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s/ai/loom/ the sentiment is always the same and it doesn't work that way. Worry about concentration of wealth and power, sure, but automation never net removed

s/ai/loom/ the sentiment is always the same and it doesn't work that way. Worry about concentration of wealth and power, sure, but automation never net removed jobs from the economy it makes more.

stemlord 3y ago
Can we define automation then because my understanding was that it quite literally means sans human labor. Are you saying it's merely a political buzzword?
vouaobrasil 3y ago
Here is the problem with your argument: our planet is finite, and growth will eventually plateau. It cannot go on forever. Automation does remove jobs, but so far it's done so on a small scale compared to what AI will do. On the other hand, AI will remove jobs on a large scale on an order of MAGNITUDE more than other automations. The argument of drawing an analogy with the loom is weak. As technology progresses, the power of it in its scope increases, and computer technology is much more wide-reaching than the loom. Unfortunately, analogy only goes so far. At some point, there may indeed be more jobs. But even then, they will be (to the human mind) quite meaningless, such as the maintenance of AI machines and of such speciality that people will lose all hope in life by doing them.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  We don't know at all what additional jobs will spring up from AI or will be removed - we already see the hype cycle ending on genAI. For example, I expect an explosion in bureaucracy with associated jobs from AI.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Exactly, which is why I recommend caution and ethical investigations, instead of hoping that this new stuff will just be hype and burn itself out. Caution is a lot better a strategy than guess and check.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    Going to be too bad if no new ones pop up?
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      There is already a whole compliance industry springing up around AI use.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    If — and it will remain "if" right up until we have actually made it — if we get an AI which is as general as a human mind, then every job can be automated, including the new ones. What that means depends how much the AI costs to run. Assuming the hardware stays working long enough to amortise to a rounding error, $100,000 per year at $0.05/kWh is 228 kW (and by extension $10k/year is about 23 kW), so a "good enough" AI can "afford" to draw a lot of electricity while still being cheaper than many experts, or to draw more electricity than most households while still being cheaper than per-capita income in 15 of the G20 countries. On the other hand, if the best we can figure out how to do while giving it human-level generality is an IQ of 85, and it's a thing that runs on 1 kW, that makes 16% of humans uncompetitive even at the UN "abject poverty" threshold, while smarter people can still be gainfully employed. Current AI is neither, as it's a combination of absurd training costs, low inference costs, and being very good at specifically and (IMO) exclusivity at the things we use to define "intelligent", but also without the stuff we don't count as "intelligence" because approximately every human has it and it's not a differentiator.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      You'd still need to build the physical stuff for the AI, just intelligence is not enough for every job: the bookshelf cleaning machine needs more than thinking.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        The hard part of robotics isn't the actuators, it's the brains. We had vacuum cleaners (and pre-programmable factory equipment in the form of punch card looms) for a century before the Roomba.
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        That hardware costs money and making complex hardware vs using a human could have a non-trivial cost boundary for a long time. I don't expect a cost efficient bookshelf cleaner robot any time soon (or even a robot vacuum cleaner that works in non-trivial settings).
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  By the time we exhaust Earth, we will be a space faring species.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    That seems highly unlikely, especially because space travel in real life is a lot more difficult than Star Trek makes it appear. But even so, I find the idea of exhausting earth rather morally reprehensible. There are beautiful life forms on earth such as birds, bears, fish, and flowers that don't deserve our carelessness. Should we not treat them with some basic level of kindess and compassion also?
    - trevithick 3y ago
      I agree with your second paragraph but am confident other life forms will ultimately prevail.
      - ChatGTP 3y ago
        What type of life forms do you think will prevail ?
        trevithick 3y ago
        Non-human "life forms on earth" to quote OP. Maybe not birds or bears, could be just a slime mold, but something here will still be going strong after we wipe ourselves out.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "Automation does remove jobs, but so far it's done so on a small scale compared to what AI will do." But, when automation was new, didn't they say it would automate everything? And it turns out that...it didn't? It seems that pattern is somewhat likely to repeat...
  - hatenberg 3y ago
    I think you need to look again. Apart from everything being a fallacy, it’s been pretty much a wipeout. Agriculture: from 70% of people working in agriculture to 25% in the 70s to 2% now. Most other physical work, by volume follows the same trajectory. Everything is meaningless
    - wumpus 3y ago
      Everything is more meaningful, do you mean? In developed countries, agriculture is highly automated, and if you want a hobby garden in your leisure time, you can choose how much automation you want.
- barrysteve 3y ago
  You don't know any of this. It was commonly thought that the planet would run out of food until the Wheatbelt was developed. The fundmental shift is changing the mindset. - Away from deriving economic tasks from logical goals developed over historical time. - Into and towards, Men guesstimating and taking risks in bold new directions for global innovation. The gloomerism is getting kind of boring and unrewarding tbh. We need better criticisms of the future, these "total-meaninglessness" jabs don't hold water.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Are you serious? Of course, when we develop more ways of using resources, we can extend them. But we are already on the brink of climate disaster and we are nowhere near to colonizing other planets. Unless our population radically decreases, we will run out of resources. It's just mathematics: resources are finite. Also, I am not advocating TOTAL meaninglessness. I am advocating a new way of life that does not include AI, that's it. I never said everything is doomed. I think humans have a chance but that we should proceed WITHOUT AI. That's it.
    - gremlinsinc 3y ago
      What if there was UBI, and everyone was guaranteed food, healthcare, education, and a home. Then they were basically encouraged to just follow their passions, whereever that takes them whether it's art, science, music, etc. Imagine that everyone who's in replaceable fields simply grew up to be scientists, and entertainers. Those were basically the only fields left to go into, and scientists are more like project managers directing AI towards finding solutions to specific goals, and making new discoveries, etc... We could fix a shit ton of issues with 70% of the population being scientists or science adjacent in their "careers" which that word is more like "life's work" or a hobby, than what it is today.
    - barrysteve 3y ago
      Resources are finite so long as you stop developing new ones. Resources exist on the planet that are either too expensive in the current market to extract, or do too much damage to the local enviroment to get approvals. They are accessible when times get tougher. The electrification of the planet is massively reducing the costs to support life. We buy and sell flipped bits to each other and renew our car batteries from home solar. You could live like a monk, automated hydroponics, electric everything and probably not notice the majority of service collapsing except sewage and water. Water is a weird one because it's often not 'destroyed', just pumped around the ecosystem by natural forces or power plants and dirtied in the process. Developing cheaper water cycling methods could push costs even lower. The mathematics of finite resources depends heavily on who is doing the mathematics. The pre-wheatbelt guys couldnt guess what was going to happen next. AI is just a better tool. It has changed the relationship to work, like a car means we no longer ride horses. But we still use cars to do the same thing horses did. The categories have not changed as much as everyone is afraid of. Get out of trivial work, aka working in grammar, rhetoric and logic, and you'll probably feel a lot safer.
somesortofthing 3y ago
I think a more appropriate conclusion to draw is that big leaps in automation required huge, costly reorganizations of society to ensure enough people have jobs to avoid civil unrest, increasingly in ways that were dubiously productive compared to, say, directly providing for the people whose labor had suddenly become worthless. Whether the next big leap(or, for that matter, the next two or five big leaps) will finally require a retool whose cost we can't afford is very much an open question.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  That's an interesting viewpoint, and I think it's one way to look at it. But, we have to go back and ask: let's suppose we CAN make sure that enough people get jobs to avoid civil unrest, to use your terminology. What will those jobs be? They will unlikely be creative jobs, since most of those will be taken over by AI. Perhaps there will be a few creative jobs left (I sincerely doubt AI will be able to write the next Dostoyevsky novel in my lifetime, but you never know). But even IF there are a few creative jobs left, they will be rather miniscule. Thus, the only jobs left will be the kind that is already increasing today: some small cog in a massive corporate scheme that somehow has not yet been automated yet. I believe there are at least some alternatives, such as: we could form a new conglomeration (perhaps a union or cartel of sorts) of people who refuse to use AI in their business, and who refuse to do business with anyone using AI. Obviously, it would take some effort, but maybe it's possible. In this union, we would operate society normally, but with a code of ethics that prevents the use of advanced AI and maybe other dangerous technologies, and we would develop a more sustainable way of living that involves sustainable farming and being more reliant on each other instead of letting massive, soulless tech companies control us. I am formulating a more detailed proposal but that's the gist of one of my ideas.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    "They will unlikely be creative jobs, since most of those will be taken over by AI. Perhaps there will be a few creative jobs left (I sincerely doubt AI will be able to write the next Dostoyevsky novel in my lifetime, but you never know). But even IF there are a few creative jobs left, they will be rather miniscule" This doesn't make sense to me. If AI eliminates most creative jobs, yet there are still humans who can do better (modern Dostoyevskys) would it not make sense for businesses to hire creative people to "out creative" their competitors, who just use the AI?
ChatGTP 3y ago
Isn't the absolute entire point of AI to remove jobs, I mean why on earth would we create AI otherwise ? It's the other half of the industrial revolution ?
- version_five 3y ago
  Do you feel the same about any technology that can help someone do their job better? Calculators, typewriters, card catalogs, tool use? What's the minimum level of technological sophistication that's acceptable to you as no being about removing jobs?
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    It's quite different, a calculator isn't supposed to work autonomously.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - BarryMilo 3y ago
      Well, before they were machines, they were jobs. We can no more imagine what AI will bring than people from the 1800s could imagine the changes computers woould bring. That is to say: everything changed.
      - ChatGTP 3y ago
        The only way I can imagine humans stay relevant in the job market, is if we can someone augment our intelligence to the point where we can basically keep up with AIs progress. I don't actually think this is impossible as in some ways, mobile phones and other wearable devices are probably the first steps to get there. Who knows?
booleandilemma 3y ago
This isn't like the loom though. If you have a loom you obsolete all weavers, but only the weavers. This is more like a magical typewriter, and it's coming for all white collar jobs.
worrycue 3y ago
> but automation never net removed jobs from the economy it makes more. That’s true for more limited forms of automation - e.g. the loom, heavy industrial machinery, even computers - as people just move on to other jobs and society gains a net improvement in productivity. AI, specially AGI (which is the endgame for AI), is a different matter. It’s not specialised. “General” is literal in its name. It could do nigh every job. There will be no jobs for everyone being displaced to move on to.
bcrosby95 3y ago
Yes, the nobility always will need their serfs doing something.
taneq 3y ago
Maybe it hasn't yet removed a net number of jobs, but it's definitely removed jobs at the skill level that's being automated. You upgrade your weaving business from manual looms to automatic looms, maybe you create more jobs for automatic loom engineers but you certainly also remove jobs for weavers. Maybe the additional productivity means that society as a whole now has more jobs but ultimately none of those jobs are going to be easier to do than weaving. Also, looms are a deceptive example because weaving is still skilled labour. Chances are if you can learn to weave good quality cloth you'll be capable of retraining into another skilled trade. The same can't be said for "unskilled" labour, your 50-year-old factory line workers displaced by automation aren't going to be re-training as graphic designers and web devs. Now apply that not to a specialized machine that screws lids on water bottles really fast, but to a machine that can do any desk job a moderately competent white collar worker can do, and you'll see we have a problem.

s/ai/loom/ the sentiment is always the same and it doesn't work that way. Worry about concentration of wealth and power, sure, but automation never net removed jobs from the economy it makes more.

stemlord 3y ago

Can we define automation then because my understanding was that it quite literally means sans human labor. Are you saying it's merely a political buzzword?

vouaobrasil 3y ago

Here is the problem with your argument: our planet is finite, and growth will eventually plateau. It cannot go on forever. Automation does remove jobs, but so far it's done so on a small scale compared to what AI will do. On the other hand, AI will remove jobs on a large scale on an order of MAGNITUDE more than other automations. The argument of drawing an analogy with the loom is weak. As technology progresses, the power of it in its scope increases, and computer technology is much more wide-reaching than the loom. Unfortunately, analogy only goes so far. At some point, there may indeed be more jobs. But even then, they will be (to the human mind) quite meaningless, such as the maintenance of AI machines and of such speciality that people will lose all hope in life by doing them.

RandomLensman 3y ago
We don't know at all what additional jobs will spring up from AI or will be removed - we already see the hype cycle ending on genAI. For example, I expect an explosion in bureaucracy with associated jobs from AI.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Exactly, which is why I recommend caution and ethical investigations, instead of hoping that this new stuff will just be hype and burn itself out. Caution is a lot better a strategy than guess and check.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Going to be too bad if no new ones pop up?
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    There is already a whole compliance industry springing up around AI use.
- ben_w 3y ago
  If — and it will remain "if" right up until we have actually made it — if we get an AI which is as general as a human mind, then every job can be automated, including the new ones. What that means depends how much the AI costs to run. Assuming the hardware stays working long enough to amortise to a rounding error, $100,000 per year at $0.05/kWh is 228 kW (and by extension $10k/year is about 23 kW), so a "good enough" AI can "afford" to draw a lot of electricity while still being cheaper than many experts, or to draw more electricity than most households while still being cheaper than per-capita income in 15 of the G20 countries. On the other hand, if the best we can figure out how to do while giving it human-level generality is an IQ of 85, and it's a thing that runs on 1 kW, that makes 16% of humans uncompetitive even at the UN "abject poverty" threshold, while smarter people can still be gainfully employed. Current AI is neither, as it's a combination of absurd training costs, low inference costs, and being very good at specifically and (IMO) exclusivity at the things we use to define "intelligent", but also without the stuff we don't count as "intelligence" because approximately every human has it and it's not a differentiator.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    You'd still need to build the physical stuff for the AI, just intelligence is not enough for every job: the bookshelf cleaning machine needs more than thinking.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      The hard part of robotics isn't the actuators, it's the brains. We had vacuum cleaners (and pre-programmable factory equipment in the form of punch card looms) for a century before the Roomba.
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        That hardware costs money and making complex hardware vs using a human could have a non-trivial cost boundary for a long time. I don't expect a cost efficient bookshelf cleaner robot any time soon (or even a robot vacuum cleaner that works in non-trivial settings).
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
By the time we exhaust Earth, we will be a space faring species.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  That seems highly unlikely, especially because space travel in real life is a lot more difficult than Star Trek makes it appear. But even so, I find the idea of exhausting earth rather morally reprehensible. There are beautiful life forms on earth such as birds, bears, fish, and flowers that don't deserve our carelessness. Should we not treat them with some basic level of kindess and compassion also?
  - trevithick 3y ago
    I agree with your second paragraph but am confident other life forms will ultimately prevail.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      What type of life forms do you think will prevail ?
      - trevithick 3y ago
        Non-human "life forms on earth" to quote OP. Maybe not birds or bears, could be just a slime mold, but something here will still be going strong after we wipe ourselves out.
JimtheCoder 3y ago
"Automation does remove jobs, but so far it's done so on a small scale compared to what AI will do." But, when automation was new, didn't they say it would automate everything? And it turns out that...it didn't? It seems that pattern is somewhat likely to repeat...
- hatenberg 3y ago
  I think you need to look again. Apart from everything being a fallacy, it’s been pretty much a wipeout. Agriculture: from 70% of people working in agriculture to 25% in the 70s to 2% now. Most other physical work, by volume follows the same trajectory. Everything is meaningless
  - wumpus 3y ago
    Everything is more meaningful, do you mean? In developed countries, agriculture is highly automated, and if you want a hobby garden in your leisure time, you can choose how much automation you want.
barrysteve 3y ago
You don't know any of this. It was commonly thought that the planet would run out of food until the Wheatbelt was developed. The fundmental shift is changing the mindset. - Away from deriving economic tasks from logical goals developed over historical time. - Into and towards, Men guesstimating and taking risks in bold new directions for global innovation. The gloomerism is getting kind of boring and unrewarding tbh. We need better criticisms of the future, these "total-meaninglessness" jabs don't hold water.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Are you serious? Of course, when we develop more ways of using resources, we can extend them. But we are already on the brink of climate disaster and we are nowhere near to colonizing other planets. Unless our population radically decreases, we will run out of resources. It's just mathematics: resources are finite. Also, I am not advocating TOTAL meaninglessness. I am advocating a new way of life that does not include AI, that's it. I never said everything is doomed. I think humans have a chance but that we should proceed WITHOUT AI. That's it.
  - gremlinsinc 3y ago
    What if there was UBI, and everyone was guaranteed food, healthcare, education, and a home. Then they were basically encouraged to just follow their passions, whereever that takes them whether it's art, science, music, etc. Imagine that everyone who's in replaceable fields simply grew up to be scientists, and entertainers. Those were basically the only fields left to go into, and scientists are more like project managers directing AI towards finding solutions to specific goals, and making new discoveries, etc... We could fix a shit ton of issues with 70% of the population being scientists or science adjacent in their "careers" which that word is more like "life's work" or a hobby, than what it is today.
  - barrysteve 3y ago
    Resources are finite so long as you stop developing new ones. Resources exist on the planet that are either too expensive in the current market to extract, or do too much damage to the local enviroment to get approvals. They are accessible when times get tougher. The electrification of the planet is massively reducing the costs to support life. We buy and sell flipped bits to each other and renew our car batteries from home solar. You could live like a monk, automated hydroponics, electric everything and probably not notice the majority of service collapsing except sewage and water. Water is a weird one because it's often not 'destroyed', just pumped around the ecosystem by natural forces or power plants and dirtied in the process. Developing cheaper water cycling methods could push costs even lower. The mathematics of finite resources depends heavily on who is doing the mathematics. The pre-wheatbelt guys couldnt guess what was going to happen next. AI is just a better tool. It has changed the relationship to work, like a car means we no longer ride horses. But we still use cars to do the same thing horses did. The categories have not changed as much as everyone is afraid of. Get out of trivial work, aka working in grammar, rhetoric and logic, and you'll probably feel a lot safer.

somesortofthing 3y ago

I think a more appropriate conclusion to draw is that big leaps in automation required huge, costly reorganizations of society to ensure enough people have jobs to avoid civil unrest, increasingly in ways that were dubiously productive compared to, say, directly providing for the people whose labor had suddenly become worthless. Whether the next big leap(or, for that matter, the next two or five big leaps) will finally require a retool whose cost we can't afford is very much an open question.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
That's an interesting viewpoint, and I think it's one way to look at it. But, we have to go back and ask: let's suppose we CAN make sure that enough people get jobs to avoid civil unrest, to use your terminology. What will those jobs be? They will unlikely be creative jobs, since most of those will be taken over by AI. Perhaps there will be a few creative jobs left (I sincerely doubt AI will be able to write the next Dostoyevsky novel in my lifetime, but you never know). But even IF there are a few creative jobs left, they will be rather miniscule. Thus, the only jobs left will be the kind that is already increasing today: some small cog in a massive corporate scheme that somehow has not yet been automated yet. I believe there are at least some alternatives, such as: we could form a new conglomeration (perhaps a union or cartel of sorts) of people who refuse to use AI in their business, and who refuse to do business with anyone using AI. Obviously, it would take some effort, but maybe it's possible. In this union, we would operate society normally, but with a code of ethics that prevents the use of advanced AI and maybe other dangerous technologies, and we would develop a more sustainable way of living that involves sustainable farming and being more reliant on each other instead of letting massive, soulless tech companies control us. I am formulating a more detailed proposal but that's the gist of one of my ideas.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "They will unlikely be creative jobs, since most of those will be taken over by AI. Perhaps there will be a few creative jobs left (I sincerely doubt AI will be able to write the next Dostoyevsky novel in my lifetime, but you never know). But even IF there are a few creative jobs left, they will be rather miniscule" This doesn't make sense to me. If AI eliminates most creative jobs, yet there are still humans who can do better (modern Dostoyevskys) would it not make sense for businesses to hire creative people to "out creative" their competitors, who just use the AI?

ChatGTP 3y ago

Isn't the absolute entire point of AI to remove jobs, I mean why on earth would we create AI otherwise ? It's the other half of the industrial revolution ?

version_five 3y ago
Do you feel the same about any technology that can help someone do their job better? Calculators, typewriters, card catalogs, tool use? What's the minimum level of technological sophistication that's acceptable to you as no being about removing jobs?
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  It's quite different, a calculator isn't supposed to work autonomously.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - BarryMilo 3y ago
    Well, before they were machines, they were jobs. We can no more imagine what AI will bring than people from the 1800s could imagine the changes computers woould bring. That is to say: everything changed.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      The only way I can imagine humans stay relevant in the job market, is if we can someone augment our intelligence to the point where we can basically keep up with AIs progress. I don't actually think this is impossible as in some ways, mobile phones and other wearable devices are probably the first steps to get there. Who knows?

booleandilemma 3y ago

This isn't like the loom though. If you have a loom you obsolete all weavers, but only the weavers. This is more like a magical typewriter, and it's coming for all white collar jobs.

worrycue 3y ago

> but automation never net removed jobs from the economy it makes more. That’s true for more limited forms of automation - e.g. the loom, heavy industrial machinery, even computers - as people just move on to other jobs and society gains a net improvement in productivity. AI, specially AGI (which is the endgame for AI), is a different matter. It’s not specialised. “General” is literal in its name. It could do nigh every job. There will be no jobs for everyone being displaced to move on to.

bcrosby95 3y ago

Yes, the nobility always will need their serfs doing something.

taneq 3y ago

Maybe it hasn't yet removed a net number of jobs, but it's definitely removed jobs at the skill level that's being automated. You upgrade your weaving business from manual looms to automatic looms, maybe you create more jobs for automatic loom engineers but you certainly also remove jobs for weavers. Maybe the additional productivity means that society as a whole now has more jobs but ultimately none of those jobs are going to be easier to do than weaving. Also, looms are a deceptive example because weaving is still skilled labour. Chances are if you can learn to weave good quality cloth you'll be capable of retraining into another skilled trade. The same can't be said for "unskilled" labour, your 50-year-old factory line workers displaced by automation aren't going to be re-training as graphic designers and web devs. Now apply that not to a specialized machine that screws lids on water bottles really fast, but to a machine that can do any desk job a moderately competent white collar worker can do, and you'll see we have a problem.