4 ms·

I worry about this stuff a fair bit, of all the net-negative AI outcomes I think perhaps the most likely group is some variant of this combined with dystopian t

I worry about this stuff a fair bit, of all the net-negative AI outcomes I think perhaps the most likely group is some variant of this combined with dystopian techno-feudalism that drives society into an attractor state that’s hard to get out of. It’s by no means certain though, and i think the article takes an over-pessimistic take. It’s true that uber drivers and doordashers get bid down, but this is the bottom rung of the ladder of unskilled labor; there is currently massive demand for this job. If you look at restaurants I believe post-covid you see a different story, where workers are not racing to the bottom and instead employers need to offer way above minimum wage to fill roles. Trades would be an even better example, where skilled carpenters and mechanics are so in demand that it’s a comfortable six-figure job. Personally I think all these low-skilled jobs are quite likely to be automated soon. How society responds to the influx of unemployed unskilled workers will be the crux. And of course the skill bar for automation will increase; in the long term many (most?) jobs are going to be automatable. UBI or similar is the obvious solution, but Capital will of course oppose this vigorously. A new social contract will be needed; the slippery slope that the US is currently on does not end in a pretty place.

MangoToupe 1y ago
> unskilled labor I really wish we would stop using this term. Not only is driving very obviously a skill, and one I'm grateful for everytime I get in a car, but jobs that are labeled as "unskilled" often emphasize skill to a higher degree. Furthermore, as someone who has worked many "unskilled" jobs (picking crops, working in a kitchen, working front of house), the skill you have makes a massive difference to your happiness and, many times, your take-home pay. We're going to see many, many types of office work get automated long before we have automated crop pickers or cooks or (actually usable) waiters. It seems to me that office work has the highest concentration of the low-skill workers. What people really mean with the term is "engages in physical labor", I think, but that should also expose how silly it is to expect these jobs to be automated anytime soon. I now work as a software engineer, which obviously takes enormous experience aka "skill", and I'd estimate that i'm on the "thickest of ice" outside of HR and the executive suite. It's the customer service people, designers, PMs most at risk of being replaced, although I think the outsourcing trend will continue for a long time before this is successfully productized in a general case. People managers tend to be replaced (or rather, not rehired) as productivity per capita goes up. I worry far more about being forced into contract work than I do of layoffs. I'n much less bullish on UBI than other people are because I see the demand for it coming from fueling the consumer economy rather than any sort of collectively-rational approach to divvying up resources and funding development of services and infrastructure. Sure, maybe there is a role for that—I'd love to rework SSDI (without pulling the rug out from under it, as neoliberals are bound to try to do) so my disabled friends don't live so vicariously, but delivering UBI before increasing democratic control of the economy that funds it feels an awful lot like putting the cart before the horse. But that's another story。 Edit: oh one last thought: I do think we are more likely to see people getting paid to play video games long before we "bring back manufacturing" or whatever. It's going to be much easier politically to directly subsidize the bottom of the economic pyramid than it will be to basically go through another economic revolution altering the pyramid structurally.
- theptip 1y ago
  It’s all relative. While there is skill, pretty much anyone can learn it in short order. Vs “skilled labor” like trades which require many years of apprenticing. And no, it’s not a proxy for “physical labor”. Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not. (To be clear, not being pejorative here. These jobs are needed.) The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower. (Or in the other direction from the workers perspective, demand is much higher for jobs requiring less training/certification.) I don’t think working class jobs are going to go first as a group; I bet paralegals will be automated before plumbers.
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    > While there is skill, pretty much anyone can learn it in short order. This is also true of my day-to-day work. Granted I pitch myself as a generalist with over twenty years of experience, but my day-to-day work uses a vanishingly-small sliver of that. I'd estimate I could train a teenager to do a substantial portion of the work I do in just a couple of months. Would they offer the same value? No, of course not, but time and money can overcome that for most businesses. Plus, there is clearly some kind of aptitude that is difficult to teach, and harder still to measure, and even harder still to quantify. I'm not sure I'd call that "skill", though, and I don't necessarily need to make 10x as much as you do because I have that aptitude. In an ideal world, anyway. > Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not. I'm assuming you're referring to instacart workers? Normally I'd agree with you that the skill barrier to entry here is quite low, but an astonishing number of workers apparently can't tell the difference between a russet potato and a yam. Granted, AI can at least help with that problem. But surely this would also apply to many office jobs that require college degrees. For instance, my bestie has a degree in chemistry and works at a local bank branch. This job, inexplicably, requires a degree. It almost seems like the college degree is just a stand-in for, well, literacy. Surely LLMs stand for the automation of literacy on some base level—but you still need to man the bank branch with humans. So is literacy really the skill, or is it just existing with a body? Many if not most workers are not hired for their bodies, but for their literacy. Hell, if you think about it, the janitor probably has more job security than anyone else in the building from the advances of technology. > The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower. Why not call these jobs "high supply" or something like that? It gets to the point much easier, and you have less of a chance of being mistaken for saying something semantically completely different. I'm not saying that the term "unskilled labor", or certainly "skilled labor", is inherently unuseful, but the vast majority of times I've seen it employed I sense incoherence regarding who ought to be paid what for what work, and it rarely does boil down to just "skill". As you point out, supply and demand are much stronger explanatory forces. I'm just saying that some highly-valued skills are just as unimpressive as those supporting sub-minimum-wage work (ie the gig economy), and the allegedly-low supply of workers leaves me scratching my head. One of my other physical jobs as a teenager (i was a lil rural hustler) was caddying for very rich and occasionally even famous people. Many of these people are hilariously helpless with basic tasks—they can't cook, they can barely button their shirts or tie their shoes, they don't know how their phone works (which was even more baffling back then when phones had about three functions total), they don't know how to talk to their children or socialize with workers (like me), they're terrible drivers, and I even ran into a few I suspect couldn't read (which was jaw-dropping to lil hyperlexic 14-year-old MangoToupe), etc. One of them had a child who could speak better Haitian-accented french and even some patois than she could english because of how much time she spent with her foreign nanny—watching her belt out a filthy swear right next to her blissfully unaware parents had me struggling not to laugh. Serene calm and being quick to laugh at jokes is the ticket to good tips. of course you would also run into people who grew up poor or middle class before finding financial success, and the cultural and social difference was like night and day—those are the people who would continue to thrive if someone took their wealth. So—to me, the "skill economy" narrative just kind of fell apart as I grew into an adult. I just don't get why, if it's so obvious to me that "skill" isn't the core driver of many parts of our economy, we retain this language implying that it is (even if I do find my work primarily through my own said skills).

MangoToupe 1y ago

> unskilled labor I really wish we would stop using this term. Not only is driving very obviously a skill, and one I'm grateful for everytime I get in a car, but jobs that are labeled as "unskilled" often emphasize skill to a higher degree. Furthermore, as someone who has worked many "unskilled" jobs (picking crops, working in a kitchen, working front of house), the skill you have makes a massive difference to your happiness and, many times, your take-home pay. We're going to see many, many types of office work get automated long before we have automated crop pickers or cooks or (actually usable) waiters. It seems to me that office work has the highest concentration of the low-skill workers. What people really mean with the term is "engages in physical labor", I think, but that should also expose how silly it is to expect these jobs to be automated anytime soon. I now work as a software engineer, which obviously takes enormous experience aka "skill", and I'd estimate that i'm on the "thickest of ice" outside of HR and the executive suite. It's the customer service people, designers, PMs most at risk of being replaced, although I think the outsourcing trend will continue for a long time before this is successfully productized in a general case. People managers tend to be replaced (or rather, not rehired) as productivity per capita goes up. I worry far more about being forced into contract work than I do of layoffs. I'n much less bullish on UBI than other people are because I see the demand for it coming from fueling the consumer economy rather than any sort of collectively-rational approach to divvying up resources and funding development of services and infrastructure. Sure, maybe there is a role for that—I'd love to rework SSDI (without pulling the rug out from under it, as neoliberals are bound to try to do) so my disabled friends don't live so vicariously, but delivering UBI before increasing democratic control of the economy that funds it feels an awful lot like putting the cart before the horse. But that's another story。 Edit: oh one last thought: I do think we are more likely to see people getting paid to play video games long before we "bring back manufacturing" or whatever. It's going to be much easier politically to directly subsidize the bottom of the economic pyramid than it will be to basically go through another economic revolution altering the pyramid structurally.

theptip 1y ago
It’s all relative. While there is skill, pretty much anyone can learn it in short order. Vs “skilled labor” like trades which require many years of apprenticing. And no, it’s not a proxy for “physical labor”. Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not. (To be clear, not being pejorative here. These jobs are needed.) The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower. (Or in the other direction from the workers perspective, demand is much higher for jobs requiring less training/certification.) I don’t think working class jobs are going to go first as a group; I bet paralegals will be automated before plumbers.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  > While there is skill, pretty much anyone can learn it in short order. This is also true of my day-to-day work. Granted I pitch myself as a generalist with over twenty years of experience, but my day-to-day work uses a vanishingly-small sliver of that. I'd estimate I could train a teenager to do a substantial portion of the work I do in just a couple of months. Would they offer the same value? No, of course not, but time and money can overcome that for most businesses. Plus, there is clearly some kind of aptitude that is difficult to teach, and harder still to measure, and even harder still to quantify. I'm not sure I'd call that "skill", though, and I don't necessarily need to make 10x as much as you do because I have that aptitude. In an ideal world, anyway. > Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not. I'm assuming you're referring to instacart workers? Normally I'd agree with you that the skill barrier to entry here is quite low, but an astonishing number of workers apparently can't tell the difference between a russet potato and a yam. Granted, AI can at least help with that problem. But surely this would also apply to many office jobs that require college degrees. For instance, my bestie has a degree in chemistry and works at a local bank branch. This job, inexplicably, requires a degree. It almost seems like the college degree is just a stand-in for, well, literacy. Surely LLMs stand for the automation of literacy on some base level—but you still need to man the bank branch with humans. So is literacy really the skill, or is it just existing with a body? Many if not most workers are not hired for their bodies, but for their literacy. Hell, if you think about it, the janitor probably has more job security than anyone else in the building from the advances of technology. > The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower. Why not call these jobs "high supply" or something like that? It gets to the point much easier, and you have less of a chance of being mistaken for saying something semantically completely different. I'm not saying that the term "unskilled labor", or certainly "skilled labor", is inherently unuseful, but the vast majority of times I've seen it employed I sense incoherence regarding who ought to be paid what for what work, and it rarely does boil down to just "skill". As you point out, supply and demand are much stronger explanatory forces. I'm just saying that some highly-valued skills are just as unimpressive as those supporting sub-minimum-wage work (ie the gig economy), and the allegedly-low supply of workers leaves me scratching my head. One of my other physical jobs as a teenager (i was a lil rural hustler) was caddying for very rich and occasionally even famous people. Many of these people are hilariously helpless with basic tasks—they can't cook, they can barely button their shirts or tie their shoes, they don't know how their phone works (which was even more baffling back then when phones had about three functions total), they don't know how to talk to their children or socialize with workers (like me), they're terrible drivers, and I even ran into a few I suspect couldn't read (which was jaw-dropping to lil hyperlexic 14-year-old MangoToupe), etc. One of them had a child who could speak better Haitian-accented french and even some patois than she could english because of how much time she spent with her foreign nanny—watching her belt out a filthy swear right next to her blissfully unaware parents had me struggling not to laugh. Serene calm and being quick to laugh at jokes is the ticket to good tips. of course you would also run into people who grew up poor or middle class before finding financial success, and the cultural and social difference was like night and day—those are the people who would continue to thrive if someone took their wealth. So—to me, the "skill economy" narrative just kind of fell apart as I grew into an adult. I just don't get why, if it's so obvious to me that "skill" isn't the core driver of many parts of our economy, we retain this language implying that it is (even if I do find my work primarily through my own said skills).