4 ms·

I have two observations. 1) My wife trained as a typesetter on a photo typesetting machine. That was already replacing typesetters working with lead, and the p

I have two observations. 1) My wife trained as a typesetter on a photo typesetting machine. That was already replacing typesetters working with lead, and the people sorting the used lead, and working with inks etc. They still needed a past-up artist and more. Eventually the GUI based computer arrived, with PageMaker, Quark, Indesign etc. These days she is super productive with a massive online icon library available, full printing and distribution capabilities. Able to do a job that could have involved half a dozen or more people previously. Are those people unemployed now? Not really (we are talking 1.5 generation now, so not the same people). Unemployment levels are low, and the workforce is significantly larger, with men and women working. The working (outside of the home) part of the population has gone up significantly over a few generations, despite all the new enabling productive tech. What I see is a lot of visually higher quality work being delivered, but often with the same core content. So productivity has increased, but you get a glossy new shiny report in a PDF, instead of a photocopy of a typewritten page. (Yes, I do simplify. But I think you get the gist.) 2) I started as a system admin, the a systems analyst, worked through project manager, etc. until I was leading startups. In the space where I work now, circular economy and food production, there is so much work to do, that any AI support we can get is welcome. But as the work is innovative, new and not done before, most often the AI tools aren’t that useful, yet. That may change, but with a society that needs to replace a significant part of the infrastructure and processes to achieve a long term sustainable society, I actually don’t worry the AI tools will take my job or any of my colleagues job away. There is plenty to do. I have enough new things in front of me that I could probably keep a whole big venture fund occupied for a long time.

nkozyra 3y ago
No offense but jobs changing is a very different shift than jobs being entirely replaced by automation. One can adapt to needing to learn new technology, but one cannot adapt to an algorithm out performing you
- thomashop 3y ago
  The parent commenter is saying that the moment automation entirely replaced traditional typesetting, people moved on and started using the new technology. Sure a part of the population is slow to adapt and therefore at a disadvantage. But the others, like his wife, adapted. The idea is that this wave of automation will be no different than other times this has happened to us in the past.
  - T_MacThrowFace 3y ago
    The difference could be that A(G)I will automate away the would-have-been new jobs as well, instantly, as it will function as a smarter human that needs no sleep and demands no pay, sort of like a young programmer but without capital owners even having to supply caffeinated beverages.
    - thomashop 3y ago
      A lot of decisions are not based on intelligence alone. A lot is about personal beliefs and tastes. I've never totally understood this binary moment when AGI does "everything" better. How can one even define everything? Our AI partner could be the most intelligent mathematician or researcher. That's great then we can bounce ideas off of them and they can help us realize our professional / creative ambitions. Sure if our goal is to maximize profit then maybe we can outsource the decisions to an AI agent. You can get a computer to create infinite remixes of songs. I haven't seen that replacing music producers doing the same.
      - T_MacThrowFace 3y ago
        The I in AGI doesn't really mean intelligence as in "a mathematician has to be more intelligent than a janitor to do his job" *, it means the productivity equivalent of whatever human conciousness is; that is, to be able to have beliefs and tastes as well. And since it will have infinite patience, arguments such as "I prefer to have an actual human musician playing" is also up for persuasion. When everyone can just press a button and have better music automatically generated, based on their exact preferences inferred from their DNA or an fMRI brain scan, what are your creative ambitions? I'm obviously not talking about today's limited (public) AI, but far into the future, like in 5 years. * whether or not that is actually the case is irrelevant
Animats 3y ago
> So productivity has increased, but you get a glossy new shiny report in a PDF, instead of a photocopy of a typewritten page. "Now, you can typeset everything in your office" - early Macintosh ad.
staplers 3y ago
needs to replace a significant part of the infrastructure and processes to achieve a long term sustainable society AI infra is extremely energy intensive and not sustainable by any metric.
- thomashop 3y ago
  That sounds like a myth to me. An Nvidia H100 consumes up to 700 watts. The same as hair dryers and microwave ovens. Sure you have big data centers full of them but that's already happening with other hardware in other businesses too.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    (Humans are ~200W, as context)
  - staplers 3y ago
    Your assumptions are incorrect.
    - thomashop 3y ago
      Please do provide some source
ajmurmann 3y ago
This reminds me of some claims I've heard about domestic cooking and baking. Supposedly recipes got more sophisticated as we developed machinery like blenders and more pre-processed ingredients to make work quicker which ultimately resulted in time to cook or bake when hosting guests to take roughly the same amount of time as before. The dishes were just more elaborate.
- BytesAndGears 3y ago
  Same with finance, we could all live an upper-middle-class life with all the luxury, for one parent working in the home, if we were willing to live the same lifestyle as the 1950s. But life today is much easier than even then — and we’d rather pay more for that extra luxury than live the spartan lifestyle that would’ve been luxury then.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    People pay top dollar to live like we lived then.
    - ajmurmann 3y ago
      What's an example of this?
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    I think that's a bold claim. Many things that were cheap then are now unreachably expensive. Many careers that paid well then are gone. The converse is also true; many things that were unreachably expensive then are cheap now, but that doesn't mean that we can easily live such lifestyles if we choose to. Forgoing a cellphone and seatbelts doesn't make it easy to afford a bungalow! Nor is such a lifestyle even legal, in many cases. And you won't find a payphone to call your family. The world moves around us, and it's not a matter of choice to be pulled along.
  - Ludleth19 3y ago
    This is just flat out untrue for a variety of reasons. People need to stop thinking of 1945-1975 as "the norm," it was a world historic anomaly that was a direct response to earlier events- the economy targeted full and fair employment to stop people from drifting to more extremist ideologies because everyone literally just lived through the result of highly unregulated capitalism for example. That was a large impetus behind Keynesianism and Bretton Woods, which was ultimately unsustainable and led to the broader global economy we have now- which itself seems more unsustainable by the day.
moneywoes 3y ago
what opportunities do you see in food production? i’d love to get involved
- bjelkeman-again 3y ago
  Our food supply system is broken. - It emits 30% of climate emissions - 30% of food produced is gone in losses and waste - People in middle to high income countries have significant obesity and related problems (some countries have either malnourished people or obese people, and less in between) - Pollution from our agriculture and aquaculture is killing the ocean near land - Our intensive agriculture is threatening biodiversity - We have lost up to 70% of insects in many industrial nations - Essentially all (90%?) of ocean fish stocks are overfished or at capacity. Even a supposedly rational and environmentally aware nation like Sweden can stop the overfishing. The cod stock has collapsed and now the herring is going too - The soils are being destroyed or depleted - The phosphor and nitrogen cycle is broken (fossil fuels or resources that are mismanaged) I could go on. It is well documented. I work on circular food production, where we really care about putting together highly efficient nutrient loops and make sure they work locally/regionally. A mix of tech (automation, IT, climate control, etc), agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, insects etc. As part of this there are very interesting completing pieces with ways of getting the nutrients in creative ways (new food tech), dealing with animal disease (new tech), combined with sensors, ML and just plain old common sense, that can make a huge impact. If we just think through the process a bit more and take responsibility for the externalities, which really are starting to bite. Much is still overhyped in foodtech imho, specifically the stuff which claims silver bullets without proper circularity. Which is detrimental to the real solutions as investors like simple superscalable solutions, and the simple solutions are mostly not sustainable. (There are of course exceptions).

nkozyra 3y ago

No offense but jobs changing is a very different shift than jobs being entirely replaced by automation. One can adapt to needing to learn new technology, but one cannot adapt to an algorithm out performing you

thomashop 3y ago
The parent commenter is saying that the moment automation entirely replaced traditional typesetting, people moved on and started using the new technology. Sure a part of the population is slow to adapt and therefore at a disadvantage. But the others, like his wife, adapted. The idea is that this wave of automation will be no different than other times this has happened to us in the past.
- T_MacThrowFace 3y ago
  The difference could be that A(G)I will automate away the would-have-been new jobs as well, instantly, as it will function as a smarter human that needs no sleep and demands no pay, sort of like a young programmer but without capital owners even having to supply caffeinated beverages.
  - thomashop 3y ago
    A lot of decisions are not based on intelligence alone. A lot is about personal beliefs and tastes. I've never totally understood this binary moment when AGI does "everything" better. How can one even define everything? Our AI partner could be the most intelligent mathematician or researcher. That's great then we can bounce ideas off of them and they can help us realize our professional / creative ambitions. Sure if our goal is to maximize profit then maybe we can outsource the decisions to an AI agent. You can get a computer to create infinite remixes of songs. I haven't seen that replacing music producers doing the same.
    - T_MacThrowFace 3y ago
      The I in AGI doesn't really mean intelligence as in "a mathematician has to be more intelligent than a janitor to do his job" *, it means the productivity equivalent of whatever human conciousness is; that is, to be able to have beliefs and tastes as well. And since it will have infinite patience, arguments such as "I prefer to have an actual human musician playing" is also up for persuasion. When everyone can just press a button and have better music automatically generated, based on their exact preferences inferred from their DNA or an fMRI brain scan, what are your creative ambitions? I'm obviously not talking about today's limited (public) AI, but far into the future, like in 5 years. * whether or not that is actually the case is irrelevant

Animats 3y ago

> So productivity has increased, but you get a glossy new shiny report in a PDF, instead of a photocopy of a typewritten page. "Now, you can typeset everything in your office" - early Macintosh ad.

staplers 3y ago

needs to replace a significant part of the infrastructure and processes to achieve a long term sustainable society AI infra is extremely energy intensive and not sustainable by any metric.

thomashop 3y ago
That sounds like a myth to me. An Nvidia H100 consumes up to 700 watts. The same as hair dryers and microwave ovens. Sure you have big data centers full of them but that's already happening with other hardware in other businesses too.
- numpad0 3y ago
  (Humans are ~200W, as context)
- staplers 3y ago
  Your assumptions are incorrect.
  - thomashop 3y ago
    Please do provide some source

ajmurmann 3y ago

This reminds me of some claims I've heard about domestic cooking and baking. Supposedly recipes got more sophisticated as we developed machinery like blenders and more pre-processed ingredients to make work quicker which ultimately resulted in time to cook or bake when hosting guests to take roughly the same amount of time as before. The dishes were just more elaborate.

BytesAndGears 3y ago
Same with finance, we could all live an upper-middle-class life with all the luxury, for one parent working in the home, if we were willing to live the same lifestyle as the 1950s. But life today is much easier than even then — and we’d rather pay more for that extra luxury than live the spartan lifestyle that would’ve been luxury then.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  People pay top dollar to live like we lived then.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    What's an example of this?
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  I think that's a bold claim. Many things that were cheap then are now unreachably expensive. Many careers that paid well then are gone. The converse is also true; many things that were unreachably expensive then are cheap now, but that doesn't mean that we can easily live such lifestyles if we choose to. Forgoing a cellphone and seatbelts doesn't make it easy to afford a bungalow! Nor is such a lifestyle even legal, in many cases. And you won't find a payphone to call your family. The world moves around us, and it's not a matter of choice to be pulled along.
- Ludleth19 3y ago
  This is just flat out untrue for a variety of reasons. People need to stop thinking of 1945-1975 as "the norm," it was a world historic anomaly that was a direct response to earlier events- the economy targeted full and fair employment to stop people from drifting to more extremist ideologies because everyone literally just lived through the result of highly unregulated capitalism for example. That was a large impetus behind Keynesianism and Bretton Woods, which was ultimately unsustainable and led to the broader global economy we have now- which itself seems more unsustainable by the day.

moneywoes 3y ago

what opportunities do you see in food production? i’d love to get involved

bjelkeman-again 3y ago
Our food supply system is broken. - It emits 30% of climate emissions - 30% of food produced is gone in losses and waste - People in middle to high income countries have significant obesity and related problems (some countries have either malnourished people or obese people, and less in between) - Pollution from our agriculture and aquaculture is killing the ocean near land - Our intensive agriculture is threatening biodiversity - We have lost up to 70% of insects in many industrial nations - Essentially all (90%?) of ocean fish stocks are overfished or at capacity. Even a supposedly rational and environmentally aware nation like Sweden can stop the overfishing. The cod stock has collapsed and now the herring is going too - The soils are being destroyed or depleted - The phosphor and nitrogen cycle is broken (fossil fuels or resources that are mismanaged) I could go on. It is well documented. I work on circular food production, where we really care about putting together highly efficient nutrient loops and make sure they work locally/regionally. A mix of tech (automation, IT, climate control, etc), agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, insects etc. As part of this there are very interesting completing pieces with ways of getting the nutrients in creative ways (new food tech), dealing with animal disease (new tech), combined with sensors, ML and just plain old common sense, that can make a huge impact. If we just think through the process a bit more and take responsibility for the externalities, which really are starting to bite. Much is still overhyped in foodtech imho, specifically the stuff which claims silver bullets without proper circularity. Which is detrimental to the real solutions as investors like simple superscalable solutions, and the simple solutions are mostly not sustainable. (There are of course exceptions).