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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 g

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.
  - Havoc 2y ago
    AI will create new jobs. Good jobs too. But not enough to absorb the losses volume wise and also not accessible to all. Some office Karen that calls google homepage „the internet“ and struggles using shift key to capitalize (true story) is not going to automate anything whatsoever in a world where even tech people struggle to keep up Or put different yes jobs but at different level entirely. So we’re still going to be stuck with a huge societal problem of people displaced with no place to go > But the low-leverage work will get automated Is this accurate? In my mind whether something can/will get automated is not linked to level of leverage it has.
    - cadamsdotcom 2y ago
      Plenty of computer illiterate people abound. They’re delivering your food and keeping the streets swept. There’s more than enough work in the physical world. Your hypothetical Karen will either retrain or fall behind and the world will go on. For a relatable present-day example of the structural unemployment you’re alluding to, consider the typical HN comment by the person who sent 500+ resumes only to get no response and/or be ghosted. Whatever skills they’re plying aren’t needed by employers - even though they’re software skills. Implying there exist sub-categories of software skills that are not needed in today’s economy. It’s possible for annyone to get left behind if they don’t upskill. But yet, unemployment in the US is insanely low: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59431 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59431 How do you square that circle? I don’t think there is or will be structural unemployment, but there’ll always be anecdotes to support fearmongering about it.
      - Havoc 2y ago
        The current unemployment situation seems largely irrelevant to a future scenario where mass AI roll out happens. Things are likely to change somehow. Probably dramatically. So more of the same is probably not what the future holds > They’re delivering your food and keeping the streets swept And when we automate those? If you keep automating stuff eventually you run out of places to put the displaced people. Does that not seem intuitively logical to you? Upskilling doesn’t magically solve that problem. It just saturates a different level. Bit like going to Uni used to be a certain win now less so because everyone is going to Uni.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  We all didn’t escape to knowledge work. Half the MAGA movement was the result of “rural America” not being able to adjust to the loss of factory work and manual labor.
  - Havoc 2y ago
    Yeah that’s fair. Some got left behind. My point is there is even less of a pressure relief valve this time.

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.
- Havoc 2y ago
  AI will create new jobs. Good jobs too. But not enough to absorb the losses volume wise and also not accessible to all. Some office Karen that calls google homepage „the internet“ and struggles using shift key to capitalize (true story) is not going to automate anything whatsoever in a world where even tech people struggle to keep up Or put different yes jobs but at different level entirely. So we’re still going to be stuck with a huge societal problem of people displaced with no place to go > But the low-leverage work will get automated Is this accurate? In my mind whether something can/will get automated is not linked to level of leverage it has.
  - cadamsdotcom 2y ago
    Plenty of computer illiterate people abound. They’re delivering your food and keeping the streets swept. There’s more than enough work in the physical world. Your hypothetical Karen will either retrain or fall behind and the world will go on. For a relatable present-day example of the structural unemployment you’re alluding to, consider the typical HN comment by the person who sent 500+ resumes only to get no response and/or be ghosted. Whatever skills they’re plying aren’t needed by employers - even though they’re software skills. Implying there exist sub-categories of software skills that are not needed in today’s economy. It’s possible for annyone to get left behind if they don’t upskill. But yet, unemployment in the US is insanely low: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59431 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59431 How do you square that circle? I don’t think there is or will be structural unemployment, but there’ll always be anecdotes to support fearmongering about it.
    - Havoc 2y ago
      The current unemployment situation seems largely irrelevant to a future scenario where mass AI roll out happens. Things are likely to change somehow. Probably dramatically. So more of the same is probably not what the future holds > They’re delivering your food and keeping the streets swept And when we automate those? If you keep automating stuff eventually you run out of places to put the displaced people. Does that not seem intuitively logical to you? Upskilling doesn’t magically solve that problem. It just saturates a different level. Bit like going to Uni used to be a certain win now less so because everyone is going to Uni.
scarface_74 2y ago
We all didn’t escape to knowledge work. Half the MAGA movement was the result of “rural America” not being able to adjust to the loss of factory work and manual labor.
- Havoc 2y ago
  Yeah that’s fair. Some got left behind. My point is there is even less of a pressure relief valve this time.