25 ms·

AI and the Automation of Work

214 points by CharlesW 3y ago

acover 3y ago
> As an analyst, though, I tend to prefer Hume’s empiricism over Decartes - I can only analyse what we can know. We don’t have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don’t seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painful than all the others.
- blueblimp 3y ago
  This is a good way to look at it. The deployment of the LLM technology we currently have is one thing. The impact of AGI, when it's created in the future, is a different thing. And people are often not clear on which of the two they're discussing.
chologrande 3y ago
What exactly is a "shadow IT app" ? How in the heck is _Evernote_ the top shadow IT app or related to automation and aI?
- benedictevans 3y ago
  Yes, Evernote surprised me too.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  Shadow IT is an unsupported, unendorsed IT process. Like when an office (without official support, and possibly against official rules) uses MS Access + VBA + whatever to automate a business process. ChatGPT is not endorsed by a lot of offices (in fact it's discouraged by many because it's an easy way to exfiltrate proprietary or otherwise confidential information since OpenAI retains those inputs), but it's become a part of a lot of people's workflows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_IT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_IT
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Salesforce is oddly popular as a Shadow IT platform for web applications because it has a database and a programming language, but is often controlled by "non-IT" teams such as finance or whatever. I'm seeing people migrate perfectly fine ASP.NET or JSP applications to Salesforce just to get away from their internal IT teams, which can stretch out the paperwork to 2-3 years just to spin up a VM for a legitimate purpose.
    - code_biologist 3y ago
      God. Migrate to Salesforce was exactly the idea brought up by the sales side at a job of mine. I was on the IT side. Thank god we talked them down (plus they got sticker shock). Some sales asks were legit and we got 'em done. Some were legit but low ROI and never done/priority even as sales had majority say in those priorities. Some were "please take this customer-hostile, flaky, human-explicitly-in-the-loop CRM workflow that has the thinnest veneer of plausibility above pure gaming of KPIs and insert it into a core product flow that's working well". I think low code tools will continue to proliferate and I'm not against it. I do think they will be an interesting test of how much and in what contexts consumers are willing to accept half baked solutions. The capital environment this past decade has meant corporate leadership has been able to touch hot stoves without getting burned. Often they've been rewarded for it.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  That entire list is bananas. Not one mention of PowerAutomate or BI? Sticking within the typical Microsoft stranglehold offers a fair amount of tooling with multiple integration points. They come bundled with everything else in a corporate environment, so they are "free" and less intimidating for a non-technical person to dip their toe into than any other low-code tool.
  - benedictevans 3y ago
    This list is shadow IT, which means the things that the corporate IT department isn't paying for and often doesn't even know about. The tools you mention are in the Productiv (and Okta) data in a different category.
kelvinjps 3y ago
I wonder if a unix like worlflow will be popular again, in general, I mean is easier to automate, ask it to make scripts etc
- Aperocky 3y ago
  Probably won't, people don't ask for what they don't know, and you'd be surprised at how even in the field of software engineering people don't actively looks for ways to automate stuff.
  - Given_47 3y ago
    Then what use cases are the general public using LLMs for other than automation for it to have exploded in popularity? Tho anecdotally it seems to be used for “wisdom” of the crowds coupled with blind trust in the objectivity of a language model
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  I feel like an alien in 2023 only wanting a terminal for most tasks, for the ease of automation in case I end up doing it twice.
mdale 3y ago
I think the "sparks of AIG" presentations are compelling. It does feel like there are a just a few remaining big problems away from AGI level capabilities where it was more futuristic unclear projections in the past. If the issues as synthetic data conversations like alpha go but for LLMs; setting much longer token contexts (or dramatically cheaper training on custom data sets) And scaling via software and hardware a few more orders of magnitude. I think then we have some big waves that will wash over any observations we could make at this point in time.
- cmdli 3y ago
  Honest question, not meaning to disagree with you: how do you view previous predictions of the success of AI, such as Marvin Minsky predicting in the 60s that AI “would substantially be solved in a generation”? What reasons would there be that the experts are correct this time?
  - famouswaffles 3y ago
    Current Capability would be the biggest one. We're at the point where any testable definitions of GI that the sota LLM fails (GPT-4) is also failed by a good chunk of humans. You couldn't say that a few years ago nevermind 60. What we have now (so no hypotheticals) coupled with the fact that scaling hasn't yet shown any performance walls makes a pretty good shout that things will probably be different this time.
    - skepticATX 3y ago
      That's not really true though. LLMs are abysmal at planning, for example. Something that comes quite naturally to humans.
      - runsWphotons 3y ago
        They are probably better than 10% of people
kreelman 3y ago
I really like that the article does its best to provide evidence with data and graphs. It's well written too. These things will be gradual, but the interest in the area is breath-taking.
somewhereoutth 3y ago
Or it could be that the time/effort required to craft a prompt and check the output is not worth it for most/all use cases, and thus after the initial excitement ChatGPT and friends gather dust much like blockchain and Apple Vision.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  Yeah this hype has opened my eyes to the fact that there are so many people who haven't already found a flow for internet searches that's more streamlined than this AI stuff. Don't we all do this every day?
  - DougEiffel 3y ago
    I'll be the odd man out here - I teach special education and GPT has been a lifesaver. I feed it a complex task or text, ask it to simplify it down to my students' reading levels, and then just do a super quick read/edit. Similarly, I've been using Dall-E to add pictures to the books we read in class. Compare this to retyping everything at a 4th grade reading level and then painstakingly searching Google for pictures (and usually ending up with mismatched pictures with varying artistic styles or watermarks). I don't know that we will have true artificial intelligence soon a lá I Robot, but I feel nervous and optimistic about what's to come either way. By the way, call me crazy but I think the Apple Vision thing is going to be a game changer for business and consumers.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    This works way better for me for many kinds of things I previously did with search, and also does not at all replace other kinds of things I did (and still do) with search. To a large extent, it has demonstrated to me that wading through stack overflow or blog posts or canonical documentation to figure out how to do some technical thing was actually a way worse workflow than I thought it was. But searching "what to do in my town this weekend" or "what are the best books about xyz" remains the best workflow.
- loveparade 3y ago
  I don't think this is a good analogy. A better analogy is the multiple previous AI hype cycles. They played out similarly. They brought some truly new capabilities that are used in production, just like LLMs will become a widely used tool, but failed to live up to the AGI hype even though everyone was convinced we're just a step away back in the 80s already and in a few years machine will do all our work. The only reason people don't see this is because they weren't around back then. It's not going to be different this time.
satisfice 3y ago
No one who claims to automate testing ever seems to have a sophisticated understanding of testing. I suspect the urge people have for automating anything comes not from the love and skill they possess for that activity, but rather for the imagined fruits of it. Software testing is easy to fake, which means it’s particularly easy to claim automation accomplished. Therefore, all these people thinking they are going to automate what I do when I test? No. You have no idea what I do. But what you can do it convince ignorant managers to buy fake software testing. That’s the real danger. Imagine if a company came around claiming to have revolutionized blood testing with radical tech, labeling its competitors slow and obsolete. The sober and responsible players in that industry may experience real damage before people figure out that Theranos is a fraud.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Someone could’ve made the same arguments about automating horse-drawn carriages. Even the safety arguments would fit: going faster would be much more dangerous. I think it’s a good idea to keep an open mind and see what happens. You might be right, but if you’re wrong, you’d be better served to be ready for it. Which seems more likely: that it’s impossible to automate testing with AI, or that it might be possible?
  - 99_00 3y ago
    >Someone could’ve made the same arguments about automating horse-drawn carriages. They can't make the same argument because the experience is first hand and can't be faked.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  What's the gap between a Co-pilot written test and a human-written test? Are tests written by co-pilot better than no tests? Developers generally hate writing tests, so I suspect more and more unit tests will be generated. I've worked with someone who does this and it seems insane to me, although I never got to see the generated tests they were referring to, so I can't give specifics.
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calderwoodra 3y ago
> But if it becomes cheaper to use a machine to make, say, a pair of shoes, then the shoes are cheaper, more people can buy shoes and they have more money to spend on other things besides, and we discover new things we need or want, and new jobs. This sounds really similar to trickle down economics.
- msla 3y ago
  No, because what he described actually works. Clothing used to be hugely expensive: https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt-really-cost-in-the-middle-ages/ https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt... > So the shirts of humble servants at Henry VIII’s court cost between 3 and 10 days’ income. That would be similar to someone who earns 10 dollars or Euros an hour spending 240 to 800 dollars or Euros on an item today. (Of course, in the 15th and 16th century, people spent much more of their incomes on food, fuel, and clothing than they do in Europe or European settler societies today, and much less on rent, transportation, and medical care … but it seems that most people could make or obtain one or two new shirts every year or so). https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic-cost-in-the-roman-empire/ https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic... > In the Edict, the simplest linen tunic could be sold for up to 500 denarii, whereas a linen weaver was to be paid 20 or 40 denarii per day plus maintenance. Fine linen tunics could be sold for up to 7,000 denarii. Elsewhere in the Edict, workers without maintenance (food and possibly fuel and shelter) earn about twice as much as those with. So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic. That is not so different from the 3 to 10 days’ income for a worker to buy a shirt at the court of Henry VIII of England, considering that the ancients did not have spinning wheels. The linen tunics in 301 CE were probably woven as one rectangular or cross-shaped piece and sewed up the sides and under the arms, whereas the English shirts were cut and sewed from long pieces of cloth, but that is another story. These days, you can buy a shirt for a much smaller amount of money, so you have more money to spend on other things, and the economy can grow. This isn't a new concept; in fact, it's so old, we tend to forget how things were before it took hold with the birth of industrialization and automation.
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deleted 3y ago
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shepherdjerred 3y ago
I am pretty concerned about AGI. I love computer science and programming. I would love to get into research after I finish my Masters in a couple of years. I think it's fair to say that _some day_ we will achieve AGI. It might not be in 10 years, or 1000, but eventually we'll get there. When we do have AGI, what would that mean for someone like me? Would there be any reason to have programmers (or similar) at all? Would computer science research (or scientific research at all!) exist, or is that something a computer could do? I think humans might start pursuing more creative/leisure activities, but... I like learning and working! --- The anxiety of the above has made me feel like it's not worth being ambitious. What's the point of research if some AI might do it better than me in 10-20 years? What's the point of joining a startup or... doing anything? I realize this sounds a bit absurd, but it is something that I've really feared since ChatGPT came about.
- 99_00 3y ago
  >What's the point of research if some AI might do it better than me in 10-20 years? You said you enjoy learning and working.
  - apsurd 3y ago
    This comment is beautiful in its ring of truth.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    There's research of the lab variety, and research of the library variety. It's valid to feel a sense of loss if all that remains for us is the library kind.
- eslaught 3y ago
  The original article gets into this at the end. It's easy to get into a cyclic argument here, where you posit a tool that can do "anything" and then try to derive consequences from that. What we don't know is what its actual capabilities will be, or how transformative those will be. There's a prayer about knowing the difference between what you can do and what you can't, and setting aside the things you can't do to focus on what you can. To me, this seems like the right way to approach this.
dsign 3y ago
It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO. So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for grabs, but for the sake of the argument, let's restrict it to manual jobs where being human doesn't matter. For example, a kitchen clerk at a burger joint doesn't need to be human, as long as it does all the tasks it needs to do and doesn't put anybody in danger. A security guard at an airport can be a machine gun with wheels, it is more intimidating that way. Picking up coffee cherries from a coffee tree can be done by a machine which is smart enough. But assume that there are jobs "high in the ladder," for amazing engineers and creatives super-charged with AI powers. The problem is that not everybody can climb that ladder. And that's a problem we are already seeing. Right now, if you are highly qualified, you have no trouble getting a decent job. But if you are not, you are fighting for 10 USD/hour shifts somewhere. Imagine if 90% of those shifts are gone. Compound that with our social media (and AIs optimizing for engagement there in) making our kids a little dumber by stealing their attention for long periods of time. It doesn't look good.
- TapWaterBandit 3y ago
  I'd be quite surprised if AI (as we've seen so far) threatens manual jobs as these have already been under quite intense pressures to automate for well over a century. The low-hanging fruit IMO are most likely to be anything that is done entirely via/inside a computer. Because interacting in the digital world is much less of an issue than having to deal with digital + physical world like manual jobs do. That's not to say it will take all computer jobs but those intuitively seem like they will be the easiest for computer-based AI to do. Something like working in a kitchen is a long way off (or at least will require a redesign of kitchens from the ground up or humanoid robotics that are effective, reliable, and reasonably cheap). Whereas if your job is already entirely done via computer with little real world engagement, then it will be much easier for AI.
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
abhaynayar 3y ago
I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would. It's certainly a very interesting technology. But in it's current form, I just don't see it replacing most jobs. Will it replace jobs if we scale further? I don't know, but my intuition says no. I feel that we will need some other major breakthroughs in AI to get there.
- shaunkoh 3y ago
  It’s been incredibly helpful to me. It helped me figure out how to get docker containers setup. It’s even helped me figure out how to run data analysis on graph data. It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible.
  - horeszko 3y ago
    >"It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible" Nice slogan... is this an ad?
    - shaunkoh 3y ago
      Lol just an attempt at being pithy. It’s true though. Something about ease of functionality curves making whole classes of new use cases / customers possible.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - throwaway1777 3y ago
      It’s probably better than most tutorials or docs
    - steve_adams_86 3y ago
      They might not need it, but it might reduce the friction dramatically. I use GPT to learn things occasionally, but it’s almost always something where I don’t have the language on hand to navigate the problem space. GPT is great at opening windows and giving you the tools you need to figure something out. In my case, I usually get to a point where I think I get the topic well enough to leave ChatGPT and go out on my own. Something interesting here is that you can ask GPT to tell you where good resources might be found on the internet. Sometimes it’ll actually come through, providing you some decent places to investigate the topic even further. Whether it’s blog posts, long form articles, or research papers. It’s mostly a matter of eliminating friction and connecting dots faster. It’s definitely not making something possible that wasn’t possible before.
keyle 3y ago
Improving some steps in your daily process by using LLM is definitely a worthy investment. However replacing someone or an entire role category is a difficult transition. Humans don't change that fast, including the part of replacing other humans. It's more likely that certain jobs will be in lesser demand when the businesses in question can get by using LLM, for filling a new position, rather than firing someone and replacing them with LLMs.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
The main fallacy with this article is assuming that generative AI is just another tool that we use. But what happens when the tool becomes far more capable intellectually than the person wielding the tool? Why have that person around? What would they do that the AI can't do? We're not there yet of course and short term this dynamic plays out of tools enhancing productivity and lowering cost. But at some point it flips around to the point where an AI can now do anything that we do faster, better, and cheaper. Of course that kind of thinking is also a bit of a fallacy because there is a third way of some people enhancing themselves with AI to level up their own capabilities. These hybrid/enhanced individuals would be able to complement each other and be able to interface with both the real world and the digital world far more efficiently. We'll be competing with our enhanced future selves. Maybe they'll ditch the wetware at some point but the near future is a hybrid of hardware and wetware.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  The article already mentions this objection: The really fundamental objection to everything I’ve just said is to ask what would happen if we had a system that didn’t have an error rate, didn’t hallucinate, and really could do anything that people can do. If we had that, then you might not have one accountant using Excel to get the output of ten accountants: you might just have the machine. This time, it really would be be different. Where previous waves of automation meant one person could do more, now you don’t need the person.
- goatlover 3y ago
  The question we should be asking is why do we want AI that can do anything faster, better, cheaper than us? Corporations would like to not have to pay labor costs, and some would argue a society where nobody has to work is utopian. But do you trust governments like the US to figure out UBI? Do we really have any sort of sociological understanding of what such a society would be like? Do we have an understanding of what war will look like? One could argue that AI should only ever be tool to enhance human capabilities, not something to replace humans. Why do we want to do that? For whose benefit?
  - 3y ago
edandersen 3y ago
How did Evernote rise to become the number one "Shadow IT" app in 2022 and 2023? Has it had a renaissance?
llogiq 3y ago
Having seen state of the art neural networks in the 70s and 80s, I am both in awe at the progress that has been made since and deeply unconcerned about AGI. Yes, storage capacity and compute have made major leaps, but it's still only lossily compressing a semantic space. It won't generate things from thin air, and it's certainly not sentient, no matter how far you scale it up. That said, it may be a useful tool in some cases, and we've also seen its numerous limitations, only some of which may be alleviated in the future. As always, the problem is not artificial intelligence, but natural stupidity.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  the problem is there are those that are naturally stupid, often elected to positions of unimagined amounts of power
mercurialsolo 3y ago
Maybe at the end of this cycle what we really invest in is on humanization of work. New work maybe all about having a human interface with the ability to connect to the person on the other side. And the entire decisioning and thinking is done by the algorithms. We do not want to read tweets or content created by AI's or machines, we want to connect with humans who can inform or teach us better. Maybe this would mean the liberation of humans from physical fields to digital fields where we keep plowing. We were meant to connect, discover, roam, invent and innovate and instead ended up somehow sitting in front of a monitor and calling it work!
inciampati 3y ago
> This is one reason I think the future of LLMs is to move from prompt boxes to GUIs and buttons - I think ‘prompt engineering’ and natural language’ are mutually contradictory. Yes. Just like search. But that didn't mean that search was replaced by a bunch of radio buttons and click boxes. On the contrary, we learned how to use freeform search. And we will do the same for LLMs. What I'm seeing is that the systems are most powerful when driven through and conversational interface. They are strong translation systems. They can ask questions and incorporate the answers into their outputs. The way to use them is only clear to a few people who are deep in the experimentation process now, but it will become common knowledge and their outputs will improve to the point that what we are doing with them now will seem primitive.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I'm excited to "why not both?" this. I'm excited for "UIs with buttons and boxes" enhanced by a conversational interface. Just to illustrate by way of one example I've had bouncing around in my head: imagine a zotero-like interface for accumulating tagged information, where it's both built from pulling out information from conversations and can be explored conversationally. I want to click a button that says "show me all the information I've accumulated about LLMs (or whatever)", which includes both links and conversations I've had about it, and I also want to be able to say that same thing to the conversational interface. In truth, I think we already have examples of this paradigm, in the various "copilot" interfaces, where you can do both things.
kranke155 3y ago
As any now typical text of this nature, it cites very little real data. Here is an article on how recent historians believe that English male height during the Industrial Revolution went down due to malnutrition: https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-living-standards-improve-during-the-industrial-revolution https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin... Historians now think the Industrial Revolution was a giant economic boom where the majority of individuals actually became poorer. Here is an Indiana University paper, consistent with the findings of others, that automation did reduce manufacturing jobs > The basic takeaway from the Ball State work is that both forces—offshoring and automation—are in play in the massive occupational realignment due to hit the U.S. economy, but automation is dominant (Wells, 2017). This assessment, that automation is the greater threat, is consistent with their earlier work placing the loss of manufacturing employment on increases in productivity https://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2018/fall/article2.html https://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2018/fall/article2.html This was all around the Trump years when the media and academia were happy to say “China didn’t do it”. Even the NYtimes said it at the time. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs-killer-is-not-china-its-automation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs... Yes we can find jobs for people if we keep trying. But the jobs that we find in a post-scarcity services society are often precarious and meaningless - and people know it. Agriculture and manufacturing, which are the two job categories that really matter, do lose jobs to automation because we are squeezing them for profits all the time through all available methods. To say that everything will be hunky dory with AI is just the same as saying the steam engine won’t take your job. That was BS in the 1800s and it’s BS now. And yes people did lose their way of life and they did become poorer, as demonstrated by the current studies on the matter.
- benedictevans 3y ago
  As I said, sometimes the job goes different people in different places, and there’s always frictional pain in the adjustment On the other hand, you are correct that I didn’t post data saying that unemployment hasn’t fallen, but then that is self-evident. We do not have 50% unemployment now because machines took half the jobs, and we are all of us vastly more prosperous than we were in 1800 or 1900 - again, I don’t think I need to post a chart to the obvious.
ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
"We don’t have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don’t seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painful than all the others." We don't need AGI to eliminate 200+ million jobs. The output of a network driving a car can be literally two signed floating points, left-right/accelerate-brake; in hindsight we will understand there is little intelligence in going from A to B without crashing, a bee does it, in 3D even. To eliminate 1+ billion jobs you take the driving network and give it hands: flipping burgers, feeding a CNC machine, handling packages, all these jobs will be gone forever, as they should. The only question is what will politicians do when their solutions so far have been to raise the retirement age.
- benedictevans 3y ago
  The entire point of the essay is to debate this assertion, and it provides a great many very basic reasons to think is wrong.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    The article speaks more about the "knowledge workers", the CC Baxters of the world performing more or less bullshit jobs [1]. The 2-3 billion unemployables of the next 10-20 years are not knowledge workers and will all be replaced forever by embedded robotics with good enough networks and statistical learning for following given goals while generating sub-goals. Boston Dynamics' Spot costs $75K today and Atlas is around $150K, once the price gets closer to $10K there is very little reason to ever employ persons as assembly line workers, construction workers, warehouse workers, machine operators, truck drivers, janitors and cleaners, agricultural workers, security guards, food service workers, garbage collectors, and so on. And even if 3 billion people could be forced to do spreadsheets to "earn" a living, "by the sweat of [their] brow", that would be an even sadder world than our currently sad world. My argument is that we need a new metaphysics for what work and life means, one where the right of a person to have food and shelter is not tied to the economic value they produce. But I have no hope for this world: the trillionaires of tomorrow will share even less than the billionaires of today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
blenboy 3y ago
[flagged]
didibus 3y ago
We did automate for the last 200 years, and it created more creative jobs as a return, less manual labor and more mental/creative labor. Now we're about to automate that as well. I am not sure there is anything else to take it's place this time though.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I'm finding a lot of the comments here very odd. This exact thing was covered in the article, indeed, was the core thing covered in the article. This is just a restatement of something the article spends significant time debating. You need to say what you found lacking in that counterargument, not just restate the position.
dahwolf 3y ago
We lack a socio-economic system where common people truly benefit from automation. We fear automation because it may replace our jobs. No worries, we'll make up some new bullshit jobs. Or maybe you can keep your job, and we raise the expectation of your output. It's all "running to stand still", not to mention sustaining yourself becoming ever more complicated and stressful. I wish we could escape this "job for job's sake" and to always output more in perpetuity. At what point do we have enough stuff and can start utilizing automation to improve people's lives, for example with less work hours, more economic security? This is an area in which zero progress is made in decades, if not negative progress.
shgidigo 3y ago
Well, this is all nice and true as long you consider that current AI tech is not a "Black Swan" and future of employment can be predicted from the past
illiac786 3y ago
„more technologies usually would not mean less work, but a higher expectation on the laborer.“ This is a S.E. Eisterer (assistant professor at Princeton) talking about the earth shattering innovation that was…. the Frankfurt kitchen. [0] [0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-frankfurt-kitchen/transcript https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-frankfurt-kitchen... Seems fitting. I truly believe demand will simply increase to match what can be achieved with AI.

214 points by CharlesW 3y ago

> As an analyst, though, I tend to prefer Hume’s empiricism over Decartes - I can only analyse what we can know. We don’t have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don’t seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painful than all the others.

blueblimp 3y ago
This is a good way to look at it. The deployment of the LLM technology we currently have is one thing. The impact of AGI, when it's created in the future, is a different thing. And people are often not clear on which of the two they're discussing.

chologrande 3y ago

What exactly is a "shadow IT app" ? How in the heck is _Evernote_ the top shadow IT app or related to automation and aI?

benedictevans 3y ago
Yes, Evernote surprised me too.
Jtsummers 3y ago
Shadow IT is an unsupported, unendorsed IT process. Like when an office (without official support, and possibly against official rules) uses MS Access + VBA + whatever to automate a business process. ChatGPT is not endorsed by a lot of offices (in fact it's discouraged by many because it's an easy way to exfiltrate proprietary or otherwise confidential information since OpenAI retains those inputs), but it's become a part of a lot of people's workflows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_IT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_IT
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Salesforce is oddly popular as a Shadow IT platform for web applications because it has a database and a programming language, but is often controlled by "non-IT" teams such as finance or whatever. I'm seeing people migrate perfectly fine ASP.NET or JSP applications to Salesforce just to get away from their internal IT teams, which can stretch out the paperwork to 2-3 years just to spin up a VM for a legitimate purpose.
  - code_biologist 3y ago
    God. Migrate to Salesforce was exactly the idea brought up by the sales side at a job of mine. I was on the IT side. Thank god we talked them down (plus they got sticker shock). Some sales asks were legit and we got 'em done. Some were legit but low ROI and never done/priority even as sales had majority say in those priorities. Some were "please take this customer-hostile, flaky, human-explicitly-in-the-loop CRM workflow that has the thinnest veneer of plausibility above pure gaming of KPIs and insert it into a core product flow that's working well". I think low code tools will continue to proliferate and I'm not against it. I do think they will be an interesting test of how much and in what contexts consumers are willing to accept half baked solutions. The capital environment this past decade has meant corporate leadership has been able to touch hot stoves without getting burned. Often they've been rewarded for it.
fbdab103 3y ago
That entire list is bananas. Not one mention of PowerAutomate or BI? Sticking within the typical Microsoft stranglehold offers a fair amount of tooling with multiple integration points. They come bundled with everything else in a corporate environment, so they are "free" and less intimidating for a non-technical person to dip their toe into than any other low-code tool.
- benedictevans 3y ago
  This list is shadow IT, which means the things that the corporate IT department isn't paying for and often doesn't even know about. The tools you mention are in the Productiv (and Okta) data in a different category.

kelvinjps 3y ago

I wonder if a unix like worlflow will be popular again, in general, I mean is easier to automate, ask it to make scripts etc

Aperocky 3y ago
Probably won't, people don't ask for what they don't know, and you'd be surprised at how even in the field of software engineering people don't actively looks for ways to automate stuff.
- Given_47 3y ago
  Then what use cases are the general public using LLMs for other than automation for it to have exploded in popularity? Tho anecdotally it seems to be used for “wisdom” of the crowds coupled with blind trust in the objectivity of a language model
kuchenbecker 3y ago
I feel like an alien in 2023 only wanting a terminal for most tasks, for the ease of automation in case I end up doing it twice.

mdale 3y ago

I think the "sparks of AIG" presentations are compelling. It does feel like there are a just a few remaining big problems away from AGI level capabilities where it was more futuristic unclear projections in the past. If the issues as synthetic data conversations like alpha go but for LLMs; setting much longer token contexts (or dramatically cheaper training on custom data sets) And scaling via software and hardware a few more orders of magnitude. I think then we have some big waves that will wash over any observations we could make at this point in time.

cmdli 3y ago
Honest question, not meaning to disagree with you: how do you view previous predictions of the success of AI, such as Marvin Minsky predicting in the 60s that AI “would substantially be solved in a generation”? What reasons would there be that the experts are correct this time?
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  Current Capability would be the biggest one. We're at the point where any testable definitions of GI that the sota LLM fails (GPT-4) is also failed by a good chunk of humans. You couldn't say that a few years ago nevermind 60. What we have now (so no hypotheticals) coupled with the fact that scaling hasn't yet shown any performance walls makes a pretty good shout that things will probably be different this time.
  - skepticATX 3y ago
    That's not really true though. LLMs are abysmal at planning, for example. Something that comes quite naturally to humans.
    - runsWphotons 3y ago
      They are probably better than 10% of people

kreelman 3y ago

I really like that the article does its best to provide evidence with data and graphs. It's well written too. These things will be gradual, but the interest in the area is breath-taking.

somewhereoutth 3y ago

Or it could be that the time/effort required to craft a prompt and check the output is not worth it for most/all use cases, and thus after the initial excitement ChatGPT and friends gather dust much like blockchain and Apple Vision.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
Yeah this hype has opened my eyes to the fact that there are so many people who haven't already found a flow for internet searches that's more streamlined than this AI stuff. Don't we all do this every day?
- DougEiffel 3y ago
  I'll be the odd man out here - I teach special education and GPT has been a lifesaver. I feed it a complex task or text, ask it to simplify it down to my students' reading levels, and then just do a super quick read/edit. Similarly, I've been using Dall-E to add pictures to the books we read in class. Compare this to retyping everything at a 4th grade reading level and then painstakingly searching Google for pictures (and usually ending up with mismatched pictures with varying artistic styles or watermarks). I don't know that we will have true artificial intelligence soon a lá I Robot, but I feel nervous and optimistic about what's to come either way. By the way, call me crazy but I think the Apple Vision thing is going to be a game changer for business and consumers.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  This works way better for me for many kinds of things I previously did with search, and also does not at all replace other kinds of things I did (and still do) with search. To a large extent, it has demonstrated to me that wading through stack overflow or blog posts or canonical documentation to figure out how to do some technical thing was actually a way worse workflow than I thought it was. But searching "what to do in my town this weekend" or "what are the best books about xyz" remains the best workflow.
loveparade 3y ago
I don't think this is a good analogy. A better analogy is the multiple previous AI hype cycles. They played out similarly. They brought some truly new capabilities that are used in production, just like LLMs will become a widely used tool, but failed to live up to the AGI hype even though everyone was convinced we're just a step away back in the 80s already and in a few years machine will do all our work. The only reason people don't see this is because they weren't around back then. It's not going to be different this time.

satisfice 3y ago

No one who claims to automate testing ever seems to have a sophisticated understanding of testing. I suspect the urge people have for automating anything comes not from the love and skill they possess for that activity, but rather for the imagined fruits of it. Software testing is easy to fake, which means it’s particularly easy to claim automation accomplished. Therefore, all these people thinking they are going to automate what I do when I test? No. You have no idea what I do. But what you can do it convince ignorant managers to buy fake software testing. That’s the real danger. Imagine if a company came around claiming to have revolutionized blood testing with radical tech, labeling its competitors slow and obsolete. The sober and responsible players in that industry may experience real damage before people figure out that Theranos is a fraud.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
Someone could’ve made the same arguments about automating horse-drawn carriages. Even the safety arguments would fit: going faster would be much more dangerous. I think it’s a good idea to keep an open mind and see what happens. You might be right, but if you’re wrong, you’d be better served to be ready for it. Which seems more likely: that it’s impossible to automate testing with AI, or that it might be possible?
- 99_00 3y ago
  >Someone could’ve made the same arguments about automating horse-drawn carriages. They can't make the same argument because the experience is first hand and can't be faked.
shepherdjerred 3y ago
What's the gap between a Co-pilot written test and a human-written test? Are tests written by co-pilot better than no tests? Developers generally hate writing tests, so I suspect more and more unit tests will be generated. I've worked with someone who does this and it seems insane to me, although I never got to see the generated tests they were referring to, so I can't give specifics.
- 3y ago

calderwoodra 3y ago

> But if it becomes cheaper to use a machine to make, say, a pair of shoes, then the shoes are cheaper, more people can buy shoes and they have more money to spend on other things besides, and we discover new things we need or want, and new jobs. This sounds really similar to trickle down economics.

msla 3y ago
No, because what he described actually works. Clothing used to be hugely expensive: https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt-really-cost-in-the-middle-ages/ https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt... > So the shirts of humble servants at Henry VIII’s court cost between 3 and 10 days’ income. That would be similar to someone who earns 10 dollars or Euros an hour spending 240 to 800 dollars or Euros on an item today. (Of course, in the 15th and 16th century, people spent much more of their incomes on food, fuel, and clothing than they do in Europe or European settler societies today, and much less on rent, transportation, and medical care … but it seems that most people could make or obtain one or two new shirts every year or so). https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic-cost-in-the-roman-empire/ https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic... > In the Edict, the simplest linen tunic could be sold for up to 500 denarii, whereas a linen weaver was to be paid 20 or 40 denarii per day plus maintenance. Fine linen tunics could be sold for up to 7,000 denarii. Elsewhere in the Edict, workers without maintenance (food and possibly fuel and shelter) earn about twice as much as those with. So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic. That is not so different from the 3 to 10 days’ income for a worker to buy a shirt at the court of Henry VIII of England, considering that the ancients did not have spinning wheels. The linen tunics in 301 CE were probably woven as one rectangular or cross-shaped piece and sewed up the sides and under the arms, whereas the English shirts were cut and sewed from long pieces of cloth, but that is another story. These days, you can buy a shirt for a much smaller amount of money, so you have more money to spend on other things, and the economy can grow. This isn't a new concept; in fact, it's so old, we tend to forget how things were before it took hold with the birth of industrialization and automation.
- 3y ago

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shepherdjerred 3y ago

I am pretty concerned about AGI. I love computer science and programming. I would love to get into research after I finish my Masters in a couple of years. I think it's fair to say that _some day_ we will achieve AGI. It might not be in 10 years, or 1000, but eventually we'll get there. When we do have AGI, what would that mean for someone like me? Would there be any reason to have programmers (or similar) at all? Would computer science research (or scientific research at all!) exist, or is that something a computer could do? I think humans might start pursuing more creative/leisure activities, but... I like learning and working! --- The anxiety of the above has made me feel like it's not worth being ambitious. What's the point of research if some AI might do it better than me in 10-20 years? What's the point of joining a startup or... doing anything? I realize this sounds a bit absurd, but it is something that I've really feared since ChatGPT came about.

99_00 3y ago
>What's the point of research if some AI might do it better than me in 10-20 years? You said you enjoy learning and working.
- apsurd 3y ago
  This comment is beautiful in its ring of truth.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  There's research of the lab variety, and research of the library variety. It's valid to feel a sense of loss if all that remains for us is the library kind.
eslaught 3y ago
The original article gets into this at the end. It's easy to get into a cyclic argument here, where you posit a tool that can do "anything" and then try to derive consequences from that. What we don't know is what its actual capabilities will be, or how transformative those will be. There's a prayer about knowing the difference between what you can do and what you can't, and setting aside the things you can't do to focus on what you can. To me, this seems like the right way to approach this.

dsign 3y ago

It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO. So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for grabs, but for the sake of the argument, let's restrict it to manual jobs where being human doesn't matter. For example, a kitchen clerk at a burger joint doesn't need to be human, as long as it does all the tasks it needs to do and doesn't put anybody in danger. A security guard at an airport can be a machine gun with wheels, it is more intimidating that way. Picking up coffee cherries from a coffee tree can be done by a machine which is smart enough. But assume that there are jobs "high in the ladder," for amazing engineers and creatives super-charged with AI powers. The problem is that not everybody can climb that ladder. And that's a problem we are already seeing. Right now, if you are highly qualified, you have no trouble getting a decent job. But if you are not, you are fighting for 10 USD/hour shifts somewhere. Imagine if 90% of those shifts are gone. Compound that with our social media (and AIs optimizing for engagement there in) making our kids a little dumber by stealing their attention for long periods of time. It doesn't look good.

TapWaterBandit 3y ago
I'd be quite surprised if AI (as we've seen so far) threatens manual jobs as these have already been under quite intense pressures to automate for well over a century. The low-hanging fruit IMO are most likely to be anything that is done entirely via/inside a computer. Because interacting in the digital world is much less of an issue than having to deal with digital + physical world like manual jobs do. That's not to say it will take all computer jobs but those intuitively seem like they will be the easiest for computer-based AI to do. Something like working in a kitchen is a long way off (or at least will require a redesign of kitchens from the ground up or humanoid robotics that are effective, reliable, and reasonably cheap). Whereas if your job is already entirely done via computer with little real world engagement, then it will be much easier for AI.
- FeepingCreature 3y ago

abhaynayar 3y ago

I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would. It's certainly a very interesting technology. But in it's current form, I just don't see it replacing most jobs. Will it replace jobs if we scale further? I don't know, but my intuition says no. I feel that we will need some other major breakthroughs in AI to get there.

shaunkoh 3y ago
It’s been incredibly helpful to me. It helped me figure out how to get docker containers setup. It’s even helped me figure out how to run data analysis on graph data. It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible.
- horeszko 3y ago
  >"It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible" Nice slogan... is this an ad?
  - shaunkoh 3y ago
    Lol just an attempt at being pithy. It’s true though. Something about ease of functionality curves making whole classes of new use cases / customers possible.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - throwaway1777 3y ago
    It’s probably better than most tutorials or docs
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    They might not need it, but it might reduce the friction dramatically. I use GPT to learn things occasionally, but it’s almost always something where I don’t have the language on hand to navigate the problem space. GPT is great at opening windows and giving you the tools you need to figure something out. In my case, I usually get to a point where I think I get the topic well enough to leave ChatGPT and go out on my own. Something interesting here is that you can ask GPT to tell you where good resources might be found on the internet. Sometimes it’ll actually come through, providing you some decent places to investigate the topic even further. Whether it’s blog posts, long form articles, or research papers. It’s mostly a matter of eliminating friction and connecting dots faster. It’s definitely not making something possible that wasn’t possible before.

keyle 3y ago

Improving some steps in your daily process by using LLM is definitely a worthy investment. However replacing someone or an entire role category is a difficult transition. Humans don't change that fast, including the part of replacing other humans. It's more likely that certain jobs will be in lesser demand when the businesses in question can get by using LLM, for filling a new position, rather than firing someone and replacing them with LLMs.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

The main fallacy with this article is assuming that generative AI is just another tool that we use. But what happens when the tool becomes far more capable intellectually than the person wielding the tool? Why have that person around? What would they do that the AI can't do? We're not there yet of course and short term this dynamic plays out of tools enhancing productivity and lowering cost. But at some point it flips around to the point where an AI can now do anything that we do faster, better, and cheaper. Of course that kind of thinking is also a bit of a fallacy because there is a third way of some people enhancing themselves with AI to level up their own capabilities. These hybrid/enhanced individuals would be able to complement each other and be able to interface with both the real world and the digital world far more efficiently. We'll be competing with our enhanced future selves. Maybe they'll ditch the wetware at some point but the near future is a hybrid of hardware and wetware.

rahimnathwani 3y ago
The article already mentions this objection: The really fundamental objection to everything I’ve just said is to ask what would happen if we had a system that didn’t have an error rate, didn’t hallucinate, and really could do anything that people can do. If we had that, then you might not have one accountant using Excel to get the output of ten accountants: you might just have the machine. This time, it really would be be different. Where previous waves of automation meant one person could do more, now you don’t need the person.
goatlover 3y ago
The question we should be asking is why do we want AI that can do anything faster, better, cheaper than us? Corporations would like to not have to pay labor costs, and some would argue a society where nobody has to work is utopian. But do you trust governments like the US to figure out UBI? Do we really have any sort of sociological understanding of what such a society would be like? Do we have an understanding of what war will look like? One could argue that AI should only ever be tool to enhance human capabilities, not something to replace humans. Why do we want to do that? For whose benefit?
- 3y ago

edandersen 3y ago

How did Evernote rise to become the number one "Shadow IT" app in 2022 and 2023? Has it had a renaissance?

llogiq 3y ago

Having seen state of the art neural networks in the 70s and 80s, I am both in awe at the progress that has been made since and deeply unconcerned about AGI. Yes, storage capacity and compute have made major leaps, but it's still only lossily compressing a semantic space. It won't generate things from thin air, and it's certainly not sentient, no matter how far you scale it up. That said, it may be a useful tool in some cases, and we've also seen its numerous limitations, only some of which may be alleviated in the future. As always, the problem is not artificial intelligence, but natural stupidity.

hackernewds 3y ago
the problem is there are those that are naturally stupid, often elected to positions of unimagined amounts of power

mercurialsolo 3y ago

Maybe at the end of this cycle what we really invest in is on humanization of work. New work maybe all about having a human interface with the ability to connect to the person on the other side. And the entire decisioning and thinking is done by the algorithms. We do not want to read tweets or content created by AI's or machines, we want to connect with humans who can inform or teach us better. Maybe this would mean the liberation of humans from physical fields to digital fields where we keep plowing. We were meant to connect, discover, roam, invent and innovate and instead ended up somehow sitting in front of a monitor and calling it work!

inciampati 3y ago

> This is one reason I think the future of LLMs is to move from prompt boxes to GUIs and buttons - I think ‘prompt engineering’ and natural language’ are mutually contradictory. Yes. Just like search. But that didn't mean that search was replaced by a bunch of radio buttons and click boxes. On the contrary, we learned how to use freeform search. And we will do the same for LLMs. What I'm seeing is that the systems are most powerful when driven through and conversational interface. They are strong translation systems. They can ask questions and incorporate the answers into their outputs. The way to use them is only clear to a few people who are deep in the experimentation process now, but it will become common knowledge and their outputs will improve to the point that what we are doing with them now will seem primitive.

sanderjd 3y ago
I'm excited to "why not both?" this. I'm excited for "UIs with buttons and boxes" enhanced by a conversational interface. Just to illustrate by way of one example I've had bouncing around in my head: imagine a zotero-like interface for accumulating tagged information, where it's both built from pulling out information from conversations and can be explored conversationally. I want to click a button that says "show me all the information I've accumulated about LLMs (or whatever)", which includes both links and conversations I've had about it, and I also want to be able to say that same thing to the conversational interface. In truth, I think we already have examples of this paradigm, in the various "copilot" interfaces, where you can do both things.

kranke155 3y ago

As any now typical text of this nature, it cites very little real data. Here is an article on how recent historians believe that English male height during the Industrial Revolution went down due to malnutrition: https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-living-standards-improve-during-the-industrial-revolution https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin... Historians now think the Industrial Revolution was a giant economic boom where the majority of individuals actually became poorer. Here is an Indiana University paper, consistent with the findings of others, that automation did reduce manufacturing jobs > The basic takeaway from the Ball State work is that both forces—offshoring and automation—are in play in the massive occupational realignment due to hit the U.S. economy, but automation is dominant (Wells, 2017). This assessment, that automation is the greater threat, is consistent with their earlier work placing the loss of manufacturing employment on increases in productivity https://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2018/fall/article2.html https://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2018/fall/article2.html This was all around the Trump years when the media and academia were happy to say “China didn’t do it”. Even the NYtimes said it at the time. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs-killer-is-not-china-its-automation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs... Yes we can find jobs for people if we keep trying. But the jobs that we find in a post-scarcity services society are often precarious and meaningless - and people know it. Agriculture and manufacturing, which are the two job categories that really matter, do lose jobs to automation because we are squeezing them for profits all the time through all available methods. To say that everything will be hunky dory with AI is just the same as saying the steam engine won’t take your job. That was BS in the 1800s and it’s BS now. And yes people did lose their way of life and they did become poorer, as demonstrated by the current studies on the matter.

benedictevans 3y ago
As I said, sometimes the job goes different people in different places, and there’s always frictional pain in the adjustment On the other hand, you are correct that I didn’t post data saying that unemployment hasn’t fallen, but then that is self-evident. We do not have 50% unemployment now because machines took half the jobs, and we are all of us vastly more prosperous than we were in 1800 or 1900 - again, I don’t think I need to post a chart to the obvious.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago

"We don’t have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don’t seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painful than all the others." We don't need AGI to eliminate 200+ million jobs. The output of a network driving a car can be literally two signed floating points, left-right/accelerate-brake; in hindsight we will understand there is little intelligence in going from A to B without crashing, a bee does it, in 3D even. To eliminate 1+ billion jobs you take the driving network and give it hands: flipping burgers, feeding a CNC machine, handling packages, all these jobs will be gone forever, as they should. The only question is what will politicians do when their solutions so far have been to raise the retirement age.

benedictevans 3y ago
The entire point of the essay is to debate this assertion, and it provides a great many very basic reasons to think is wrong.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  The article speaks more about the "knowledge workers", the CC Baxters of the world performing more or less bullshit jobs [1]. The 2-3 billion unemployables of the next 10-20 years are not knowledge workers and will all be replaced forever by embedded robotics with good enough networks and statistical learning for following given goals while generating sub-goals. Boston Dynamics' Spot costs $75K today and Atlas is around $150K, once the price gets closer to $10K there is very little reason to ever employ persons as assembly line workers, construction workers, warehouse workers, machine operators, truck drivers, janitors and cleaners, agricultural workers, security guards, food service workers, garbage collectors, and so on. And even if 3 billion people could be forced to do spreadsheets to "earn" a living, "by the sweat of [their] brow", that would be an even sadder world than our currently sad world. My argument is that we need a new metaphysics for what work and life means, one where the right of a person to have food and shelter is not tied to the economic value they produce. But I have no hope for this world: the trillionaires of tomorrow will share even less than the billionaires of today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

blenboy 3y ago

[flagged]

didibus 3y ago

We did automate for the last 200 years, and it created more creative jobs as a return, less manual labor and more mental/creative labor. Now we're about to automate that as well. I am not sure there is anything else to take it's place this time though.

sanderjd 3y ago
I'm finding a lot of the comments here very odd. This exact thing was covered in the article, indeed, was the core thing covered in the article. This is just a restatement of something the article spends significant time debating. You need to say what you found lacking in that counterargument, not just restate the position.

dahwolf 3y ago

We lack a socio-economic system where common people truly benefit from automation. We fear automation because it may replace our jobs. No worries, we'll make up some new bullshit jobs. Or maybe you can keep your job, and we raise the expectation of your output. It's all "running to stand still", not to mention sustaining yourself becoming ever more complicated and stressful. I wish we could escape this "job for job's sake" and to always output more in perpetuity. At what point do we have enough stuff and can start utilizing automation to improve people's lives, for example with less work hours, more economic security? This is an area in which zero progress is made in decades, if not negative progress.

shgidigo 3y ago

Well, this is all nice and true as long you consider that current AI tech is not a "Black Swan" and future of employment can be predicted from the past

illiac786 3y ago

„more technologies usually would not mean less work, but a higher expectation on the laborer.“ This is a S.E. Eisterer (assistant professor at Princeton) talking about the earth shattering innovation that was…. the Frankfurt kitchen. [0] [0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-frankfurt-kitchen/transcript https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-frankfurt-kitchen... Seems fitting. I truly believe demand will simply increase to match what can be achieved with AI.