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The idea that demand for work remains constant is also bad. Work is not a zero sum game, it expands depending on capability and needs. Ultimately our desires ar
by visarga 3y ago
The idea that demand for work remains constant is also bad. Work is not a zero sum game, it expands depending on capability and needs. Ultimately our desires are impossible to satisfy because we always want more than we have.
Let's take software development as an example - in 70 years of coding we have automated many things, we have plenty of libraries and languages at our fingertips. And yet we have more devs than ever, how can that be? Computers were five orders of magnitude slower 3-4 decades ago. Where did that power go into? We can clearly do today everything we did back then with less people. In reality we invented databases, applications, internet, and cloud computing, and now we have more work than ever.
Another example - in ML we suddenly got to a point where almost everything we did pre-2020 is now trivial. Why are we hiring even more devs to do NLP tasks? Our old skills suddenly became outdated, we had to learn a new paradigm, and here we are, with lots of work. Even labeling is seeing a surge - you'd think we don't need it anymore since LLMs are so smart, but in reality we need even more benchmarks and tests now that shit got serious.
Same for medicine and other fields - they all seen massive improvements and yet humans work just as hard.
- alismayilov 3y agoBut at some point, there is and there will be saturation.
- visarga 3y agoDesire is not a zero sum game. We can have more desires if they got a chance of being fulfilled.
- marcosdumay 3y agoJevons paradox happen all the time, except for when it doesn't. People have some simplistic view where society always respond the same way to the same inputs. It's patently false, but well, the complex real world has no place on people's mind. This phrase: > Ultimately our desires are impossible to satisfy because we always want more than we have. Is visibly false nowadays. A lot of people have been happy with what they have since the last century. Yet, an entire science keeps it as a fundamental.
- visarga 3y agoPeople would "want" more things if they were possible. "We couldn't even dream of it, but now we have it." AI will embolden our desires.
- Jensson 3y ago> A lot of people have been happy with what they have since the last century. Yet, an entire science keeps it as a fundamental. The context here is whether they would spend more if they could, and in that context very few are happy with what they got since they eagerly work hard to get more money so they can spend more money.
- aiisdoomed 3y ago> A lot of people have been happy with what they have since the last century. I dont see many folks riding horses or using the telegraph these days, perhaps you do?
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoDo Amish count?
- joshspankit 3y ago> > Ultimately our desires are impossible to satisfy because we always want more than we have. > Is visibly false nowadays. Counterargument: Processing power is multiple orders of magnitude higher and yet instead of tuning software to make use of it, we created more layers of convenient abstraction and thought up new use-cases that expanded in to it.