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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

• 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.
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  • Kiro 4y ago
    What do you mean? Every article about this makes the comparison with the Industrial Revolution, including this one.
    • dmichulke 4y ago
      I think he means that the Industrial Revolution made a lot of human work obsolete, yet here we are almost without unemployment. Same for the invention of the wheel. So how was that possible? Turns out people didn't want to work less, they wanted more stuff. (Bigger houses, more houses, better food, health care, ...) The same will happen again with AI. Thanks to infinite human wants.
      • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
        We're only "without unemployment" because most of the population is spectacularly underpaid. This makes it cheaper - so far - to use human labour than machine labour. And we don't use human labour very efficiently. A lot of activities are pointless make-work or zero productivity wealth transfer. Which is almost the point of AI. It's not just about partial mechanisation or automation, which is what happened during the first Industrial Revolution. It's about making all human activity obsolete. Including all forms of mental and physical labour. All forms of culture. And all forms of economic and political organisation. There will be nothing humans can do which a machine won't do better. We're like the dinosaurs. A few of us are looking up at the new light in the sky and thinking "Well, that's interesting" without much of an idea of what's actually incoming.
        • dogcomplex 4y ago
          But the real question is: will we make good pets?
        • akbarian 4y ago
          "We're like the dinosaurs. A few of us are looking up at the new light in the sky and thinking "Well, that's interesting" without much of an idea of what's actually incoming" That was the one of the most funniest and at the same time scariest thing I have ever read.
  • twelve40 4y ago
    > Outsourcing was not a technology He's likely referring to not just the general concept of outsourcing, which has been around forever, but the programming offshoring scare of the early 2000's (which - the scare - was very real, having worked through it). It was very much caused by technology - messaging, Webex (before Skype even), source control and issue tracking getting mainstream adoption (Bugzilla, CVS, Subversion), combined with an influx of people into tech companies and the subsequent market bust in 2000. It was the first time when regular office workers (programmers in this case) realized they could be made completely disposable by the millions, and that would not have been possible before the technology i listed became mainstream.
    • thrashh 4y ago
      Still, technology didn’t make for a significant productivity gain. One human wasn’t getting more done — one human was simply being paid less for the same work (arguably worse work). IMO it’s more of an example of globalization and specifically where globalization works and where it doesn’t.
  • UncleMeat 4y ago
    Technologists making historical claims and arguments while not engaging with actual historians and also arguing that the humanities are a waste of time and money... name a better pair. Like, Stanford has some world class History of Technology scholars just down the road from Marc's home. He could go speak to any of them.
• zarzavat 4y ago
  Not up-skilling but down-skilling. AI is going to come for the mathematicians and radiologists first and work its way down to the pizza delivery boys. This is because robotics is a couple of decades behind. Anyone with a desk job as a knowledge worker is most at risk.
  • im3w1l 4y ago
    Yeah I could easily see it happening this way. Which breakthrough will happen first is frankly anyone's guess at this point.
  • valine 4y ago
    Mathematicians are more than just number crunchers. Perhaps the most important part of a mathematicians job is formally defining problems. Even if the next generation of ChatGPT can solve any math problem you give it satisfactory, you still need a mathematician to ask the question. Presumably this AI won’t be omnipotent either, and there will be some limit to its mathematical prowess. I suspect most human effort will be spent inventing new ways to push the AI further.
    • thomasahle 4y ago
      Why does society have mathematicians right now? It's some mix of "the people find mathematics intellectually worthwhile" (public universities) and "we sometimes need to ask them to solve hard problems". If AI makes it less intellectually interesting, the first reason goes away. If engineers can just ask the AI to solve a hard problem instead of the mathematician, they don't need the mathematician as a middle man. So AI also breaks this reason. > I suspect most human effort will be spent inventing new ways to push the AI further. Assuming the AI can't just do that itself too.
      • yohannesk 4y ago
        I am quite interested in this AI that can improve upon itself or come up with genuinely new and novel ideas. What are you referring to exactly? LLMs?
• AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  The reason technology doesn't net destroy jobs is that things that destroy jobs lower costs, which leaves people with more money in their pockets, which creates jobs. What net destroys jobs is things that unproductively increase costs. Resources that are wasted can't be used for productive labor that improves quality of life.
  • wardedVibe 4y ago
    Just because there are new jobs doesn't mean the people whose jobs were automated out of existence will be able to take them. This is the whole "teach truckers to write code" thing from back when people thought the next wave of automation would be self-driving, rather than art.
    • AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      > Just because there are new jobs doesn't mean the people whose jobs were automated out of existence will be able to take them. Yes it does, because those are the people whose labor will be available. They'll take whatever jobs they're qualified for, which may lower wages in those occupations until the lower price increases demand or reduces supply by driving anyone currently in those occupations who is qualified for another job into the other job. The change isn't necessarily Pareto optimal. There can be people who are worse off because the amount their cost of living went down was less than the amount their wages went down. But for most people it will be the opposite, because the change is an increase in productivity. You get more production with less labor, so you on average need to do less labor to meet your cost of living.
      • Tanjreeve 4y ago
        Outside of undergraduate economics 101 textbooks Labour is not perfectly fungible. - People have aptitudes, especially for creative work - Changing trades requires training/education which in itself requires capital - for most people their brains are less adaptable at older ages. Which worsens the other two effects.
• cm2187 4y ago
  If those communities were moving to London they would be doing fine. The unemployment rate in the UK is really low. It doesn't mean that a job will show up at your doorstep without having to do anything.
  • Tanjreeve 4y ago
    Thats what many did and they're not doing fine though. One of the reasons London became so unlivable was so many people have to move there especially early in careers just to get a job. Which has a bonus effect of draining the original communities and speeding up the feedback loop.
  • ckolkey 4y ago
    You make it sound like there are no other factors. People like where they are. They like their communities. They may dislike cities, and they may not have the means to move to them even if they did like them. You dont seem to understand the absolutely rapid pace of change over the last 200 years.
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  • desas 4y ago
    The communities are moving to London. Hundreds of thousands of (primarily young) people have been moving into London each year from other UK regions for decades. It's mainly balanced by migration out of London due to house prices and immigration from other countries. I grew up in a coalfield area. I have friends and family who made that move and further afield. It's a big ask for people to uproot their families from their support network and stable council house for a very uncertain future in London. What transferable skills do you think a coal miner had?
    • wyclif 4y ago
      How do these young people from the home counties afford London real estate?
  • samastur 4y ago
• herbst 4y ago
  I myself, probably 'killed' more work hours (others could have been paid for) than I ever worked myself. The idea that brilliant new tech is not going to destroy even more jobs is just stupid IMO. People really refuse to see the reality of our future of unemployment and/or even more badly paid jobs in the gig economy.
• frankreyes 4y ago
  > 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) In order to make money selling coal, someone has to buy that coal. They're selling something that nobody buys anymore. Try selling ice cubes in the North Pole. The purpose of those coal jobs was jobs creation, not problem solving. New generations need to be re skilled in understanding that jobs don't come from government policies but from problem solving. And government can only create new problems.
  • flangola7 4y ago
    Government can also create solutions that solve problems. Hoover dam being one excellent on-topic example.
    • frankreyes 4y ago
      It's ok to give an example to show a contradiction, but it's a mistake to use an example to point a generalization. Hoover dam is a bad example which can not be generalized into the "government is net positive problem solver" argument.
      • optimalsolver 4y ago
        For one thing, everyone in the West who's fallen on hard times has been pretty grateful their government didn't let them starve to death. This general, wide-impact instance of problem-solving is why the public will never allow libertarians anywhere near power.
        • frankreyes 4y ago
          The US is the single largest food and energy producing country in the world. The US economy barely depends on exports to work and it's most important trading partners are the two neighbors, Mexico and Canada. Mexico for labor and Canada for fertilizer. There is no other country in the world with the relative and absolute advantages of the US. And that has nothing to do thanks to government, but instead despite government. In particular, the USA energy supply kept running of fossil fuels, which is the government just doing nothing. The USA is in a position to take a lot of bad choices and still have a great economy. The rest of the world only chance to have a good economy is to make good choices. The next possible country that had a proven track record of very bad choices and still working out is Argentina. Net positive Food and energy producer. And yes, they tried hard to f*k it.
• imtringued 4y ago
  If we assume an economy with a demurrage currency, then Say's Law applies and involuntary unemployment is impossible. Without a demurrage currency, Say's Law is not guaranteed at all and structural involuntary unemployment is possible even without increases in productivity unless you have a central bank that has to constantly increase the money supply and emulate the demurrage fee with inflation.
• hef19898 4y ago
  If we take the industrial revolution as an example, yes, it is true that on average, at the minimum and as a whole indistrialized nations and societies are better off after it then before. Also true, the period between before and after sucked, killed and ruined the health of generations, affected mostly those whose skills weren't as valuable as before anymore and the poor. Ignoring this change, and the social impact it has, is heartless capitalism at its worse. And during the industrial revolution, it was only addressed due to labor organisation and action, unions and public pressure so high that governmebts couldn't ignore it anymore. And it gave birth to communism. Not sure if AI amounts to the same level of impact as industrialisation did, but f it does maybe it it would be sound policy to address the resulting social problems before they are to severe to ignore. And no, I am not talking about six figure salaries tech "workers", I talk about all those under paid and close to minimum wage blue collar real workers.
• than3 4y ago
  Honestly, in my opinion, the claim is clickbait misinformation, it fails to address several common issues, and basically relies on the claim that because it hasn't happened in the past it won't happen. There's also a decent number of Chat-GPT like mistakes in the article, so probably a test for clickbait. Also, credibility is important. I looked up the guy, and he's a hedge-fund guy, who's got a lot of money. Don't you think if you are in the business of investing, that you've heard and understand intimately the phrase; "past performance does not predict future results".