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

401–410 of 582 posts

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#401

Post by jillesvangurp »

Good article. Nice to get some counter arguments to the utopian/libertarian/dystopian world views that dominate the debate here normally. None of those views are new. You can go back hundreds of years and find very similar points of view as early as the the seventeenth century when modern science was born, early industrialism, pre and post WW-II, etc.

The real world is much more resilient and stubborn. The industrial revolution indeed wiped out a lot of jobs. But it created a lot more new ones. Agriculture and food production no longer is >90% of the economy. The utopian version of that (we all get free food) never happened. The dystyopian version (we'll all starve) didn't happen either. And the Luddite version (we'll all go back to artisanal farming) didn't happen either. What happened is that well fed laborers went to work doing completely different stuff. Subsistence farming now only exists in undeveloped countries and regions in e.g. rural Africa.

The simple reality is that we have 8 billion people probably growing towards 10 billion. These people are going to buy and spend stuff with their income. Whatever that is, is what the economy is and what we collectively value. If AI puts us all out of work, people aren't going to sit on their hands and go back to subsistence farming. They'll fill the time with whatever is is that they can create income with so they can spend it on things that are valuable to them.

This notion of value is what is key. Because if AI lowers the cost of something, it simply becomes cheaper. We need a lot of valuable and scarce resources to power AI. That isn't cheap. So, there's an equilibrium of stuff that is valuable enough to automate with it that people still want to pay for by committing their valuable resources to it. Which as they become scarcer become more valuable and more interesting from an economic point of view. The economy adapts towards activity that facilitates value creation. We're opportunists. It all boils down to what we can do for each other that is valuable and interesting to us. Whatever that is, is where there will be a lot of growth.

I'm in software, I'm not worried about less work. I'm worried about handling the barrage of stuff I don't have time to do that I now need to start worrying about doing. There's no way I'm going to do any of that without AI. It's already generating more work than I can handle. This isn't frivolous stuff that I don't need, it's stuff that's valuable to my company because we can sell it to other companies who need that stuff.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#402

Post by flanked-evergl »

atlintots wrote: post #190
flanked-evergl wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You can't afford an apartment because the ownership class is working very hard to keep housing prices high while paying you as little as possible for the two decades you have been working. Not because some disabled person elsewhere is struggling to get by on government loans and welfare.

The people keeping housing prices high are the leftist that push regulations that make it impossible to build while importing immigrants who disproportionately use welfare and get starter loans which they then use to push up housing prices without contributing anything to the economy. If this is the "ownership class" I guess stop voting for leftist. But nobody does, they just keep doing it, and housing becomes even more unaffordable.

The right wing here are the only people where I live with an actual viable plan for helping working people, even low class working people. The left makes deliberate choices that everyone knows will make things worse for lower class working people.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#403

Post by geraneum »

delegate wrote: post #86

Bottlenecks. Yes. Company structures these days are not compatible with efficient use of these new AI models. Software engineers work on Jira tickets, created by product managers and several layers of middle managers. But the power of recent models is not in working on cogs, their true power is in working on the entire mechanism. When talking about a piece of software that a company produces, I'll use the analogy of…

> The future seems to be one operator working on the entire puzzle, minus the hierarchy of people.

Given the rest of your argument that makes no sense. Why should that one operator exist? If AI is good at big picture and the entire puzzle, I don’t see why that operator shouldn’t be automated away by the AI [company] itself?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#404

Post by matwood »

enraged_camel wrote: post #377
jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

>> The thing I keep seeing firsthand is that automation doesn't eliminate the job - it eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts. No, not necessarily. There are different kinds of automation. Earlier in my career I sold and implemented enterprise automation solutions for large clients. Think document scanning, intelligent data extraction and indexing and automatic routing. The C-level…

> The C-level buyers overwhelmingly had one goal: to reduce headcount.

For many businesses this is the only way to significantly reduce costs.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#405

Post by laichzeit0 »

hirvi74 wrote: post #212
zozbot234 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So AI is going to steamroll all feasible jobs, all at once, with no alternatives developing over time? That's just a fantasy.

It'd probably be cold day in Hell before AI replaces veterinary services, for example. Perhaps for mild conditions, but I cannot imagine an AI robot trying to restrain an animal.

All these so-called safe jobs still depend on someone being able to afford those services. If I don't have a job, I can't go see the vet, the fact that no one else can do the vets job is irrelevant at such a point.

I would like to know if there's some kind of inflection point, like the so-called Laffer curve for taxes, where once an economy has X% unemployment, it effectively collapses. I'd imagine it goes: recession -> depression -> systemic crisis and appears to be somewhere between 30-40% unemployment based on history.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#406

Post by jama211 »

Animats wrote: post #334
jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

> automation tools ... eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts. But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified. There's also a tradeoff between automation flexibility and cost. If you need an LLM for each transaction, your costs will be much higher than if some simple CRUD server does it. Here's a nice example from a more physical business - sandwich ma…

No? You don’t only gain justification for automation by cutting costs. You can gain justification by increasing profits. You can keep the same amount of people but use them more efficiently and you create more total value. The fact you didn’t consider this worries me.

Also the statement “show why automation hasn’t taken over” is truely hysterically wrong. Yeah, sure, no automation has taken over since the Industrial Revolution

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#407

Post by jama211 »

csa wrote: post #342
Animats wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> automation tools ... eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts. But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified. There's also a tradeoff between automation flexibility and cost. If you need an LLM for each transaction, your costs will be much higher than if some simple CRUD server does it. Here's a nice example from a more physical business - sandwich ma…

> But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified. In many cases, this is a fallacy. Much like programming, there is often essentially an infinite amount of (in this case) bookkeeping tasks that need to be done. The folks employed to do them work on the top X number of them. By removing a lot of the scut work, second order tasks can be done (like verification, clarification, etc.) or can…

Well said. It’s like they think that the only thing automation is good for is cutting costs. You can keep the same staff size but increase output instead, creating more value.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#408

Post by jama211 »

Ensorceled wrote: post #293
jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

I recently did a contract at medium sized business with a large retail and online business that had a CFO and several accountants / bookkeepers. You're describing a situation where that CFO only needs two or three accountants and bookkeepers to run the business and would lay off two or three people. It IS about headcount in a lot of cases.

Or they’d keep the same number of people and increase total value output. Businesses tend to like the idea of growth more than cost cutting after all.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#409

Post by matwood »

socalgal2 wrote: post #394
atlintots wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't afford an apartment because the ownership class is working very hard to keep housing prices high while paying you as little as possible for the two decades you have been working. Not because some disabled person elsewhere is struggling to get by on government loans and welfare.

The ownership class is doing no such thing. Zoning, regulation, nimby-ism are what keep prices high.

> Zoning, regulation, nimby-ism

And who exactly do you think controls these items?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#410

Post by jama211 »

tudorconstantin wrote: post #354
next_xibalba wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economies of scale were realized in the tv, but not the house. Maybe bc they aren’t realizable in housing, maybe bc regulation, maybe bc of the nimby veto, etc.

I think it’s rather because of scarcity: you can’t scale and automate land/prime-location land

Well you can scale it, which is why housing affordability is higher in many places where the cities are actually far denser than Australia. There are perverse incentives not to though, property prices don’t rise (which is what investors want) if you actually focus on increasing supply.
Post reply on HN