8 ms·

"air traffic controllers were paid a median annual salary of $132,250 in 2022, or nearly four times the $33,380 median annual pay of crossing guards" It's not

by fny 3y ago

"air traffic controllers were paid a median annual salary of $132,250 in 2022, or nearly four times the $33,380 median annual pay of crossing guards" It's not quite "expertise" that justifies the wage gap, it's supply and demand. Almost anyone can be a crossing guard--not everyone can be an air traffic controller. If AI theoretically could make anyone an air traffic controller, one would expect the salary to collapse as well. Additionally, the notion of a middle class relies on a wage differential. If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes.

bumby 3y ago
Likewise I think the author makes the same error elsewhere. TFA states: >The contemporary challenge is the high and rising price of essential services like healthcare, higher education and law, that are monopolized by guilds of highly educated experts. The rising cost of education and healthcare are not exactly going to the "guilds of highly educated experts" as much as they are ballooned by second-order effects from an overly complicated system. For example, the higher cost of education is not going to professors as much as it's going to the administrative costs as colleges continue to compete for a growing supply of students willing to pay (in part because the mass availability of student loans allows them an extensive line of credit and also because the labor market makes it seem like they must get a degree to be competitive).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Swizec 3y ago
> If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes We can study this by looking at examples! Slovenia (where I'm from) has the 3rd lowest gini index in the world[1]. Meaning we are the 3rd most egalitarian country in the world with close to zero income inequality. You would think this is fantastic, but in practice it means everyone's equally poor-ish. There's a lot of talent drain. Everyone in my millenial generation that's great at their job has either moved out of the country, works remotely for foreign companies, or has built a business that primarily targets foreign markets. They're starting to build a proper middle class, but there's nowhere for their money to go. There aren't enough higher middle class folk to support all the services they'd want. So the extra money goes to foreign companies or into inflated real estate that has become unaffordable to anyone employed locally. And there are no rich people to tax or ask for philanthropy to break the status quo. A net worth of ~$20mil puts you on the list of top 100 richest Slovenians as of 2023. Most of them made their money abroad and have also moved their wealth out of the country to avoid high taxation. The concept of "upwards mobility" is barely worth talking about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  I'm very eager to understand this. If there are no rich people to tax, then who owns the unaffordable real estate?
  - golergka 3y ago
    People who don't have income and other taxable economic activity in the country.
    - pydry 3y ago
      If they have any interest in the country, they have taxable activity. Whether the government wants to tax it is a different question. Usually they do not.
      - Swizec 3y ago
        > Whether the government wants to tax it is a different question. Usually they do not. We're talking about a formerly socialist European country here. Not everywhere is USA :) Income tax in Slovenia goes up to 50% and VAT (similar to sales tax) is an eyebleeding 22%. Capital gains taxes can be as high as 25%. Slovenia is not afraid to tax people don't worry. https://spot.gov.si/en/info/taxes/taxes/ https://spot.gov.si/en/info/taxes/taxes/
      - golergka 3y ago
        That's how you make people lose interest in the country — exactly what OP is complaining about. If you want to stop brain and capital drain, taxation should be the last thing on your mind.
        bumby 3y ago
        There's a tipping point though, right? I think the right question is, how do we find the correct threshold? Otherwise, there will be an asymmetry in which the "brains and capital" will get all the benefits of taxes with little to no skin in the game. That implies society serves the economy and not the other way around.
xyst 3y ago
Right. Instead of many people in a business (ie, accountants, lawyers, product owners, software engineers). The “workforce” can theoretically be reduced to specialists within a field: - “prompt engineer - accounting” who has vast history of accounting practices - “prompt engineer - lawyer”. No more farming out writing up complicated EULAs to Skadden. Have your general counsel do all of this for you with the help of “AI”. Or maybe have an IPO prepared without the help of a middleman such as “JPM” or “Goldman Sachs”. Billable hours drop significantly. - “prompt engineer - swe”. Instead of multiple teams of engineers. Have “Devin” scaffold out the basic application while you focus on architecting an end to end solution. All of those “middle class jobs” once held by mid tier specialists have evaporated.
- sublinear 3y ago
  I don't know enough about the other disciplines, but the SWE one would be the other way around and serially dependent. The architecture comes first and then the implementation details can be handed off to the prompt engineer. Then the code review will still require a human senior developer and maybe the architect. The testing after that can be fuzzed by AI but will still need to be confirmed by a human senior QA specialist. In other words, AI can lower the bar for entry level work (not by much), but it does not eliminate or create any new jobs. It's very similar to what search did for entry level work. Search results "powered by AI" are also over a decade old.
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    This has been my impression overall with AI so far as someone with Senior in their title. AI is very good at doing things that can be unit tested, or doing small implementation details. It falls flat on its face when you ask it to understand architectural patterns, or even reference other classes/modules in a broader codebase. The hard part about coding is rarely the code, more often it is understanding the human side of things, and how you can fulfill real world needs of users.
  - robjan 3y ago
    I think it actually replaces an army of junior engineers or your offshore development house. The real engineering continues while the grunt work is farmed out to AI. It also kills the junior engineer since there will be years where they are less valuable than something with a marginal cost close to zero.
mhh__ 3y ago
> Supply https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
dmurray 3y ago
Well, we can also say that we expect air traffic controllers generate at least their $132k/ year in value. Crossing guards seem to have a similar role and in theory could be generating the same value, but at the margin they're probably not - you'd expect hiring another one would be worth some significant fraction of the $132k to railway companies, but they're not competing to hire more of them. So if AI enables every unskilled worker to produce $132k of value instead of $33k, who gets the $99k surplus? Marxist economics teaches us that in a capitalist society, without additional state intervention, the employer gets all of it. Too bad for the worker. The good news, though, is that most labour economists wouldn't go as far as Marx. In modern societies the working man seems to get at least some benefit from productivity gains that don't come directly from him working harder. And even if you do believe Marx, note the caveat about "without state intervention". The modern state has many tools to intervene and is not afraid to use them: taxes, minimum wage laws, mandating bullshit jobs. In this scenario, doubling minimum wage wouldn't hurt economic productivity - the workers are all producing $132k of value, so not a single one will be laid off if they need to be paid $66k each. Of course, there are some coordination problems to solve...
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > In modern societies the working man seems to get at least some benefit from productivity gains that don't come directly from him working harder. And even if you do believe Marx, note the caveat about "without state intervention". The modern state has many tools to intervene and is not afraid to use them: taxes, minimum wage laws, mandating bullshit jobs. That may have been the case 30, 40 years ago in the US. In reality, the minimum wage in almost the entire US (unchanged since 2009, to add!) is not enough to afford to have a family [1]. Companies and the ultra rich aren't taxed shit - when you have people like Warren Buffett calling to tax him and his ilk more [2], it's obvious that the situation is clearly out of control. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/living_wage.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/living_wage.asp [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE8AP0LZ/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE8AP0LZ/
  - golergka 3y ago
    Why would you expect a person to be able to afford a family on minimum wage? Why would you even want that? If you raised a minimum wage to that level, you would eliminate a lot of low-level jobs completely, and leave people who don't aspire or need this non-trivial level of achievement without jobs.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Additionally, the notion of a middle class relies on a wage differential. If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes. Yup, and that is going to be the defining problem of the next decade - IMHO even more than climate change and most other environmental issues. The lower classes aren't going to be threatened by AI, not for a looong time until we get "I, Robot"/Star Trek TNG Data-like robots with precision dexterity comparable to a human. The jobs they do aren't automatable at all, have been automated long ago so it's not an issue any more (most of manufacturing, mining) or human labor will be cheaper than a robot replacing it (which is sad enough - shouldn't automation actually free the masses from toiling in hard and rewardless jobs?). The higher classes (depending on definition, usually the 1-10 top % of wealth) aren't going to be threatened by AI either. Those who have the money have the power after all, and almost everyone with a fully paid off home and a second one to rent out should be set even for the worst cases. But the wide masses? Realistically, as you said most of them will fall to lower classes in income and lifestyle, and a very few luckshotters (="AI prompt engineers") manage to raise up. We've seen in the last decade or so just how powerful and reactionary the search of these masses for a scapegoat for their externally-caused misfortune can be, and it can take on a lot of different forms: nationalism to far-right xenophobia, antisemitism, anti-muslim, anti-intellectual ("antivaxxers", a ton of "homeschoolers")... that's a lot to take on even for a stable society, and external influence (enemy nation propaganda, financially motivated propaganda such as the Macedonian troll farms hunting for ad placements, domestic media moguls) makes it even worse. Honestly I have zero idea how the fuck humanity is supposed to continue to exist as a civilization longer than 10-20 years. Even the best of our democracies are falling apart not just at the fringes (you always had and will have loons) but in the center.
- bumby 3y ago
  Alarmism aside, there are ways to mitigate this outcome. Take your comment: >or human labor will be cheaper than a robot replacing it One option is to create an automation tax, which makes human labor more competitive while also supplanting the income taxes that are lost due to automation. That's just one example, but like so many problems that are of man-made origin, there are also potential solutions of man-made origin. They are not natural laws.
holoduke 3y ago
Yes. Most people will be seen as unneeded occupants by the rich elite. A world with only a few million is desired by them. Workers are no longer needed. Low and middle class people are waste.
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
You see this all the time. Like college degrees for example. They did studies that showed if you got a university degree you would earn X times more than someone who didn't. But that was only the case because a relatively small percentage of people did go to college. Once EVERYONE has a college degree, this doesn't work anymore.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  College degrees is a bad example to use. Even today, a bachelors degree is highly correlated with a massive earnings boost compared to a high school only education. Sources: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jqzJ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jqzJ
  - adamtaylor_13 3y ago
    I doubt that's the intrinsic value of the degree (a la supply and demand), but rather the mindset, social-economic status, and background of someone that goes to college. (At least in the US)
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
      Exactly this, the degree is used as a proxy for the actual qualities that employers for certain higher paying positions are screening for. But that's not what they tell you. They tell you that 'having a degree will get you a high paying job'. This stops being the case if the everyone has a degree and the proxy relationship no longer works. The honest thing to say is have the correct "mindset, social-economic status, and background" and you will get a high paying job.
    - adamredwoods 3y ago
      While having a strong position in social-economic class is indeed influential, data shows even an associate's degree helps increase long term salary. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cba/annual-earnings https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cba/annual-earnin...
  - 3y ago
cyanydeez 3y ago
We could easily bring back the middle class by.capping public corporation CEO pays. We choose yo ignore wealth ineqaulty for delusional reasons

by fny 3y ago

bumby 3y ago

Likewise I think the author makes the same error elsewhere. TFA states: >The contemporary challenge is the high and rising price of essential services like healthcare, higher education and law, that are monopolized by guilds of highly educated experts. The rising cost of education and healthcare are not exactly going to the "guilds of highly educated experts" as much as they are ballooned by second-order effects from an overly complicated system. For example, the higher cost of education is not going to professors as much as it's going to the administrative costs as colleges continue to compete for a growing supply of students willing to pay (in part because the mass availability of student loans allows them an extensive line of credit and also because the labor market makes it seem like they must get a degree to be competitive).

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Swizec 3y ago

> If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes We can study this by looking at examples! Slovenia (where I'm from) has the 3rd lowest gini index in the world[1]. Meaning we are the 3rd most egalitarian country in the world with close to zero income inequality. You would think this is fantastic, but in practice it means everyone's equally poor-ish. There's a lot of talent drain. Everyone in my millenial generation that's great at their job has either moved out of the country, works remotely for foreign companies, or has built a business that primarily targets foreign markets. They're starting to build a proper middle class, but there's nowhere for their money to go. There aren't enough higher middle class folk to support all the services they'd want. So the extra money goes to foreign companies or into inflated real estate that has become unaffordable to anyone employed locally. And there are no rich people to tax or ask for philanthropy to break the status quo. A net worth of ~$20mil puts you on the list of top 100 richest Slovenians as of 2023. Most of them made their money abroad and have also moved their wealth out of the country to avoid high taxation. The concept of "upwards mobility" is barely worth talking about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

mitthrowaway2 3y ago
I'm very eager to understand this. If there are no rich people to tax, then who owns the unaffordable real estate?
- golergka 3y ago
  People who don't have income and other taxable economic activity in the country.
  - pydry 3y ago
    If they have any interest in the country, they have taxable activity. Whether the government wants to tax it is a different question. Usually they do not.
    - Swizec 3y ago
      > Whether the government wants to tax it is a different question. Usually they do not. We're talking about a formerly socialist European country here. Not everywhere is USA :) Income tax in Slovenia goes up to 50% and VAT (similar to sales tax) is an eyebleeding 22%. Capital gains taxes can be as high as 25%. Slovenia is not afraid to tax people don't worry. https://spot.gov.si/en/info/taxes/taxes/ https://spot.gov.si/en/info/taxes/taxes/
    - golergka 3y ago
      That's how you make people lose interest in the country — exactly what OP is complaining about. If you want to stop brain and capital drain, taxation should be the last thing on your mind.
      - bumby 3y ago
        There's a tipping point though, right? I think the right question is, how do we find the correct threshold? Otherwise, there will be an asymmetry in which the "brains and capital" will get all the benefits of taxes with little to no skin in the game. That implies society serves the economy and not the other way around.

xyst 3y ago

Right. Instead of many people in a business (ie, accountants, lawyers, product owners, software engineers). The “workforce” can theoretically be reduced to specialists within a field: - “prompt engineer - accounting” who has vast history of accounting practices - “prompt engineer - lawyer”. No more farming out writing up complicated EULAs to Skadden. Have your general counsel do all of this for you with the help of “AI”. Or maybe have an IPO prepared without the help of a middleman such as “JPM” or “Goldman Sachs”. Billable hours drop significantly. - “prompt engineer - swe”. Instead of multiple teams of engineers. Have “Devin” scaffold out the basic application while you focus on architecting an end to end solution. All of those “middle class jobs” once held by mid tier specialists have evaporated.

sublinear 3y ago
I don't know enough about the other disciplines, but the SWE one would be the other way around and serially dependent. The architecture comes first and then the implementation details can be handed off to the prompt engineer. Then the code review will still require a human senior developer and maybe the architect. The testing after that can be fuzzed by AI but will still need to be confirmed by a human senior QA specialist. In other words, AI can lower the bar for entry level work (not by much), but it does not eliminate or create any new jobs. It's very similar to what search did for entry level work. Search results "powered by AI" are also over a decade old.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  This has been my impression overall with AI so far as someone with Senior in their title. AI is very good at doing things that can be unit tested, or doing small implementation details. It falls flat on its face when you ask it to understand architectural patterns, or even reference other classes/modules in a broader codebase. The hard part about coding is rarely the code, more often it is understanding the human side of things, and how you can fulfill real world needs of users.
- robjan 3y ago
  I think it actually replaces an army of junior engineers or your offshore development house. The real engineering continues while the grunt work is farmed out to AI. It also kills the junior engineer since there will be years where they are less valuable than something with a marginal cost close to zero.

mhh__ 3y ago

> Supply https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

dmurray 3y ago

Well, we can also say that we expect air traffic controllers generate at least their $132k/ year in value. Crossing guards seem to have a similar role and in theory could be generating the same value, but at the margin they're probably not - you'd expect hiring another one would be worth some significant fraction of the $132k to railway companies, but they're not competing to hire more of them. So if AI enables every unskilled worker to produce $132k of value instead of $33k, who gets the $99k surplus? Marxist economics teaches us that in a capitalist society, without additional state intervention, the employer gets all of it. Too bad for the worker. The good news, though, is that most labour economists wouldn't go as far as Marx. In modern societies the working man seems to get at least some benefit from productivity gains that don't come directly from him working harder. And even if you do believe Marx, note the caveat about "without state intervention". The modern state has many tools to intervene and is not afraid to use them: taxes, minimum wage laws, mandating bullshit jobs. In this scenario, doubling minimum wage wouldn't hurt economic productivity - the workers are all producing $132k of value, so not a single one will be laid off if they need to be paid $66k each. Of course, there are some coordination problems to solve...

mschuster91 3y ago
> In modern societies the working man seems to get at least some benefit from productivity gains that don't come directly from him working harder. And even if you do believe Marx, note the caveat about "without state intervention". The modern state has many tools to intervene and is not afraid to use them: taxes, minimum wage laws, mandating bullshit jobs. That may have been the case 30, 40 years ago in the US. In reality, the minimum wage in almost the entire US (unchanged since 2009, to add!) is not enough to afford to have a family [1]. Companies and the ultra rich aren't taxed shit - when you have people like Warren Buffett calling to tax him and his ilk more [2], it's obvious that the situation is clearly out of control. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/living_wage.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/living_wage.asp [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE8AP0LZ/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE8AP0LZ/
- golergka 3y ago
  Why would you expect a person to be able to afford a family on minimum wage? Why would you even want that? If you raised a minimum wage to that level, you would eliminate a lot of low-level jobs completely, and leave people who don't aspire or need this non-trivial level of achievement without jobs.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Additionally, the notion of a middle class relies on a wage differential. If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes. Yup, and that is going to be the defining problem of the next decade - IMHO even more than climate change and most other environmental issues. The lower classes aren't going to be threatened by AI, not for a looong time until we get "I, Robot"/Star Trek TNG Data-like robots with precision dexterity comparable to a human. The jobs they do aren't automatable at all, have been automated long ago so it's not an issue any more (most of manufacturing, mining) or human labor will be cheaper than a robot replacing it (which is sad enough - shouldn't automation actually free the masses from toiling in hard and rewardless jobs?). The higher classes (depending on definition, usually the 1-10 top % of wealth) aren't going to be threatened by AI either. Those who have the money have the power after all, and almost everyone with a fully paid off home and a second one to rent out should be set even for the worst cases. But the wide masses? Realistically, as you said most of them will fall to lower classes in income and lifestyle, and a very few luckshotters (="AI prompt engineers") manage to raise up. We've seen in the last decade or so just how powerful and reactionary the search of these masses for a scapegoat for their externally-caused misfortune can be, and it can take on a lot of different forms: nationalism to far-right xenophobia, antisemitism, anti-muslim, anti-intellectual ("antivaxxers", a ton of "homeschoolers")... that's a lot to take on even for a stable society, and external influence (enemy nation propaganda, financially motivated propaganda such as the Macedonian troll farms hunting for ad placements, domestic media moguls) makes it even worse. Honestly I have zero idea how the fuck humanity is supposed to continue to exist as a civilization longer than 10-20 years. Even the best of our democracies are falling apart not just at the fringes (you always had and will have loons) but in the center.

bumby 3y ago
Alarmism aside, there are ways to mitigate this outcome. Take your comment: >or human labor will be cheaper than a robot replacing it One option is to create an automation tax, which makes human labor more competitive while also supplanting the income taxes that are lost due to automation. That's just one example, but like so many problems that are of man-made origin, there are also potential solutions of man-made origin. They are not natural laws.

holoduke 3y ago

Yes. Most people will be seen as unneeded occupants by the rich elite. A world with only a few million is desired by them. Workers are no longer needed. Low and middle class people are waste.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

You see this all the time. Like college degrees for example. They did studies that showed if you got a university degree you would earn X times more than someone who didn't. But that was only the case because a relatively small percentage of people did go to college. Once EVERYONE has a college degree, this doesn't work anymore.

dghlsakjg 3y ago
College degrees is a bad example to use. Even today, a bachelors degree is highly correlated with a massive earnings boost compared to a high school only education. Sources: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jqzJ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jqzJ
- adamtaylor_13 3y ago
  I doubt that's the intrinsic value of the degree (a la supply and demand), but rather the mindset, social-economic status, and background of someone that goes to college. (At least in the US)
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
    Exactly this, the degree is used as a proxy for the actual qualities that employers for certain higher paying positions are screening for. But that's not what they tell you. They tell you that 'having a degree will get you a high paying job'. This stops being the case if the everyone has a degree and the proxy relationship no longer works. The honest thing to say is have the correct "mindset, social-economic status, and background" and you will get a high paying job.
  - adamredwoods 3y ago
    While having a strong position in social-economic class is indeed influential, data shows even an associate's degree helps increase long term salary. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cba/annual-earnings https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cba/annual-earnin...
- 3y ago

cyanydeez 3y ago

We could easily bring back the middle class by.capping public corporation CEO pays. We choose yo ignore wealth ineqaulty for delusional reasons