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Historically, automation has always made society richer and better off as a result. There are two guys outside of my window at this very moment getting rid of

Historically, automation has always made society richer and better off as a result. There are two guys outside of my window at this very moment getting rid of a huge pile of dirt. One is in an excavator, the other in a truck. There’s a bunch of piles that they’ve taken care of today. Two centuries ago this work would’ve taken a dozen people, a few animals of burden, and a lot more time. Where are the other ten hypothetical people? I don’t know, but chances are they’ve been absorbed by the rest of the economy doing something else worthwhile that they are getting paid for.

dash2 3y ago
This comment and the grandparent can both be right. Society gets richer because automation replaces jobs, leaving us more time to do other jobs.
daxfohl 3y ago
Those ten hypothetical people would likely have actually been zero because the task wouldn't have been worth hiring ten people.
- thatjoeoverthr 3y ago
  Important, and often ignored! Technological improvements change the cost structure of activities. Consider texting. We send billions of texts every day. This does not replace billions of couriers. Rather, more people work to maintain our phone supply and telecom than we ever had running around with letters. It's not a promise but it is a pattern.
andsoitis 3y ago
also, two centuries ago, we didn't have trucks and the concomitant infrastructure, jobs, wealth, etc. that machines brought along.
iExploder 3y ago
> Where are the other ten hypothetical people? Zoned out somewhere in the backstreets of SF
- direwolf20 3y ago
  Or dead because Trump cut off their welfare.
xnorswap 3y ago
I agree, on a societal level it's a great benefit. On an individual level, however, I'd suggest keeping an eye out for opportunities to retrain. As an analogy, I'd rather be like the coal miners in the 80s who could read the writing on the wall and quietly retrained into something else rather than those who spent their better years striking over cuts to little avail. It's a very daunting prospect seeing a path to unemployability, though. Depending how quickly the change happens, it could be a gentle transition, or it could upset a lot of people.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  Yeah, but what do you retrain to? I can't think of any industry that isn't being threatened with massive automation.
  - daxfohl 3y ago
    Well, the AI job market is pretty hot, so that's an option. And I expect as things mature it'll only create even more opportunity. Projects that nobody previously would have considered, because they'd have taken too long, required too much training for too many people? Now they can happen! And for each of those things, jobs are created, not taken away. Imagine yourself as CEO. What do you think is your most likely train of thought? A/ "I can fully replace my labor force with bots" or B/ "My employees now have superpowers to do things we couldn't even conceive of two years ago". While there are certainly some scenarios where the first choice is appropriate, the latter sounds far far more likely in most scenarios to me. Why would you contract when there's suddenly so much opportunity to expand?
    - direwolf20 3y ago
      What AI jobs?
atleta 3y ago
There are two problems with this argument. The first, and easier to accept one is that while society might be better off, in the long run , as a result the affected individuals will probably not. We tend to generalize from a single historical example, the industrial revolution and, more specifically, the automatic loom, and in that case the displaced workers ended up doing worse. Better jobs and opportunities only got created later. The other problem is, of course, is that all the historical examples (the data) are too few to generalize from while we do see how these examples are different from each other. As technological evolution progresses, automation gets more and more sophisticated, it can replace jobs that require more and more skills and talent. In other words, jobs that fewer and fewer people were able to do in the first place. This means that the bar for successfully competing in the labor market gets higher and higher and it will get to a point where a substantial number of people will just be plain uncompetitive for any job. Or, at least that was one of the morels until LLMs were invented. (Mostly everyone thought that automation would take over the opportunities from the bottom up in general.) Now it seems that indeed white collar jobs are more in danger for now. But I digress. The point here is that past examples are false analogies because AI (and I moslty mean future AI) is funcamentally different from past inventions. It's capabilities seem to improve quickly but we're mostly stuck with what evolution gave us. (We, as a species, are evolving but it's very slow compared to the rate of technological evolution and also we, as individuals, are stuck with whatever we were born with.)
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  I think the other thing people miss is the impact of our existing infrastructure on the speed at which these new technologies can be deployed. Society had a lot of time to get used to the printing press, the advances of the Industrial Revolution and the internet. This is because the knowledge had to spread, and it's also because a ton of equipment had to be manufactured and/or shipped all over the world. We had to make printing presses, design and build factories, and get a critical mass of people internet-capable computers. AI is fundamentally different, in that the knowledge of AI can spread instantly because of the internet and because the vast majority of the world already has access to all of the hardware they need to access the most powerful AI models. Soon we'll have humanoid robots coming, and while they obviously have to be built, we are much more capable now than we were 50 years ago at building giant factories. We also have an efficient system of capital allocation that means that as soon as someone demonstrates a generally useful humanoid robot and only needs to scale production, they'll have access to basically infinite investor money.

dash2 3y ago

This comment and the grandparent can both be right. Society gets richer because automation replaces jobs, leaving us more time to do other jobs.

daxfohl 3y ago

Those ten hypothetical people would likely have actually been zero because the task wouldn't have been worth hiring ten people.

thatjoeoverthr 3y ago
Important, and often ignored! Technological improvements change the cost structure of activities. Consider texting. We send billions of texts every day. This does not replace billions of couriers. Rather, more people work to maintain our phone supply and telecom than we ever had running around with letters. It's not a promise but it is a pattern.

andsoitis 3y ago

also, two centuries ago, we didn't have trucks and the concomitant infrastructure, jobs, wealth, etc. that machines brought along.

iExploder 3y ago

> Where are the other ten hypothetical people? Zoned out somewhere in the backstreets of SF

direwolf20 3y ago
Or dead because Trump cut off their welfare.

xnorswap 3y ago

I agree, on a societal level it's a great benefit. On an individual level, however, I'd suggest keeping an eye out for opportunities to retrain. As an analogy, I'd rather be like the coal miners in the 80s who could read the writing on the wall and quietly retrained into something else rather than those who spent their better years striking over cuts to little avail. It's a very daunting prospect seeing a path to unemployability, though. Depending how quickly the change happens, it could be a gentle transition, or it could upset a lot of people.

jay_kyburz 3y ago
Yeah, but what do you retrain to? I can't think of any industry that isn't being threatened with massive automation.
- daxfohl 3y ago
  Well, the AI job market is pretty hot, so that's an option. And I expect as things mature it'll only create even more opportunity. Projects that nobody previously would have considered, because they'd have taken too long, required too much training for too many people? Now they can happen! And for each of those things, jobs are created, not taken away. Imagine yourself as CEO. What do you think is your most likely train of thought? A/ "I can fully replace my labor force with bots" or B/ "My employees now have superpowers to do things we couldn't even conceive of two years ago". While there are certainly some scenarios where the first choice is appropriate, the latter sounds far far more likely in most scenarios to me. Why would you contract when there's suddenly so much opportunity to expand?
  - direwolf20 3y ago
    What AI jobs?

atleta 3y ago

There are two problems with this argument. The first, and easier to accept one is that while society might be better off, in the long run , as a result the affected individuals will probably not. We tend to generalize from a single historical example, the industrial revolution and, more specifically, the automatic loom, and in that case the displaced workers ended up doing worse. Better jobs and opportunities only got created later. The other problem is, of course, is that all the historical examples (the data) are too few to generalize from while we do see how these examples are different from each other. As technological evolution progresses, automation gets more and more sophisticated, it can replace jobs that require more and more skills and talent. In other words, jobs that fewer and fewer people were able to do in the first place. This means that the bar for successfully competing in the labor market gets higher and higher and it will get to a point where a substantial number of people will just be plain uncompetitive for any job. Or, at least that was one of the morels until LLMs were invented. (Mostly everyone thought that automation would take over the opportunities from the bottom up in general.) Now it seems that indeed white collar jobs are more in danger for now. But I digress. The point here is that past examples are false analogies because AI (and I moslty mean future AI) is funcamentally different from past inventions. It's capabilities seem to improve quickly but we're mostly stuck with what evolution gave us. (We, as a species, are evolving but it's very slow compared to the rate of technological evolution and also we, as individuals, are stuck with whatever we were born with.)

idopmstuff 3y ago
I think the other thing people miss is the impact of our existing infrastructure on the speed at which these new technologies can be deployed. Society had a lot of time to get used to the printing press, the advances of the Industrial Revolution and the internet. This is because the knowledge had to spread, and it's also because a ton of equipment had to be manufactured and/or shipped all over the world. We had to make printing presses, design and build factories, and get a critical mass of people internet-capable computers. AI is fundamentally different, in that the knowledge of AI can spread instantly because of the internet and because the vast majority of the world already has access to all of the hardware they need to access the most powerful AI models. Soon we'll have humanoid robots coming, and while they obviously have to be built, we are much more capable now than we were 50 years ago at building giant factories. We also have an efficient system of capital allocation that means that as soon as someone demonstrates a generally useful humanoid robot and only needs to scale production, they'll have access to basically infinite investor money.