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> "Better than the average human at most profitable tasks" I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the world are min wage workers running around and

> "Better than the average human at most profitable tasks" I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the world are min wage workers running around and doing real world things, not code monkeys and glorified type writers filling excel sheets. So yes, replacing the bullshit jobs we invented to keep people busy will be relatively easy, that's if you don't account for the fact you'll now have to create bullshit+ jobs to keep them busy And even then we're far away, sure it can shit out code for a todo webapp and create semi realistic images of a monkey eating a burrito but that's about it. More than a year ago someone betted against me here that chatgpt would revolutionise the world in the next year, nothing happened really, geeks are excited, execs are buying the hype, tons of money is transferred, yet there was no 4th industrial revolution. What happened though is that the web is flooded with absolutely useless content, amazon is full of ai generated books, students rely more and more on chatgpt to generate homeworks, thesis, "find" solutions, &c. it might very well end up being a net negative for the average joe in the long run

hotdogscout 3y ago
>I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the world are min wage workers running around and doing real world things, not code monkeys and glorified type writers filling excel sheets. This is not true at all. How many products do you use that come primarily from minimum wage workers? If a few people responsible for Google maps running stopped working the GDP loss would be much bigger than if magnitudes more minimum wage workers did the same.
- diggan 3y ago
  Forget "how many", without those people, you'd end up without food on your table. Then the rest of the products you use wouldn't matter.
  - hotdogscout 3y ago
    Also not true, I know the big farms of my state and they don't depend on minimum wage workers and I live in a third world country. I doubt agricultural wages or truck drivers are minimum wage jobs where you live. Assuming US https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Farm_Labor/fl_allwg.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Farm_Labor/fl_allw...
    - lm28469 3y ago
      France is one of if not the biggest agriculture power in Europe, most farmers can't even generate a 35hr min wage equivalent while working 80+ hours a week. 20% of them live in poverty, half of them make less than 22k euros a year Truck drivers earn between min wage and 150% of min wage, while being on the road every day and not having a social life, they drive 8 hours per day and sleep in their fucking truck while some code monkey makes 300k+/year coding memeojis at apple. Guess which ones will be automated first by openai lmao
      - qvrjuec 3y ago
        >Truck drivers earn between min wage and 150% of min wage Where are you getting this information? It's absolutely wrong. Long haul truckers (the one's you're saying don't have social lives because they drive 8 hours per day) make $71,196 on average in the US[1]. [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/LONG-HAUL-Truck-Driver-Salary#Yearly https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/LONG-HAUL-Truck-Driver...
        allendoerfer 3y ago
        He is talking about France in the sentence before. There are barely any truckers in Germany with a German nationality. They are simply not competitive. Same goes for package delivery. Just imagine what would happen to a trucker's salary in the US if it were to create a unified market with Mexico and all of Central America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_Europe... It's not necessarily a bad thing. Economies of Eastern European countries have been growing after all and Western Europe does not have enough workers because of its demographics anyway. My take is, that everybody is winning, there is less poverty than before, but some sideffects look ugly for a while.
      - hotdogscout 3y ago
        >half of them make less than 22k euros a year I'd be extremely happy making this amount. Some people are just accustomed to easier lives. >while some code monkey makes 300k+/year coding memeojis at apple. Meme position for a privileged caste statistically irrespective of skill in an institution that can piss money on anything and still succeed.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Take a look at what happened to farm employment figures over the last 100 years. It was a good thing.
- lm28469 3y ago
  The people picking trash in my street stopped working for 2 days and it looks like I live in some third world country now, two fucking days and it looks like I live in the middle of an open air dump If trucks stopped deliveries every city would die in a week If construction workers stopped building / maintaining we'd be in deep shit in 6 months or less If the people in warehouses stopped working for a week the economy would tank like it rarely does Nurses, doctors, bus/tram/train drivers, police, firefighters, ambulances, janitors, trash pickers, plumbers, sewer workers, electricians, people taking care of water treatment plants, power plants, teachers, social workers, ... You could delete facebook, openai, instagram, twitter, netflix, tesla and 90% of startups from the face of the earth right now and I'd have the exact same life as yesterday. Remove any of the people I mentioned above and society would crumble in no time And none of these are even remotely close to being automated at all, nobody cares about most of these jobs. But hey, here is a dancing kangaroo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuivg5rz_aA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuivg5rz_aA
  - hotdogscout 3y ago
    Are any of the positions you cited minimum wage workers where you live? Again, assuming US: https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-high-pay/ https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-... https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/garbage-collector/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/garbage-collector... >You could delete facebook, openai, instagram, twitter, netflix, tesla and 90% of startups from the face of the earth right now and I'd have the exact same life as yesterday. Remove any of the people I mentioned above and society would crumble in no time Yes because you picked non-essential work. (?)
    - rvnx 3y ago
      Even further, maybe the world would actually be better without these companies. Now that there are great inventions like TikTok, teenagers are depressed as hell, and they don't go to meet each other to play soccer together, because the "social" networks are giving the illusion of having that connection.
    - lm28469 3y ago
_Algernon_ 3y ago
>there was no 4th industrial revolution. Yet. The industrial revolution didn't happen in a year either.
ecoquant 3y ago
This all reminds me of my asshole great uncle making fun of me as a teenager circa 1997 while I was at the computer and on the internet. Sarcastically asking me "Can you meet girls on that?" and then laughed. He wasn't wrong in the short term but laughably wrong in the long term.
joenot443 3y ago
> I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the world are min wage workers running around and doing real world things Is this really true? It's certainly a nice soundbyte when you're making class arguments or trying to dunk on the "HN crowd", but I think it falls apart under any level of scrutiny. Who keeps your lights on? Who drives your bus? Who manages your sewage? Who teaches your kids? Who builds your roads? None of them make minimum wage and would probably be a little insulted to be characterized as such. It's pretty reductionist to call anyone outside our realm of tech a "min wage worker", they're just workers like or I. I think it's a pretty stupid and pointless exercise to subdivide people into useful or non-useful workers, serving no purpose but to further pet the smugness of HN AI skeptics.
- weakfish 3y ago
  I think this comment focuses too much on the “minimum wage” aspect - the core of the argument is that those are roles not at risk to AI in its present state, not necessarily the compensation aspect
CamperBob2 3y ago
"More than a year ago"? Really? What did anyone think was going to happen in a year? This sort of thing usually takes longer than you expect it to, and then it usually happens faster than you expect it to.

hotdogscout 3y ago

>I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the world are min wage workers running around and doing real world things, not code monkeys and glorified type writers filling excel sheets. This is not true at all. How many products do you use that come primarily from minimum wage workers? If a few people responsible for Google maps running stopped working the GDP loss would be much bigger than if magnitudes more minimum wage workers did the same.

diggan 3y ago
Forget "how many", without those people, you'd end up without food on your table. Then the rest of the products you use wouldn't matter.
- hotdogscout 3y ago
  Also not true, I know the big farms of my state and they don't depend on minimum wage workers and I live in a third world country. I doubt agricultural wages or truck drivers are minimum wage jobs where you live. Assuming US https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Farm_Labor/fl_allwg.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Farm_Labor/fl_allw...
  - lm28469 3y ago
    France is one of if not the biggest agriculture power in Europe, most farmers can't even generate a 35hr min wage equivalent while working 80+ hours a week. 20% of them live in poverty, half of them make less than 22k euros a year Truck drivers earn between min wage and 150% of min wage, while being on the road every day and not having a social life, they drive 8 hours per day and sleep in their fucking truck while some code monkey makes 300k+/year coding memeojis at apple. Guess which ones will be automated first by openai lmao
    - qvrjuec 3y ago
      >Truck drivers earn between min wage and 150% of min wage Where are you getting this information? It's absolutely wrong. Long haul truckers (the one's you're saying don't have social lives because they drive 8 hours per day) make $71,196 on average in the US[1]. [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/LONG-HAUL-Truck-Driver-Salary#Yearly https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/LONG-HAUL-Truck-Driver...
      - allendoerfer 3y ago
        He is talking about France in the sentence before. There are barely any truckers in Germany with a German nationality. They are simply not competitive. Same goes for package delivery. Just imagine what would happen to a trucker's salary in the US if it were to create a unified market with Mexico and all of Central America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_Europe... It's not necessarily a bad thing. Economies of Eastern European countries have been growing after all and Western Europe does not have enough workers because of its demographics anyway. My take is, that everybody is winning, there is less poverty than before, but some sideffects look ugly for a while.
    - hotdogscout 3y ago
      >half of them make less than 22k euros a year I'd be extremely happy making this amount. Some people are just accustomed to easier lives. >while some code monkey makes 300k+/year coding memeojis at apple. Meme position for a privileged caste statistically irrespective of skill in an institution that can piss money on anything and still succeed.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Take a look at what happened to farm employment figures over the last 100 years. It was a good thing.
lm28469 3y ago
The people picking trash in my street stopped working for 2 days and it looks like I live in some third world country now, two fucking days and it looks like I live in the middle of an open air dump If trucks stopped deliveries every city would die in a week If construction workers stopped building / maintaining we'd be in deep shit in 6 months or less If the people in warehouses stopped working for a week the economy would tank like it rarely does Nurses, doctors, bus/tram/train drivers, police, firefighters, ambulances, janitors, trash pickers, plumbers, sewer workers, electricians, people taking care of water treatment plants, power plants, teachers, social workers, ... You could delete facebook, openai, instagram, twitter, netflix, tesla and 90% of startups from the face of the earth right now and I'd have the exact same life as yesterday. Remove any of the people I mentioned above and society would crumble in no time And none of these are even remotely close to being automated at all, nobody cares about most of these jobs. But hey, here is a dancing kangaroo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuivg5rz_aA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuivg5rz_aA
- hotdogscout 3y ago
  Are any of the positions you cited minimum wage workers where you live? Again, assuming US: https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-high-pay/ https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-... https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/garbage-collector/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/garbage-collector... >You could delete facebook, openai, instagram, twitter, netflix, tesla and 90% of startups from the face of the earth right now and I'd have the exact same life as yesterday. Remove any of the people I mentioned above and society would crumble in no time Yes because you picked non-essential work. (?)
  - rvnx 3y ago
    Even further, maybe the world would actually be better without these companies. Now that there are great inventions like TikTok, teenagers are depressed as hell, and they don't go to meet each other to play soccer together, because the "social" networks are giving the illusion of having that connection.
  - lm28469 3y ago

_Algernon_ 3y ago

>there was no 4th industrial revolution. Yet. The industrial revolution didn't happen in a year either.

ecoquant 3y ago

This all reminds me of my asshole great uncle making fun of me as a teenager circa 1997 while I was at the computer and on the internet. Sarcastically asking me "Can you meet girls on that?" and then laughed. He wasn't wrong in the short term but laughably wrong in the long term.

joenot443 3y ago

> I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the world are min wage workers running around and doing real world things Is this really true? It's certainly a nice soundbyte when you're making class arguments or trying to dunk on the "HN crowd", but I think it falls apart under any level of scrutiny. Who keeps your lights on? Who drives your bus? Who manages your sewage? Who teaches your kids? Who builds your roads? None of them make minimum wage and would probably be a little insulted to be characterized as such. It's pretty reductionist to call anyone outside our realm of tech a "min wage worker", they're just workers like or I. I think it's a pretty stupid and pointless exercise to subdivide people into useful or non-useful workers, serving no purpose but to further pet the smugness of HN AI skeptics.

weakfish 3y ago
I think this comment focuses too much on the “minimum wage” aspect - the core of the argument is that those are roles not at risk to AI in its present state, not necessarily the compensation aspect

CamperBob2 3y ago

"More than a year ago"? Really? What did anyone think was going to happen in a year? This sort of thing usually takes longer than you expect it to, and then it usually happens faster than you expect it to.