class job (one where you can comfortably afford living, fun, saving, etc I think is most people's interpretations), is that it represents an unstable equilibrium state. Incentives of most businesses are the opposite of someone in the middle class. Businesses don't think in terms how they can take so little such as to perpetuate some idyllic lifestyle unimpinged, they think in…

Institute law that give employees greater than 50% shares of any large company they were work for. So, the capitalist class can't actually extract wealth away from the worker class.

There are many ways to snap ones fingers and right the ship, very few ways to do it in practice. Imagine trying to get such a law passed, you'd have the entire worlds economy outadvertising and out lobbying you.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#43

Post by copperx » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 9:06 PM UTC

hscontinuity wrote: post #21

d--b wrote: post #19

This person assumes AI is going to stay in its current form: a technology that requires an expert operator to help accomplish tasks. Most people are afraid of “next-level” AI, where no operator is required. If trucks can be moved without anyone at the wheel, truck driving is a job that won’t exist anymore. As simple as that. Whether trucks can be 100% autonomous remains to see.

Not if but when. 100% autonomous ability is well within reach.

> 100% autonomous ability is well within reach.

I don't doubt that, but the timeframe is unknown. 5 years? 10 years? Within our lifetime?

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#44

Post by sublinear » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 9:09 PM UTC

xyst wrote: post #25

fny wrote: post #5

"air traffic controllers were paid a median annual salary of $132,250 in 2022, or nearly four times the $33,380 median annual pay of crossing guards" It's not quite "expertise" that justifies the wage gap, it's supply and demand. Almost anyone can be a crossing guard--not everyone can be an air traffic controller. If AI theoretically could make anyone an air traffic controller, one would expect the salary to collapse…

Right. Instead of many people in a business (ie, accountants, lawyers, product owners, software engineers). The “workforce” can theoretically be reduced to specialists within a field: - “prompt engineer - accounting” who has vast history of accounting practices - “prompt engineer - lawyer”. No more farming out writing up complicated EULAs to Skadden. Have your general counsel do all of this for you with the help of “…

I don't know enough about the other disciplines, but the SWE one would be the other way around and serially dependent. The architecture comes first and then the implementation details can be handed off to the prompt engineer.

Then the code review will still require a human senior developer and maybe the architect. The testing after that can be fuzzed by AI but will still need to be confirmed by a human senior QA specialist.

In other words, AI can lower the bar for entry level work (not by much), but it does not eliminate or create any new jobs. It's very similar to what search did for entry level work. Search results "powered by AI" are also over a decade old.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#45

Post by smallmancontrov » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 9:09 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #29

asdff wrote: post #4

The problem with the concept of a middle class job (one where you can comfortably afford living, fun, saving, etc I think is most people's interpretations), is that it represents an unstable equilibrium state. Incentives of most businesses are the opposite of someone in the middle class. Businesses don't think in terms how they can take so little such as to perpetuate some idyllic lifestyle unimpinged, they think in…

> one where you can comfortably afford living, fun, saving, etc I think is most people's interpretations My understanding is that most people's understanding of "middle class" is "about 20% richer than me", and that this remains true regardless of how rich one is. Most people, for most of the years since Joseph Marie Jacquard realised he could control a loom with punched cards, the Red Queen race of automation has gi…

> "middle class" is "about 20% richer than me"

There are better definitions.

> Karl Marx

You said Voldemort's name! Now he will surely haunt us.

In any case, your objective function dramatically changes when you own things for a living rather than work for a living. Many people would call someone with a 1MM retirement portfolio rich, but 4% returns on a 1MM portfolio is $40k/yr and probably isn't going to replace a job, not for someone who managed to amass 1MM in the first place. However, 4% returns on a 10MM portfolio is $400k/yr, and it might. 4% on $100MM is $4MM/yr, and it probably will. So the composition of incentives switches from worker-like to owner-like somewhere around $10MM net worth, and this is worth noting.

If you ever saw old timey movies from the 50s or 60s where "millionaire" was said with reverence, note that $1MM in 60s dollars is $10MM in 2024 dollars. They were aware of the class divide back then in a way that people generally are not today.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#46

Post by abdullahkhalids » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 9:11 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #42

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institute law that give employees greater than 50% shares of any large company they were work for. So, the capitalist class can't actually extract wealth away from the worker class.

There are many ways to snap ones fingers and right the ship, very few ways to do it in practice. Imagine trying to get such a law passed, you'd have the entire worlds economy outadvertising and out lobbying you.

> We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Ursula K Le Guin [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-gu...

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#47

Post by thfuran » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 9:12 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #40

This seems to be the author's main point: "Recall that the advent of pre-AI computing made the expert judgment of professional decision- makers more consequential and more valuable by speeding the task of acquiring and organizing information. Simultaneously, computerization devalued and displaced the procedural expertise that was the stock-in-trade of many middle-skill workers. But imagine a technology that could inv…

>The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement

No, it wasn't. A company can't survive long paying all its employees more than they're worth. The goal of unions was, at least as far as pay is concerned, only to reduce the margin that was skimmed off of employee value by employers.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#48

Post by asdff » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 9:12 PM UTC

drewcoo wrote: post #20

asdff wrote: post #4

The problem with the concept of a middle class job (one where you can comfortably afford living, fun, saving, etc I think is most people's interpretations), is that it represents an unstable equilibrium state. Incentives of most businesses are the opposite of someone in the middle class. Businesses don't think in terms how they can take so little such as to perpetuate some idyllic lifestyle unimpinged, they think in…

> The problem with the concept of a middle class job (one where you can comfortably afford living, fun, saving, etc I think is most people's interpretations), is that it represents an unstable equilibrium state. Incentives of most businesses are the opposite of someone in the middle class. Ok, and I claim that the problem with the current model of capitalism, as opposed to the post-WWII model, is that it's opposition…

>Now the question is about the societal outcomes we expect from the systems people create. Why should we prefer greater inequity and an even more complete loss of the middle class? These things are all being imposed by human-manufactured systems - we can control them.

Control of these systems lies in the capital class not in the working class. They prefer greater inequality, you and I probably don't but you and I have zero agency to do anything at all about how the world works. We lack support and we lack money to advertise our position and garner support relative to the groups empowered and enriched by the status quo.

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#49

Post by Animats » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 9:12 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #37

sideshowb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see that math expanded because I'm not sure I follow. Just because some (even if all) companies want to bleed the world dry, they aren't all colluding. If Tesco put up their prices it's not going to derail my middle class lifestyle, I'll just go shop at lidl instead. If my employer cuts pay in real terms then that's certainly a tougher situation which is why we have a union, but though it may be hassle, m…

I'm not alleging collusion, I don't believe there is any active collusion at all. These things are possible through just incentives. E.g. consider a hypothetical streaming providor; compute is cheaper by the year, cost of owning your datacenter goes down by the year, your customer base grows by the year, the amount of money you return on investments like productions continues to pay out by the year, yet your sharehol…

When electric utilities were tightly regulated, utility stocks were rated on the size and consistency of their dividends. PG&E was a great stock to own for a century. The stock price didn't go up fast, but the dividends were paid consistently. That's the steady state of a mature company.

Then came deregulation. Within five years, PG&E went bankrupt.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California_e...

Re: AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

#50

Post by azinman2 » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 9:14 PM UTC

xyst wrote: post #15

If AI truly does take over most jobs of today (low to mid tier level SWEs replaced with a couple of “prompt engineers”). I would be okay, but only if there were proper support pillars in place. Healthcare should be free for all. UBI. And of course continued education provided to train workforce into something else.

UBI means everyone is poor and on welfare. I don’t see why this is the ideal solution everyone points to. I guess better than everyone jobless and no net whatsoever, but I wouldn’t call it something to strive for.