4 ms·

100% and this has ruined millions of lives throughout history, most notably in the Rust Belt. A heck of a lot of auto workers had their job automated away and w

100% and this has ruined millions of lives throughout history, most notably in the Rust Belt. A heck of a lot of auto workers had their job automated away and weren't able to make the jump to white collar work or another trade profession and so fell into unemployment or much less lucrative service employment. And the country ignored the pain and despair of these folks because they were a concentrated group of people, outside of the Coastal bubble. The people on this forum who go on and on about "we have gone through this before and society kept going, people were fine in the end" are half right. Society as a whole did keep going and people outside of the Rust Belt weren't directly affected. But what is different this time is that this is going to annihilate 70-90% of jobs in the "knowledge sector" and it is going to do so very, very quickly. This will knock out most of us comfortable engineers, but also middle management, consultants, journalists, writers, artists, paralegals, influencers, wall street traders, maybe even teachers, lawyers, and doctors to an extent. I don't know what the US will do with the middle/top of the income brackets all across the country suddenly facing mass unemployment and then the subsequent race to fill service or trade jobs. How is a software engineer who got a 30 year mortgage that costs $3k a month going to survive going from a $180k a year salary to being an electrician apprentice at $50k a year? And that is in an environment where this hypothetical former engineer was the top candidate out of 100 other former engineers vying for a spot. GPT-4 will kill many people via unemployment unless it is paired with a UBI, or at least that is my pessimistic view.

vondur 4y ago
I believe that most of the rust belt jobs were sent to countries with lower wages/more lax environmental laws.
phkahler 4y ago
>> A heck of a lot of auto workers had their job automated away And a lot of the remaining jobs went to Mexico.
alexpotato 4y ago
> wall street traders When I started working in FinTech at a big bank, our Managing Director mentioned that he was told: "In 2 years, there will no longer be the job of 'trader'" This quote was from 2005 and he was sharing it with us in 2007. While, yes, there are a LOT less traders than there used to be, it is certainly not zero.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- biohax2015 4y ago
  > there are a LOT less traders than there used to be That is the core of the problem, which has been iterated several times in this thread. Where do those traders that used to be there go? Historically, switching careers or positions has not been insanely difficult. But as there are fewer and fewer jobs, it becomes more and more difficult for people to retrain.
barrysteve 4y ago
Who is this super-layman that can sit down in front of ChatGPT5, ask it to produce a highly technical document and then immediately implement it's recommendations? The man is going to ask it for explanations for days, throw something together that kinda works and hire an expert 'consultant' that should have been an employee, when it inevitably breaks or requirements change. Who would bet the legal success of their company on the 'truthiness' of ChatGPT? The skilled knowledge workers just got upgraded to a better set of tools and the layman is as equally clueless as ever. C++ didn't get easier to read, we just got a robot teacher.
- dangerwill 4y ago
  Yeah but the point isn't that all engineers will go away, but there will be a much lower need for them at scale. Who is going to have use for a bunch of junior/mid level engineers when the job becomes purely specification writing and verification? 1 senior engineer who also plays double duty as project manager will be able to replace a team that had been like 8 people before. We aren't going to all of a sudden have 8x more projects to work on, we are going to have 8x fewer engineers. And companies will LOVE this because it will become a rat race down to the bottom salary wise as people get desperate for any job at all
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    The loss of low-hanging fruit is likely, I agree. Same as most mature technological markets. Making an iPhone app today is a saturated proposition, compared to a decade ago. But the paradigm that websites, iphone apps and windows programs are the breadwinners, can very well change. If we're really getting on the 'gpt engineering revolution' bandwagon, then it must logically bring quantum computing, metaverse, more cybersecurity vulnerabilities, more sophisticated internet backbone and better computing hardware with it. (And fusion power and flying pigs, ect idealism). A revolution for one, will bring a revolution for everything and that involves an awful lot of developer-hours, once we have changed the target market from "http-websites and apps" to the next market.
newmanah223 4y ago
I agree. Automation is getting to the point where it isn't just replacing manual jobs but now it is going to replace most creative jobs. And it isn't going to be a high tech utopia, because a small group at the top is going to capture 95% of the wealth generated. I would predict serious social unrest. The problem is people won't understand why they don't have jobs, so they will blame x country or z group for their problems which will lead to extremism. I would argue many of the major historical events in the US, such as civil war, great depression, WW2, great recession were actually connected to automation requiring a reset of society.
int_19h 4y ago
UBI can also go different ways. It's one thing when everybody gets an equal share of some reasonable proportion of what society as a whole has produced. It's quite another when the elites (= the people who own the automation) maintain UBI on the level just enough to prevent social unrest while still maximizing profits otherwise. The latter can still be a very shitty place to live in; for a sci-fi example of something like this, consider The Expanse.

vondur 4y ago

I believe that most of the rust belt jobs were sent to countries with lower wages/more lax environmental laws.

phkahler 4y ago

>> A heck of a lot of auto workers had their job automated away And a lot of the remaining jobs went to Mexico.

alexpotato 4y ago

> wall street traders When I started working in FinTech at a big bank, our Managing Director mentioned that he was told: "In 2 years, there will no longer be the job of 'trader'" This quote was from 2005 and he was sharing it with us in 2007. While, yes, there are a LOT less traders than there used to be, it is certainly not zero.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
biohax2015 4y ago
> there are a LOT less traders than there used to be That is the core of the problem, which has been iterated several times in this thread. Where do those traders that used to be there go? Historically, switching careers or positions has not been insanely difficult. But as there are fewer and fewer jobs, it becomes more and more difficult for people to retrain.

barrysteve 4y ago

Who is this super-layman that can sit down in front of ChatGPT5, ask it to produce a highly technical document and then immediately implement it's recommendations? The man is going to ask it for explanations for days, throw something together that kinda works and hire an expert 'consultant' that should have been an employee, when it inevitably breaks or requirements change. Who would bet the legal success of their company on the 'truthiness' of ChatGPT? The skilled knowledge workers just got upgraded to a better set of tools and the layman is as equally clueless as ever. C++ didn't get easier to read, we just got a robot teacher.

dangerwill 4y ago
Yeah but the point isn't that all engineers will go away, but there will be a much lower need for them at scale. Who is going to have use for a bunch of junior/mid level engineers when the job becomes purely specification writing and verification? 1 senior engineer who also plays double duty as project manager will be able to replace a team that had been like 8 people before. We aren't going to all of a sudden have 8x more projects to work on, we are going to have 8x fewer engineers. And companies will LOVE this because it will become a rat race down to the bottom salary wise as people get desperate for any job at all
- barrysteve 4y ago
  The loss of low-hanging fruit is likely, I agree. Same as most mature technological markets. Making an iPhone app today is a saturated proposition, compared to a decade ago. But the paradigm that websites, iphone apps and windows programs are the breadwinners, can very well change. If we're really getting on the 'gpt engineering revolution' bandwagon, then it must logically bring quantum computing, metaverse, more cybersecurity vulnerabilities, more sophisticated internet backbone and better computing hardware with it. (And fusion power and flying pigs, ect idealism). A revolution for one, will bring a revolution for everything and that involves an awful lot of developer-hours, once we have changed the target market from "http-websites and apps" to the next market.

newmanah223 4y ago

I agree. Automation is getting to the point where it isn't just replacing manual jobs but now it is going to replace most creative jobs. And it isn't going to be a high tech utopia, because a small group at the top is going to capture 95% of the wealth generated. I would predict serious social unrest. The problem is people won't understand why they don't have jobs, so they will blame x country or z group for their problems which will lead to extremism. I would argue many of the major historical events in the US, such as civil war, great depression, WW2, great recession were actually connected to automation requiring a reset of society.

int_19h 4y ago

UBI can also go different ways. It's one thing when everybody gets an equal share of some reasonable proportion of what society as a whole has produced. It's quite another when the elites (= the people who own the automation) maintain UBI on the level just enough to prevent social unrest while still maximizing profits otherwise. The latter can still be a very shitty place to live in; for a sci-fi example of something like this, consider The Expanse.