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It's always frustrating to me, the headline about the destroyed jobs. Very rarely any mention of the new jobs or the fact that the jobs that were destroyable we

It's always frustrating to me, the headline about the destroyed jobs. Very rarely any mention of the new jobs or the fact that the jobs that were destroyable were also often not a whole lot of fun in the first place. Or that we are maintaining the good things we have with even have human capital available to accomplish ever more (hopefully) important things.

Xylakant 3y ago
The issue with destroying the boring menial tasks is that as a society, we have not come up with a replacement for them. Some people rely on those for their livelihood and have not had the good fortune of an education that allows for higher qualifications. And those people are left behind - society could educate them, just pay them a living stipend, whatever. But in the end, the profits gained from the eliminating these jobs go in the pockets of the high qualified and to a massive extend to those that own the capital.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  Wrong, wrong, wrong. The benefits of increased productivity go to all of society that can now get more of their wants fulfilled as less people need to be devoted to fulfilling said want. 99% of humanity used to spend their lives farming and now it’s 1%. I don’t bemoan that 98% of farmers are now out of work. We are at historically low unemployment. People have found new desires to be fulfilled and created businesses to fulfill them, forever and ever.
  - Xylakant 3y ago
    I’m not disputing that society as a whole may win - but the gains are not equally distributed. Look at all the gig economy jobs that are thriving because the other jobs are even more exploitative. Look at the Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers that pee in bottles and shit in bags. Are they profiting? They’re clearly not. They may be able to buy a bigger phone or a larger tv, but in the end, they’re often worse off than what a worker at ford or gm had on the factory floor.
    - monero-xmr 3y ago
      I think if you ever spoke with these people supposedly peeing in bottles and asked if they liked their jobs, what they did before, what their goals are, you would get a very different opinion about how miserable the American work force is. They are not miserable. The language of socialists / Marxists - “workers are ‘exploited’” etc. is very inflammatory and inaccurate. It is like once you get this worm in your brain that all work is just evil exploiters taking advantage of the workers, you became a bitter cultist and can’t see how backwards your thinking is.
      - Xylakant 3y ago
        If you’re right and the gains from productivity improvements were equally distributed among the populace, you’d expect the Gini coefficient which measures inequality to stay level - that is neither rise nor fall. And it’s clearly not for the US https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA So either the top end of the bracket is pocketing more or the bottom end is loosing some. But it’s definitely not equal. Acknowledging that and considering that a problem is neither a Marxist standpoint nor a sign of a rotten mind. And neither is acknowledging that there’s a whole class of people that are exploited by society.
      - hgs3 3y ago
        You're focusing on the benefits of increased productivity squarely from the perspective of a consumer. It's true increased productivity means consumers benefit from more goods, however, producers are not benefiting. Take programmers today, we are more productive than ever before due to increased computation power and a vast collection of open source libraries. When it comes to building CRUD apps one developer today can produce in a day what would have taken a week or more ~25 years ago. So if a programmer is ~5 times more productive today, why are we still working 5 days a week? Why not 1 day a week? Why do we need H-1B's and other salary suppressing nonsense? The problem is these technology gains are not benefiting producers, only consumers and C-suites. If you're dead set on favoring consumers over producers, then consider by freeing the producers time up they'd be able to produce more passion projects for consumers to enjoy. Today's consumers don't necessarily get the highest quality "stuff" but rather the "stuff" that is "safe" and guaranteed to maximize profits (see Hollywood movies). If socialism/Marxism ever did take hold, then I agree that there would be less "stuff" to consume, however, the "stuff" that is produced would be of higher quality because it would be made with passion and love of the craft. True builders will build anyway regardless of whether there are financial gains. It would be quality over quantity.
  - pydry 3y ago
    >The benefits of increased productivity go to all of society They havent though. They've gone to shareholders and landowners. It would theoretically be nice if the productivity gains were evenly distributed but in practice to make that actually happen would probably require a great deal of violence.
    - monero-xmr 3y ago
      But what about all the pensions that are shareholders?
      - pydry 3y ago
        You mean the average pensioner - the bottom 90% who own 11% of the stock market between them? What about them? Do you think the bottom 90% of pensioners do not deserve to own more than 11% of the capital stock of the country?
        monero-xmr 3y ago
        I mean that huge pools of capital actually represent the interests of a lot of people, such as Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fund and CALPERS which collectively fund the retirements for millions of people. And there are 401ks and IRAs, and even social security which is backed by the dollar which requires a healthy economy to maintain its preeminence. It’s hard to just point the finger at this thing or that thing and pretend it’s just “the 1%” who benefits and they are causing all the problems. The economy, and society itself, is far far more complex and trying to do something extreme like destroy private business has enormous knock-on consequences.
      - mxuribe 3y ago
        But...Aren't the beneficiaries of those pensions 2 types of people: 1) retirees who technically are not impacted by the job loss that is happening or is about to happen; 2) fund managers that are "Actively managing" portfolios including pensions? Happy to be corrected.
        3y ago
  - blacksmith_tb 3y ago
    I guess I don't see it playing out quite like that - let's say we replace a lot of creative-but-not-very desk jockeys of various kinds, lawyers, graphic designers, software devs. For the rest of society, they continue to get adequate output from those fields, now mostly from AI and a few handlers. They didn't really need more of it, and the owners of the companies producing it are unlikely to pass their new savings along. So the benefits don't seem to trickle down meaningfully? And the replaced middle-class folks can't get work doing what they trained to do, so at best they start over.
  - sharadov 3y ago
    That happened over several decades with the mechanization of agriculture - gave people enough time to adapt and skill up to other jobs. The pace at which it's happening now with no social safety net for the work force being left by the wayside - is what is worrisome.
    - monero-xmr 3y ago
      What pace? Where are the job losses caused by AI? I’ve been hearing about these forever, although previously it was called “automation” yet here we are with very low unemployment. I’ll believe it when it actually happens because the futurists have cried wolf for too many decades.
  - AccountDean 3y ago
    >The benefits of increased productivity go to all of society that can now get more of their wants fulfilled Serious question, how exactly do you envision unemployed people without any renueve stream can afford to "fulfill their wants" when the goverment and landlords will yell them for their cut of the meal on taxes and rent at the end of every month, implying they've enough food savings to last up to that point? > People have found new desires to be fulfilled and created businesses to fulfill them What about the desiree to not die thanks to a crashed economy and inexistent safety nets? Seriosly, on what kind of cutesy fantasy spot do you think vast mayority of people live on, that they've the time to daydream about hypothetical wants instead of the real treath of being kicked out of a roof and starving to death? Maybe, at some point in the distant future, some middle spot can be reached, but not sure not right now, society as we know it may be the verge of crashing and those holding the keys are hardly willing to care.
    - monero-xmr 3y ago
      I don’t know what country you live in, but it sounds like Cuba or Venezuela. I am very sorry for your situation.
      - AccountDean 3y ago
        Not sure if this is a snarky gotcha, but is hardly worth sleeping on considering that USA isn't on a extremely healthy economic spot right now, and be sure shareholders aren't inconvincing themselves anytime soon to improve the situation. It really feels like people is suddenly trusting too much the intentions of those companies owning both these models AND the hardware is able to run on, and also can operate them at a much higher scale than anyone else could dream of.
- erikerikson 3y ago
  > we have not come up with a replacement for them yet. I appreciate the assertion that we ought to solve that problem. Energy expended upon countering the positive reasons we get to do so could be better spent. No reason for you (or anyone) to expect $randomInternetStranger (i.e. me) to care but I do. I have come to believe the problem is a creativity supply problem, alongside insufficient transition supports, and incentive design problems with many beneficial human labors. I believe that we constrain our growth and prosperity due to this lack of vision and this is why I endeavor to do better, extend ladders, and so on.
dlisboa 3y ago
> the jobs that were destroyable were also often not a whole lot of fun in the first place. You're severely underestimating how much high education and creative jobs will be impacted. Those are the "fun" jobs, involving imagining, learning, thinking. Illustrators, architects, designers, writers (of different sorts), journalists, even programmers and musicians. In fact, manual and repetitive labour is the one kind of job not impacted by today's AIs. It's not that you'll fully replace all of those jobs with AI. It's that if you needed 10 illustrators, or 10 designers or 10 writers, now you might only need 1 to make sure the output of the AI is ok. There'll be new opportunities afforded by this increase in productivity, new jobs in new industries, but retraining will not happen fast enough to employ those 9 extra people. And the problem is it'll happen in many different areas of the economy and at roughly the same time, that we won't have enough new jobs to go around for everyone in a timeframe that saves them from unemployment.
- erikerikson 3y ago
  I think it is fair to interpret this as admitting that we will accomplish the same societal value with a smaller proportion of the creative, well educated population. That portion of our creative population will be available to help solve these problems. Some of them will have the resolve and resources to do so. I expect we would gain from increasing the size of that population but we have seemed to struggle to do so.
  - dlisboa 3y ago
    In the long-term you're correct, society will rebalance itself and will make better use of the available brain power. In the short-term some jobs in the industries will just disappear and those people will not find another right away in the same industry. It's specially hard on entry level jobs: a beginner designer would come up with a few designs and a more experienced designer would shoot some down and approve others, thus helping the beginner learn and improve. The company needed the beginner to do the leg work that would be too expensive to pay the experience designer to do. Now the experienced designer does not need the beginner at all, just the AI as they already know what is a good design, and for actually zero cost. The beginner designer in this example will not be able to find another job in the industry, because they do not yet possess any skill that is valuable, and will never acquire the experience necessary for those skills. Maybe they'll transition to a different industry, but that will take some amount of time and for that time they may be unemployed.
blibble 3y ago
> Very rarely any mention of the new jobs what if there aren't any this time? like horses after the invention of the motor car
- Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  Cars created all kinds of jobs. Gas production, gas stations, car production, mechanics, and driver's ed most obviously. An expansion in the hospitality sector as people became more able to take vacations. All sorts of small vendor jobs became feasible that previously weren't. Indeed groups of all kinds be ame feasible that weren't before, as people became more able to join each other from farther away. The invention of cars had an effect similar to the invention of cities.
  - xnx 3y ago
    > Cars created all kinds of jobs. Not for horses
- erikerikson 3y ago
  From my observation, the horses that live today have far less grueling and cruel existences than those that lived before cars.
  - jp10558 3y ago
    Sure, but something like 95% of horses died out.
AccountDean 3y ago
Outside of scarce spots on some heavily regulated or unionized (for now) sectors, what exactly can the average worker sell or do than the huge corporation with the power of hundreds of workers that don't need to rest or social benefits can't? Being resellers? Previous means of automation still needed human intervetion because they only reduced the effort to finish some task, but couldn't do them themselves, these models only need some basic QA for as much as the business needs care. >or the fact that the jobs that were destroyable were also often not a whole lot of fun in the first place Very few things in this world can be agreed to be "fun", but goverment wants taxes and shareholders rent, and they precisely don't care much about your quality of life when you don't find a way to provide them those. Can't blame the players for doing what they can.

Xylakant 3y ago

The issue with destroying the boring menial tasks is that as a society, we have not come up with a replacement for them. Some people rely on those for their livelihood and have not had the good fortune of an education that allows for higher qualifications. And those people are left behind - society could educate them, just pay them a living stipend, whatever. But in the end, the profits gained from the eliminating these jobs go in the pockets of the high qualified and to a massive extend to those that own the capital.

monero-xmr 3y ago
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The benefits of increased productivity go to all of society that can now get more of their wants fulfilled as less people need to be devoted to fulfilling said want. 99% of humanity used to spend their lives farming and now it’s 1%. I don’t bemoan that 98% of farmers are now out of work. We are at historically low unemployment. People have found new desires to be fulfilled and created businesses to fulfill them, forever and ever.
- Xylakant 3y ago
  I’m not disputing that society as a whole may win - but the gains are not equally distributed. Look at all the gig economy jobs that are thriving because the other jobs are even more exploitative. Look at the Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers that pee in bottles and shit in bags. Are they profiting? They’re clearly not. They may be able to buy a bigger phone or a larger tv, but in the end, they’re often worse off than what a worker at ford or gm had on the factory floor.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    I think if you ever spoke with these people supposedly peeing in bottles and asked if they liked their jobs, what they did before, what their goals are, you would get a very different opinion about how miserable the American work force is. They are not miserable. The language of socialists / Marxists - “workers are ‘exploited’” etc. is very inflammatory and inaccurate. It is like once you get this worm in your brain that all work is just evil exploiters taking advantage of the workers, you became a bitter cultist and can’t see how backwards your thinking is.
    - Xylakant 3y ago
      If you’re right and the gains from productivity improvements were equally distributed among the populace, you’d expect the Gini coefficient which measures inequality to stay level - that is neither rise nor fall. And it’s clearly not for the US https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA So either the top end of the bracket is pocketing more or the bottom end is loosing some. But it’s definitely not equal. Acknowledging that and considering that a problem is neither a Marxist standpoint nor a sign of a rotten mind. And neither is acknowledging that there’s a whole class of people that are exploited by society.
    - hgs3 3y ago
      You're focusing on the benefits of increased productivity squarely from the perspective of a consumer. It's true increased productivity means consumers benefit from more goods, however, producers are not benefiting. Take programmers today, we are more productive than ever before due to increased computation power and a vast collection of open source libraries. When it comes to building CRUD apps one developer today can produce in a day what would have taken a week or more ~25 years ago. So if a programmer is ~5 times more productive today, why are we still working 5 days a week? Why not 1 day a week? Why do we need H-1B's and other salary suppressing nonsense? The problem is these technology gains are not benefiting producers, only consumers and C-suites. If you're dead set on favoring consumers over producers, then consider by freeing the producers time up they'd be able to produce more passion projects for consumers to enjoy. Today's consumers don't necessarily get the highest quality "stuff" but rather the "stuff" that is "safe" and guaranteed to maximize profits (see Hollywood movies). If socialism/Marxism ever did take hold, then I agree that there would be less "stuff" to consume, however, the "stuff" that is produced would be of higher quality because it would be made with passion and love of the craft. True builders will build anyway regardless of whether there are financial gains. It would be quality over quantity.
- pydry 3y ago
  >The benefits of increased productivity go to all of society They havent though. They've gone to shareholders and landowners. It would theoretically be nice if the productivity gains were evenly distributed but in practice to make that actually happen would probably require a great deal of violence.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    But what about all the pensions that are shareholders?
    - pydry 3y ago
      You mean the average pensioner - the bottom 90% who own 11% of the stock market between them? What about them? Do you think the bottom 90% of pensioners do not deserve to own more than 11% of the capital stock of the country?
      - monero-xmr 3y ago
        I mean that huge pools of capital actually represent the interests of a lot of people, such as Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fund and CALPERS which collectively fund the retirements for millions of people. And there are 401ks and IRAs, and even social security which is backed by the dollar which requires a healthy economy to maintain its preeminence. It’s hard to just point the finger at this thing or that thing and pretend it’s just “the 1%” who benefits and they are causing all the problems. The economy, and society itself, is far far more complex and trying to do something extreme like destroy private business has enormous knock-on consequences.
    - mxuribe 3y ago
      But...Aren't the beneficiaries of those pensions 2 types of people: 1) retirees who technically are not impacted by the job loss that is happening or is about to happen; 2) fund managers that are "Actively managing" portfolios including pensions? Happy to be corrected.
      - 3y ago
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  I guess I don't see it playing out quite like that - let's say we replace a lot of creative-but-not-very desk jockeys of various kinds, lawyers, graphic designers, software devs. For the rest of society, they continue to get adequate output from those fields, now mostly from AI and a few handlers. They didn't really need more of it, and the owners of the companies producing it are unlikely to pass their new savings along. So the benefits don't seem to trickle down meaningfully? And the replaced middle-class folks can't get work doing what they trained to do, so at best they start over.
- sharadov 3y ago
  That happened over several decades with the mechanization of agriculture - gave people enough time to adapt and skill up to other jobs. The pace at which it's happening now with no social safety net for the work force being left by the wayside - is what is worrisome.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    What pace? Where are the job losses caused by AI? I’ve been hearing about these forever, although previously it was called “automation” yet here we are with very low unemployment. I’ll believe it when it actually happens because the futurists have cried wolf for too many decades.
- AccountDean 3y ago
  >The benefits of increased productivity go to all of society that can now get more of their wants fulfilled Serious question, how exactly do you envision unemployed people without any renueve stream can afford to "fulfill their wants" when the goverment and landlords will yell them for their cut of the meal on taxes and rent at the end of every month, implying they've enough food savings to last up to that point? > People have found new desires to be fulfilled and created businesses to fulfill them What about the desiree to not die thanks to a crashed economy and inexistent safety nets? Seriosly, on what kind of cutesy fantasy spot do you think vast mayority of people live on, that they've the time to daydream about hypothetical wants instead of the real treath of being kicked out of a roof and starving to death? Maybe, at some point in the distant future, some middle spot can be reached, but not sure not right now, society as we know it may be the verge of crashing and those holding the keys are hardly willing to care.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    I don’t know what country you live in, but it sounds like Cuba or Venezuela. I am very sorry for your situation.
    - AccountDean 3y ago
      Not sure if this is a snarky gotcha, but is hardly worth sleeping on considering that USA isn't on a extremely healthy economic spot right now, and be sure shareholders aren't inconvincing themselves anytime soon to improve the situation. It really feels like people is suddenly trusting too much the intentions of those companies owning both these models AND the hardware is able to run on, and also can operate them at a much higher scale than anyone else could dream of.
erikerikson 3y ago
> we have not come up with a replacement for them yet. I appreciate the assertion that we ought to solve that problem. Energy expended upon countering the positive reasons we get to do so could be better spent. No reason for you (or anyone) to expect $randomInternetStranger (i.e. me) to care but I do. I have come to believe the problem is a creativity supply problem, alongside insufficient transition supports, and incentive design problems with many beneficial human labors. I believe that we constrain our growth and prosperity due to this lack of vision and this is why I endeavor to do better, extend ladders, and so on.

dlisboa 3y ago

> the jobs that were destroyable were also often not a whole lot of fun in the first place. You're severely underestimating how much high education and creative jobs will be impacted. Those are the "fun" jobs, involving imagining, learning, thinking. Illustrators, architects, designers, writers (of different sorts), journalists, even programmers and musicians. In fact, manual and repetitive labour is the one kind of job not impacted by today's AIs. It's not that you'll fully replace all of those jobs with AI. It's that if you needed 10 illustrators, or 10 designers or 10 writers, now you might only need 1 to make sure the output of the AI is ok. There'll be new opportunities afforded by this increase in productivity, new jobs in new industries, but retraining will not happen fast enough to employ those 9 extra people. And the problem is it'll happen in many different areas of the economy and at roughly the same time, that we won't have enough new jobs to go around for everyone in a timeframe that saves them from unemployment.

erikerikson 3y ago
I think it is fair to interpret this as admitting that we will accomplish the same societal value with a smaller proportion of the creative, well educated population. That portion of our creative population will be available to help solve these problems. Some of them will have the resolve and resources to do so. I expect we would gain from increasing the size of that population but we have seemed to struggle to do so.
- dlisboa 3y ago
  In the long-term you're correct, society will rebalance itself and will make better use of the available brain power. In the short-term some jobs in the industries will just disappear and those people will not find another right away in the same industry. It's specially hard on entry level jobs: a beginner designer would come up with a few designs and a more experienced designer would shoot some down and approve others, thus helping the beginner learn and improve. The company needed the beginner to do the leg work that would be too expensive to pay the experience designer to do. Now the experienced designer does not need the beginner at all, just the AI as they already know what is a good design, and for actually zero cost. The beginner designer in this example will not be able to find another job in the industry, because they do not yet possess any skill that is valuable, and will never acquire the experience necessary for those skills. Maybe they'll transition to a different industry, but that will take some amount of time and for that time they may be unemployed.

blibble 3y ago

> Very rarely any mention of the new jobs what if there aren't any this time? like horses after the invention of the motor car

Jeff_Brown 3y ago
Cars created all kinds of jobs. Gas production, gas stations, car production, mechanics, and driver's ed most obviously. An expansion in the hospitality sector as people became more able to take vacations. All sorts of small vendor jobs became feasible that previously weren't. Indeed groups of all kinds be ame feasible that weren't before, as people became more able to join each other from farther away. The invention of cars had an effect similar to the invention of cities.
- xnx 3y ago
  > Cars created all kinds of jobs. Not for horses
erikerikson 3y ago
From my observation, the horses that live today have far less grueling and cruel existences than those that lived before cars.
- jp10558 3y ago
  Sure, but something like 95% of horses died out.

AccountDean 3y ago

Outside of scarce spots on some heavily regulated or unionized (for now) sectors, what exactly can the average worker sell or do than the huge corporation with the power of hundreds of workers that don't need to rest or social benefits can't? Being resellers? Previous means of automation still needed human intervetion because they only reduced the effort to finish some task, but couldn't do them themselves, these models only need some basic QA for as much as the business needs care. >or the fact that the jobs that were destroyable were also often not a whole lot of fun in the first place Very few things in this world can be agreed to be "fun", but goverment wants taxes and shareholders rent, and they precisely don't care much about your quality of life when you don't find a way to provide them those. Can't blame the players for doing what they can.