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AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

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

#71

Post by bumby »

dmurray wrote: post #53
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…

Well, we can also say that we expect air traffic controllers generate at least their $132k/ year in value. Crossing guards seem to have a similar role and in theory could be generating the same value, but at the margin they're probably not - you'd expect hiring another one would be worth some significant fraction of the $132k to railway companies, but they're not competing to hire more of them. So if AI enables every…

>we can also say that we expect air traffic controllers generate at least their $132k/ year in value

This is an important distinction that the author misses. People are paid according to their value to the economy, not their value to society. So, even if the jobs were similar in expertise, the crossing guard would likely not make as much because the ATC provides more to the economy.

*FWIW, I'm not saying this is moral or fair, it's just is the way the economic cookie crumbles.

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

#72

Post by mschuster91 »

Animats wrote: post #49
asdff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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

It's not like deregulation was the only issue, that just accelerated the bullshit. PG&E had neglected ("deferred") maintenance for many decades - the deadly 2018 wildfire was caused by a cable hook that was around a century old and had never been inspected for a very VERY long time until it eventually failed [1]. IMHO, that amount of maintenance neglect should have been classified as financial fraud:

> PG&E has said in recent court filings it didn’t track when its hooks were installed or how long they had been exposed to weather. It also didn’t routinely inspect them to look for corrosion or wear. Before the Camp Fire, PG&E inspection forms didn’t even include space to note the condition of hooks and other hardware.

How PG&E dared to pay dividends when they didn't even know how much liabilities they had on the books, that is just utterly insane.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-old-metal-hook-could-deter...

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

#73

Post by asdff »

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.

On the other hand, offshoring of manufacturing and the emergence of computers should have reduced the workforce but we saw the opposite happen. There might not be truck drivers in the future but maybe those people will just be working different jobs, like how I am not a blacksmith making horseshoes today.

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

#74

Post by bumby »

mschuster91 wrote: post #57
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…

> Additionally, the notion of a middle class relies on a wage differential. If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes. Yup, and that is going to be the defining problem of the next decade - IMHO even more than climate change and most other environmental issues. The lower classes aren't going to be threatened by AI, no…

Alarmism aside, there are ways to mitigate this outcome. Take your comment:

>or human labor will be cheaper than a robot replacing it

One option is to create an automation tax, which makes human labor more competitive while also supplanting the income taxes that are lost due to automation. That's just one example, but like so many problems that are of man-made origin, there are also potential solutions of man-made origin. They are not natural laws.

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

#75

Post by mschuster91 »

bumby wrote: post #74
mschuster91 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, the notion of a middle class relies on a wage differential. If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes. Yup, and that is going to be the defining problem of the next decade - IMHO even more than climate change and most other environmental issues. The lower classes aren't going to be threatened by AI, no…

Alarmism aside, there are ways to mitigate this outcome. Take your comment: > or human labor will be cheaper than a robot replacing it One option is to create an automation tax, which makes human labor more competitive while also supplanting the income taxes that are lost due to automation. That's just one example, but like so many problems that are of man-made origin, there are also potential solutions of man-made o…

> One option is to create an automation tax, which makes human labor more competitive while also supplanting the income taxes that are lost due to automation.

As if those in power would ever agree to such a thing. "Trickle down" is a myth, US Congress has been gridlocked for decades, and most other parliaments in the world are so infested with lobbyists that you will not ever see an automation tax without widespread violent unrest. People living outside of democracies have it even worse.

There are zero signs that democracy is capable of fixing the issues at hand, it's all just too damn corrupt, and fighting for utter and bare survival against the rise of authoritarianism. Yes, you sometimes have "social democrats" gain power (or authoritarians getting booted off their posts like PiS in Poland or what will sooner or later happen to Erdogan and Netanyahu), but they spend almost all of their political energy on undoing the worst "accomplishments" of their predecessors, and all too often get booted themselves by a population unwilling or financially unable to go through change (as we're seeing in Germany).

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

#76

Post by asdff »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #63
asdff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to tell me that. You have to just out compete over a century of very successful anti union propaganda to get through to the labor in this country. Not to mention how the working class is so fractured on identity politics. No easy thing to go up against, especially when so many groups profit off the status quo as it is and will fight you every step of the way.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.asp... https://www.marketplace.org/2023/01/03/gen-z-is-the-most-pro...

Never underestimate capitals ability to buy votes and influence when it matters. See how uber bought prop 22. All you have to do is fill the void with enough noise and you can convince the few percent of eligible voters who actually vote to believe anything.

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

#77

Post by golergka »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #54
Swizec wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes We can study this by looking at examples! Slovenia (where I'm from) has the 3rd lowest gini index in the world[1]. Meaning we are the 3rd most egalitarian country in the world with close to zero income inequality. You would think this is fantastic, but in practice it means e…

I'm very eager to understand this. If there are no rich people to tax, then who owns the unaffordable real estate?

People who don't have income and other taxable economic activity in the country.

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

#79

Post by hscontinuity »

copperx wrote: post #43
hscontinuity wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We have a problem with data - even when we apply our newest advanced technologies to put data in ever increasingly small environments (even down to the atomic level), entropy still exists.

So what we have is the ability to input data, but not yet a delivery system and retrieval system that can fit on say, a small chip, or light array, or other small systems.

It's a giant part of reason we'll see diminishing returns with data being applied in classical material approaches. New materials (currently being workd on, like graphite and others) will be needed to harness the compute power to enable large scale data capabilities at increasingly smaller and smaller levels (already a well known issue to be resolved).

Similar in physical approach but different in application would be TinyLM.

Timeline? Not sure but we created ION drives over 30 years ago. Seems to me we're limited not by the science, but the material needs to continue technological advancement. Seems to me autonomous driving is within reality in under 25 years. If I had to put a guestimate on it.

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

#80

Post by golergka »

mschuster91 wrote: post #65
dmurray wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we can also say that we expect air traffic controllers generate at least their $132k/ year in value. Crossing guards seem to have a similar role and in theory could be generating the same value, but at the margin they're probably not - you'd expect hiring another one would be worth some significant fraction of the $132k to railway companies, but they're not competing to hire more of them. So if AI enables every…

> In modern societies the working man seems to get at least some benefit from productivity gains that don't come directly from him working harder. And even if you do believe Marx, note the caveat about "without state intervention". The modern state has many tools to intervene and is not afraid to use them: taxes, minimum wage laws, mandating bullshit jobs. That may have been the case 30, 40 years ago in the US. In re…

Why would you expect a person to be able to afford a family on minimum wage? Why would you even want that?

If you raised a minimum wage to that level, you would eliminate a lot of low-level jobs completely, and leave people who don't aspire or need this non-trivial level of achievement without jobs.

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