4 ms·

The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment, so I have no doubt that those "lost" jobs will be immediately replaced by newly invented jobs, j

by p-e-w 3y ago

The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment, so I have no doubt that those "lost" jobs will be immediately replaced by newly invented jobs, just to keep the whole thing going just a little longer. I'm quite certain that even the current generation of AI could already make 10-20% of first-world jobs obsolete, but of course those in power don't want that to happen. Not because of the poverty that would create, but because they don't want so many people having so much free time at their hands.

nmz 3y ago
Or they could go to war, to cull unnecessary humans, leaving a higher class with nothing but them and their servants, or I guess in this case, robot slaves.
godelski 3y ago
> I'm quite certain that even the current generation of AI could already make 10-20% of first-world jobs obsolete I often ask people how we could modify a economy to support 10% automation of the workforce. Where 10% of people are not only displaced, but that we do not gain an additional 10% of new jobs which could be filled by humans. The most reasonable answer I've ever gotten was jobs programs. But I don't think this actually solves things, and neither did that person. It's just a tax and prevents people from... being the most human they can be. It also prevents us from reaching post scarcity. Now I don't actually believe that 10% of jobs in Western countries could be replaced. There's 135m people employed in America and AI can't even replace the 2.4m janitorial staff that we have. AI isn't needed to replace the 3.8m retail staff (#1), 3.4m cashiers (#3), or 3.2m fastfood workers (#4), where the first two have already seen significant disruption and the latter is still unsolved since AI can't "flip burgers" good enough yet (yes, I know there are burger flipping robots, you're missing the point). But they still can't replace health care aids (#2), nurses (#5), or even movers (#8). I'd really encourage you to check out the most popular jobs[0] and ask yourself if you truly can disrupt them. Because if so, you should probably apply for a y-combinator seed round. Or AI just isn't as far as many people think it is. Replacing the one cashier and one person working the drive-through (both people multi-task btw) isn't going to significantly reduce the 8 people working during any given shift at a taco bell. [0] https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-largest-employment.aspx https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-larges...
- zarzavat 3y ago
  This is a common fallacy that I see often on HN. People are used to technologies that have a certain set of capabilities, where people find new ways to apply this technology over time. For example smartphones basically do the same kind of things they did 10 years ago, but people have found many more industries to apply them in (by writing apps). AI is fundamentally different because the capabilities of the base technology are growing rapidly, at the same time as people are finding more applications for it. So when you look into the future, you don’t just have to forecast increased applications of AI, you also have to forecast broader capabilities of the base technology. It is no use to take GPT-4’s capabilities and cast those into the future.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    "It is no use to take GPT-4’s capabilities and cast those into the future." This is true, but we cannot say "ChatGPT is huge now, and in 5 years we will have the tech to replace humans" when we have no real evidence that that is the case either...
  - godelski 3y ago
    AI is different because it can act intelligently, getting the nuance that humans are able to. That is, it can do everything a human can do. But we're nowhere near that yet.[0] Past technology didn't directly replace human workers, but rather changed the way things were done. The difference is a self-checkout vs a janitor robot. The former is a paradigm shift, displacing the worker by shifting how the job is done and who is performing the tasks. The latter is a direct replacement of the human worker, drop in. Of course current AI will get better, but this idea has been around for decades, and like François says, people have assumed many of these problems would be solved far sooner than they have been. The thread is worth a read. We are talking about the opinions of a high ranking AI/ML researcher who extensively writes about the nature of intelligence and current limitations. Don't be fooled by fancy demos. [0] https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1683200588782379008 https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1683200588782379008 [1] https://fchollet.com/ https://fchollet.com/
sgath92 3y ago
> The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment It already does if you go by the labor participation rate. The traditional prescription for unemployment caused by technological innovation is to artificially decrease the employee pool by taking away both ends of the workforce (after shorting them by age). The elderly get retirement, and the young go to compulsory school. This was fine for dealing with the introduction of combustion engines, steam engines and early electricity adaptation but eventually even this was insufficient. Which is why so many young adults 18-25 are put into higher education to artificially drag out the time until they enter their chosen careers. They're not necessarily there to obtain a specific set of skills or education, as if that were the case employers would be more willing to hire talented & skilled but diploma or certification lacking applicants (that are automatically tossed out of the running by mostly automated job applicant filters). The problem is that this requires piles of money to sustain, and our leadership is already trying to crawl back retirement by upping the retirement age even as US life expectancy has been trending down for years (incl pre-COVID). Most likely: We'll see people deemed redundant by the marketplace left to "let nature run its course" and die off from poverty (via addiction, avoidable medical problems, malnutrition etc). This has been what was already dragging down life expectancy in the post 2008-crash America.
bugglebeetle 3y ago
> The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment, so I have no doubt that those "lost" jobs will be immediately replaced by newly invented jobs, just to keep the whole thing going just a little longer. In the US, they’ll be left to rot like they were before in the industrial Midwest, post-NAFTA. Or is happening now in most major US cities, where real estate speculation is favored over everything else, resulting in an affordability crisis and widespread homelessness.
ITB 3y ago
It’s not those in power wanting to oppress the masses. Humans with too much free time cause trouble. We don’t want that.
- CTDOCodebases 3y ago
  Don't forget income tax. They have to juice the masses for productivity as well so they can be taxed!
- epolanski 3y ago
  > Humans with too much free time cause trouble Where is this coming from? Got any data?
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
    Riots during the lockdown? Nothing even a fraction as intense would have happened if people weren't stuck at home.
    - godelski 3y ago
      Is the cause of those things too much free time or are they actual social problems? If the latter, was it additional time that enabled them to actually attempt to address these issues or additional stress that resulted in surpassing the requisite threshold. Obviously some combination, but do you really think the dominating __cause__ of riots or do you think "riots are the voice of the unheard" (not advocation, but a warning).
  - godelski 3y ago
    I really don't get why this is such a popular belief. When you ask people what they'd do if they didn't have to work you find that they talk about hobbies, many of which have social value. Art, science, education, whatever. You do of course have to ask what they'd do after the initial relief of this burden, and specify long term rather than short term things like catching up on sleep or going on vacations. In fact, we actually have strong evidence to support this claim that people would do "work." There are plenty of people who have amassed so much wealth that their family would not need work for several generations while maintaining an extravagant lifestyle. There's 182 people with >= $10bn, which I think we can say is a pretty conservative estimate for calculating indefinite luxury (let's again be conservative and say that's $1m/yr spending per person, and a they can gain a 2.5% return per year). I don't know everyone on Forbes list, but I'd be shocked if a quarter of them did not work. Gates and Buffet have both "worked" into their old age. I don't see why an average person wouldn't either. People just get too fucking bored to not "work." Hell, look at how many open source projects there are. I'd only expect those to grow.

by p-e-w 3y ago

nmz 3y ago

Or they could go to war, to cull unnecessary humans, leaving a higher class with nothing but them and their servants, or I guess in this case, robot slaves.

godelski 3y ago

> I'm quite certain that even the current generation of AI could already make 10-20% of first-world jobs obsolete I often ask people how we could modify a economy to support 10% automation of the workforce. Where 10% of people are not only displaced, but that we do not gain an additional 10% of new jobs which could be filled by humans. The most reasonable answer I've ever gotten was jobs programs. But I don't think this actually solves things, and neither did that person. It's just a tax and prevents people from... being the most human they can be. It also prevents us from reaching post scarcity. Now I don't actually believe that 10% of jobs in Western countries could be replaced. There's 135m people employed in America and AI can't even replace the 2.4m janitorial staff that we have. AI isn't needed to replace the 3.8m retail staff (#1), 3.4m cashiers (#3), or 3.2m fastfood workers (#4), where the first two have already seen significant disruption and the latter is still unsolved since AI can't "flip burgers" good enough yet (yes, I know there are burger flipping robots, you're missing the point). But they still can't replace health care aids (#2), nurses (#5), or even movers (#8). I'd really encourage you to check out the most popular jobs[0] and ask yourself if you truly can disrupt them. Because if so, you should probably apply for a y-combinator seed round. Or AI just isn't as far as many people think it is. Replacing the one cashier and one person working the drive-through (both people multi-task btw) isn't going to significantly reduce the 8 people working during any given shift at a taco bell. [0] https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-largest-employment.aspx https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-larges...

zarzavat 3y ago
This is a common fallacy that I see often on HN. People are used to technologies that have a certain set of capabilities, where people find new ways to apply this technology over time. For example smartphones basically do the same kind of things they did 10 years ago, but people have found many more industries to apply them in (by writing apps). AI is fundamentally different because the capabilities of the base technology are growing rapidly, at the same time as people are finding more applications for it. So when you look into the future, you don’t just have to forecast increased applications of AI, you also have to forecast broader capabilities of the base technology. It is no use to take GPT-4’s capabilities and cast those into the future.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "It is no use to take GPT-4’s capabilities and cast those into the future." This is true, but we cannot say "ChatGPT is huge now, and in 5 years we will have the tech to replace humans" when we have no real evidence that that is the case either...
- godelski 3y ago
  AI is different because it can act intelligently, getting the nuance that humans are able to. That is, it can do everything a human can do. But we're nowhere near that yet.[0] Past technology didn't directly replace human workers, but rather changed the way things were done. The difference is a self-checkout vs a janitor robot. The former is a paradigm shift, displacing the worker by shifting how the job is done and who is performing the tasks. The latter is a direct replacement of the human worker, drop in. Of course current AI will get better, but this idea has been around for decades, and like François says, people have assumed many of these problems would be solved far sooner than they have been. The thread is worth a read. We are talking about the opinions of a high ranking AI/ML researcher who extensively writes about the nature of intelligence and current limitations. Don't be fooled by fancy demos. [0] https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1683200588782379008 https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1683200588782379008 [1] https://fchollet.com/ https://fchollet.com/

sgath92 3y ago

> The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment It already does if you go by the labor participation rate. The traditional prescription for unemployment caused by technological innovation is to artificially decrease the employee pool by taking away both ends of the workforce (after shorting them by age). The elderly get retirement, and the young go to compulsory school. This was fine for dealing with the introduction of combustion engines, steam engines and early electricity adaptation but eventually even this was insufficient. Which is why so many young adults 18-25 are put into higher education to artificially drag out the time until they enter their chosen careers. They're not necessarily there to obtain a specific set of skills or education, as if that were the case employers would be more willing to hire talented & skilled but diploma or certification lacking applicants (that are automatically tossed out of the running by mostly automated job applicant filters). The problem is that this requires piles of money to sustain, and our leadership is already trying to crawl back retirement by upping the retirement age even as US life expectancy has been trending down for years (incl pre-COVID). Most likely: We'll see people deemed redundant by the marketplace left to "let nature run its course" and die off from poverty (via addiction, avoidable medical problems, malnutrition etc). This has been what was already dragging down life expectancy in the post 2008-crash America.

bugglebeetle 3y ago

> The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment, so I have no doubt that those "lost" jobs will be immediately replaced by newly invented jobs, just to keep the whole thing going just a little longer. In the US, they’ll be left to rot like they were before in the industrial Midwest, post-NAFTA. Or is happening now in most major US cities, where real estate speculation is favored over everything else, resulting in an affordability crisis and widespread homelessness.

ITB 3y ago

It’s not those in power wanting to oppress the masses. Humans with too much free time cause trouble. We don’t want that.

CTDOCodebases 3y ago
Don't forget income tax. They have to juice the masses for productivity as well so they can be taxed!
epolanski 3y ago
> Humans with too much free time cause trouble Where is this coming from? Got any data?
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  Riots during the lockdown? Nothing even a fraction as intense would have happened if people weren't stuck at home.
  - godelski 3y ago
    Is the cause of those things too much free time or are they actual social problems? If the latter, was it additional time that enabled them to actually attempt to address these issues or additional stress that resulted in surpassing the requisite threshold. Obviously some combination, but do you really think the dominating __cause__ of riots or do you think "riots are the voice of the unheard" (not advocation, but a warning).
- godelski 3y ago
  I really don't get why this is such a popular belief. When you ask people what they'd do if they didn't have to work you find that they talk about hobbies, many of which have social value. Art, science, education, whatever. You do of course have to ask what they'd do after the initial relief of this burden, and specify long term rather than short term things like catching up on sleep or going on vacations. In fact, we actually have strong evidence to support this claim that people would do "work." There are plenty of people who have amassed so much wealth that their family would not need work for several generations while maintaining an extravagant lifestyle. There's 182 people with >= $10bn, which I think we can say is a pretty conservative estimate for calculating indefinite luxury (let's again be conservative and say that's $1m/yr spending per person, and a they can gain a 2.5% return per year). I don't know everyone on Forbes list, but I'd be shocked if a quarter of them did not work. Gates and Buffet have both "worked" into their old age. I don't see why an average person wouldn't either. People just get too fucking bored to not "work." Hell, look at how many open source projects there are. I'd only expect those to grow.