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Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?

• hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  I don't think anyone serious was ever claiming they weren't trying to "replace jobs with AI", except maybe as a PR thing. Indeed this claim falls straightforwardly out of the numbers: Human labor is the most expensive component of most industries in the developed world, so naturally we'd like a subsitute. It's a much more obvious near-term target than, say, innovating over a decade or two to reduce the global price of commodity rice by a cent per kilogram.
• gregjor 2y ago
  Who hasn’t admitted this already, either outright or by their actions? Going back to the industrial revolution the people who control capital and production have openly sought to replace human labor with automation. Nothing new, just that this time it threatens “knowledge workers” and the techie HN crowd. If you hear someone claim that they want to “advance humanity” with automation they profit from you can safely assume they don’t mean that sincerely.
• qrsjutsu 2y ago
  > the more people can be prepare Nope. People will prepare as much as engineers care. But engineers don't care. Educating the people is tedious. It's easier to "manipulate"/direct them, which is the job of representatives, who are about status and money and being groomed by the industries, who are exclusively about money. People are fine without AGI until they are not. That's another 15 years at least. If you want to worry, worry about local solutions to climate change mitigation where you need old school manpower, big machines, shovels and logistics.
• smgit 2y ago
  It's not going to happen over night. But even if something radical happens, it will probably play out like Marshall Brain describes in Manna - https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 Not all bad.
  • actionfromafar 2y ago
    All bad except for a tiny enclave of freeholders in Australia or something?
    • disambiguation 2y ago
      Apparently the manna system falls apart at some point because of "billionaire infighting" and the Australia system prevails.
  • Espressosaurus 2y ago
    The first half feels far too realistic. The second half feels like wish fulfillment. I honestly don't see how you get there from here.
• akmarinov 2y ago
  I thought everyone already knew this. IT, doctors, lawyers will be mostly gone. Probably most office worker jobs that I’m not thinking of. Best thing to do is become a nurse, that’ll be bulletproof until AGI makes progress on robotics.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    How is AI going to replace doctors?
    • akmarinov 2y ago
      What's a doctor anyway? You go to 90% of doctors, you plug in your symptoms, they get to ask you questions based on your symptoms and vitals, possibly order tests and imaging and come up with a diagnosis based on those, using data from their university days and medical cases so far. AI would be hundreds of times better than any doctor, since it'll base its diagnosis on thousands of years of collective medical cases and texts, instead of the couple of decades that individual doctors can muster up. There's still the surgery part of it, where some doctors stick for a while, but surgery robots have been getting really good at that too, they'll likely be the first robots to put humans out of jobs.
      • scarface_74 2y ago
        Is AI going to physically check your breathing, check diabetics skin and feet, do surgery, robots are nowhere near good enough to do complex surgery.
        • akmarinov 2y ago
          Yeah, hence the nurse part and i already addressed surgeons
          • scarface_74 2y ago
            I’ve had one surgery in my life - a triple arthrodesis in 1996. It’s where the doctor goes in a breaks the bones in your foot and resets it. Here is the description of it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK551713/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK551713/ Would you trust a robot to do that? Have you known anyone who had to deal with diabetes? That’s the only major, constant care I know about from relatives besides more minor things like eye surgery.
• laptopdev 2y ago
  We dont align our current actions with AGI. Rather, we align our actions with a presumption of what we think AGI is to become (assuming some inevitability). Some people believe AGI is imminent, others believe AGI is here now. Observe their behavior, calm your anticipation, and satisfy your curiosoty rather than seeking to confirm a bias on the matter. The tech is new in my experience and accepting claims beyond my capacity to validate such a grand assertion would require me to take on faith the word of someone I don't know or have never seen, who likely generated such a query in the first place outside the context length of Chatgpt mini.
  • sureIy 2y ago
    The problem is that exactly tomorrow someone might announce some technology that will revolutionize AI once again, like ChatGPT did only a couple of years ago. No one expected that. No one expected creative jobs to be taken by Midjourney. We could hide behind "we can't predict the future" but it would be wise to get ready for that inevitability. One day you will ask your computer to "open a word processor" and it will pull a fully-featured Word 2013 out of thin air. What will developers do then? That day could be March 1st, 2025 or 2050. Many of us will likely still be in the jobs pool either way.
• RachelF 2y ago
  Yes, the idea of businesses is to reduce costs. Labor costs are a big expense. It's harder to do than it looks. Offshoring to places with lower wages has kept wages for many white- and blue-collar workers in the West from growing. But it is hard to do correctly. I suspect AI or AGI or AI with agents will take a longer time to actually work reliably than many suspect.
  • graemep 2y ago
    I agree, but, like offshoring, it does not have to work all that well to reduce demand by enough to have a significant impact on incomes.
• aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
• purplethinking 2y ago
  Yes, of course. But it's also inevitable and overall good. If we stagnate then we are headed towards certain doom via climate change, nuclear war, an asteroid, a vulcano eruption leading to cooling and crop failure or a pandemic. If we are to survive and thrive long term we need to become true masters of our environment, and that means we need to be smarter, stronger and more productive. I think this is my main disconnect with the pessimists, I don't see "stop AI progress" as a valid option anyway.
  • pydry 2y ago
    AI does fuck all about climate change or nuclear war or any other existential threat. I'm not all that bothered about stopping AI progress, but if capital is overwhelmingly directed towards replacing blue and white collar workers with machines while climate change and every other existential threat is starved of capital then as a species we are doomed. It's not like this is being done for the benefit of humanity either. Ask those same profit-obsessed oligarchs (or their media outlets) who are effusive about AI's ability to create a better future what will happen if the retirement age is raised in response or even kept the same. They 180 on their techno-jobs-killing-optimism so fast you will get whiplash: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dandoonan/2024/01/30/demographic-changes-highlight-growing-retirement-challenges/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dandoonan/2024/01/30/demographi...
  • slooonz 2y ago
    Yes, collective suicide means we no longer have any Climate Change issue. Calling this "a solution" stretches the definition of the word tho. > If we are to survive and thrive long term we need to become true masters of our environment, and that means we need to be smarter, stronger and more productive. Yes. I fundamentally agree with that vision. We want this for us. We/Us humans. If we build AGI we won’t thrive. We won’t be smarter. We won’t be stronger. We won’t be more productive. We won’t be masters of our environment. The AI will be all of this. We’ll just be relegated to passive, helpless spectators.
    • munksbeer 2y ago
      I think you've got a very strong view on what it will definitely look like, but I don't see any exploratory thinking on how we move to that point. The world is chaotic. We have no way to predict that this is what it will end up like. One possibility is that AGI remains a tool, without a mind or direction other than what we give it. We may manage to constrain it in that manner, and it is used to do "work" in the sense of solving mathematical problems, engineering problems, etc. We could end up with a reduced scarcity (if not post scarcity) scenario, where people do other things for meaning (come on, use your imagination here, plenty to imagine). I could even imagine neural implants and regenerative technology. Meaning suddenly we're not so constrained by our physical limitations. What possibilities does that unlock? I sometimes feel that the doomers lack imagination.
• ergocoder 2y ago
  Yes. Who doesn't want to admit that? This is not just for businesses but for everything in life. For example, we all buy robot vaccuums, right? People even rearrange furniture to make sure it is compatible with the robot vaccuums. Everyone wants it to do more and be more reliable.
• jkhdigital 2y ago
  All major technological advancements have eliminated some jobs and created others. In general, producing more with less human input is how society becomes richer. Is it a tragedy that we no longer need telephone switchboard operators, ice cutters, and lamplighters? There were surely countless mini-tragedies as the people who made their livelihoods that way struggled with stagnant wages and unemployment, but the next generation became free to pursue other more productive forms of work and accumulated greater wealth as a result.
  • veunes 2y ago
    Yet the change isn’t without hardship, though. For the people who lose jobs due to new technologies, the transition can be difficult. But I agree innovation may seem disruptive in the short term for some, in the long run, it’s part of a broader process
    • versteegen 2y ago
      > in the long run, it’s part of a broader process Well put. And what is this broader process? Those who say new jobs will always be created as others become obsolete think that the broader process is standing still in stream: job titles change, average wealth and comfort increase, but the structure of civilisation will never change. That we'll all still have jobs and won't become unemployable. Eternal stasis sounds absurd to me. But I don't assume that the change that happens will be bad. And I don't think all jobs will go. I think we'll end up with a fraction of people employed and well off, such as tradespeople, while the majority will busy themselves with unpaid labour. I already do.
  • jatins 2y ago
    > have eliminated some jobs and created others genuinely asking: Do you see LLMs creating jobs? I see them taking 10 jobs to create one Sure there might be a world down the line where one does NOT need jobs and everything is practically free because AI makes infinite of it. But the transition period could be quite painful
  • Xenoamorphous 2y ago
    > Is it a tragedy that we no longer need telephone switchboard operators, ice cutters, and lamplighters? As a society? No. For those individuals that were caught up in the transition? Probably.
• rustcleaner 2y ago
  As for why people losing economic power is a bad thing, see CGP Grey's Rules for Rulers videos. AI is about to make a whole bunch of people superfluous, and superfluous people might as well be rhinos on a safari as the techno-war overlords cruise by in their jeeps. It means our societies will degrade into natural resource rich but skill poor countries: disenfranchised poor hordes kept in check by the zoo keepers. Are you ready for your Brave New World? :^)
  • ben_w 2y ago
    The people in Brave New World were still economically relevant. It may be more like SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-13 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-13
• gnfargbl 2y ago
  But how is an individual supposed to "prepare" for AGI? The outcome of further automation will be to move even more capital under the control of an even smaller number of hands. It's that increasing inequality which is the problem, not AGI.
  • globalise83 2y ago
    If you are right, a modest investment in an index fund of shares covering tech companies in the USA should generate enough returns over the next few years to retire in comfort.
    • weatherlite 2y ago
      They will have very good earnings if this happens but I'm not expecting them to become 10x their current market cap in a few years. So yeah I put some money on the index but retire comfortable sounds too good to be true to me.
  • weatherlite 2y ago
    You're right. It's tough, I'm not gonna tell you otherwise. I think there are 3 main things most people should try to do: 1) Mental preparation - understanding your current career is finite (be it 5 more years or 20, its not gonna last forever) and broaden and deepen other things in your life such as family, friends and hobbies. I've contemplated the loss of my career hundreds of times already if not thousands, I do it almost on a daily basis (not for hours, just a few moments of a passing thought). It's kind of the opposite of denial and it seems helpful for me to do it. 2) Financials - an obvious one. We should all accept that quite possibly our standard of living will be lower 10 years from now. It's not a certainty, but the likelihood is high enough that we need to be more frugal - which means both trying to save money as much as we can and also learning to enjoy things that don't cost a lot of money. 3) Possible career pivot - there will be opportunities. Some parts of the labour market are starving for employees and I don't mean just the trades - there's a constant need for nurses, teachers, care etc. The problem is these jobs are notorious for burning their workers out; I don't have a solution for that.
• jdietrich 2y ago
  None of this is news to blue collar workers. We've spent the last 300 years replacing skilled manual workers with machines.
• Throw83949489 2y ago
  > we aren't advancing humanity with AI, it is just focused on automating out jobs. We are doing both! You are assuming people like to work, and jobs are something good. Without jobs, people will have less stress and more free time. They will spend more time on leisure activities, with their families, and so on. Also jobs contribute to carbon emissions, we have to maintain cities, large offices, car makes CO2 for commute...
  • karles 2y ago
    How will they pay the bills when the 1%-hoarders are keeping all the profits for themselves, and now that the Oligarchy is in full reign in the US, taxes and "big bad socialism" is out of the question?
    • Throw83949489 2y ago
      My country had socialism for 40 years. It is highly overrated.
      • karles 2y ago
        Come to Scandinavia and see how it's done right.
    • graemep 2y ago
      Dole, servants to the oligarchy, policing and security (which will be more needed with a large discontented class)....
  • sapphicsnail 2y ago
    Companies aren't going to assign less work hours and still pay the same wages. A small group of people will become even richer and everyone else will have to work just as hard as before.
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    > Without jobs, people will have less stress and more free time. They will spend more time on leisure activities, with their families, and so on. and how will they pay for rent, food, etc.? __that's__ the question
• wickedsight 2y ago
  I don't think we're replacing anything. Just looking at my own workplace, we can have multiple X increases in productivity and still have enough work to do. In IT for example, we're building nice software, but some bigger project have been running for years and are nowhere near done. Accelerating this would mean we can do more projects with the same budget, not that we will slash people and keep doing the same number of projects. Sure, this won't be true for every role and organization, but for many this will definitely be true.
• xgstation 2y ago
  from Company perspective, I think the answer is yes but from individual perspective I don't think that is the case. Since AlphaGo first time was released and beat world-class players, have all these players gone? not really, but it even promotes more people study Go with AI instead. As a software engineer myself, am I enjoy using AI for coding? yes, for many trivial and repetitive works, but do I want it to take my coding works fully away such that I can just type natural languages? My answer is no. I still need the dopamine hit from coding myself, either for work or my for hobby time, even I am rebuilding some wheels other folks have already built, and I believe many of ours are the same.
  • Havoc 2y ago
    > have all these players gone? The guy that got beaten literally decided to retire immediately after explicitly because AI displaced him > On 19 November 2019, Lee announced his retirement from professional play, stating that he could never be the top overall player of Go due to the increasing dominance of AI. I do get your point though that overall player count is still fine
    • xgstation 2y ago
      I can imagine how depress Lee felt when being beaten by AI the first time, but looking at the bright side, we see Shin Jin-seo as the rising star in the AI-era of Go by leveraing AI to help him training.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• cadamsdotcom 2y ago
  Let’s chat about lawnmowers. There was a time when cutting grass was done with scythes, specially shaped swords. All day back and forth swinging the blade to get grass just the perfect length. Swing, take a step, swing. It was backbreaking labor in the sun. So lawns probably were quite expensive and having your own was probably pretty flashy, or maybe they were public, provided by the state to the people, or maybe both. Along comes the string of inventions that led to lawnmowers. Now, anyone can mow grass in an afternoon. Gone are the lawn-scything jobs! Did the sky fall then? Of course we know how this played out. Some lawn-scythers lamented the loss of their work, but they’re forgotten to history. Other clever lawn-scythers went and trained as lawn-mowers, while a few even cleverer ones went and became lawnmower mechanics, a few became engineers so they could start to design lawnmowers, and some started lawnmower factories and employed plenty of workers making way more lawnmowers than anyone thought possible. Lawnmowers aren’t free but they’re super cheap and getting cheaper all the time, they’re abundant, and the real cost now is labor, which is going up all the time. So what do you do? You pay a lawnmowing person to take care of your lawn while you work your high paid office job. Whenever someone says AI is coming for the jobs, ask them which exact AI model is coming for the jobs; which tool built by which startup it is that’s coming for the jobs, and if so why are they hiring?
  • Havoc 2y ago
    Thing is when manual jobs got replaced we escaped to knowledge work. This time there is no equivalent. These lawnmower/textile worker analogies fall flat because this time might actually be different
    • cadamsdotcom 2y ago
      Knowledge work is too broad a definition. There’s immense potential to reduce the “creative drudgery” in work - think background art, music for malls, first drafts of company comms… Some knowledge work has more leverage than other knowledge work. We don’t have a term for this distinction right now. But the low-leverage work will get automated, leaving us with more pleasant, higher-level, more creative jobs. This is just a continuation of the trend that saw most people leave the factory and sit down at air conditioned desks. Knowledge workers can keep up if they stop thinking of themselves as workers and start thinking of themselves as automators of knowledge work.
• denkmoon 2y ago
  Do we, so far, have any economic analysis or research showing AI is actually reducing jobs?
• usrnm 2y ago
  The whole idea behind computers has always been replacing people, it's the foundation of our industry. From the very first scientific calculations that used to be performed by people before computers, replacing human labour is what allowed IT to grow so fast and so big. Most people on this site enjoy their fat paychecks because one person writing code can replace thousands of people that used to do stuff manually decades ago, so drop the shocked Picachu face. AI is just another tool for doing what we've been doing forever.
  • JimDabell 2y ago
    Not just computers, technology in general. Humanity has spent thousands of years inventing technology to reduce human effort. We always find new jobs to do because we want to achieve bigger and better things. Arguing against AI because it takes jobs is essentially an argument against virtually all technology.
• postepowanieadm 2y ago
  Of course we do, just not our own jobs.
• revskill 2y ago
  If you take automation and AI to the extreme, the world only needs ONE person to manage the whole robotic AI to do the rest of production. What else do you need ? More people ?
• 627467 2y ago
  Can we just admit many jobs either have very crappy parts to it or are entirely crappy and wouldn't it be nice if that could be replaced with technology?
  • listenallyall 2y ago
    Will technology replace your income?
    • globular-toast 2y ago
      My "income"? As in, the food going into my belly? The warmth of my house etc? We are already totally dependent on modern technology for these things. When was the last time you foraged or lit a fire?
• Tade0 2y ago
  My position is that the demographic collapse in countries with a near 100% literacy rate is going to more than make up for any jobs replaced by AI. It is said that AI will make 200 million jobs redundant. China's workforce alone shrunk by 80 million during the previous decade according to their 2020 census. Overall I think we need to increase efforts with AI, particularly make it more energy efficient, as currently it's simply expensive to run, if we wish to not bear the consequences of having a globally ageing literate population.
• physicsguy 2y ago
  It feels to me like there'll start to be people retraining sooner rather than later. If you feel your job is threatened, you're likely to look at options that can't be easily displaced. I did a Physics degree and PhD and my 'backups' are going to do something in the very very regulated nuclear industry (currently crying out for people in the UK) or going into teaching. I think the people who will be most easily displaced are those that don't have an additional combined skillset. I see a lot of software engineers with a CS background whose skillset is only writing software. I think people from mixed backgrounds are likely to do better in a big disruption since they've got another thing to jump to, perhaps in a different industry.
  • oytis 2y ago
    If an AI can do "most economically valuable jobs" retraining won't help. Unless you want to retrain for something that is not economically valuable enough to spend compute on it, and has having a human body as a non-negotiable prerequisite.
    • physicsguy 2y ago
      I chose those examples specifically because they’re difficult to replace a physical person there
      • disambiguation 2y ago
        I also aspire(d) to be a physics teacher, but I'm pessimistic about it. Things like khan academy already make "teaching" obsolete, imagine pairing that with an GPT93 agent. 24/7 interactive learning.
        • physicsguy 2y ago
          All the research I've seen around MOOCs and online only learning is that it's pretty tough for people to stick at, and only 5-10% of people ever complete a course. I just can't see that putting people in front of a computer to do this sort of thing is a good strategy for everyone.
• gunian 2y ago
  it's just a new evolutionary/eugenic variable. the people who can get out, switch to trades and manual labor, learn to fish, minimize costs etc will pass the test and survive then robots will become a thing and the same for manual labor i think the non manual labor work class was chosen because they have demonstrated problematic sentiments to the powers that be a lot of people might die or UBI may become a thing. migration to less developed areas might happen although i doubt the powers that be will allow cross border movements they love their fiefdoms the barons will always be there unless there is a skynet type event that wipes out humanity same shit different day if you a peasant like me and not a good dev without any dev education or connections most probably will die it is what it is
• beardyw 2y ago
  If we assume that very many people will be unemployed there will need to be a complete change in political focus towards supporting society rather than the individual. That is, wealth will need to be directed to those who need it rather than those who can grab it. The USA is one of the least politically prepared for that, but contains the wealth to resolve it. We will live in interesting times.
  • graemep 2y ago
    > That is, wealth will need to be directed to those who need it rather than those who can grab it. That is a huge political change that will be strongly = resisted. Do you recognise the quote "to each according to his needs"? It is what you are suggesting, and the very opposite of the thinking that dominates the world (not just the US, these days). > We will live in interesting times. Certainly, but it will be very turbulent, and very likely violent. Even previously stable societies are clearly a lot less stable if you look at the political changes and the hostility between different political groups (the move from those on the other side being just "wrong" to being "evil" - "worse than Nazis" to quote a prominent British politician). I would say we live in scary times.
    • beardyw 2y ago
      > Do you recognise the quote Yes, of course I did see the parallel, but I think raking over old quotes doesn't help keep a clear mind. Wikipedia - February Revolution describes Russia's failure to ...modernise its archaic social, economic, and political structures while maintaining the stability of ubiquitous devotion to an autocratic monarch. Sounds familiar?
      • graemep 2y ago
        I agree about not raking over old quotes, but people will. Any attempt to do what you are suggesting will be labelled "communism" or similar. Of course communism is not the only value system I remember an Yes Minister episode (I cannot recall which one) in which some one quotes that and Hacker guesses the source of the quote is Jesus. Not an unreasonable guess. The problem is that whatever values you base the justification of the change on, they have to be radically different from that of the current political consensus. > Wikipedia - February Revolution describes Russia's failure to The problem is what that lead to. Not something I want to live through, or want my children to live through.
• raylad 2y ago
  Throughout human existence there have been only a few means of distribution of resources. In hunter/gatherer days within small bands, and also to a large extent within families (but perhaps a bit less now) the method was Generalized Reciprocity[1], where people basically take care of each other and share. This was supported by the extremely fertile and bountiful forests and other resources that were shared between early people. Later, the large "water monopoly" cultures like ancient Egypt had largely Redistributive economies, where resources flowed to the center (the Pharaoh, etc.) and were distributed again outwards. Finally we got Market Exchange, where people bargain in the marketplace for goods, and this has been efficiently able (to a greater or lesser degree) to distribute resources for hundreds of years. Of course we have some redistributive elements like Social Security and Welfare, but these are limited. Market Exchange relies now on basically everyone having a Job or another means to acquire money. But with automation this breaks down because jobs will more and more be taken by the AIs and then by robotic AIs. So only a few possibilities are likely: either we end up with almost everyone a pauper and increase dole payments just up to the point where there's no revolution, or we somehow end up with everyone owning the AI resources and their output, taking the place the forests and other ancient resources played in hunter-gatherer days, and everyone can eventually be wealthy. It looks as if, at least in the USA we are going down the path of having a tiny oligarch class with everyone else locked out of ownership of the products of the AI, but this may not be true everywhere, and perhaps somehow won't end up being true here. [1] Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins https://archive.org/details/stoneageeconomic0000sahl/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/stoneageeconomic0000sahl/page/n5...
  • graemep 2y ago
    "It looks as if, at least in the USA we are going down the path of having a tiny oligarch class with everyone else locked out of ownership of the products of the AI, but this may not be true everywhere, and perhaps somehow won't end up being true here." We are already headed towards that in every major economy, and all the others I know of too. Wealth and power started concentrating before AI, so its not just AI. The group that has the wealth and power has the power to block change. They can distract the hoi polloi with scape goats (e.g. immigrants), culture wars, doomscrolling, day to day survival and a lot more. The current trajectory is towards a global oligarchic class.
• concordDance 2y ago
  > Can we just be real and just say we aren't advancing humanity with AI, it is just focused on automating out jobs. These are the same thing. Automation does advance humanity. The reason for the current world prosperity has been lots of automation. (There is the separate and much more concerning risk of humans going the way of the horse, but that does not seem to be what you are concerned about)
• globular-toast 2y ago
  What we need to admit is why we are so scared of this. Do you want to work? If nobody has to work then we are all permanently on holiday. Isn't that good? What are you afraid of here? We just get to spend all day making or finding things fun. Are people afraid because they have no meaning in their lives other than work? Do you need a boss? Are you scared because everyone will be equal and you won't be "special" any more? What is it? I'd really like to know specifically what people are afraid of. Please just think about it a bit. Everyone seems to be thinking "I'll lose my job!" but what you need to be thinking is "everyone loses their job".
  • ramblerman 2y ago
    > but what you need to be thinking is "everyone loses their job". People realize the end goal, but it's naive to think that will happen overnight. The road there could get really messy, with a lot of wealth redistribution while a few still hang on to their jobs. Not to mention the truly dystopian scenario where a few companies hold all the compute (and power).
• randoments 2y ago
  In the whole history of the world, humans have always strived for automating their job and yet, here we are with a single digit unemployment rate.
• oytis 2y ago
  I understand why _they_ would want to replace jobs with AI, but not why _we_ would want it. The democratic world as we know it is largely based on labour, and especially intellectual labour, having a lot of leverage. If it is no longer the case, most of people are not needed any more, and their opinion doesn't matter, as simple as that. Not sure how you (as a worker) want to prepare for that - maybe by becoming depressed, quiet and atomized in advance. US leaders (political and big tech) seem to be preparing exactly for that now, but my assumption is you are not one of them.
• downboots 2y ago
  If the perceived value of laying you off exceeds the perceived value of keeping you employed... Seems like work and value decoupled
• EZ-E 2y ago
  I still don't think AI will displace a lot of jobs. Am I the only one left? I'm sure it had had impact in copywriting/translation but I don't see a tsunami.
  • waltercool 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • insane_dreamer 2y ago
      > better labor conditions hang on there! the industrial revolution brought people into _worse_ labor conditions -- it wasn't technology that created better work environments, it was worker protests that did so, and it took decades
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    these things take time -- first, industry specific tools leveraging LLMs have to be created and take root; then companies slowly implement those by freezing new hires and not filling positions that empty, reducing their costs and leaving the rest of the employees to pick up the slack because they are now "more productive" thanks to AI
• Agraillo 2y ago
  Why can't other AI tasks be also in focus? Like having fun with some creativity. I remember that I once created a story with an LLM when we switched sides. I still remember some of the twists and it's interesting that I no longer can attribute them to either of us :)
• Gud 2y ago
  I would absolutely embrace AI if the means of production was owned collectively, not by the few privileged. It seems to me, that the path we are on will lead us closer to a Terminator-like future, and less likely to lead to a positive future. Our leadership are greedy fools.
  • listenallyall 2y ago
    > Our leadership are greedy fools. Why? Because our government hasn't seized the assets of the AI companies, like intellectual eminent domain? This is brand new technology from which nobody knows the eventual impact on society (hence the discussion in this thread). And if the government did take it over, who would continue to build it, earning a govt salary?
    • mostlysimilar 2y ago
      Are you really so intellectually un-curious that this is the only alternative you can envision? How about a government that recognizes the benefits of technological progress but ensures the rewards are shared by all instead of just a select few?
      • senordevnyc 2y ago
        To be fair, they were specifically responding to a comment about "the means of production being owned collectively", which sounds exactly like the government seizing assets.
• antquinonez 2y ago
  There’s uses of AI that do not replace people but rather hands them tools that enable and empower them to create as they have never created before. I hope to talk about what I’m building in the next few days.
• dabe19 2y ago
  When I look at the progress and advancements in industrial automation as a blueprint, and I have worked in this field for my entire professional career, and from my time building a few toy 'agentic AI' systems as a hobby and for education, the jobs aren't going anywhere. They're going to change, where humans sit in the loop and how they program will change, probably a good blend of procedural control and object-oriented processes, where the agents are considered objects and process flow is defined in the procedural methods, but don't freak out there's still a ton to do. There are many design principles we can leverage to enhance human participation and fulfillment instead of just replacing them. Lights out manufacturing hasn't taken off, why would we think a lights out society would work any better? Edited for formatting.
• donanon 2y ago
  This is great thread! Thanks everyone for serious polite exchange! Seems to me that AI (today) allows amateurs to generate low quality professional work. Cheaply. Disrupting the careers of many creative professionals. Where does that lead?
• donanon 2y ago
  Newb: What a great thread of informed, courteous folks! Thanks! Simplistic: A major impact today is that amateurs using AI can generate tons of low quality professional work for peanuts. Overall quality suffers but profits soar or rise enough. Where does that lead?
• dfilppi 2y ago
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• waltercool 2y ago
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• HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  Another point to acknowledge is that this job elimination, even if it temporarily boosts corporate profits, is not going to be good for the economy, nor going to boost GDP. Cheap AI labor will depress wages and therefore reduce consumer demand. This is not a recipe for GDP growth or a vibrant economy anymore than outsourcing to reduce labor costs has been. The people trying to sell AI as good for the economy will no doubt tell you that companies don't want to reduce your salary or lay you off - that they will be happy to keep payroll the same, or increase it (increased consumer spending = GDP growth!) by employing you as a highly paid AI whisperer. Yeah, no, companies are looking to reduce payroll.
• tim333 2y ago
  >Can we just be real and just say we aren't advancing humanity with AI, it is just focused on automating out jobs. No because that's not real. AI will automate jobs but also advance humanity. It's like saying can't we be real and admit that tractors and farm machinery were not advancing humanity they were just replacing farm jobs. They replaced some farm jobs but also provided food abundance and let people go off and work as personal trainers and the like to help people lose the weight. And work as scientists, artists etc.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > just tell the truth plainly that everybody hasn't actually thought about what happens when AGI comes they have and they will reap the benefits as the "alphas"; what happens to the rest of humanity, that's someone else's problem
• Lockal 2y ago
  According to their clear definition, "AGI will be achieved once OpenAI has developed an AI system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits"[1]. To reach this amount they can just do nothing, as they secured $500 billion in investment[2]. So consider "AGI" already happened, but nothing happened, only slop. [1] https://gizmodo.com/leaked-documents-show-openai-has-a-very-clear-definition-of-agi-2000543339 https://gizmodo.com/leaked-documents-show-openai-has-a-very-... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2025/01/21/oracle-stock-surges-ahead-of-500-billion-stargate-openai-trump-deal/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2025/01/21/oracle-sto...
• starchild3001 2y ago
  I graduated from undergrad 25 yrs ago. I worked in 5 different business sectors with highly overlapping but also quite distinct skill sets (4.5 yrs of academia/writing papers, 5 yrs of telecom/signal processing engineering, 7 yrs of quantitative finance, 1 yr of mobile consumer-device intelligence, 7.5 yrs of information retrieval). Every ~5 yrs I've had to reinvent myself. So, what about the disruption from AI? Just suck it up, ok? You have to reinvent yourself anyway if you are in the tech sector. Start moving already. Every tech disruption is a challenge and opportunity.
  • mauflows 2y ago
    Curious to learn more. Did you make these changes by just switching jobs? Did education precede it?
    • starchild3001 2y ago
      Background in telecommunications/signal processing (phd) + applied math. I studied finance + machine learning for two years as a hobby before the switch. In the evenings and weekends. Studied data structures + algorithms + python for two years before took a job as a software engineer in google (initially as a data scientist in apple). Worked 6 days a week for 1.5 yrs to master information retrieval in google. So lots of studying was involved on top of a solid educational base.
• munksbeer 2y ago
  In my opinion, strong AI is inevitable. And I also think superhuman AI is inevitable, though where that point lies in future is guesswork. Between those two points is a period of instability. Judging from history, many people will be impacted and those people may not transition to new jobs. Though in my case, if I were to lose my software engineering job because AI had become good enough to replace me completely then my ego thinks that we'd be much closer to superhuman AI than I thought and all bets are off. Software developers don't just write code. They think, and think, and think and second guess, and look at the larger stack impact, and scaling, and so on. AI may well get to that level but IMO there is a reason we still don't see robots fixing plumbing, and it is because the reasoning part of these jobs are much deeper than some people realise. Once we get to the point that huge amounts of white collar reasoning workers can be replaced, then I optimistically think we'll also be closer to reducing scarcity. What I'd hope for is that we would adjust to other types of work that we find hard to predict at the moment, just like every other leap in technology has resulted in. I know the strong narrative is AI can simply do those too, but try to imagine a world where we have superhuman ability to produce, but no consumers because no-one has the means to pay for the produce. That just doesn't work. These so called "elites" will have no-one to sell to. So it seems self obvious to me that a balance will be found. If it isn't people will elect governments who force that balance. Maybe some rough period ahead, but I don't subscribe to the doom theories on the economic side. What I do unfortunately subscribe to is doom of another type. Once near superhuman AI is possible, then it feels impossible to stop it from being widely available, eventually. And given how many humans there are on the planet, I feel there will be some who are deranged enough to use the technology for full planet wide destruction of some sort. I think this feels almost close to inevitable.
• ben_w 2y ago
  > Can we just be real and just say we aren't advancing humanity with AI, it is just focused on automating out jobs. I believe the goal is to advance humanity by automating out jobs. I don't know if that is wishful thinking or if it will actually work (Nash equilibriums and politics make me suspect the former) but the idea that it was possible to do both at the same time was already a widespread meme in the spaces that culturally drive AI research of the sort we now see. The idea that we can have both is also why optimistic people sometimes bring up (amongst other things) UBI in this context. I'm really not sure what an individual can do to "prepare" for AGI; it's like trying to guess in 1884 if you should bet on Laissez-faire USA, the British Empire, or that manifesto you've heard of from Marx a few decades ago. And then deciding that, no matter what, the world will always need more buggy-whips and humans will never fly in heavier-than-air vehicles.
• Mukina 2y ago
  Good question. My sense is that there is a lot of compute capacity, data acquisition, etc., required to create any dent in this type of automation. Likely the next 2 years are focused on more “compute”, “data center capacity”, and “energy”. That allows for a) better training, b) more inference load, … and hence prepare for more automation. Much like the Y2K era of 30 years back, we are entering the new era of YNA, an era whY Not Automate.
• tomholandpick 2y ago
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• lizamomo96 2y ago
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• jakeinspace 2y ago
  What still has value when intellectual/knowledge work becomes free? 1) Land 2) Natural Resources 3) Energy 4) Weapons 5) Physical/in-person Labour That means that, unless there are big societal changes, you better have at least a few of those available to you. A huge percentage of Americans own no land nor investments in durable assets. That means at best, they are thrown into a suddenly way-oversupplied physical labour market in order to make a living. At the geopolitical level, a country like the United States, with so much of its current wealth tied to amorphous things like IP, the petro dollar, and general stability, certainly has all 5 of the above categories covered. However, there's a lot of vulnerable perceived value in the stock market and housing market which might vanish if the world is hit with a sudden devaluation of labour. Even if the US is theoretically poised to capitalize off of AGI, a sudden collapse of the middle class and therefore the housing market and therefore the entire financial sector might ruin that. UBI is the bare minimum I can imagine preventing total societal collapse. Countries with existent strong safety nets or fully socialist systems might have a big advantage in surviving this. I certainly feel a certain sense of comfort living in Quebec, where although many aspects of government are broken, I can at least count on a robust and cheap hydroelectric-supplied grid and reasonable social safety nets. Between AI and climate change, I feel like there are worse places to be this century.