9 ms·

What coal and Jevons’ paradox tell us about AI and data

71 points by erehweb 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
smokel 3y ago
Also interesting in this context is to consider the Kardashev scale [1] or the Dyson Sphere [2]. On top of that, I genuinely think that reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy should be mandatory for every doomsday prophet, regardless whether they're an AI one or a climate one. So many nonsense discussions could be avoided by reading some proper nonsense to put things into perspective. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
- mempko 3y ago
  What both of these miss is that all energy expended creates pollution. If we exponentially scale our energy (say using a Dyson sphere), we will exponentially scale our pollution. This is physically unavoidable. What's the point of using all the energy of the sun when the pollution alone will kill us or excess heat will boil our oceans. We found a great source of energy (oil) and have since pushed the planet outside the temperature humans have lived in for over 300,000 years in less than 100. Case in point, Freedom Dyson misses the whole pollution problem so much he is a climate skeptic of the "CO2 is good for plants" variety. "Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess.". Yeah, because it's that fucking easy. Dyson: "The change that’s now going on is very strongly concentrated in the Arctic. In fact in three respects, it’s not global, which I think is very important. First of all, it is mainly in the Arctic. Secondly, it’s mainly in the winter rather than summer. And thirdly, it’s mainly in the night rather than at the daytime. In all three respects, the warming is happening where it is cold, not where it is hot." Dyson's understanding is just wrong. It's happening globally, in hot areas and in cold areas. The delta is higher in the Arctic, but there is a delta everywhere. And not only that, he is a skeptic because of the way those concerned about global warming behave. They upset him. Sorry, we as a species are just not smart enough. https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_cl...
  - smokel 3y ago
    I'm sorry but I don't think your reasoning holds up. It does not make sense to say that it is physically unavoidable to exponentially scale pollution. Pollution is having unwanted substances in our environment. If we ever get to the point that we can actually construct a Dyson sphere, it seems likely that we could also dispose of unwanted substances, and place them outside of our environment, i.e. the outside of the sphere. As a more realistic example, wind and solar power do not seem to increase pollution (at least not in the most obvious way), but they do increase our access to more energy. Also, Freeman Dyson is no longer with us, so he will probably not be able to change his mind anymore. He was a skeptic, and I dare not say that I agree or disagree with him, but I must say that you're portraying him very poorly, and the linked article is much more nuanced than that.
    - mempko 3y ago
      Lets say you have a process that uses all available energy and energy grows exponentially at say 2% per year. This means energy doubles every 35 years and so does the usage of it. If the process is 95% efficient at using the energy for useful work, that means 5% of the energy used is waste/pollution (could be in the form of heat or something else). By definition, for every doubling of energy created and used, you have a doubling of pollution. This should be obvious. To prevent the doubling the amount of pollution generated for any given year, you must increase efficiency by the same amount (double efficiency in 35 years). It should be obvious that it's impossible to use 100% of energy available for useful work without waste. There is always waste. That's what I mean that it's physically unavoidable to exponentially grow pollution if you exponentially grow energy use.
      - smokel 3y ago
        I understand the math, but waste and pollution are two different things. There may be exponentially more waste, but if that waste would consist solely of heat that could be dissipated to the outside of the sphere (we're still discussing the Dyson Sphere structure), then there need not be any pollution at all. I understand that it is impossible to ever reach 100% efficiency in harvesting energy. But in principle, if the inefficiency would be in the form of heat only, then one might easily dissipate more than 100% of that, and we'd even cool down. Note the use of the word "easily" in a context where we're actually building Dyson spheres. Unfortunately, this is all very hypothetical, and perhaps that is the source of our confusion here. Building a Dyson Sphere will probably not start in our lifetimes, and present energy sources tend to do pollute our atmosphere, so there are still some practical problems to solve :/
danbruc 3y ago
And data teams are sitting on an enormous supply of potential answers! We have spent the last decade re-building our data stacks around infinitely-scalable cloud warehouses and their attending ETL tools. It’s a (wait for it) massive coal mine just waiting to be turned into energy. What are those untapped data resourvoirs, who owns them and what are the questions they might finally get answered? Please tell me it is not just every click ever made on the internet and now they can figure out better how to sell more shit to more people.
robbywashere_ 3y ago
Since chatgpt 'massive explosion on the scene' I have and still do predict; the amount of info-tech jobs will actually GO UP. This has always been the case with any tech innovation. I find it humorous; as pointed out in the article; there is an assumption that once an efficiency is discovered we will just throw our hands up; sit back and relax. This has never happened. The market runs on innovation and competition. New tech means more competitive edge. If free energy is ever discovered (extremely doubtful), we will not help but boil ourselves from the excess heat it generates.
- kristianp 3y ago
  > If free energy is ever discovered (extremely doubtful), we will not help but boil ourselves from the excess heat it generates. Love this evocation. Although you missed a chance to say we'd boil the oceans!
- Gravityloss 3y ago
  Well, what happened to film makers or photo development shops? Photography as activity didn't go away but some components became unnecessary or a middleman could be bypassed with the new digital camera technology. And the same happened with camera makers as people could take good enough photos with their phones.
  - sydbarrett74 3y ago
    The above doesn't even touch on the analogue photography renaissance taking place. Polaroid cameras are being snapped up at flea markets all over the place. Zoomers and younger millennials are spellbound by the whole milieu.
    - anon84873628 3y ago
      Oh come on, that's not the same at all. Horses didn't go extinct after the automobile either -- they still exist in quaint or niche cases, especially as a hobby for rich people. That doesn't mean their role in society came back along with all the supporting infrastructure. Are you looking to start a saddle making or carriage business?
HPsquared 3y ago
It's more akin to gold mining (processing tons and tons of worthless material to extract nuggets of information).
quitit 3y ago
We should expect change but the expectation of AI being able to arbitrarily replace humans is not an idea held by people who manage projects. It's an idea that brings its own problems which then other people must solve. Humans highly value productivity as that's hard for humans, and simultaneously we don't necessarily value our human contributions to the process, such as, but not limited to: - Inventiveness, redefining the problem or challenging the necessity - Management such as dealing with other humans, motives and objectives - Course correction and morality The importance of productivity distracts certain types into believing that the human is redundant in the process. With AI, humans become more productive, but the AI itself is incomplete as it can't solve the realities of business where the above human-skills become essential. A limiting factor is that ultimately the works will go to serve a human and humans are fickle, they change their mind often and are poor at defining their needs and wants. If we can't extract humans from the input, and humans will be using the output, then we can't realistically exclude humans from the process too. Finally, the minutiae of a project also means that the higher-ups in a company, who already have their own jobs, won't have the time or skills necessary to test and babysit the AI - even with advanced AI someone will need to be briefing it: past advancements show that we don't have less people working as productivity increases, instead we create more with the additional productivity; there is no ceiling on what we can create - this is a fundamental flaw in the thinking of those that believe robots will replace humans, because it relies on the falsehood that we already have everything.
- visarga 3y ago
  Well said. Computing power, number of computers and the internet bandwidth increased a huge deal in the last quarter century. And yet we still have low unemployment, where is all that new productivity hidden? Demand expansion. It's a paradox to think increased capability leads to job loss. It usually leads to competition over new applications and markets. The increased productivity can't be turned into pure profits by companies either, because there is competition on price and features. And for the foreseeable future AI needs babysitting. In the end it seems companies will have to adopt AI to remain competitive, and keep humans to extract more from AI. Or competition will use humans+AI to get ahead.
- pixl97 3y ago
lordnacho 3y ago
This is basically right. Look at excel, did that destroy accountancy and data analysis? If anything there's now a whole class of jobs that didn't exist before. Look at what we call programming now that you don't need a mainframe. You're a lot more likely to run into a programmer now than before. Why would AI be any different? There will be a whole class of jobs dealing with AI. Making infra for it, coding it up, using it for various apps, adapting for existing business, and so. It does transform the jobs though. Mainframe guy probably has a very different experience from modern internet programmer. Excel accountant isn't the same as paper accountant. ChatGPT era nerd is going develop his own relationship with the AI, how to use it, etiquette, jargon, and so on.
- me_me_me 3y ago
  I agree with your post, however I would bring a different point of interest to it. Comparing ChatGPT to other tools is all fine, but taking a step back and thinking about next ChatGPT tool that will be created is probably bit more concerning. And I dont mean ChatGPT version X but next iteration of AI tools. In the last decade we have seen an unprecedented explosion of computer intelligence, task once deemed too human or fuzzy are being done (and often outperforming humans) left and right. From AI vision to creative endorsers. What I am afraid is the next 'excel' and who will control it - cuz the next iteration might be smart enough to let the creators tangibly impact the world.
2devnull 3y ago
Manager types want to manage other people. Manager types basically run the world. They don’t want to manage robots, they want to manage over people. The manager types will find ways to manage over people no matter what. It’s hardwired. Humans will always employ other humans because of this. Some people have told me they like to go out to eat primarily because they like to be waited on by human waitstaff. These people who need to have power over others are the people in charge; politicians, managers, rulers. For this reason it’s likely that ai will not replace human labor, merely reduce the cost and quality of life for workers.
- IKantRead 3y ago
  Interestingly enough the Marxist variation on this is that, if we assume Marx's Labor Theory of Value (I know, big assumption for most, but let's just go with it and see what the conclusion would be): All surplus value is extracted from human labor, automation (including AI) is just efficiency which is used by Capitalist to gain temporary advantage over other Capitalist. This advantage is always temporary. The second part of this logic is quite apparent: Assuming AI is game changing, early adopters will see an initial advantage, but in the long run everyone will have to use AI or no longer be competitive. But the LTV (remember, for the sake of exploration we're assuming this is true) argues that value is always extracted as surplus (i.e. unpaid) labor from humans. So LTV would predict that if AI truly replaces humans we would ultimately see a decline in the surplus value that Capitalists extract, i.e. we would b faced with an economic crisis. So LTV would predict that we would have either just as much or more hours of human labor happening or we would enter an economic crisis.
mempko 3y ago
I've been telling people the same thing. The aggregate demand for ALL knowledge work will go up because of LLM not go down. Why? If someone is 2x more productive, then they become 2x more valuable for the same pay. There are all sorts of small companies out there that previously couldn't afford marketing or analysts. But if they become a better investment because of LLM, then suddenly companies will demand more of them. The issue I have with the article is that it doesn't explain why Jevon's paradox works. Fundamentally it's because demand/supply curves are non-linear! Where a 10% drop in price (because of efficiency gains for example) creates a 50% increase in demand.
cool_dude85 3y ago
I always roll my eyes at Jevons' Paradox. It's just an idea of how things might be. There's no a priori reason to believe that it will actually happen in any real scenario just because an economist described this concept a hundred years ago.
- philipkglass 3y ago
  It's an observed thing. It's notable as a paradox because it's counterintuitive and less common than the intuitively obvious outcome. The irksome thing about it is when people proclaim an assured Jevons Paradox in advance. Its instances are knowable only with hindsight.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Exactly, in technology we constantly talk about disruption and how we all want to develop the next disruptive industry to strike it rich. Each disruption is a paradigm shift, a kind of event horizon that you can only determine the effects of after you pass it. Now we're watching the potential for one of the bigger disruptions in history and attempting to make predictions with authority. Very few will even be close to correct and those will only be near by the shear probabilistic outcome of so many predictions being made.
- perrygeo 3y ago
  In the energy world, it's been observed countless times on many different scales and timeframes. Every single item in the typical American household has seen huge improvements in efficiency in my lifetime (lightbulbs, fridges, heat pumps, to name the most prominent) but the average consumption of electricity has increased in that time. It's really quite intuitive - calling it a "paradox" is a disservice to the simplicity of the idea. If an energy-intensive technology exists and is generally useful, there will be some demand for it. If there is enough demand, market forces will invest in efficiency which drives down the total cost of ownership. And when prices go down, demand increases. Framed this way, it would be hard to imagine a case where the market put forth the effort to make a technology more efficient and it failed to drive up demand. It's an inevitable consequence of market economics - hardly what one would call a "paradox".
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
The things that a lot of these types analyses miss is that while it makes sense to argue that LLMs may enable more overall work by humans, this work exists at a higher difficulty level that many people just aren't able to accomplish. Here's a specific example: ChatGPT has already started taking away the work of copywriters - there have been a bunch of mainstream media articles about this. I think it's fine to argue "That type of copywriting was low-value work anyway. Now this means that sales and marketing folks will be able to operate at a higher strategic level since they no longer have to deal as much with 'how should this specific blurb on the website be phrased'." The problem with this is 2 fold: 1. A lot of that "low value work" is how new folks learn the tools of the trade to begin with. Over the past 30 or more years technology has done a very good job at "removing" the lower rungs of the career ladder. Remember those stories we used to hear about how folks "worked their way up from the mailroom, or from being a secretary"? The mailroom and secretaries largely don't exist anymore. 2. In my experience and belief, there are a large swath of people that just want to be given instructions and then execute them well and with pride. I think it bodes very, very, very poorly for society if all of those types of jobs go away and the response to those people is basically "fine, you can exist at a level just above starving". We had a booming post WWII middle class because there were tons of these types of good paying factory (and office) jobs that allowed people to have dignity in their work. The destruction of those types of jobs is a huge part of our current social strife and "deaths of dispair" in my opinion.
- pradn 3y ago
  Re point #1 there has been a big shift in the corporate world to hiring vendors for any "non-essential" services. So now the chance of someone moving up from the mail room is low. There's been a progressive shift in how corporations work. It's an organizational change.
  - michaelrpeskin 3y ago
    I was just talking about this idea related to technology in general making it hard for people to break in at the entry level. Even something as simple as construction: Before mechanization, you needed a bunch of "ditch diggers" to do the manual labor. And after being on the site for a while, you'd start to pick up things and then can move up to more skilled labor while 1) getting paid to do the low skilled labor and 2) learning on the job while still providing value. As tech takes away the low skill jobs, the skill level for "entry level" becomes higher and there's no way to learn on the job, you need to pay for education to level up enough to get started. LLMs are just the current example of this, but it's been happening for years. Not saying it's good or bad, but it is interesting that "working your way up" gets harder over time because it's harder to get that entry level low skill work.

71 points by erehweb 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Also interesting in this context is to consider the Kardashev scale [1] or the Dyson Sphere [2]. On top of that, I genuinely think that reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy should be mandatory for every doomsday prophet, regardless whether they're an AI one or a climate one. So many nonsense discussions could be avoided by reading some proper nonsense to put things into perspective. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

mempko 3y ago
What both of these miss is that all energy expended creates pollution. If we exponentially scale our energy (say using a Dyson sphere), we will exponentially scale our pollution. This is physically unavoidable. What's the point of using all the energy of the sun when the pollution alone will kill us or excess heat will boil our oceans. We found a great source of energy (oil) and have since pushed the planet outside the temperature humans have lived in for over 300,000 years in less than 100. Case in point, Freedom Dyson misses the whole pollution problem so much he is a climate skeptic of the "CO2 is good for plants" variety. "Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess.". Yeah, because it's that fucking easy. Dyson: "The change that’s now going on is very strongly concentrated in the Arctic. In fact in three respects, it’s not global, which I think is very important. First of all, it is mainly in the Arctic. Secondly, it’s mainly in the winter rather than summer. And thirdly, it’s mainly in the night rather than at the daytime. In all three respects, the warming is happening where it is cold, not where it is hot." Dyson's understanding is just wrong. It's happening globally, in hot areas and in cold areas. The delta is higher in the Arctic, but there is a delta everywhere. And not only that, he is a skeptic because of the way those concerned about global warming behave. They upset him. Sorry, we as a species are just not smart enough. https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_cl...
- smokel 3y ago
  I'm sorry but I don't think your reasoning holds up. It does not make sense to say that it is physically unavoidable to exponentially scale pollution. Pollution is having unwanted substances in our environment. If we ever get to the point that we can actually construct a Dyson sphere, it seems likely that we could also dispose of unwanted substances, and place them outside of our environment, i.e. the outside of the sphere. As a more realistic example, wind and solar power do not seem to increase pollution (at least not in the most obvious way), but they do increase our access to more energy. Also, Freeman Dyson is no longer with us, so he will probably not be able to change his mind anymore. He was a skeptic, and I dare not say that I agree or disagree with him, but I must say that you're portraying him very poorly, and the linked article is much more nuanced than that.
  - mempko 3y ago
    Lets say you have a process that uses all available energy and energy grows exponentially at say 2% per year. This means energy doubles every 35 years and so does the usage of it. If the process is 95% efficient at using the energy for useful work, that means 5% of the energy used is waste/pollution (could be in the form of heat or something else). By definition, for every doubling of energy created and used, you have a doubling of pollution. This should be obvious. To prevent the doubling the amount of pollution generated for any given year, you must increase efficiency by the same amount (double efficiency in 35 years). It should be obvious that it's impossible to use 100% of energy available for useful work without waste. There is always waste. That's what I mean that it's physically unavoidable to exponentially grow pollution if you exponentially grow energy use.
    - smokel 3y ago
      I understand the math, but waste and pollution are two different things. There may be exponentially more waste, but if that waste would consist solely of heat that could be dissipated to the outside of the sphere (we're still discussing the Dyson Sphere structure), then there need not be any pollution at all. I understand that it is impossible to ever reach 100% efficiency in harvesting energy. But in principle, if the inefficiency would be in the form of heat only, then one might easily dissipate more than 100% of that, and we'd even cool down. Note the use of the word "easily" in a context where we're actually building Dyson spheres. Unfortunately, this is all very hypothetical, and perhaps that is the source of our confusion here. Building a Dyson Sphere will probably not start in our lifetimes, and present energy sources tend to do pollute our atmosphere, so there are still some practical problems to solve :/

danbruc 3y ago

And data teams are sitting on an enormous supply of potential answers! We have spent the last decade re-building our data stacks around infinitely-scalable cloud warehouses and their attending ETL tools. It’s a (wait for it) massive coal mine just waiting to be turned into energy. What are those untapped data resourvoirs, who owns them and what are the questions they might finally get answered? Please tell me it is not just every click ever made on the internet and now they can figure out better how to sell more shit to more people.

robbywashere_ 3y ago

Since chatgpt 'massive explosion on the scene' I have and still do predict; the amount of info-tech jobs will actually GO UP. This has always been the case with any tech innovation. I find it humorous; as pointed out in the article; there is an assumption that once an efficiency is discovered we will just throw our hands up; sit back and relax. This has never happened. The market runs on innovation and competition. New tech means more competitive edge. If free energy is ever discovered (extremely doubtful), we will not help but boil ourselves from the excess heat it generates.

kristianp 3y ago
> If free energy is ever discovered (extremely doubtful), we will not help but boil ourselves from the excess heat it generates. Love this evocation. Although you missed a chance to say we'd boil the oceans!
Gravityloss 3y ago
Well, what happened to film makers or photo development shops? Photography as activity didn't go away but some components became unnecessary or a middleman could be bypassed with the new digital camera technology. And the same happened with camera makers as people could take good enough photos with their phones.
- sydbarrett74 3y ago
  The above doesn't even touch on the analogue photography renaissance taking place. Polaroid cameras are being snapped up at flea markets all over the place. Zoomers and younger millennials are spellbound by the whole milieu.
  - anon84873628 3y ago
    Oh come on, that's not the same at all. Horses didn't go extinct after the automobile either -- they still exist in quaint or niche cases, especially as a hobby for rich people. That doesn't mean their role in society came back along with all the supporting infrastructure. Are you looking to start a saddle making or carriage business?

HPsquared 3y ago

It's more akin to gold mining (processing tons and tons of worthless material to extract nuggets of information).

quitit 3y ago

We should expect change but the expectation of AI being able to arbitrarily replace humans is not an idea held by people who manage projects. It's an idea that brings its own problems which then other people must solve. Humans highly value productivity as that's hard for humans, and simultaneously we don't necessarily value our human contributions to the process, such as, but not limited to: - Inventiveness, redefining the problem or challenging the necessity - Management such as dealing with other humans, motives and objectives - Course correction and morality The importance of productivity distracts certain types into believing that the human is redundant in the process. With AI, humans become more productive, but the AI itself is incomplete as it can't solve the realities of business where the above human-skills become essential. A limiting factor is that ultimately the works will go to serve a human and humans are fickle, they change their mind often and are poor at defining their needs and wants. If we can't extract humans from the input, and humans will be using the output, then we can't realistically exclude humans from the process too. Finally, the minutiae of a project also means that the higher-ups in a company, who already have their own jobs, won't have the time or skills necessary to test and babysit the AI - even with advanced AI someone will need to be briefing it: past advancements show that we don't have less people working as productivity increases, instead we create more with the additional productivity; there is no ceiling on what we can create - this is a fundamental flaw in the thinking of those that believe robots will replace humans, because it relies on the falsehood that we already have everything.

visarga 3y ago
Well said. Computing power, number of computers and the internet bandwidth increased a huge deal in the last quarter century. And yet we still have low unemployment, where is all that new productivity hidden? Demand expansion. It's a paradox to think increased capability leads to job loss. It usually leads to competition over new applications and markets. The increased productivity can't be turned into pure profits by companies either, because there is competition on price and features. And for the foreseeable future AI needs babysitting. In the end it seems companies will have to adopt AI to remain competitive, and keep humans to extract more from AI. Or competition will use humans+AI to get ahead.
pixl97 3y ago

lordnacho 3y ago

This is basically right. Look at excel, did that destroy accountancy and data analysis? If anything there's now a whole class of jobs that didn't exist before. Look at what we call programming now that you don't need a mainframe. You're a lot more likely to run into a programmer now than before. Why would AI be any different? There will be a whole class of jobs dealing with AI. Making infra for it, coding it up, using it for various apps, adapting for existing business, and so. It does transform the jobs though. Mainframe guy probably has a very different experience from modern internet programmer. Excel accountant isn't the same as paper accountant. ChatGPT era nerd is going develop his own relationship with the AI, how to use it, etiquette, jargon, and so on.

me_me_me 3y ago
I agree with your post, however I would bring a different point of interest to it. Comparing ChatGPT to other tools is all fine, but taking a step back and thinking about next ChatGPT tool that will be created is probably bit more concerning. And I dont mean ChatGPT version X but next iteration of AI tools. In the last decade we have seen an unprecedented explosion of computer intelligence, task once deemed too human or fuzzy are being done (and often outperforming humans) left and right. From AI vision to creative endorsers. What I am afraid is the next 'excel' and who will control it - cuz the next iteration might be smart enough to let the creators tangibly impact the world.

2devnull 3y ago

Manager types want to manage other people. Manager types basically run the world. They don’t want to manage robots, they want to manage over people. The manager types will find ways to manage over people no matter what. It’s hardwired. Humans will always employ other humans because of this. Some people have told me they like to go out to eat primarily because they like to be waited on by human waitstaff. These people who need to have power over others are the people in charge; politicians, managers, rulers. For this reason it’s likely that ai will not replace human labor, merely reduce the cost and quality of life for workers.

IKantRead 3y ago
Interestingly enough the Marxist variation on this is that, if we assume Marx's Labor Theory of Value (I know, big assumption for most, but let's just go with it and see what the conclusion would be): All surplus value is extracted from human labor, automation (including AI) is just efficiency which is used by Capitalist to gain temporary advantage over other Capitalist. This advantage is always temporary. The second part of this logic is quite apparent: Assuming AI is game changing, early adopters will see an initial advantage, but in the long run everyone will have to use AI or no longer be competitive. But the LTV (remember, for the sake of exploration we're assuming this is true) argues that value is always extracted as surplus (i.e. unpaid) labor from humans. So LTV would predict that if AI truly replaces humans we would ultimately see a decline in the surplus value that Capitalists extract, i.e. we would b faced with an economic crisis. So LTV would predict that we would have either just as much or more hours of human labor happening or we would enter an economic crisis.

mempko 3y ago

I've been telling people the same thing. The aggregate demand for ALL knowledge work will go up because of LLM not go down. Why? If someone is 2x more productive, then they become 2x more valuable for the same pay. There are all sorts of small companies out there that previously couldn't afford marketing or analysts. But if they become a better investment because of LLM, then suddenly companies will demand more of them. The issue I have with the article is that it doesn't explain why Jevon's paradox works. Fundamentally it's because demand/supply curves are non-linear! Where a 10% drop in price (because of efficiency gains for example) creates a 50% increase in demand.

cool_dude85 3y ago

I always roll my eyes at Jevons' Paradox. It's just an idea of how things might be. There's no a priori reason to believe that it will actually happen in any real scenario just because an economist described this concept a hundred years ago.

philipkglass 3y ago
It's an observed thing. It's notable as a paradox because it's counterintuitive and less common than the intuitively obvious outcome. The irksome thing about it is when people proclaim an assured Jevons Paradox in advance. Its instances are knowable only with hindsight.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Exactly, in technology we constantly talk about disruption and how we all want to develop the next disruptive industry to strike it rich. Each disruption is a paradigm shift, a kind of event horizon that you can only determine the effects of after you pass it. Now we're watching the potential for one of the bigger disruptions in history and attempting to make predictions with authority. Very few will even be close to correct and those will only be near by the shear probabilistic outcome of so many predictions being made.
perrygeo 3y ago
In the energy world, it's been observed countless times on many different scales and timeframes. Every single item in the typical American household has seen huge improvements in efficiency in my lifetime (lightbulbs, fridges, heat pumps, to name the most prominent) but the average consumption of electricity has increased in that time. It's really quite intuitive - calling it a "paradox" is a disservice to the simplicity of the idea. If an energy-intensive technology exists and is generally useful, there will be some demand for it. If there is enough demand, market forces will invest in efficiency which drives down the total cost of ownership. And when prices go down, demand increases. Framed this way, it would be hard to imagine a case where the market put forth the effort to make a technology more efficient and it failed to drive up demand. It's an inevitable consequence of market economics - hardly what one would call a "paradox".

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

The things that a lot of these types analyses miss is that while it makes sense to argue that LLMs may enable more overall work by humans, this work exists at a higher difficulty level that many people just aren't able to accomplish. Here's a specific example: ChatGPT has already started taking away the work of copywriters - there have been a bunch of mainstream media articles about this. I think it's fine to argue "That type of copywriting was low-value work anyway. Now this means that sales and marketing folks will be able to operate at a higher strategic level since they no longer have to deal as much with 'how should this specific blurb on the website be phrased'." The problem with this is 2 fold: 1. A lot of that "low value work" is how new folks learn the tools of the trade to begin with. Over the past 30 or more years technology has done a very good job at "removing" the lower rungs of the career ladder. Remember those stories we used to hear about how folks "worked their way up from the mailroom, or from being a secretary"? The mailroom and secretaries largely don't exist anymore. 2. In my experience and belief, there are a large swath of people that just want to be given instructions and then execute them well and with pride. I think it bodes very, very, very poorly for society if all of those types of jobs go away and the response to those people is basically "fine, you can exist at a level just above starving". We had a booming post WWII middle class because there were tons of these types of good paying factory (and office) jobs that allowed people to have dignity in their work. The destruction of those types of jobs is a huge part of our current social strife and "deaths of dispair" in my opinion.

pradn 3y ago
Re point #1 there has been a big shift in the corporate world to hiring vendors for any "non-essential" services. So now the chance of someone moving up from the mail room is low. There's been a progressive shift in how corporations work. It's an organizational change.
- michaelrpeskin 3y ago
  I was just talking about this idea related to technology in general making it hard for people to break in at the entry level. Even something as simple as construction: Before mechanization, you needed a bunch of "ditch diggers" to do the manual labor. And after being on the site for a while, you'd start to pick up things and then can move up to more skilled labor while 1) getting paid to do the low skilled labor and 2) learning on the job while still providing value. As tech takes away the low skill jobs, the skill level for "entry level" becomes higher and there's no way to learn on the job, you need to pay for education to level up enough to get started. LLMs are just the current example of this, but it's been happening for years. Not saying it's good or bad, but it is interesting that "working your way up" gets harder over time because it's harder to get that entry level low skill work.