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AI Won't Cause Unemployment

• keithba 4y ago
  Stopped reading after the patently false “communist inspired universal basic income”. A casual knowledge of the topic would lead one to understand it’s a capitalist, Milton Friedman inspired, idea.
• felipelalli 4y ago
  I always say that.
• NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Wow. I was hoping to read some interesting thoughts about AI overpanic, and instead got exposed to communist overpanic :-O
  • 93po 4y ago
    Yeah, it's super annoying to see phrases like "Soviet style price setting" when we see this same shit happening in literally every capitalist country
  • notahacker 4y ago
    Yes. Did a double take when I saw the name of the author, which I assumed based on the article was someone in their early to mid teens who'd learned everything they knew about the world of business from a copy of Atlas Shrugged! No adult, least of all a VC, should be citing clothing and household furnishings as shining examples of technology-driven innovation in stark contrast to the moribund world of healthcare, or implying government regulates textbooks more than new cars
• Mistletoe 4y ago
  > We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever. How much of this economy and growth was real and how much was free money from the FED? We’ve still got all that same stuff now, but the only difference is the free money is gone and things look a lot different. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    People overestimate the potency of monetary policy. Japan's central banks had its foot to the pedal for 2 decades and only recently have things gotten better. 0% interest rates is not an elixir for growth. It's not that easy or simple. Same for other countries which had 'easy money' polices but far less success compared to the US, no Facebook or Aamzons coming out of the UK or Germany.
    • Mistletoe 4y ago
      Japan is ahead of us in time. What they are we will be. Zero interest rates can’t fix massive debt, a graying population with low population growth, low immigration, and out of control property prices. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencelight/2021/02/24/will-the-us-end-up-like-japan/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencelight/2021/02/24/will-t...
      • neilwilson 4y ago
        It can. Zero interest rates are the natural rate for money - since it is costless to produce. Therefore that is the optimal rate for the currency issuer. There is no need to pay people not to spend when you can tax them if they do. That's just basic income for rich people. Banks then discount assets into liquidity at a markup over zero and they can be allowed to compete fully and go bust which controls the net interest margin. If you optimise the system so it operates on maximum liquidity then you lower the cost of business investment while selecting for productivity by moving the business to where the people are rather than the other way around. That gets you around the greying population problem without destroying your society - by learning to do more with less. Japan has gone some way down this road, but not entirely.
        • Der_Einzige 4y ago
          "costless to produce" No, making coins or dollars, particularly the type which is resistant to counter-fitting, takes an awful lot of money to produce. Hell, pennies are worth significantly more than their face value, hence why we have people calling to ban the penny all the time!
• IdiocyInAction 4y ago
  I partially agree on that - for example, I find it hard to believe the LLMs will make many lawyers or doctors redundant - not necessarily because of a lack of capabilities, but due to regulatory burdens.
  • xen2xen1 4y ago
    I've worked with software for lawyers, and I remember thinking if it was done right, it would not make lawyers redundant, it would make paralegals redundant. Still seems to be the case.
• adamquek 4y ago
  How did this get so many points?
  • yberreby 4y ago
    I'm going to bet it's because this was written by Marc Andreessen.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • James_Henry 4y ago
    Some people probably agree with him. I think his reasoning isn't quite right and do think that there will be people fired and replaced at least in part by AI, but I think his insistence that AI is illegal and that's the reason health, education, and housing prices are so high is kind of funny. I feel like he hasn't thought about how setting a bone, wrapping a bandage, meeting with individual students, building on finite land might not be done as relatively efficiently as the other things on that list.
  • TOMDM 4y ago
    Sometimes I'll upvote a post where the article is essentially useless if I'm interested in seeing the hacker news community discuss the topic. I haven't done so for this article, but it could be a similar motivator for others.
  • ssgh 4y ago
    "Am I interested to see what HN thinks about this?" If the answer is yes, I upvote the post. The article itself might be junk, but that's irrelevant.
• paulpauper 4y ago
  Most of the recent AI advances and hype is around content creation, like generating essays or images. The big money is not content creation, but strategy, ranking visibility, etc. that arise from competition, like promoting a new product or outranking a competitor. Google is worth $1 trillion for this reason. Facebook $400 billion. Getty Images is worth $1 billion. Humans have to compete against other humans for an edge; AI does not stand a chance.
• idopmstuff 4y ago
  I can't help but think Andreesen's gone off the deep end a bit, especially after he started gushing over Adam Neumann's second run at a real estate company (“We think it is natural that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes.”). > AI is simply already illegal across most of the economy, soon to be virtually all of the economy. This just isn't true - AI won't necessarily be a product in the sectors he's talking about, but it'll absolutely improve them. Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology. College tuition? I suppose that depends on how much the value of higher education remains in scarce brand names vs. education, but clearly AI is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down. And then AI will eventually (and to be clear, it might be a while) get us to general-purpose robots. He says "Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine." but in an industry like construction, if you accept what he's saying, all of that control is in the hands of the rich folks at the top. What he's suggesting is that they'll protect the jobs of construction workers when they can replace them with cheaper, more efficient robots who are exempt from safety standards.
  • phillipcarter 4y ago
    Yeah, his whole post is thinly veiled anti-regulations blather. I suppose it’s a nice break from his web3 nonsense and his deranged anti-“woke” posting.
    • deleted 4y ago
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    • James_Henry 4y ago
      I missed the veil.
    • deleted 4y ago
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• epgui 4y ago
  Uhh… from the point of view of someone that has spent 12 years in academia (post-secondary education, in Canada) essentially studying health sciences and healthcare, the premise of this article is delusional— completely disconnected from reality. The conclusion may be correct, I don’t know… But if it’s correct, it’s only accidentally so. Garbage reasoning.
• alpineidyll3 4y ago
  - Just a little bit of ideological over-simplification in this piece and , generally speaking, a false equivalence between technology and libertarian deregulation. There's plenty of room for technological authoritarianism, ask anyone who lived through zero-covid. - I don't disagree at all that hospital costs are the direct result of regulatory failure. However, it has nothing to do with technology? Hospitals are actually bastions of advanced technology and AI? We just have no market on healthcare. I actually see plenty of room for AI to help make markets efficient, by helping poorly informed consumers be more aware of their options (such as seeking healthcare in places that DO have two-sided healthcare markets). - One of the pathological 'red' lines is "college textbooks" some insignificant fraction of the economy, not really a relevant counter to "household furnishings".
• bfdm 4y ago
  You could also argue that the "red" categories align more closely with "needs" people have little to no choice but to pay, and are ripe for predatory pricing. It's true there are monopoly problems here, but the answer isn't to remove regulation it's to strengthen it. A return to real anti-trust in particular. The blue items lean more towards luxury items and discretionary spending, so pricing can't be so exploitative.
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    I feel more like the red items are all the ones where the price pressure has been removed for one reason or another, where a new company with a rich investor can't arrive and create a hugely increased supply. Housing in desirable areas works that way due to zoning/NIMBY restrictions, education works that way because at the point of choosing to pay there's no effective price competition as student loans cover the difference so that potential students don't really change their decisions meaningfully because the price is $10,000 higher than in another place, textbooks have the same but even more - because students paying for textbooks have almost no say in which textbooks will get chosen and can't choose a different book because it's cheaper, and medicine because of both of these factors - artificially limited supply of doctors due to restricted residency&licensing spots, and a price disconnect with insurers paying huge bills according to rules of what needs to be paid or not and lack of price transparency (and price competition!) for procedures; the majority of medical cost is for planned, non-urgent procedures but even for these people aren't making a meaningful choice whether they'll do the same thing in Hospital A for $10,000 or in Hospital B for $7,000, it's either covered/in-network/whatever or not; so there's no free market price setting that would limit these costs.
  • epgui 4y ago
    I don’t know if this is the best way to frame it, but at least it’s not disconnected from reality like the article.
    • bfdm 4y ago
      I mainly meant to say that there's way more going on than what's described.
• LeroyRaz 4y ago
  I think there is real difference between a) devaluing someone's work, and b) and voiding work of value. What makes AI different from previous technological innovations is that it seems to have the potential to make peoples labor worthless, rather than merely devalued. To give examples, if your writing is worse than ChatGPTs then your writing is worthless. If your art is worse than stable diffusion then your art is worthless, and if it takes more money to feed, clothe, and train you for construction than it does to run the Atlas robot then your physical labor is worthless too. I do not think our current social policies are ready for that.
  • twoodfin 4y ago
    But this is the story of technology for two centuries or more. Somehow we kept income and aggregate growth going even as we needed far fewer farmers, factory foremen, and travel agents.
    • pixl97 4y ago
      Eh, time to go watch "humans need not apply" again then. None of us know where we are on the S curve currently.
    • paulryanrogers 4y ago
      Arguably there is a larger portion of people unable to adapt as specialization has skyrocketed. Look at how much education is now expected, more than 12y in most industries. And the portion of the working age population under employed or on SSDI.
    • mrshadowgoose 4y ago
      Except it isn't, and the failure of most people to perceive this nuance could be catastrophic. We have never created (and we still haven't, but recent advances are starting to become frightening) an artificial replacement for general human cognition. General cognition is the only thing that makes us special and valuable. Replace that, and most of us will be reduced to just another discardable animal. This could end up great, and could usher in a post-scarcity future. There are also a number of dystopias, and outright near-extinction scenarios that could result if the wrong actors develop AGI first.
• deleted 4y ago
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• psuedo_uuh 4y ago
  Either indoctrination or a detachment from reality. Can’t tell which. Wonder when the last time he spoke to someone who isn’t a reflection of himself was.
• gumby 4y ago
  I am sorry to agree with his conclusion because I really look forward to an abundance world where the marginal cost of production asymtotes to nil and unemployment is universal (pretty sure I won't live long enough to see this). (He should have stopped his essay after the first couple of paragraphs). However we'll need more sophisticated intelligence than what most of today's "AI" work is leading towards.
• shkkmo 4y ago
  That argument is extremely underwhelming and repeatedly makes assertions that are flat out wrong. Somehow high inflation areas like "college textbooks" are more heavily regulated than low inflation areas like "new cars". Meanwhile, the article completely ignores how much labor costs make up the prices in those different sectors. It does this in an article explicitly about fears that AI will be used to drive down labor costs and cause unemployment. I have dramatically less respect for Marc Andresson after reading an example of such poor reasoning.
• outside1234 4y ago
  Remember this is the same guy that pitched Crypto as a good investment...
• version_five 4y ago
  I have an extremely low opinion of Marc Andreesen (because of all the web3 scamming), and I actually thought that was a good article. It's almost a reframing of David Graeber's bullshit jobs in a sense, so much of what's tied up in these sectors (the ones that keep getting more expensive) is bullshit anyway, it could have been automated or just removed long before some new take on "AI" but it hasn't been, and a lifelike chatbot or whatever people think makes this time different isn't going to change that.
• EugeneOZ 4y ago
  It was interesting in the beginning, but ended with “and then I found 5 dollars”. The term “illegal” is not explained, and the graph (which is the basis) doesn't have an “AI-services” line, so overall the dots are not connected to prove that conclusion.
• chubot 4y ago
  Honest question (willing to be consider new info): I always thought that housing, health care, and college are more expensive than TVs and cell phones because those things can't be OUTSOURCED to another country. - If an American/Westerner wants a TV or a cell phone, Samsung or Apple can manufacture it overseas and have someone ship it here cheaply. - If an American wants a house, they generally have to hire local labor, and pay local prices for land. - If an American wants health care, for practical reasons, they must be treated by doctors and nurses who live here, and who are generally educated here. - If an American wants to send his or her children to college, they often pay a huge premium for a campus in this country, with educators who also live in this country. i.e. these are the industries where "remote work" is less appealing for inherent logistical reasons. Andressen says that prices have increased because of regulation, but he doesn't provide evidence for these claims: Why? The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now Sure, there are little mini-cartels in all those industries. But wasn't that also the case 50 years ago? (I remember watching a documentary about the Mafia in the 20th century in NYC, and even then it was common for real estate builders to have to pay the mafia for labor. The mafia controlled some union leaders.) So how much of the tremendous price increase is due to regulation, vs. labor costs? And there are obviously more than 2 possibilities. Anyone have real evidence to cite?
  • James_Henry 4y ago
    Not being outsourced is part of what's going on. There is more to it, and each of these different goods have their own particular factors going into the rise in their costs. A big factor leading to this graph is labor productivity. An hour is an hour for everyone, but while we've figured out how to make a TV in a lot less labor hours, it still takes about as many labor hours to set a bone or read a book.
  • thenerdhead 4y ago
    The idea he is trying to say is similar to old school investors in which the the prices continue to be hiked up in order to afford people who are willing to bribe / lobby to reduce the possibility for disruption. I think there’s a UC Santa Barbara talk by Charlie Munger on this pricing power.
• 93po 4y ago
  His data is meaningless without actually saying the sources for these numbers. BLS inflation data is highly criticized and it may make his entire point moot if the cost of those industries hasn't actually increased.
  • readthenotes1 4y ago
    Are you really questioning whether the price of disease care or university in the United States has risen higher than overall inflation rate?
• renewedrebecca 4y ago
  Something tells me that if someone came up with a technology that threatened to make venture capitalists unemployed and bankrupt, Andreesen would suddenly become very pro-luddite.
  • HillRat 4y ago
    Machines have been able to flip a coin for a while now, but it doesn't seem to have automated away any VCs.
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  I don’t get the argument of tech not being able to affect prices. Having an AI research assistant or tutor surely should reduce the ridiculous prices of college textbooks and the need for TAs no? Also how does virtual and reimagined medical care not disrupt this? Go look at OneMedical and Amazon and they seem to be bringing costs down significantly. Didn’t Charlie Munger say something about how high prices create the illusion of scarcity and quality?
  • twelve40 4y ago
    > Having an AI research assistant or tutor surely should reduce the ridiculous prices of college textbooks and the need for TAs no? Not clear: the textbook prices have been detached from reality for many years now not because there weren't alternative ways to get the knowledge all along. But because they are a part of a bloated system that works to extract more and more money by gatekeeping (formal degrees), upselling, cross-selling, making deals. That this system will disappear or become irrelevant overnight because of better tooling is not obvious. MIT had a bunch of classes online forever, a determined person could get all the content for a full degree almost for free for many years, yet people still flock to colleges and pay more money than ever to be a part of that (broken) system. > Go look at OneMedical and Amazon and they seem to be bringing costs down significantly If this was happening industry-wide, it would probably be noticeable on his "Medical care services" graph line, which instead is shooting way up? Maybe it's crap and I don't have any better data, but do you?
    • thenerdhead 4y ago
      I don’t think you’d see the change immediately as many of these companies just shifted strategies to be digital in the last few years and continued to increase prices. I’d expect that to slowly reverse over the next decade or two. If not, then there was plenty of successful lobbying.
• deleted 4y ago
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• AverageDude 4y ago
  Disagree. AI will cause mass unemployment because it’s way more efficient than a human, doesn’t get sick (relatively less than humans) and costs less. Simple economics. I’ll give you one example. The checkout counters in supermarkets, if the supermarkets would have hired young people on those positions not only we might have less young people going towards drugs and hooliganism but it would have also made them better productive citizens as they gain skills in their teen years. Corporates need to understand that their greed for infinite profit will eventually create a singularity which will consume them one day. People without jobs buy less. May be we will finally get rid of the consumerism.
  • hezralig 4y ago
    When capitalism gets to the point that it has rid itself of consumers, I fear it means it will get 'rid' of consumers.
  • BurningFrog 4y ago
    We have replaced human labor with machines that are way more efficient than a human for 250 years now. Mass unemployment has always been feared as a result, and it has always not happened. I strongly expect trends to continue.
    • frosted-flakes 4y ago
      Is that because we've always been able to specialise further? But is there an end point to that? We can only specialise so much.
    • john_the_writer 4y ago
      The real difference is the pace. It took 20 years for self checkout to really catch on. It's not even fully there yet. It took months for Book and Magazine publishers to say. No more submissions please, we have enough content for a while. The winner of a massive photography comp in the US took no pictures, had no subjects and didn't write the back stories of his "subjects". He AI'd the lot.
• xigency 4y ago
  The advent of AI will absolutely eliminate jobs, either by decimating the required headcount or by making whole professions redundant. I don’t think we can accurately predict which industries will be affected either, as surprisingly many creative disciplines are being impacted now. How our society integrates AI and robotics technology will determine who is impacted and how we handle it. This is actually a great opportunity to find what is valuable and meaningful. For instance, what can we do to improve people’s lives with excess hands and funds? I think the foundation will be in providing equitable access to society. For instance, greater accessibility technology will help those who are disabled or differently-abled. There is so much beyond ADA compliance that can help the blind, deaf, lame, and mentally handicapped. Coming out of a global pandemic, we’ve also learned how crucial socialization is to mental health. Rather than using technology to cut people out of the system (self-checkout; ordering from kiosks; automated support desks), I imagine we will expand services like counseling, fitness, and social events. Places where we prefer interacting with humans to machines. In the end, it is a bit of a reckoning - what can I do that’s meaningful when I am outperformed by a machine? It means throwing away the culture of being the best, and picking up the habits of doing the best for others.
• reducesuffering 4y ago
  > The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government Pmarca, you're around these parts sometimes. No one wants to hear your musings on government regulation affecting housing prices until you address your own hypocritical contribution: 'Andreessen and his wife recently submitted public comments to the Atherton Town Council denouncing a plan to green-light the construction of around 130 multifamily properties in the area. "Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!” the email from the Andreessens to the council read. “I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton…Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July,” the couple wrote. “They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.”' https://nypost.com/2022/08/08/marc-andreessen-opposed-affordable-housing-in-his-town-report/ https://nypost.com/2022/08/08/marc-andreessen-opposed-afford...
• asah 4y ago
  Sorry, but there's so many things wrong with this... - nobody cares about "unemployment" - they care about investing decades of their lives and losing their jobs and not being able to replace them quickly at the same level of income and quality of life, including a million photographers, models, makeup artists, etc. who are looking at diffusion model results and wondering who'd pay for their work next year, let alone in 10. "employment" is a made up number that could be 100Ms prospering and optimistic about the future, or 100Ms terrified of the future and millions giving up and disappearing from the employment stats: https://www.google.com/search?q=working+age+men+employment https://www.google.com/search?q=working+age+men+employment - nobody cares about average prices by category - they care about what they pay for the goods they buy, and the baskets of goods used for these surveys are comically different from what actual consumers experience. Notably, the "TV" from 20 years ago is not the same "TV" as today, let alone cellphones or even healthcare. Also, healthcare has seen continuous improvement e.g. cancer therapies, while the TV innovations that consumers care about have sometimes zoomed forward (thin displays, larger displays, 4K, HDR) and failed to take hold (3D, long-throw projectors). - MA is not an expert on employment and neither am I, but I'm not prognosticating.
  • ChatGTP 4y ago
    Just a side note, I honestly think models, photography people and markup artists will still exist. People will still make clothes, whether that's AI assisted or not, and people are going to want to take real photos of the clothes, with models wearing them. No not in all cases, but as long as there are people there will be some demand for this. Same goes for fashion shows, they will still exist too. People will continue to like celebrities, follow their lives and hope they can be like them or meet them. Maybe what people are forgetting is that people do actually like doing things with other people, whether that's taking photos of them, looking at photos of them, or watching them walk down a cat walk. There is a reason why we haven't already completely replaced models (for photography) with wax dolls, mannequins etc. Sure they'd be cheaper, but there other drawbacks too. Even using some of the latest AI technology, it's still not really easy to get what you want in the same way working with a good model is, then there is also sometimes the creativity that a model can inject into a photo shoot, which yes yes yes, can be automated, but I'm not sure why we'd bother when you can actually just enjoy working with another person. Like it or not, sex sells, sex with algorithms, doesn't sell...happy to take the down votes for that statement but there is something in it. Ever wonder why young people listen to a lot of (IMO) crap music? It's because many young people are attracted to the musicians and that attracts other young people which attracts more young people. It's also why AI won't replace bands. It's not just about the quality of music, it's about being part of a tribe and sharing that experience with other like minded people. While I know AI will replace some areas of our lives, I think people do forget that it's not always about the quality and quantity of something. Making perfect music, a song no one has ever heard before every time, is going to be less attractive to many people than a band your girlfriend really likes and you both like going to see live together. Handmade goods are another example of this, whether or not it matters, people definitely enjoy using handmade tools, knives, skis, surfboards etc. People will actually go out of their way and pay more money to support people doing these things.
• KidComputer 4y ago
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• stult 4y ago
  What an incredibly, idiotically reductionist interpretation of cherry-picked data this is. First of all, he selected a fairly random, non-representative set of goods and services. I can immediately think of a glaringly obvious counter-example that his dataset excludes: energy. It's one of the most highly regulated industries in the US and yet energy inflation has been barely positive over the last 20 years (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/energy-inflation https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/energy-inflation), completely contradicting Andreesen's hypothesis. So basically all of his conclusions are unsubstantiated and likely false on that basis alone. But there's more stupidity here. He also does not define "heavily regulated" or how one can measure the level of regulation applicable to a given good or service in a way that allows for apples-to-apples comparisons to other goods and services. But even just taking a colloquial understanding of what the term means, car manufacturing is incredibly highly regulated. Perhaps not so much as medical services, but certainly far more than household furnishings or clothing. And yet the inflation curves for those goods are nearly identical to the one for new cars. If regulation is the sole explanation for the differing inflation trajectories between each of these goods and services, then why is such a highly regulated good performing identically to substantially less regulated goods? There are many more flaws in his thinking but I won't bother digging into it because this is a childishly stupid article that would never have made it to the front page of HN if it weren't written by an especially wealthy idiot.
  • djs070 4y ago
    His interpretation of “industries that are allowed to innovate vs those where it’s illegal” is laughable. Has Marc considered that there might be some other fundamental difference between the inflation-positive sectors of health, education, food and housing, vs the inflation-negative ones of TVs, cars and software subscriptions? I’ll give you a hint Marc: some of these are essential to life and society and some are not.
    • sacrosancty 4y ago
      They're not though - the regulations keep getting stricter. Housing (building), for instance is expensive because the requirements tighten to match what people can afford. Remember when single glazed windows were legal? 2000 standard healthcare would probably be cheaper today if we were allowed to use it. But now we have newer more expensive (and better) treatments. Cars go like that too with safety growing.
• rsaesha 4y ago
  Blah blah blah government law and regulations bad give back my laissez faire slaves - this is what I hear. Some industries are more regulated than others - a simple fact. What are the reasons behind these regulations? To discuss which of these reasons no longer hold might be a better argument. But no, the writer would rather cry 'muh entry barrier communists gov' on the webs. What is the purpose here, to go viral or actually improve the world we live on? For the case in point: innovation historically changes which professions are required for production of value. In the 19th century, if you were skilled in iron smelting and forging you would put food on your families table. Nowadays, I'd advise against running a coal furnace in your apartment kitchen. The fear of ai caused unemployment is very real for people who are too old to learn and apply an entire new skillset. If it's hard to understand this, put yourself in the shoes of a newspaper journalist. He or she might have worked 15 years at the news, and he listen to sales people commenting that sales are dropping like a cannonball. Anxiety and fear overload. Maybe he gets a new job at the newer and hotter online webpage that seems to be hiring good writers. Maybe not.
• rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  LOL The red lines are lines where (PRIMARILY) skilled labor is required for products and services essential to human life. The blue lines are lines where unskilled labor in Shenzhen factories in pump out unnecessary consumer goods. Medical costs are rising because people like him are pumping money into hedge funds and they are squeezing every red cent out of the systems they have captured-- not because doctors have to have licenses. Housing costs are rising because people like him are pumping money into hedge funds and they are robo-buying every property they can while simultaneously lobbying state and local governments to restrict building-- not because you need to follow safety standards. >In 2022, Andreessen advocated against the construction of 131 multifamily housing units in their affluent Atherton, California town. In a letter, Andreessen and his wife wrote that they opposed permitting more than one house on a single acre of land. What the fuck is wrong with libertarian tech bros? Were they dropped on their heads as children?
  • omgomgomgomg 4y ago
    In his case.....looking at his head, something unique happened.
• williamstein 4y ago
  Patrick Boyle has a vastly better new video on exactly the same topic: https://youtu.be/_iMItrc0ChU https://youtu.be/_iMItrc0ChU
• 00F_ 4y ago
  the idea that this man is a billionaire is mind-blowing. this article is absolutely vapid. picking it apart is more for sport than anything else. We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever. most people refused to believe that the internet would change anything at all. there was no panic. when bill gates went on letterman and was asked to explain how the internet was different than what already existed, he couldnt. letterman taunted him, saying "ever heard of a tape recorder? ever heard of a radio?" and he was oddly not wrong. thats the extent of the panic in the case of the internet. AI is certainly different. it is extremely different from all other technologies because it is the only technology that replaces the human mind completely rather than just augment it. the argument of these reverse-luddites is that technology has always been good therefore it always will be good. there is no deeper analysis of whats really going on. there cant be, because it will always lead to the conclusion that our way of life as humans cannot co-exist with AGI. one must understand that human society is held in place by an economic and technological equilibrium. if AGI were to be created, it cannot be denied that science and technology would almost instantly surge forward by trillions of man-years. we would be transported instantly into an environment where fundamental economic and technological factors are no longer valid. rules would be so different that the very concept of a country would no longer be geopoliticaly tenable. new meta-organisms would be at the center of the new equilibrium and the old human-based meta-organisms that we call countries would cease to exist. in essence, once the singularity happens the most severe and profound power vacuum that has ever existed will be created and the world will transition into a new version of itself where grotesque machine-based meta-organisms find a new equilibrium. this will involve what we call "war" and the idea that the human race could survive this is immediately dismissed. on the other side of the war will be a world where human industry is not just redundant but cosmically irrelevant. if by some miracle we survived the singularity, if our existence posed the slightest inconvenience to the machines, we would all die. this is not true currently because the dominant meta-organism is always human-based. thats the difference. the absolute best case scenario is that humans somehow manage to parasitically attach themselves to an AGI meta-organism. they would lead lives devoid of agency or purpose except to ogle the machines. except that wouldnt be very interesting because the machines will immediately embark on doing things that a human being could never, ever understand. people have this delusion that natural selection wont apply to AGI or the singularity. the singularity wont be about you or your fantasy. it wont be about humans or human society.
• SinParadise 4y ago
  No because you have to be actively looking to be counted as unemployed.
• 00F_ 4y ago
  if anyone else is worried about AGI and the singularity, and wants to help prevent these things, i think we should get in touch. as far as i know, there is no serious political group that is advocating for regulation of AI based on human redundancy. i think its really important to get this ball rolling as soon as possible.
  • zug_zug 4y ago
    We should just require AIs to be "employed" and "taxed" at an alternate minimum wage, which should then be served as a stipend to the general population. Essentially there will only be more resources to go around, as long as the distribution doesn't get too lopsided (which it would under normal capitalism), the future is brighter.
  • jjlustig 4y ago
    I've been very interested in this space (political group for AI regulation). And actually, I just recently got an initiative I've been thinking of for awhile off the ground. How can I get in touch with you 00F_? You can reach me at lustig.jj@gmail.com
    • 00F_ 4y ago
      ive sent you an email. looking forward to talking to you.
• wnevets 4y ago
  I'm surprised he didn't mention the role of the "Woke mind virus" in this post. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1626394183832596480?lang=en https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1626394183832596480?lang=e...
  • CommieBobDole 4y ago
    Wow, that's maybe the dumbest thing I've read today. Not the part about the 'woke mind virus', that's just garden-variety lazy parroting of culture war slogans. It's the part about AI noticing and understanding things. This guy is ostensibly a technologist or at least spends his time doing technology-adjacent business, but he thinks ML text or image generators are capable of understanding (and passing judgement on) abstract ideas? It's like hiring a door installer to install doors on your house and finding out that he thinks doors are high-tech matter transporters that operate on exotic principles of physics but are only able to transport you the imperceptible distance from one side of the doorway to the other because of some technical limitation. Also he's confused them for windows somehow.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  College textbooks are expensive simply because it's a cartel. A textbook could simply be a file that is copied infinitely for free.
  • rgmerk 4y ago
    And who’s going to write and update that textbook? If your answer is “the professor teaching the course”, that’s cost-shifting and in many cases less efficient than having one textbook author write a textbook used in many places. If your further suggestion is that LLMs will generate college textbooks, that seems like a gross overestimate of their current capabilities.
    • DoctorOW 4y ago
      It's the gatekeeping that's the problem. A royalty on a textbook for the actually author is very low, maybe like $10 on a $100 textbook? Replace the editors and layout designers with AI, the printing and binding with PDF, and the campus bookstore with Shopify or the like and make the same amount of money on $15 textbooks.
      • rgmerk 4y ago
        There's actually a long tradition of this kind of thing. As an undergraduate, my first-year maths "course notes" were actually a textbook in all but name, produced by the Mathematics department and sold for a very modest cost, bypassing the publishers and the campus bookshop because the markups by both were outrageous Even if you'd paid the authors $10 per copy it would have been a bargain.
    • ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
      There are about 3,000 academic fields [1], give or take. US† could easily afford to spend 1,000,000 USD per year for a new/updated textbook in each field (absolutely overkill as many fields overlap) and it would barely be $3 billion per year: that's ~0.17% of the $1.73 trillion DOD budget for FY2023 [2]. We are keeping knowledge in chains in order for some parasitic losers to make 1 to 7 billion USD revenue per year [3]. And they are parasitic losers because (i) they prey on the authors (the authors can get even under 10% [4]), and (ii) they are capitalistically inefficient (under 10 billion USD per year is a rounding error for Apple and the likes). † although it could be a worldwide effort. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_fields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_fields [2] https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2023 https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=... [3] https://www.tckpublishing.com/top-publishers-by-revenue https://www.tckpublishing.com/top-publishers-by-revenue [4] https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book
• jeezfrk 4y ago
  That's a complete load of crap. All of the "AI Magicness" that could go into making a cheaper ham sandwich or burger or diapers ... has been applied. Fully. There just isn't much Happy AI Magic profit to be found. Sometimes a burger is just in need of a huge chain of people to do all the raising, butchering, transporting, refrigerating and cooking of a beef patty.
• _448 4y ago
  This claim that AI won't cause unemployment baffles me. I understand the argument being made that new types of jobs will be created, but what the people making that argument miss is the massive level of up-skilling/re-skilling that is required of the population whose jobs are replaced. This has not worked out well. Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam locomotive(yes, for that many generations the effects of job losses are felt). These communities have not yet recovered. The challenge with AI is that it is going to touch every spectrum of the jobs, and the people required for the available jobs will be far less and require very niche skills.
  • thrashh 4y ago
    It’s very surprising when people talk about AI but not talk about the Industrial Revolution. The power loom hugely changed the world. You don’t have to write a substack about your opinions — just read a history book. Second, Marc quotes outsourcing but that’s not at all a relevant example. Outsourcing was not a technology. His other example is of robots but robots have not been revolutionary like the power loom or even the assembly line have been.
    • wardedVibe 4y ago
      Everyone should read about the Luddites. Turns out this debate has happened before, except with more smashing.
      • imtringued 4y ago
        Smashing? You mean armed government forces fighting against their citizens.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • Kiro 4y ago
      What do you mean? Every article about this makes the comparison with the Industrial Revolution, including this one.
• janalsncm 4y ago
  > The jobs apocalypse is always right around the corner; just ask the Luddites. The obvious yet unaddressed point here is that automation was bad for the Luddites. They lost their jobs to machines. The implied retort is that people can and should be reskilled, but as people like Andrew Yang have said many times, reskilling has mixed results. It seems very weird that I, as a moderately knowledgeable layperson, should be able to have 3 or 4 steps of conversation into this topic that Marc simply does not acknowledge. I can only imagine how insulting it would be to an economist or social scientist who has seriously studied this stuff. This essay pretends we know nothing at all about automation.
  • usgroup 4y ago
    And reskilling makes much more sense when you’re replacing manual labour. Less sense when you’re replacing brains.
    • 1letterunixname 4y ago
      The presumption that there are alternative jobs or that a given worker can attain new skills imposes a tax on them they may not be able to pay. There are disabled and unemployed people who cannot handle "reskilling".
      • usgroup 4y ago
        i think that youre right. i also think that "information workers" were always a bit slushy in so far that an average "information worker" will likely have 3-4 "careers" during a lifetime anyway and AI will mostly affect information workers IMO -- or at least affect them first and the most. The trouble is that if what you're mostly contributing is pushing and processing info because so far it was not automatable, you might find no adjacent fields to slip into.
    • Der_Einzige 4y ago
      Most the reskilling will ironically be in knowledge workers who will be forced into skilled physical labor. AI plumbers are a lot further out than most other forms of AI workers. Morevec's paradox rearing it's ugly head again
• usgroup 4y ago
  So one counter example falsifies this argument right? Marketing agencies are already shedding copywriters in favour of ChatGPT written content. Therefore AI is causing unemployment. Therefore “AI won’t cause unemployment” is false.
• ralph84 4y ago
  Gotta admire the cognitive dissonance when four of the biggest corporate investors in AI are doing mass layoffs.
  • Cwizard 4y ago
    Why? Are they replacing those they let go with AI? I highly doubt it.
    • ralph84 4y ago
      If AI is really going to make people more productive without causing unemployment why can’t the biggest investors in AI make their own employees productive enough to not need to lay them off? Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI simultaneously with laying off 10,000 people. The money MSFT was spending on employing those people was redirected to AI.
• juanbyrge 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • neilwilson 4y ago
    It always amuses me that the 'high prices are a market signal to produce more' belief only seems to apply in areas other than housing and financial risk assets. Funny that.
  • astrange 4y ago
    That's only possible because the Atherton government listens to him and nothing else stops the local government.
  • codekansas 4y ago
    It is super hypocritical, but also, it's basically correct. I'd rather live in a world where random people showing up to Atherton city council meetings can block developments on property they don't even own (fortunately we seem to be moving that direction). This is very much an example of regulatory capture by vested interests
• acidioxide 4y ago
  Even though we see a steady increase in jobs and wages, that doesn't mean that there were periods when in certain communities almost everybody lost their job. There are places / cities in many regions that relied mostly on one factory or industry, and as the employers collapsed, so did the communities. Many never recovered, because you can't just tell a 60 year old miner to requalify.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  He's got to be taking the piss. > The lines in red are the sectors where technological innovation is not permitted to push down prices; in fact, the prices of education, health care, and housing as well as anything provided or controlled by the government are going to the moon, even as those sectors are technologically stagnant. I don't mean to dunk or anything but surely it's a bit ridiculous to talk about housing here. He's literally the guy opposing it. Baffling post.
• cabalamat 4y ago
  > Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income Which communist country has or had UBI? Because I am not aware of any, nor do I regard it as communist. So what do I mean by communism? All economies are run by a mixture of markets and commands. Communism is any economy that is largely command-based (all real economies are a mixture of the two, of course). UBI is where someone is given a regular amount of money and can spend it however they like (i.e. market based). The USSR was not run like this. Instead it was command-based, e.g. Krushchev build millions of Krushchevkas (standardised apartment housing) and people were allocated an apartment. So when Andreessen says "Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income" what he really means is presumably "I disapprove of UBI so I'm going to smear it by inaccurately associating it with something I presume my readers dislike". IMO this is deeply dishonest.
  • alephnerd 4y ago
    Ironically, Libertarian-Republican Alaska has been practicing UBI since the 70s after reaping in the Oil Boom - https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wharton-podcast/alaskas-experience-shows-promise-universal-basic-income/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...
  • neilwilson 4y ago
    What's funny is that it isn't communist. UBI is a free market belief utilising the money illusion to make capitalist extraction seem 'fair' to those who can't see past a dollar sign. Hence why Friedman made the case for it via 'negative income tax' In reality it is people who don't want to work for a living being fed and clothed by forcible extraction of time and output from those that do work for a living - with the extraction being laundered by a capitalist intermediary in the usual fashion. If the workers owned the means of production, then they would take Friday off instead of working extra to produce a surplus for UBI people to consume for nothing material in return. In a communist economy everybody has to take their share of the 'socially necessary labour' if they want anything out of the communal pot. You have to use your time working for the benefit of others. That's a guaranteed job, not a guaranteed pension.
    • 4y ago
• joe_the_user 4y ago
  The idea that technology is "illegal" in child care is kind of absurd. Has anyone developed an effective automation method for child care that's being held back? Just as much, "technology" is certainly not illegal with text books. Text book manufacturers use ever more sophisticated technologies to bolster their abusive monopolies. And lots of tech goes into reducing health care costs. It's simply failed so far and the various monopolies continue their march. Sure he says "The lines in red are the sectors where technological innovation is not permitted to push down prices" but that's kind of begging the question - assuming that the use of technology is by itself what allows or doesn't decreases in price.
  • Gatsky 4y ago
    The ‘last mile’ in healthcare isn’t really amenable to any technological cost reduction, especially for the most serious (and costly) illnesses. Any practising healthcare professional can tell you that. We are talking about actually seeing patients, trying to deal with their numerous problems across physical, mental and social spheres, supporting and advocating for them and their carers, tailoring treatment and investigation to their needs/preferences/beliefs, and participating in very difficult decisions about limiting treatment when that is appropriate. There is nothing to ‘optimize’ here. Good healthcare requires someone to take responsibility for the wellbeing of a patient.
• xivzgrev 4y ago
  Says the guy who invests in AI and is a NIMBY part of that red housing line (1) (1) https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bbd9/billionaire-marc-its-time-to-build-andreesen-is-a-nimby https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bbd9/billionaire-marc-its-...
• t0bia_s 4y ago
  > We are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four year college degree costs $1 million. Because TV is excellent tool for plush propaganda, education make it header to believe it. Great deal both for lobbying and states.
• 1letterunixname 4y ago
  The most out-of-touch wishful thinking since trickle down economics. Meanwhile, real income for the bottom 50% continues to fall while fat cats like him pay virtually no taxes because they bought DC with lobbyists. AI will destroy office jobs of all kinds. It won't create even a sliver of replacement jobs. More and more, work and livable income become scarcer. https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te...
• dmje 4y ago
  "Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income" dear lord
  • 1letterunixname 4y ago
    The battle cry of raving lunatic libertarians like Koch and Ron Paul.
• dsign 4y ago
  I think Mr. Andreessen is up to something here: we can use regulation to...well, the word is not "control", but more like "intervene" in the impact of AI. Which I think we should, I for example would hate for killer drones to be less regulated than life-saving drugs.
• sklivvz1971 4y ago
  The main argument presented in the blog is flawed. The assertion that "regulated" industries perform worse than "unregulated" because of regulation is not backed by any evidence provided. The graphs only demonstrate that labor-intensive sectors experience a proportional increase in cost with an increase in average labor cost, which is not particularly surprising. Regarding the question of whether AI will cause unemployment, it is poorly framed. It is better to break it down into three distinct questions. First, will AI displace some current jobs? Second, will AI create new jobs? And third, will the balance of jobs be negatively affected? When posed in this manner, it is reasonable to assume a "yes" response to the first two questions and an "unknown" response to the third.
  • dogcomplex 4y ago
    With the followup break down "Will AI decrease consumer prices on goods and services?" and "Will the balance of overall quality of life be negatively affected?" since simply focusing on jobs themselves without the externalities is too limited. ("Yes", and "Hard-No-in-long-term / Possibly-in-short-term")
• temp123789246 4y ago
  It seems like if we want an answer to the question of “What impact will a human-like AI have on the economy?” then a relevant thing to look at would be historical times and places where slavery was prevalent. If we get to a point where the average person can spend a year’s salary to buy a human-like robot to work for them, well, that has been the case in many times and places before (it just wasn’t a robot).
  • dogcomplex 4y ago
    And the purely-digital "robot slave" will likely be $0 (albeit probably a little lower quality than the premium corporate versions), if open source software patterns are any indication.
• nathias 4y ago
  All useful technologies replace old types of production that require labor and replace it with new types of production that require less labor. There are new jobs created but much less of them for that type, what the general consequences and if there will be mroe jobs created in other novel types of production is anybody's guess.
• code51 4y ago
  Paul Graham surely didn't think social media would drive up teenage depression when investing at social media. It's hard to find any value in investors' words in these topics. Massive conflict of interest. It's that %0.1 trying to persuade %99.9.
• achenet 4y ago
  I have a hard time accepting an argument against government regulation by a guy who supports large amounts of housing regulations to keep people from building anything near his property. Deregulation, like charity, begins at home.
• gieksosz 4y ago
  I don't see how the body of this post supports its title/thesis. What I read is the old re-heated argument "regulation drives up the costs" and very little about how this might relate to AI.
• voytec 4y ago
  Popularization of computers in our lives did not caused massive unemployment and ML/AGI probably also won't. Some jobs became obsolete, some people needed to adjust but it's just life. Things change and most humans can be flexible. On the other hand, there is this ongoing, politically-driven, toxic trend of making people from various groups consider themselves as victims of abuse. Changes may be problematic for those who demand from others but not self.
• jalapenos 4y ago
  You have to remember both sides of the balance sheet. AI can offer a path to reduced costs, threatening jobs, but it also offers a path to increased profitability, which creates jobs. It's hard to tell which force wins out on net, but there's always more work to do, no matter how good our tools are.
  • herbst 4y ago
    Not sure if that is necessarily true, so if I use AI to generate more content (which I actually do) and earn more from that. I have less work and more money. No reason to create a job for anyone else here.
  • gls2ro 4y ago
    what if history is not always a good predictor of the future? So what if AI will indeed increase profitability while also net reducing the number of jobs? Who will buy those high margin products? Imagine you could build with AI a new Amazon. It will take one person: you and then everything else is AI and AI robots. 90% margin on everything. a business running 24/7/365 every second, no need for rest. But then suddenly you have 1.5 million people without any job or income. So your market will be reduced by at least that. now imagine that just like you another rich capitalist builds a new Amazon to compete. the ssme process one person all AI down. how do you imagine this market? Profit will be a meaningless word. I think if AGI becomes reality only the first ones having it will profit. Then society as we know it will collapse (for better or worse) and we will need to find a new way to organize economical and political.
  • dogcomplex 4y ago
    Too limited scope. It's entirely possible increased profitability will not create jobs if it outperforms most people. However, reduced costs and increased profitability do mean increased/easier quality of life. Even if robots are outperforming people in the business sphere, you're still gonna be seeing the externalities of incredible abundance at the local level. Hard to say how that wins out on net when people can't get jobs to pay for the (very cheap) goods and services though. This is typically where government/community should step in.
• brap 4y ago
  I genuinely love how Marc Andreessen is a capitalist and isn't apologetic about it. It's honestly refreshing, coming from a tech billionaire in '23 SV. And I agree with every word. There's a follow-up, by the way: https://pmarca.substack.com/p/followup-to-why-ai-wont-cause-unemployment https://pmarca.substack.com/p/followup-to-why-ai-wont-cause-...
• sirsinsalot 4y ago
  I'm going to post my usual: Everyone should read "Who Owns the Future?" by Jaron Lanier where these topics a dealt with, and with much more intellectual rigor.
• cs702 4y ago
  This is a cynical piece with a political. Its argument is that AI won't cause unemployment in the US because regulations in industries like healthcare, education, and housing won't allow it. The centerpiece of the argument is this plot, showing how those sectors are becoming a greater and greater share of GDP over time: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F975d2151-7def-45a4-8c52-878cf32d8c7b_1320x1424.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... No one disagrees that healthcare, education, and housing are "broken" in the US. But the US is only one economy. The plot looks different for other economies. For example, Scandinavian countries with high taxation have free healthcare, free education, and no homelessness.
  • dogcomplex 4y ago
    I would very-much love to see that chart with relative prices from other countries, with taxation accounted for in pricing.
• ChicagoDave 4y ago
  This article is pure conservative BS. The stagnation of certain industries is because of tax policy and the insane greed injected into our healthcare systems when the HMO laws passed in the 1980's. I'm not even sure what pmarca is talking about here. It's like he's waving his arms, "look over here at my BS and don't look over there where AI is about to slam information workers." AI will absolutely change the way software engineering is accomplished. We already use things like Cloud Formation templates to auto-build and scale cloud-based architectures. We have code generators to build microservices. We even have modeling techniques to simplify complex systems. All of those "things" will be plugged into an AI and one senior technologist will be able to write a detailed functional description of a system in natural language, domain models, with data points, and an AI will write, test, integrate, and deploy production level code. I absolutely see entire divisions of software engineers being wiped out by AI-generated systems. Pmarca makes the argument that even so, all those engineers will do "something else" that pays a salary and benefits society. The ones that can elevate their skills to systems design and architecture will probably be okay. But people that like coding...they're going to be creating building blocks for the AI to use in its generation processes and those are going to be low-wage jobs. AI is going to change humanity in dramatic ways. I just hope that in the process, someone builds an AI that figures out a path out of international conflict, through global food and water safety issues, and speeds up our ability to restore the planet's health so humanity can survive.
  • lisasays 4y ago
    All of those "things" will be plugged into an AI and one senior technologist will be able to write a detailed functional description of a system in natural language, domain models, with data points, and an AI will write, test, integrate, and deploy production level code. Given that the severe limitations of the current state of the art (as we've seen from from how trivial is to show that these systems are basically spouting nonsense, and certainly have no meaningful understanding of the world we actually live in); and that this 100 percent waterfall model of software creation you describe has never worked in the aforementioned actual world that we live in - How, exactly, do you "know" that the above will come to pass?
  • secfirstmd 4y ago
• _2uwr 4y ago
  >Fears about new technology replacing human labor and causing overall unemployment have raged across industrialized societies for hundreds of years, despite a nearly continual rise in both jobs and wages in capitalist economies. The jobs apocalypse is always right around the corner; So by using the term "overall unemployment", the argument is framed in such a way the argument cant really be won. Why even bother debating? However in the UK look at the Victorian seaside resorts, these have never recovered from their Victorian popularity because the airplane makes it quicker and easier to jet to better place's like Majorca or Ibiza. Any politician attempting to suggest otherwise with schemes, is just deluded, wasting tax payers money, unless the country has its own Brexit & Covid in which to force people to holiday at home ... Of course some seaside towns might become a hub for oil or windfarms[1], but that doesnt really help those already in a downhill trajectory living there, through lack of employment or age. Look at the mining towns, the electricity grid and gas pipelines have put those miners out of business, and there are always going to be some who never recover because they are too old to retrain or dont have finances to escape to places with better pay and job opportunities. I think people are poor at recognising the disruptive technology that can put them out of work, or lower their income. The internet lowered the wages of programmers and call centre staff as work could be offshored more cheaply using the internet. Banking and investing, gambling on spotting the trends which will become profitable over different timelines can be done anywhere in the world where fast communications exist provided you are not High Frequency Trading [1] where you then need your computers to be as close to the exchange as possible in order to manipulate markets. Disruptive technology will always displace people, just look at the Middle East, places like Dubai, they have the already more favourable climate, so they can take modern building practices and turn a load of sand dunes into something quite spectacular. You cant do that in places like the UK or Canada, where the weather is brutal and the winters are long, because everybody needs sunshine, and these man made inventions like heating and light just don't cut it for humans. They are stops gaps to help you survive the length of the a winter today if you dont have the finance to have a second home in the Maldives or Morroco, but if the planets orbit were to change, lengthening the winter, you would see things change more, a greater concentration of people moving back to the equator. So AI will change jobs, getting rid of some and creating others, like the lab technician, tasked with the boring mundane error prone job of cell counting for blood tests, or spotting cancer cells in tissue biopsies, will be automated by AI. And AI will perform new jobs as routine, like spotting and counting bacterial biofilms in all tissue samples, when previously this was not routine, those jobs counting cells and biofilms will morph into management of AI roles, in much the same way a typical manager manages people. Just like we see with programming languages coming and going, there are diverging and converging trends to be seen everywhere which will guide the future. The takeaway is, recognise when something has peaked and find the next thing to peak on a timescale that works for you. This is what investments is all about. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=great+yarmouth+lowestoft+wind+farm+jobs https://www.google.com/search?q=great+yarmouth+lowestoft+win... [2] https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_...
• frankreyes 4y ago
  Red lines are those industries where people care more about job creation than problem solving.
• intellectronica 4y ago
  This argument can be backtested, sort of. AI is novel technology, but information technology in general has been on a wild run for now 2~3 decades. One would expect the advances in information technology to result in significant productivity increases that would affect the entire economy and likely result in unemployment. None of that has happened. Productivity increases from digital technology growth are really hard to detect. In fact the same period that featured the most significant growth in digital technology is also the period where productivity increases in developed economies stagnated. Pmarca's explanation predicts that - if large and growing parts of the economy are blocked to technological improvements then no matter how much technology improvements we develop it won't affect the economy in the aggregate. This was true for the last three decades. Hard to see why it wouldn't be true also going forward.
  • eastbound 4y ago
    > significant productivity increases that would affect the entire economy and likely result in unemployment. None of that has happened. Of course. Some people believe that if some work is done by a cohort, then others can’t work. It’s the opposite that happens. If one person builds something, then others can work too. If more people work, then the entire society is richer and poor people can also find help more easily.
• sureklix 4y ago
  We need to invent a version of the glass bead game to avoid mass unemployment.
• worksonmine 4y ago
  It should though, when are we going to stop chasing infinite growth and take a minute to smell the flowers?
• mwilliamson 4y ago
  Two thoughts: 1. I think it's worth considering how much the Baumol effect is responsible for the price changes described. Specifically: we'd expect those industries that don't benefit from improved productivity (for instance, because AI doesn't actually meaningfully help with most parts of the work) to experience price rises, since they're competing in the labour market with other sectors that have have benefited from improved productivity, and can therefore pay workers more. Or, to put it another way, you'd expect this effect to some degree in a market operating entirely without restriction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect 2. If I remember correctly, in the past, when technological innovation eliminated jobs, the new ones that sprang up generally meant a rise in wages across the board. In other words, the overall effect was low-paid jobs being replaced with higher-paid jobs. No more. In recent years, the graph of wages of replacement jobs looks more like a U-shape: they tend to either be low-paid or high-paid. For instance, take translating a textbook. A company might decide to fire their moderately well-paid translators with a steady job, and replace them with AI (built by another company, using a smaller number (per book) of high-paid tech workers), plus some low-paid, proof readers to fix up the mistakes. And the latter group is probably precariously employed: the better the AI gets, the less they're needed. And they're probably seen as lower skilled and therefore easier to replace by the company, so perhaps their jobs look more like precarious gig economy jobs. That's a simplification, but I think the evidence suggests that that U-shape is a pattern that, very broadly, holds true. So, we might not be unemployed, but we might have a lot of people with falling incomes and much lower job security. (Apologies, writing this in a hurry, so can't find a source right now!)
• danbruc 4y ago
  I hope that guy is wrong, what is even the point of developing AI if it doesn't make us all unemployed eventually?
• f0ld 4y ago
  >Uses Ai generated profile pic
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• e2le 4y ago
  As an AI enthusiast, I completely agree with the author's perspective on this matter. AI has the potential to revolutionize the workforce, but it won't necessarily lead to mass unemployment. In fact, AI can create new job opportunities and enhance productivity in existing jobs. It's important to recognize that AI is a tool that can complement human skills, not replace them entirely. As the author points out, we should focus on upskilling and reskilling workers to adapt to the changing job market. The key is to embrace AI technology and use it to our advantage. Overall, this article provides a refreshing perspective on the potential benefits of AI and how we can prepare for the future of work.