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I don't buy it. The idea that automation reduces overall employment needs to die in a ditch. It's just not true. Look around you, we live in a world that's auto

by simonh 4y ago

I don't buy it. The idea that automation reduces overall employment needs to die in a ditch. It's just not true. Look around you, we live in a world that's automated up to the eyeballs compared to any previous generation, yet employment is as high as it's ever been. In fact it's substituted for domestic labour and has allowed generations of women to go to work and build careers, and hundreds of millions of rural labourers have been drafted into industrial work forces in my lifetime. As automation has expanded, the demand for labour has grown voraciously. These LLMs are incredibly smart compared to humans in some ways, but they're incredibly stupid in other ways. They're just another tool, and tools need users. Hopefully they will be another big force multiplier in knowledge based industries, but this will increase demand for knowledge workers, because they will become more valuable due to being more productive from having better tools. If better knowledge tools reduced demand for the people using them, Moore's Law and the availability of ever more sophisticated software would have ravaged employment in the IT industry. But that's just not how that works. It's based on the assumption that when a worker becomes more productive, that the only effect that has is reducing the amount of work there is for others to do, but that's an incredibly naive view. In fact it also dramatically reduces the cost of that work being done and increases the capacity of the organisation to do work. This increases demand for that work, it makes that labour more skilled, and increases profits thus stimulating investment. Yes there can be localised negative effects in some cases, sure. Ive seen some of those myself, but any economic realignment can have it's pains. Taking into account all the positives it increases the value of the economic activity overall.

ChatGTP 4y ago
Maybe one day, some of us will see the end of the JIRA backlog ?
- soco 4y ago
  Imagine that, the entire world looking at the last user story being moved to "done" in silence, all having the same thought "now what"...
roca 4y ago
This assumes that humans in knowledge-based industries will maintain a significant cost-effective edge over AIs in some economically relevant skill domain. There's no reason to believe that will still be true in, say, 10 years.
- simonh 4y ago
  This assumes that a human with a chisel will maintain a significant cost effective edge over a CNC machine... It's the same thing. These things are still just tools that need to be used by humans. Fair enough, I can't really see 10 years into the future, but I don't think anyone can, and there's nothing about these tools we're developing today that makes me think they're immune to the economic effects of automation throughout the last 300 years.
code51 4y ago
Decision-making and reasoning was not automated in any era before. "Automation is just fine because it was fine until now" is an old world approach. We are not only tool users at this point. We started to change through our tool use. We think we have guardrails against AI but our brains don't have any guardrails. It will get harder and harder to get motivated to learn any domain deeply. Our brains can't cope with these short-term job definitions in intellectually demanding contexts. Prompt engineer today, automated next year. Take a look at the fate of indie AI startups (avatar generation is best example of this) and you'll see. Income opportunities are limited to shorter and shorter time windows. Only the big players dominate (with their marketing machine) and will probably pay peanuts after reaching dominance.
- simonh 4y ago
  Of course decision making has been automated, that's literally what computers do. This will just streamline the process of pushing it into more problem domains. Everyone thinks their job is special and that automating any part of it will be the end of the world. Eventually, with full human level AI yes, sure, at that point we'd not be augmenting human intelligence but genuinely substituting for it. We are a long, long, long way away from that though. I edited my post above, so you may not have read the last paragraph.
  - code51 4y ago
    I understand our perspectives differ because I think we are right at the edge of fast take-off and you outlined your view as slow take-off. Computers were bicycles for our minds, applying our previously formulated solutions to scale. I agree I did not explicitly clarify that I was meaning high-level decision-making getting automated. “It’s not the end of the world” begs for definition of what end of the world looks like. A meteor is not end of the world apparently but it killed the dinosaurs.
    - simonh 4y ago
      Well, I'll put my big mouth on the line and make a prediction. 12 years ago we all thought self-driving cars would be with us by now, and my wife genuinely wondered whether our kids would need to learn how to drive. My youngest passed her test a few months ago. There's a significant low hanging fruit effect in AI domains. We rapidly reach a 90% solution, but that last 10% is absolutely critical, and virtually impossible to attain. I think these LLMs will follow the same trajectory. They will quickly become incredibly valuable or even indispensable tools, but the alignment problem and over-fitting will come to limit their reliable applicability in critical edge cases that make skilled human oversight essential. This will relegate them to the role of productivity enhancement rather than genuine labour substitution.
Yoric 4y ago
If my memory serves, in past industrial revolutions, employment eventually caught up with automation. It did take one generation, though (~40 years in the 19th century). That being said, I won't attempt to predict anything. Just checking what I can do to build a ChatGPT-proof resume :)
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Employment is just as high for exactly the reason they’ve given. We create bullshit underpaid jobs in order to make sure everyone is employed.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  No one is employing people for shits and giggles(maybe the government). Every employee exists because their employer believes they will add value to the company.

by simonh 4y ago

ChatGTP 4y ago

Maybe one day, some of us will see the end of the JIRA backlog ?

soco 4y ago
Imagine that, the entire world looking at the last user story being moved to "done" in silence, all having the same thought "now what"...

roca 4y ago

This assumes that humans in knowledge-based industries will maintain a significant cost-effective edge over AIs in some economically relevant skill domain. There's no reason to believe that will still be true in, say, 10 years.

simonh 4y ago
This assumes that a human with a chisel will maintain a significant cost effective edge over a CNC machine... It's the same thing. These things are still just tools that need to be used by humans. Fair enough, I can't really see 10 years into the future, but I don't think anyone can, and there's nothing about these tools we're developing today that makes me think they're immune to the economic effects of automation throughout the last 300 years.

code51 4y ago

Decision-making and reasoning was not automated in any era before. "Automation is just fine because it was fine until now" is an old world approach. We are not only tool users at this point. We started to change through our tool use. We think we have guardrails against AI but our brains don't have any guardrails. It will get harder and harder to get motivated to learn any domain deeply. Our brains can't cope with these short-term job definitions in intellectually demanding contexts. Prompt engineer today, automated next year. Take a look at the fate of indie AI startups (avatar generation is best example of this) and you'll see. Income opportunities are limited to shorter and shorter time windows. Only the big players dominate (with their marketing machine) and will probably pay peanuts after reaching dominance.

simonh 4y ago
Of course decision making has been automated, that's literally what computers do. This will just streamline the process of pushing it into more problem domains. Everyone thinks their job is special and that automating any part of it will be the end of the world. Eventually, with full human level AI yes, sure, at that point we'd not be augmenting human intelligence but genuinely substituting for it. We are a long, long, long way away from that though. I edited my post above, so you may not have read the last paragraph.
- code51 4y ago
  I understand our perspectives differ because I think we are right at the edge of fast take-off and you outlined your view as slow take-off. Computers were bicycles for our minds, applying our previously formulated solutions to scale. I agree I did not explicitly clarify that I was meaning high-level decision-making getting automated. “It’s not the end of the world” begs for definition of what end of the world looks like. A meteor is not end of the world apparently but it killed the dinosaurs.
  - simonh 4y ago
    Well, I'll put my big mouth on the line and make a prediction. 12 years ago we all thought self-driving cars would be with us by now, and my wife genuinely wondered whether our kids would need to learn how to drive. My youngest passed her test a few months ago. There's a significant low hanging fruit effect in AI domains. We rapidly reach a 90% solution, but that last 10% is absolutely critical, and virtually impossible to attain. I think these LLMs will follow the same trajectory. They will quickly become incredibly valuable or even indispensable tools, but the alignment problem and over-fitting will come to limit their reliable applicability in critical edge cases that make skilled human oversight essential. This will relegate them to the role of productivity enhancement rather than genuine labour substitution.

Yoric 4y ago

If my memory serves, in past industrial revolutions, employment eventually caught up with automation. It did take one generation, though (~40 years in the 19th century). That being said, I won't attempt to predict anything. Just checking what I can do to build a ChatGPT-proof resume :)

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

Employment is just as high for exactly the reason they’ve given. We create bullshit underpaid jobs in order to make sure everyone is employed.

HDThoreaun 4y ago
No one is employing people for shits and giggles(maybe the government). Every employee exists because their employer believes they will add value to the company.