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"An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

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Re: "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh I see your nuance and meet with further nuance. That was exactly the problem with Crypto. You had the base technology that had demonstrable value due to novel security mechanisms. But getting a lot of this value to investors was always difficult. And then you had technology that was useful for working with the base technology (NFT's, ZKSnarks, Smart Contracts) but was always going to be extremely difficult to extr…

I don't see NFTs (for example) as a valid product, it was always a scam. Always based on speculative gambling with no actual value to anyone underpinning it. And because of that, the whole "crime having a positive social outcome" doesn't work for me - doing crime to keep a scam going is not positive.

>I don't see NFTs (for example) as a valid product, it was always a scam. Always based on speculative gambling with no actual value to anyone underpinning it.

NFT is a protocol. Its technology. It shouldn't be a product, it should enable products. If NFT's were ever going to become widely used, they wouldnt be described as NFTs. Its like going around selling TCP/IPs to someone.

Cryptokitties remains its most proven use case. The non fungibility of the token is perfect for encoding the unique genetics of the derpy looking cats. Theres no reason to pay eleven billion dollars for one, but the platform has never relied on that, just bit payments for trading and breeding. There's possible future uses in property trading, but again, the NFT should never be the point like the weird grifters tried to make happen.

Re: "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

#72

Why are AI boosters turning around and trying to suggest AI now won't take our jobs? Or less jobs than previously stated? Meanwhile Meta has so much AI compute that they don't know what to do with, and they are ready to lease it out. And corporations suddenly want token austerity across the board. OpenAI is delaying their IPO until "next year." Something is starting to give.

The AI replacement discourse was meant for the investors. Now that they have mostly secured the money, they want to convince the consumers.

Re: "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

#73
post #58
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 - what if bots want to fcuk humans? You’re probably right that many jobs can eventually be done by AI but not on day 1. Between Day 1 of the brave new AI world and Day N, humans will be in the loop doing stuff that other humans will try to automate away ad nauseam. On Day N+1, there’ll be yet another HN question asking what exactly humans will be doing in the Braver Newer AI World.

Actually Brave New World was a utopia, not dystopia. Many confuse it with 1984. Every need of the common people was met and their happiness was catered for. And those who were unusually independent, intellectually curious, creative or couldn’t fit in were “exiled”, to a place with their equals, where their were free to continue their studies, art, etc. Imagine a world where the MAGAs are happy and content instead of…

What? Brave New World is Huxley’s famous dystopian novel. Like many dystopian novels it is presented as a utopia to begin with that unravels to expose it’s horrors as the plot unfolds.

He did write a utopian book called Island.

Re: "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

#74
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise. Welcome to economics! Bullshit and conjecture all the way down.

If it were all BS, how do you explain success stories like the Internet and the notion that countries on Dell’s supply chain won’t go to war with each other? Fundamentally, economics is the belief that humans have self-interests and act on them. Economics is obviously not 100% right - it’s not a physical science - but more often than not, you can see it in action. Economics is closer to weather science - we can make…

The internet was in large part made possible because of government funded multi-year research during the cold war. It was largely ruined through commercialization and privatization, on all its layers.

Re: "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

#75
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were all BS, how do you explain success stories like the Internet and the notion that countries on Dell’s supply chain won’t go to war with each other? Fundamentally, economics is the belief that humans have self-interests and act on them. Economics is obviously not 100% right - it’s not a physical science - but more often than not, you can see it in action. Economics is closer to weather science - we can make…

I think youre confusing a religious like belief in capitalism that posits that "greed is good" despite any contra indication with economics, which is a discipline where conjecture is taught as fact and empiricism if frowned upon. I'm not even going to touch your examples. They are completely illogical? Dell? The Internet?? Thats one company, and a technology. If you read the wealth of nations, the only real promise o…

Nowhere did I say that economics = greed is good capitalism.

Economics is fundamentally a study of how human and human society processes self interest.

It tries to find broad patterns in how we process self interest and then supports or subverts those patterns. To build on your example, capitalism reinforces self-interest while communism tries to regulate self interest. Both are economic theories.

Two countries on Dell’s supply chain not wanting to fight against each other is an example of weighing self interest and deciding that participating in a global supply chain is worth more than fighting a war.

Re: "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

#76
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were all BS, how do you explain success stories like the Internet and the notion that countries on Dell’s supply chain won’t go to war with each other? Fundamentally, economics is the belief that humans have self-interests and act on them. Economics is obviously not 100% right - it’s not a physical science - but more often than not, you can see it in action. Economics is closer to weather science - we can make…

The internet was in large part made possible because of government funded multi-year research during the cold war. It was largely ruined through commercialization and privatization, on all its layers.

The demand for Internet was an economic event where the efficiencies it afforded - quick, low cost communication, scale etc - made it attractive.

Other countries had invented the Internet (France, I believe) but it went nowhere.

Other comms technologies have been invented - Iridium satellites e.g. - but they died. Even distributed Internet based systems like Ipfs have the technology but not the adoption.

Technology is a part of the story but the success and spread of the US backed Internet is an economic story.

That the Internet has balkanised into walled gardens is downstream problem of successful products getting shittified until someone steps in a creates an alternative.

Re: "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a disingenuous comment. The entire rest of the section where you lifted this quote from directly addresses the thing you’re claiming no one will ever even try to address. And they even close the section by acknowledging that “this time it’s different” might actually be true with AI, and that we simply don’t have enough data to say for sure!

> The entire rest of the section where you lifted this quote from directly addresses the thing you’re claiming no one will ever even try to address. Please point me to what I asked for, an example of what this magical new job actually looks like. What does a person with that job do on a day to day basis, in very broad terms. I didn't spot anything like this in the paper. > And they even close the section by acknowled…

This is the final two paragraphs of Briggs' section:

The second more existential risk is that “this time is different” and AI is fundamentally a more labor-replacing technology than those that inform our historical analysis. While tech sector commentators extrapolating from their own experience tend to lean into this view, we believe that past technology shocks provide a useful guide to the likely labor displacement from AI automation (although effects could be larger if the eventual emergence of AGI eventually makes human input in knowledge-based work tasks redundant).

That said, the answer to “is this time different?” will be hard to prove or disprove until the labor market holds up or doesn’t in the coming years. So, the debate around this question will remain lively for the foreseeable future.

Re: "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

#78
> However, Acemoglu notes that if workers in higher-paid managerial roles are also displaced, as some think they could be, then inequality could actually decline.

"inequality could decline" is a hell of a way to say "everyone will be out of a job, even the managers"

Re: "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what people do before the new jobs show up.

Well in the Industrial Revolution, the no-longer-necessary skilled craftsman became miserable, poorly paid cogs in service of their new automatic controllers. So a lot of us have that to look forward to. Personally, I’ve switched back to the track I was on in my twenties: I spent the day doing moderately interesting work in a skilled trade, periodically having to haul 80lb-90lb steel machine parts up two flights of s…

With all due respect, you seem rather cynical and upset for someone who made it past "the first week of a years-long trade apprenticeship".

Re: "An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

#80
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 and 5 have been active research for decades, 9 and 10 are obsolete sci-fi, 8 is probably impossible, and all the rest are fraud.

> obsolete sci-fi Well, living in an AGI world was sci-fi until arguably, we found ourselves in one post 2022.

What does "obsolete" mean to you?
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