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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]

#81

Post by ben_w »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #45
ben_w wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 j…

> There are better definitions.

I'm a linguistic descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. This is how I think most use the term, even if there's a more useful term of art in economics or in politics.

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

One might even say that a spectre is haunting Europe… ;P

> So the composition of incentives switches from worker-like to owner-like somewhere around $10MM net worth, and this is worth noting.

In a sense, sure. This is also close to what I'm told is the actuarial value of a human life in the USA, and that's not a mere coincidence.

But also, at that level you most likely only got the money by having a very different objective function to begin with, as it comes from starting a successful business. (Other options are "inherit" and "win big on lottery" and both groups have differently bad reputations to the kind of bad reputation that successful businesses people get; I can't possibly comment how accurate any of these reputations are).

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

#82

Post by dghlsakjg »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #67
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…

You see this all the time. Like college degrees for example. They did studies that showed if you got a university degree you would earn X times more than someone who didn't. But that was only the case because a relatively small percentage of people did go to college. Once EVERYONE has a college degree, this doesn't work anymore.

College degrees is a bad example to use. Even today, a bachelors degree is highly correlated with a massive earnings boost compared to a high school only education.

Sources: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jqzJ

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

#83

Post by Enginerrrd »

d--b wrote: post #41
hscontinuity wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 policem…

I agree. However I think there is a gap of meta learning that someone may figure out how to fill. Imagine you could take the state of the art driving AI, deploy it, and then wait until it makes a mistake. And then... suppose you could just explain to it in english what it did wrong like you would interacting with a multi-modal LLM. The missing component (for now) is that AI taking your feedback and adjusting the weights in the driving model to fix that mistake. Not just adding additional training data, but correcting based on more fundamental understanding and abstraction of what just occurred and the key take-aways, etc. and then making sure not to repeat that mistake. Just like a new human driver would learn.

It's possible someone might figure out a way to create a training loop using a multi-modal LLM to generate synthetic training data based on the situation you just explained and then updating the driving model by training on this new data until its performance improves on the task.

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

#84

Post by acchow »

d--b wrote: post #41
hscontinuity wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 policem…

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

I imagine we will reach a place where fully autonomous vehicles will pull off to the side of the road in certain weather. Which I wish we could force for humans, but seems infeasible to implement.

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

#85

Post by hscontinuity »

d--b wrote: post #41
hscontinuity wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 policem…

Right, it's not about the conditions, it's about the ability to perceive those conditions. However this asserts that we won't change how we construct, manage and maintain the routes of travel. Is it unlikely roads will become retrofitted in an effort to enhance the needs of autonomous vehicles?

Seems likely to me; we built EV's before we built the infrastructure to support them and conversely we created in infrastructure for petroleum vehicles before they entered mass production at the largest of scale in the period (1950's) after the fact.

I don't see how autonomous vehicles are not going to become a reality. Perhaps not in my lifetime, but, absolutely likely and possible.

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

#86

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #82
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see this all the time. Like college degrees for example. They did studies that showed if you got a university degree you would earn X times more than someone who didn't. But that was only the case because a relatively small percentage of people did go to college. Once EVERYONE has a college degree, this doesn't work anymore.

College degrees is a bad example to use. Even today, a bachelors degree is highly correlated with a massive earnings boost compared to a high school only education. Sources: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jqzJ

I doubt that's the intrinsic value of the degree (a la supply and demand), but rather the mindset, social-economic status, and background of someone that goes to college. (At least in the US)

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

#87

Post by firstplacelast »

bumby wrote: post #71
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…

> 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 mor…

Disagree. People are paid based on value-extraction, not value-generation. They are correlated, but are vastly different metrics.

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

#88

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #82
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see this all the time. Like college degrees for example. They did studies that showed if you got a university degree you would earn X times more than someone who didn't. But that was only the case because a relatively small percentage of people did go to college. Once EVERYONE has a college degree, this doesn't work anymore.

College degrees is a bad example to use. Even today, a bachelors degree is highly correlated with a massive earnings boost compared to a high school only education. Sources: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jqzJ

If every single high school graduate then got a bachelors degree, would their median earnings match the median earnings of the of the bachelors degree group now? It doesn't seem likely. Otherwise we can just mail every single person a bachelors degree certificate in the mail and watch the salaries increase, productivity sore, the economy on permanent boom!

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

#89

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #86
dghlsakjg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College degrees is a bad example to use. Even today, a bachelors degree is highly correlated with a massive earnings boost compared to a high school only education. Sources: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jqzJ

I doubt that's the intrinsic value of the degree (a la supply and demand), but rather the mindset, social-economic status, and background of someone that goes to college. (At least in the US)

Exactly this, the degree is used as a proxy for the actual qualities that employers for certain higher paying positions are screening for. But that's not what they tell you. They tell you that 'having a degree will get you a high paying job'. This stops being the case if the everyone has a degree and the proxy relationship no longer works. The honest thing to say is have the correct "mindset, social-economic status, and background" and you will get a high paying job.

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

#90

Post by dghlsakjg »

sublinear wrote: post #44
xyst wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spec…

This has been my impression overall with AI so far as someone with Senior in their title.

AI is very good at doing things that can be unit tested, or doing small implementation details.

It falls flat on its face when you ask it to understand architectural patterns, or even reference other classes/modules in a broader codebase.

The hard part about coding is rarely the code, more often it is understanding the human side of things, and how you can fulfill real world needs of users.

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