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Think back a few hundred years when tools were all made by hand. As the Industrial Revolution kicked off it would have been easy to say, we'll you can do simple

Think back a few hundred years when tools were all made by hand. As the Industrial Revolution kicked off it would have been easy to say, we'll you can do simple things like weave with machines but you'll never be able to build a machine that can do something complicated like build a [insert complicated tool name]. Fast forward to today where we've got the Tesla Gigafactory and you can see how far manufacturing automation has come. Not only is it rare to find tools that are made by hand today, but most of the highest quality tools are made by machines! Even if you argue that building tools by hand is better for the people no major economy in the world is going to go back to a less efficient and more costly model. The Pandora's box of AI has been opened and the world is evolving. Yes jobs will be lost and yes we wont be able to predict how far this will go.

pixl97 3y ago
The question of the future isn't about what jobs will be around, or what AI will be able to do. It is if the greedy will attempt to horde the gains from the technology and set forth a path of world war and destruction in doing so.
- snapplebobapple 3y ago
  It won't be much of a war if one side has fully automated factories pump*ng out drone armies... it is also the wrong idea entirely. The greeedy have always attempted to horde all the benefit for themselves, it is what motivates them to make new awesome things. The first big innovation in this space was unchaining that greed by giving individuals much greater rights. The second big innovation was antitruat law, breaking up market power abusers so that greedy startups can compete effectively and take market share. It is this second innovation that is failing right now and will have failed if all the benefits of automation accrue to capital rather than being competed away lowering prices and sending benefit to the consumer. Greed has and will c(ntinue to work as advertised,
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    One must not confuse wars with revolutions.
    - blooalien 3y ago
      One also must not confuse "horde" with "hoard".
    - snapplebobapple 3y ago
      That's pretty irrelevant when there is no longer any value in your opponent. Human psychology has this horrid but effective ability to out group vasts swaths of people and do horrible things to them up to and including genocide with little negative psychological impact on the perpetrator. What kept things in line in previous wars and revolutions is the cost to you in lives of fighting (vastly lowered by drone armies) and the pontential future benefit of having the people you are fighting with as customers/subjects/slaves. What's the benefit incentivizing you to minimize loss of life for your opponent when you don't need a labor force? It's also still a true response to an irrelevant frame of thought of the op comment. Greed still isn't the problem, the problem is still the government failing to mitigate market power abuse via company breakup/regulation. The above is just the likely outcome of a hypothetical that isn't relevant.
- btbuildem 3y ago
  That's not a question; it's guaranteed that they will. They always have, consistently, done so.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    I guess the question is, how much of the world will burn because of it.
    - squigz 3y ago
      This seems an unnecessary and sadly pessimistic view of humanity...
      - pixl97 3y ago
        Pessimistic, probably. Unnecessary, absolutely not. Watching the second rise of populism and fascism in the world teaches you that you must absolutely watch out for humans in mass promoting violent behavior.
      - caeril 3y ago
        Strongly agree. If there's one thing the long arc of human history has taught us, it's that those in power have immense love, respect, and charity for those who are not. Another thing I find to be unnecessary is all the organic matter whose ROI does not meet or exceed the elites' target metric. When the robots are rounding up all of our unnecessary organic matter for reprocessing, I'll look back fondly at how I didn't give in to pessimism, no matter how accurate it may be. Always remember, when you're hiding under the floorboards from the nanobots sent to disassemble you, that it's "sadly pessimistic" to think that humans have slaughtered each other for a hundred thousand years, and slept soundly at night for having done so. We achieved the status of Apex Predator and dominated the planet not by behaving like an apex predator or a dominator, but by communing with the trees, smoking ayahuasca with the buffalo, and using resources in a manner deferential and highly respectful of Mother Gaia. One of the best things about modernity is that we were raised on enlightened Saturday Morning Cartoons to understand the true reality of our species, that 99.999% of us are good and caring, and even if by some impossible situation there is a bad person, it's nothing that can't be solved by a hearty Care Bear Stare!
- yndoendo 3y ago
  Greed is there already. American Solutions for Business has an infrastructure for sales agents to use customer service representatives from Asia built into the business. Can either A) do it yourself, B) find someone locally and hire them, C) only written communication goes through Singapore and doe A or B for phone communication, D) completely out source written and verbal communication. Why spend ($$$) locally when one can out source through a company wide built solution and pay ($) and keep ($$) in your pocket? This one big business out of many. Former company I helped create was bought by Texas VCs. Moved manufacturing from local state, not Texas, and city to South Korea. Moved all customer service from local to Singapore. Because they want to make ($$$) in at least (5) years and try to find any method to save ($). Would argue that a country with a living wage economic infrastructure and design would be an indication we are pulling away from greed. Right now America is more investing in supporting greed than limiting or balancing it. Assuming this will create a long term economic bubble that will slowly stagnate the stock market as more become less wealthy and people cannot spend like they had in the past via limiting economic flow.
- electrondood 3y ago
  This is my criticism of the position that AI and the coming labor automation revolution will yield an "age of abundance" where goods are so insanely cheap that anyone can have anything: Have you ever known a company to reverse shrinkflation, or return profits to consumers, rather than to shareholders? I worry that this is another bit of feel-good garbage like "wealth will trickle down when we cut taxes for the wealthy." It's completely contrary to human behavior.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
edgyquant 3y ago
Yet people still have to work for a living, which is the point
- bognition 3y ago
  Perhaps, we currently have double the productivity of several decades ago and yet people are working more not less. Its not universally true that we "have" to work to survive. There are alternate ways to structure a society so that everyone gets what they need to survive and people have more free time to invest in relationships, art, self expression, etc... The current system is not setup to permit that kind of personalization, instead its setup to exploit workers as much as possible. The explosion of AI is just the next step in the cycle. Eventually someone will build a fully autonomous humanoid robot that is capable of doing most of the manual tasks that humans are paid for. Those robots will be cheaper than paying someone a living wage and as such those jobs will be lost. What happens to those people when this happens?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
rco8786 3y ago
All of those examples are still just repeatable processes. The machines aren't making decisions independently and then executing complex tasks based on their judgment. Not saying we'll never get there with AI...but it's a fundamentally different problem space.
- bognition 3y ago
  A huge percentage of the software that is getting built today is little more than a CRUD app with some sort of domain specific data model.
  - sublinear 3y ago
    Yes, but app maintenance and integration is what has always kept devs employed. Anyone can arbitrarily define what a v1.0.0 release looks like. It doesn't mean anything of value was really created, nor can we cut humans out when requirements need to be added.
  - rco8786 3y ago
    Tbh I completely disagree with this statement. Even extremely simple CRUD has unique data modeling, validation, storage and scaling, deployment, UI/UX concerns, etc A very, very small percentage of software falls into the category of “simple form on top of a database table”. And even when it does, it doesn’t tend to stay that simple unless it’s just kinda not that valuable anyway.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  LLMs can make decisions independently and execute tasks based on their judgment. I'm not putting a GPT-4 agent in charge of much of course, but that’s a competency problem, not a problem space one. 4 is a much more competent agent than 3.5. Presumably, 5 will be another jump from 4. You can't have these competency improvements and expect humans to always be necessary. And "just so competent, a human is needed" sounds like a real tangible line but is actually entirely arbitrary and no harder than any other line to cross.
ru552 3y ago
I'd argue that jobs wont be lost so much as change, just like all the previous technological jumps. You had an entire industry to cater to horse travel until cars came along. Then you needed an entire industry to cater to cars and their maintenance.
dheera 3y ago
I actually hope certain jobs will be lost: Anything that involves physical, biological, chemical danger, or unhealthy work habits (e.g. night/weekend on-call). These kinds of jobs shouldn't exist, if possible.
michaelbuckbee 3y ago
A far more recent and relevant example is that of secretarial and typing pools in offices. Pre personal computers, this was a viable career: taking notes in meetings, typing up and sending letters, dictation, filing, etc. functions that, for 99% of folks they just do themselves.
sublinear 3y ago
> Fast forward to today where we've got the Tesla Gigafactory and you can see how far manufacturing automation has come. Fast forward to today where we don't have the equivalent of the Tesla Gigafactory for software dev or any business operations at all.
shermantanktop 3y ago
Based on the defect rate coming out of that Tesla Gigafactory, we humans still have some runway. But it’s merely a matter of time. Improved precision, driven by AI, is likely to squeeze even more costs out of overbuilt consumer products. The phenomenon of an appliance that dies 3 months after the warranty expires will become more and more common.

pixl97 3y ago

The question of the future isn't about what jobs will be around, or what AI will be able to do. It is if the greedy will attempt to horde the gains from the technology and set forth a path of world war and destruction in doing so.

snapplebobapple 3y ago
It won't be much of a war if one side has fully automated factories pump*ng out drone armies... it is also the wrong idea entirely. The greeedy have always attempted to horde all the benefit for themselves, it is what motivates them to make new awesome things. The first big innovation in this space was unchaining that greed by giving individuals much greater rights. The second big innovation was antitruat law, breaking up market power abusers so that greedy startups can compete effectively and take market share. It is this second innovation that is failing right now and will have failed if all the benefits of automation accrue to capital rather than being competed away lowering prices and sending benefit to the consumer. Greed has and will c(ntinue to work as advertised,
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  One must not confuse wars with revolutions.
  - blooalien 3y ago
    One also must not confuse "horde" with "hoard".
  - snapplebobapple 3y ago
    That's pretty irrelevant when there is no longer any value in your opponent. Human psychology has this horrid but effective ability to out group vasts swaths of people and do horrible things to them up to and including genocide with little negative psychological impact on the perpetrator. What kept things in line in previous wars and revolutions is the cost to you in lives of fighting (vastly lowered by drone armies) and the pontential future benefit of having the people you are fighting with as customers/subjects/slaves. What's the benefit incentivizing you to minimize loss of life for your opponent when you don't need a labor force? It's also still a true response to an irrelevant frame of thought of the op comment. Greed still isn't the problem, the problem is still the government failing to mitigate market power abuse via company breakup/regulation. The above is just the likely outcome of a hypothetical that isn't relevant.
btbuildem 3y ago
That's not a question; it's guaranteed that they will. They always have, consistently, done so.
- pixl97 3y ago
  I guess the question is, how much of the world will burn because of it.
  - squigz 3y ago
    This seems an unnecessary and sadly pessimistic view of humanity...
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Pessimistic, probably. Unnecessary, absolutely not. Watching the second rise of populism and fascism in the world teaches you that you must absolutely watch out for humans in mass promoting violent behavior.
    - caeril 3y ago
      Strongly agree. If there's one thing the long arc of human history has taught us, it's that those in power have immense love, respect, and charity for those who are not. Another thing I find to be unnecessary is all the organic matter whose ROI does not meet or exceed the elites' target metric. When the robots are rounding up all of our unnecessary organic matter for reprocessing, I'll look back fondly at how I didn't give in to pessimism, no matter how accurate it may be. Always remember, when you're hiding under the floorboards from the nanobots sent to disassemble you, that it's "sadly pessimistic" to think that humans have slaughtered each other for a hundred thousand years, and slept soundly at night for having done so. We achieved the status of Apex Predator and dominated the planet not by behaving like an apex predator or a dominator, but by communing with the trees, smoking ayahuasca with the buffalo, and using resources in a manner deferential and highly respectful of Mother Gaia. One of the best things about modernity is that we were raised on enlightened Saturday Morning Cartoons to understand the true reality of our species, that 99.999% of us are good and caring, and even if by some impossible situation there is a bad person, it's nothing that can't be solved by a hearty Care Bear Stare!
yndoendo 3y ago
Greed is there already. American Solutions for Business has an infrastructure for sales agents to use customer service representatives from Asia built into the business. Can either A) do it yourself, B) find someone locally and hire them, C) only written communication goes through Singapore and doe A or B for phone communication, D) completely out source written and verbal communication. Why spend ($$$) locally when one can out source through a company wide built solution and pay ($) and keep ($$) in your pocket? This one big business out of many. Former company I helped create was bought by Texas VCs. Moved manufacturing from local state, not Texas, and city to South Korea. Moved all customer service from local to Singapore. Because they want to make ($$$) in at least (5) years and try to find any method to save ($). Would argue that a country with a living wage economic infrastructure and design would be an indication we are pulling away from greed. Right now America is more investing in supporting greed than limiting or balancing it. Assuming this will create a long term economic bubble that will slowly stagnate the stock market as more become less wealthy and people cannot spend like they had in the past via limiting economic flow.
electrondood 3y ago
This is my criticism of the position that AI and the coming labor automation revolution will yield an "age of abundance" where goods are so insanely cheap that anyone can have anything: Have you ever known a company to reverse shrinkflation, or return profits to consumers, rather than to shareholders? I worry that this is another bit of feel-good garbage like "wealth will trickle down when we cut taxes for the wealthy." It's completely contrary to human behavior.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

edgyquant 3y ago

Yet people still have to work for a living, which is the point

bognition 3y ago
Perhaps, we currently have double the productivity of several decades ago and yet people are working more not less. Its not universally true that we "have" to work to survive. There are alternate ways to structure a society so that everyone gets what they need to survive and people have more free time to invest in relationships, art, self expression, etc... The current system is not setup to permit that kind of personalization, instead its setup to exploit workers as much as possible. The explosion of AI is just the next step in the cycle. Eventually someone will build a fully autonomous humanoid robot that is capable of doing most of the manual tasks that humans are paid for. Those robots will be cheaper than paying someone a living wage and as such those jobs will be lost. What happens to those people when this happens?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

rco8786 3y ago

All of those examples are still just repeatable processes. The machines aren't making decisions independently and then executing complex tasks based on their judgment. Not saying we'll never get there with AI...but it's a fundamentally different problem space.

bognition 3y ago
A huge percentage of the software that is getting built today is little more than a CRUD app with some sort of domain specific data model.
- sublinear 3y ago
  Yes, but app maintenance and integration is what has always kept devs employed. Anyone can arbitrarily define what a v1.0.0 release looks like. It doesn't mean anything of value was really created, nor can we cut humans out when requirements need to be added.
- rco8786 3y ago
  Tbh I completely disagree with this statement. Even extremely simple CRUD has unique data modeling, validation, storage and scaling, deployment, UI/UX concerns, etc A very, very small percentage of software falls into the category of “simple form on top of a database table”. And even when it does, it doesn’t tend to stay that simple unless it’s just kinda not that valuable anyway.
famouswaffles 3y ago
LLMs can make decisions independently and execute tasks based on their judgment. I'm not putting a GPT-4 agent in charge of much of course, but that’s a competency problem, not a problem space one. 4 is a much more competent agent than 3.5. Presumably, 5 will be another jump from 4. You can't have these competency improvements and expect humans to always be necessary. And "just so competent, a human is needed" sounds like a real tangible line but is actually entirely arbitrary and no harder than any other line to cross.

ru552 3y ago

I'd argue that jobs wont be lost so much as change, just like all the previous technological jumps. You had an entire industry to cater to horse travel until cars came along. Then you needed an entire industry to cater to cars and their maintenance.

dheera 3y ago

I actually hope certain jobs will be lost: Anything that involves physical, biological, chemical danger, or unhealthy work habits (e.g. night/weekend on-call). These kinds of jobs shouldn't exist, if possible.

michaelbuckbee 3y ago

A far more recent and relevant example is that of secretarial and typing pools in offices. Pre personal computers, this was a viable career: taking notes in meetings, typing up and sending letters, dictation, filing, etc. functions that, for 99% of folks they just do themselves.

sublinear 3y ago

> Fast forward to today where we've got the Tesla Gigafactory and you can see how far manufacturing automation has come. Fast forward to today where we don't have the equivalent of the Tesla Gigafactory for software dev or any business operations at all.

shermantanktop 3y ago

Based on the defect rate coming out of that Tesla Gigafactory, we humans still have some runway. But it’s merely a matter of time. Improved precision, driven by AI, is likely to squeeze even more costs out of overbuilt consumer products. The phenomenon of an appliance that dies 3 months after the warranty expires will become more and more common.