5 ms·

It's a lie which I'm frankly astonished so many people fall for. Put yourself in the shoes of the profit maximizing firm for once: Why would you pay dollars per

It's a lie which I'm frankly astonished so many people fall for. Put yourself in the shoes of the profit maximizing firm for once: Why would you pay dollars per hour for bespoke human cognition when store brand costs pennies of electricity and works [almost as well/just as well/even better]?

paulcole 3y ago
Another good one that shocks me that people ignore is the long-term effect of remote work on salaries. If you can do your job from home, there's someone who can do it who has a cheaper home than you.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Good for them. But they have no local social network.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Rather the opposite: those WHF can just live in a small city / community with 100x the "local social network", cohesion, friendliness, etc. than the ones living in some big city where they don't even know their immediate neighbors. And of course if someone from e.g. India replaces you, I'm pretty sure they'll have a far greater "local social network" than whatever Silicon Valley can offer.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      I don’t mean having friends, I mean having a useful professional network for getting jobs
      - coldtea 3y ago
        All else being equal, their lower cost will get them jobs more easily than some expesive fella's "professional network". Also, even when working remotely, people tend to remember who did a good job and who they collaborated well or has some good skills - and when they start another company, or move to work elsewhere, they can still opt to bring them in, even if they've never gossiped next to the same watercooler.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        Respectfully I disagree unless the job is low skill and fungible. Network is far more valuable. Especially local ones.
      - Volundr 3y ago
        > I mean having a useful professional network for getting jobs Why does this need to be local? Even when I was working in the office a good chunk of my professional network wasn't for in the same city as me.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        Local networks are just typically stronger. And networks in major cities are typically stronger. It will take a lot of time for this to change. I’m mostly remote but everyone is still attached to a major urban hub.
- tnel77 3y ago
  I think it depends on how much salaries drop. Let’s say salaries drop 25%, but more people can live in places where homes cost 50% or less, it’s likely still a good deal for that remote employee. Remote work is making cities in the Midwest far more attractive.
- htek 3y ago
  That's why strong unions are needed.
- eweise 3y ago
  You might not have to worry about that. I'm seeing people being called back into the office at least part of the time.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >If you can do your job from home, there's someone who can do it who has a cheaper home than you. Yes, but rent also falls in now highly coveted due to work availability areas, since people can increasingly live everywhere.
- Roark66 3y ago
  This is no different than living in a city, going to work in person and renting cheapest, crappiest place of residence you can. You could say "There is always someone willing to tolerate shittier living conditions and undercut you" if your pay was based on your cost of living. But it's not. Your pay is based on the supply vs demand for the type of work you do. If it so happens the work you do is worth enough to support you living in a large city(and your sales skills good enough to take advantage of it) great. There is plenty of people who work in person and can't afford more than a room in a bedsit in a city. Imagine how much better their life can be if they can do their work remotely and they can rent a house "in the hicks" for the same money. There will always be people willing to do your job for cheaper as well as these that take 3x what you take and do half. Such is life.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    > There will always be people willing to do your job for cheaper as well as these that take 3x what you take and do half. Such is life. Which of these do you think is the bigger threat to you? If they can do your job roughly as well as you for half the cost, what's the employer's incentive to keep you around to do it?
hef19898 3y ago
Because AI is nowhere close to replace a large swath of jobs? Besides content spam authors? Because even in case of artists, the 100% AI generated stuff is crap compared to the AI-supported stuff.
- M4v3R 3y ago
  > Because AI is nowhere close to replace a large swath of jobs? It's nowhere close now. 10 years ago we were nowhere close to generative AI. How will the AI landscape look in the next 10-20 years? There's a non-zero chance that it will be ready by then to replace many jobs.
  - criley2 3y ago
    There's a "non-zero" chance all life on earth is eradicated in an extinction event like a gamma ray burst too. That phrase is just smarter sounding weasel words. With regards to generative AI replacing jobs, it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in. For example, I am not a lawyer or doctor therefore it seems trivial to me that AI will replace much of what lawyers and doctors do. Both boil down to reading a libraries worth of information and then making sense of it right? Bam, easy for AI. However, I'm a professional engineer and I know how extremely complex and difficult computer science is to get right, especially at scale, therefore I'll eat my hat if in 10 years you can write "Create a facebook clone that can support 500 million simultaneous users" and the AI does anything but hallucinate nonsense that won't work. (There's also the reality that there is far more to large scale software than what can be typed into a computer or repeated by an AI, but hey, details). I'll also point out that 10 years is not so long. 10 years ago Elon Musk told us AI was replacing driving and taxis. 2015 that feature was launched. 10 years later... not so much.
    - anonylizard 3y ago
      "it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in." You attribute this to a 'bias of underestimating other people's jobs' I attribute this to a 'bias of overestimate our own jobs'. Most programmer jobs do not involve facebook clones that support 500 million users. Most programmer jobs are boring crud apps for random companies in traditional industries. Just think of what the outsourcing mills in India produce, and how many people they employ, then think again about how many jobs generative AI replace. Also, Hollywood rapidly organised to try to slow down AI. They could see, very evidently, how extremely rapidly AI was advancing, and how lethal the threat is to them.
flanked-evergl 3y ago
You say "put yourself in the shoes of the profit maximizing firm", do you expect governments to not optimize for cost, or other organizations should not optimize for cost?
- coldtea 3y ago
  Yes, I expect companies and even more so, governments, to not optimize for cost. I expect them to optimize for human wellbeing, a functional society, and a clean environment above cost, and then cost.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    well said. thank you.
  - flanked-evergl 3y ago
    I don't see how taxing people indefinitely so that an indefinite amount can be spent to maximize employment through delivering something which can be delivered cheaper and better with more technology is optimizing human wellbeing. If the government is spending money on delivering X, they should do it as cost-effectively as possible, and the rest of the money can then be spent on other things or can remain in taxpayers pockets so they can spend it elsewhere. If the government is going to try to achieve full employment with everything it does, it will just be a disaster.
rootusrootus 3y ago
The most hopeful answer is 'because the competition will use AI to augment instead of replace, and produce a superior product.'
Mistletoe 3y ago
We even have ample evidence from history that this did not occur with other innovations. We don’t have a field of workers anymore, we have one guy in a tractor. We don’t have a factory of workers anymore, we have one guy watching the machines. We won’t have a field of lawyers, radiologists, programmers anymore, we will have one guy watching the machines. You can tell yourself you’ll be that one guy, but statistically you won’t.
- htek 3y ago
  How does that one guy in a tractor or that one guy watching the machines get paid when no one has a job to buy food, widgets, health care, et cetera? A sudden disruption like AI is purported to potentially cause is a recipe for total societal collapse.
  - Mistletoe 3y ago
    We’ve tried to kick the can down the road to a weird ponzi where we all do services for one another, but I don’t know how much longer that can go for. Now AI is going to disrupt that. We need to just stop sending all the money upwards and enjoy the benefits that mechanization and AI can bring. But I doubt that happens. > In a short essay published in 1930, the world’s most important economist, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that within 100 years, most people would be working no more than 15 hours a week. We did not get this future. We got a future where both husband and wife have to work 40+ hour weeks for the same lifestyle. He did not envision the siphoning off of wealth that would characterize the 20th and 21st century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
  - f0ld 3y ago
    Easy. Make things for rich people only.
tnel77 3y ago
I think most businesses will struggle to completely eliminate the need for humans. Surely AI will continue to drive efficiency for those who remain employed and others will find new jobs and/or start their own businesses. That, or all the jobs go away and then no one has money resulting in a non-functioning economy :).
- pixl97 3y ago
  'completely' is the word here that simply doesn't matter. Lets say you need ditches dug and you need 100 people to do it. Lets say there's only 50 people that want to dig ditches. This is a market favorable to labor. Pay will increase and so will growth of technology. But the moment the opposite happens the equation dramatically changes. If you have 50 jobs and 51 workers looking for jobs you can now get labor to fight with itself to see who will work for the least money. >and others will find new jobs and/or start their own businesses. Right, because there's going to be some magical market where AI isn't doing the same thing (maybe direct contact prostitution for a while?). And yea, lots of little businesses will pop up, and be very quickly ate up and consolidated by large businesses exploiting the interconnectedness of technology everywhere. The future doesn't look like the past in great number of ways because of this. > then no one has money resulting in a non-functioning economy This is a very serious risk. Typically this is why authoritarian states fall apart. And in the 'free west' we risk exactly the same with larger corporate consolidation effectively forming a quasi-authoritarian state via lack of competition, rent seeking behaviors, and semi-direct control of the government via lobbying.
- malka 3y ago
  if all job go away, because they are replaced by AI, it means that * there is no longer a need for a working class * there is no longer a need for a consumer class If there is neither a worker class, neither a consumer class, there is no longer a need for an economy There are just rich people waging war using drones to control access to resources to fullfil their own need. Most people would become utterly irrelevant here.
anonylizard 3y ago
Its not a lie that people fall for. Its a lie people want to believe. Try telling people about the pace of AI advancement, scaling laws, how AI art managed to surpass 90% of human artists in 1 year. And it'll either result in visceral disgust, or complete indifference. People do not care. Even if the flood has consumed the street, and is rising 1 meter per minute, they do not care. Unless the flood hits their front door, and wets their feet, they prefer to live their normal lives assuming everything tomorrow will be the same as today. Hence all the AI messaging has become all about 'copilots', because that's the only message people want to listen to. There's plenty of extremely frank discussions by AI company CEOs, AI company staff, or even AI enthusiast forums, but people are utterly uninterested, and prefer to scroll tiktok and watch their TV. Only when they actually encounter a bot a work that does 95% of their work, will they suddenly wake up, and organise, and demand a response. Hollywood managed to organize at an incredible speed to demand a slowdown to AI, but the water was at their necks already. Now, its understandable why most people don't want to read about AI advancements. They have their lives, chores, children, weekend trips. They feel entitled to a life in statis, where revolutionary change doesn't happen unless they are the ones demanding it. Too bad reality doesn't work that way. In the end, its individual choice, to go all in, to decisively steer your career path for a post-AI future, or pretend it doesn't exist, and enjoy their remaining years in their jobs in bliss. I will watch with fascination and horror what happens to the latter group.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  >They feel entitled to a life in statis, where revolutionary change doesn't happen unless they are the ones demanding it. Truer words have never been spoken. My bottomwit approach: On an individual level, use AI as far as I can push it. Maximize individual productivity. Then dump the resulting profits into index funds, to hedge against when - not if - my own cognitive labor becomes near worthless by investing in the productivity of the entire Earth, broadly defined.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    This is a good investment strategy because eventually your cognitive ability will decline to zero even if AI does not advance any further!

paulcole 3y ago

Another good one that shocks me that people ignore is the long-term effect of remote work on salaries. If you can do your job from home, there's someone who can do it who has a cheaper home than you.

jncfhnb 3y ago
Good for them. But they have no local social network.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Rather the opposite: those WHF can just live in a small city / community with 100x the "local social network", cohesion, friendliness, etc. than the ones living in some big city where they don't even know their immediate neighbors. And of course if someone from e.g. India replaces you, I'm pretty sure they'll have a far greater "local social network" than whatever Silicon Valley can offer.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    I don’t mean having friends, I mean having a useful professional network for getting jobs
    - coldtea 3y ago
      All else being equal, their lower cost will get them jobs more easily than some expesive fella's "professional network". Also, even when working remotely, people tend to remember who did a good job and who they collaborated well or has some good skills - and when they start another company, or move to work elsewhere, they can still opt to bring them in, even if they've never gossiped next to the same watercooler.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        Respectfully I disagree unless the job is low skill and fungible. Network is far more valuable. Especially local ones.
    - Volundr 3y ago
      > I mean having a useful professional network for getting jobs Why does this need to be local? Even when I was working in the office a good chunk of my professional network wasn't for in the same city as me.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        Local networks are just typically stronger. And networks in major cities are typically stronger. It will take a lot of time for this to change. I’m mostly remote but everyone is still attached to a major urban hub.
tnel77 3y ago
I think it depends on how much salaries drop. Let’s say salaries drop 25%, but more people can live in places where homes cost 50% or less, it’s likely still a good deal for that remote employee. Remote work is making cities in the Midwest far more attractive.
htek 3y ago
That's why strong unions are needed.
eweise 3y ago
You might not have to worry about that. I'm seeing people being called back into the office at least part of the time.
coldtea 3y ago
>If you can do your job from home, there's someone who can do it who has a cheaper home than you. Yes, but rent also falls in now highly coveted due to work availability areas, since people can increasingly live everywhere.
Roark66 3y ago
This is no different than living in a city, going to work in person and renting cheapest, crappiest place of residence you can. You could say "There is always someone willing to tolerate shittier living conditions and undercut you" if your pay was based on your cost of living. But it's not. Your pay is based on the supply vs demand for the type of work you do. If it so happens the work you do is worth enough to support you living in a large city(and your sales skills good enough to take advantage of it) great. There is plenty of people who work in person and can't afford more than a room in a bedsit in a city. Imagine how much better their life can be if they can do their work remotely and they can rent a house "in the hicks" for the same money. There will always be people willing to do your job for cheaper as well as these that take 3x what you take and do half. Such is life.
- paulcole 3y ago
  > There will always be people willing to do your job for cheaper as well as these that take 3x what you take and do half. Such is life. Which of these do you think is the bigger threat to you? If they can do your job roughly as well as you for half the cost, what's the employer's incentive to keep you around to do it?

hef19898 3y ago

Because AI is nowhere close to replace a large swath of jobs? Besides content spam authors? Because even in case of artists, the 100% AI generated stuff is crap compared to the AI-supported stuff.

M4v3R 3y ago
> Because AI is nowhere close to replace a large swath of jobs? It's nowhere close now. 10 years ago we were nowhere close to generative AI. How will the AI landscape look in the next 10-20 years? There's a non-zero chance that it will be ready by then to replace many jobs.
- criley2 3y ago
  There's a "non-zero" chance all life on earth is eradicated in an extinction event like a gamma ray burst too. That phrase is just smarter sounding weasel words. With regards to generative AI replacing jobs, it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in. For example, I am not a lawyer or doctor therefore it seems trivial to me that AI will replace much of what lawyers and doctors do. Both boil down to reading a libraries worth of information and then making sense of it right? Bam, easy for AI. However, I'm a professional engineer and I know how extremely complex and difficult computer science is to get right, especially at scale, therefore I'll eat my hat if in 10 years you can write "Create a facebook clone that can support 500 million simultaneous users" and the AI does anything but hallucinate nonsense that won't work. (There's also the reality that there is far more to large scale software than what can be typed into a computer or repeated by an AI, but hey, details). I'll also point out that 10 years is not so long. 10 years ago Elon Musk told us AI was replacing driving and taxis. 2015 that feature was launched. 10 years later... not so much.
  - anonylizard 3y ago
    "it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in." You attribute this to a 'bias of underestimating other people's jobs' I attribute this to a 'bias of overestimate our own jobs'. Most programmer jobs do not involve facebook clones that support 500 million users. Most programmer jobs are boring crud apps for random companies in traditional industries. Just think of what the outsourcing mills in India produce, and how many people they employ, then think again about how many jobs generative AI replace. Also, Hollywood rapidly organised to try to slow down AI. They could see, very evidently, how extremely rapidly AI was advancing, and how lethal the threat is to them.

flanked-evergl 3y ago

You say "put yourself in the shoes of the profit maximizing firm", do you expect governments to not optimize for cost, or other organizations should not optimize for cost?

coldtea 3y ago
Yes, I expect companies and even more so, governments, to not optimize for cost. I expect them to optimize for human wellbeing, a functional society, and a clean environment above cost, and then cost.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  well said. thank you.
- flanked-evergl 3y ago
  I don't see how taxing people indefinitely so that an indefinite amount can be spent to maximize employment through delivering something which can be delivered cheaper and better with more technology is optimizing human wellbeing. If the government is spending money on delivering X, they should do it as cost-effectively as possible, and the rest of the money can then be spent on other things or can remain in taxpayers pockets so they can spend it elsewhere. If the government is going to try to achieve full employment with everything it does, it will just be a disaster.

rootusrootus 3y ago

The most hopeful answer is 'because the competition will use AI to augment instead of replace, and produce a superior product.'

Mistletoe 3y ago

We even have ample evidence from history that this did not occur with other innovations. We don’t have a field of workers anymore, we have one guy in a tractor. We don’t have a factory of workers anymore, we have one guy watching the machines. We won’t have a field of lawyers, radiologists, programmers anymore, we will have one guy watching the machines. You can tell yourself you’ll be that one guy, but statistically you won’t.

htek 3y ago
How does that one guy in a tractor or that one guy watching the machines get paid when no one has a job to buy food, widgets, health care, et cetera? A sudden disruption like AI is purported to potentially cause is a recipe for total societal collapse.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  We’ve tried to kick the can down the road to a weird ponzi where we all do services for one another, but I don’t know how much longer that can go for. Now AI is going to disrupt that. We need to just stop sending all the money upwards and enjoy the benefits that mechanization and AI can bring. But I doubt that happens. > In a short essay published in 1930, the world’s most important economist, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that within 100 years, most people would be working no more than 15 hours a week. We did not get this future. We got a future where both husband and wife have to work 40+ hour weeks for the same lifestyle. He did not envision the siphoning off of wealth that would characterize the 20th and 21st century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
- f0ld 3y ago
  Easy. Make things for rich people only.

tnel77 3y ago

I think most businesses will struggle to completely eliminate the need for humans. Surely AI will continue to drive efficiency for those who remain employed and others will find new jobs and/or start their own businesses. That, or all the jobs go away and then no one has money resulting in a non-functioning economy :).

pixl97 3y ago
'completely' is the word here that simply doesn't matter. Lets say you need ditches dug and you need 100 people to do it. Lets say there's only 50 people that want to dig ditches. This is a market favorable to labor. Pay will increase and so will growth of technology. But the moment the opposite happens the equation dramatically changes. If you have 50 jobs and 51 workers looking for jobs you can now get labor to fight with itself to see who will work for the least money. >and others will find new jobs and/or start their own businesses. Right, because there's going to be some magical market where AI isn't doing the same thing (maybe direct contact prostitution for a while?). And yea, lots of little businesses will pop up, and be very quickly ate up and consolidated by large businesses exploiting the interconnectedness of technology everywhere. The future doesn't look like the past in great number of ways because of this. > then no one has money resulting in a non-functioning economy This is a very serious risk. Typically this is why authoritarian states fall apart. And in the 'free west' we risk exactly the same with larger corporate consolidation effectively forming a quasi-authoritarian state via lack of competition, rent seeking behaviors, and semi-direct control of the government via lobbying.
malka 3y ago
if all job go away, because they are replaced by AI, it means that * there is no longer a need for a working class * there is no longer a need for a consumer class If there is neither a worker class, neither a consumer class, there is no longer a need for an economy There are just rich people waging war using drones to control access to resources to fullfil their own need. Most people would become utterly irrelevant here.

anonylizard 3y ago

Its not a lie that people fall for. Its a lie people want to believe. Try telling people about the pace of AI advancement, scaling laws, how AI art managed to surpass 90% of human artists in 1 year. And it'll either result in visceral disgust, or complete indifference. People do not care. Even if the flood has consumed the street, and is rising 1 meter per minute, they do not care. Unless the flood hits their front door, and wets their feet, they prefer to live their normal lives assuming everything tomorrow will be the same as today. Hence all the AI messaging has become all about 'copilots', because that's the only message people want to listen to. There's plenty of extremely frank discussions by AI company CEOs, AI company staff, or even AI enthusiast forums, but people are utterly uninterested, and prefer to scroll tiktok and watch their TV. Only when they actually encounter a bot a work that does 95% of their work, will they suddenly wake up, and organise, and demand a response. Hollywood managed to organize at an incredible speed to demand a slowdown to AI, but the water was at their necks already. Now, its understandable why most people don't want to read about AI advancements. They have their lives, chores, children, weekend trips. They feel entitled to a life in statis, where revolutionary change doesn't happen unless they are the ones demanding it. Too bad reality doesn't work that way. In the end, its individual choice, to go all in, to decisively steer your career path for a post-AI future, or pretend it doesn't exist, and enjoy their remaining years in their jobs in bliss. I will watch with fascination and horror what happens to the latter group.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
>They feel entitled to a life in statis, where revolutionary change doesn't happen unless they are the ones demanding it. Truer words have never been spoken. My bottomwit approach: On an individual level, use AI as far as I can push it. Maximize individual productivity. Then dump the resulting profits into index funds, to hedge against when - not if - my own cognitive labor becomes near worthless by investing in the productivity of the entire Earth, broadly defined.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  This is a good investment strategy because eventually your cognitive ability will decline to zero even if AI does not advance any further!