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I kind of get it, but at the same time...isn't "we made a machine to do something that people used to do" basically the entire history of of technology? It feel
by sincerely 1y ago
I kind of get it, but at the same time...isn't "we made a machine to do something that people used to do" basically the entire history of of technology? It feels like somehow we should have figured out how to cope with the "but what about the old jobs" problem
- poszlem 1y agoNot really, because this time it's not machine to do something that people used to do, but a machine to do anything and everything that people used to do.
- bamboozled 1y agoEnjoy eating a bowl of pasta ?
- aabhay 1y agoHistory is full of technology doing things that go beyond human possibility as well. Think of microscopes, guns, space shuttles. There has been technology that explicitly replaces human labor but that is not at all the whole story.
- darthoctopus 1y agothat is the point of Luddism! the original Luddite movement was not ipso facto opposed to progress, but rather to the societal harm caused by society-scale economic obsolescence. the entire history of technology is also powerful business interests smearing this movement as being intrinsically anti-progress, rather than directly addressing these concerns…
- scotty79 1y agoSomehow modern Luddite messaging doesn't communicate that clearly either. Instead of "where's my fair share of AI benefits?" we hear "AI is evil, pls don't replace us".
- happytoexplain 1y ago>pls don't replace us Yeah, how dare they not want to lose their careers. Losing a bunch of jobs in a short period is terrible. Losing a bunch of careers in a short period is a catastrophe. Also, this is dishonest - nobody is confused about why people don't like AI replacing/reducing some jobs and forms of art, no matter what words they use to describe their feelings (or how you choose to paraphrase those words).
- Filligree 1y agoThat’s false. It’s very easy to become confused about the point, when anti-AI folks in general don’t spend their time attacking companies… What I typically see is: - Open source programmers attacking other open source programmers, for any of half a dozen reasons. They rarely sound entirely honest. - Artists attacking hobbyists who like to generate a couple pictures for memes, because it’s cool, or to illustrate stories. None of the hobbyists would have commissioned an artist for this purpose, even if AI didn’t exist. - Worries about potential human extinction. That’s the one category I sympathise with. Speaking for myself, I spent years discussing the potential economic drawbacks for once AI became useful. People generally ignored me. The moment it started happening, they instead started attacking me for having the temerity to use it myself. Meanwhile I’ve been instructed I need to start using AI at work. Unspoken: Or be fired. And, fair play: Our workload is only increasing, and I happen to know how to get value from the tools… because I spent years playing with them, since well before they had any. My colleagues who are anti-AI, I suspect, won’t do so well.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- candiddevmike 1y agoI've seen enough anecdotes about business productivity lately that LLMs is not the solution to their workload struggles. You can't lay off people and expect the remainder + LLMs to replace them.
- portaouflop 1y ago
- orourke 1y agoI think the concern in this case is that, unlike before where machines were built for other people to use, we’re now building machines that may be able to use themselves.
- fragmede 1y agoThe concern is the same, people want to be taken care of by society, even if they don't have a job, for whatever reason.
- beeflet 1y agoIn the old times, this was a "want" because the only people without work were those unqualified or unable to work. In the new times, it will be a "need" because everyone will be unemployed, and no one will be able to work competitively.
- Jordan-117 1y agoNot that much of a difference tbh. If one traditional machine allows one worker to do the work of twenty in half the time, that's still a big net loss in those jobs, even if it technically creates one. The real issue is that AI/robotics are machines that can theoretically replace any job -- at a certain point, there's nowhere for people to reskill to. The fact that it's been most disruptive in fields that have always been seen as immune to automation kind of underscores that point.
- johnwheeler 1y agoThere’s a difference between something and everything though
- Kiro 1y agoI think we should be careful attributing too much idealism to it. The Luddites were not a unified movement and people had much more urgent concerns than thinking about technological progress from a sociocentric perspective. Considering the time period with the Napoleonic Wars as backdrop I don't think anyone can blame them for simply being angry and wanting to smash the machines that made them lose their job.
- leptons 1y ago>wanting to smash the machines that made them lose their job. Wondering how long before people start setting datacenters on fire.
- andriesm 1y agoI find it hard to locate my sympathy button for people who smash and burn things built up by other people.
- saulpw 1y agoDatacenters aren't built by people, they're built by corporations.
- einsteinx2 1y agoCorporations which are entirely made up of people. Not to mention the people that physically built and maintain the data center. Or did the actual legal fiction of a corporation do it? Maybe the articles of incorporation documents got up and did the work themselves?
- saulpw 1y agoIt means that no one cares about the creations except in terms of money. If an Oracle building burns down and no one is hurt, I wouldn't shed a single tear. If an artistic graffiti mural adorned its wall, I would be more upset.
- CamperBob2 1y agoWould we be better off today if the Luddites had prevailed? No? Well, what's different this time? Oh, wait, maybe they did prevail after all. I own my means of production, even though I'm by no means a powerful, filthy-rich capitalist or industrialist. So thanks, Ned -- I guess it all worked out for the best!
- marnett 1y agoThe Amish seem to be doing fine — and I don’t know if their way of life is under as much existential risk of upheaval and change as everyone else’s
- mock-possum 1y agoIm sorry but - Who do you think, precisely, seems to be doing ‘fine’ among the Amish? White cishet men? I cannot imagine what a hell my life might have been like if I were born into an Amish community, the abuse I would have suffered, the escape I would had to make just to get to a point in my life where I could be me without fear of reprisal. God just think about realizing that your choices are either: die, conform, or a complete exodus from your family and friends and everything you’ve ever known? “The Amish seem to be doing just fine” come on
- marnett 1y agoI was not super precise in my remark, so I think it suffered from being misconstrued as written. My remark was strictly in the context of the Parent posts remark on Luddites prevailing or not. In the context of Luddite societies or communities of faith, the Amish have been able to continue to persist for roughly three centuries with Luddite-like way of life as their foundation. In fact, they are not strictly Luddite in the technical sense, but intentional about what technologies are adopted with a community-focused mindset driving all decisions. This is what I meant be "fine" - as in, culture is not always a winner-take-all market. The amish have persisted, and I don't doubt they will continue to persist - and I envision a great eye will be turned to their ways as they continue protected from some of the anti-human technologies we are wrestling with in greater society. All of this is to say, we have concrete anthropological examples we can study. I do not doubt that in the coming years and decades we will see a surge of neo-Luddite religious movements (and their techno-accelerationist counterparts) that, perhaps three centuries from now, will be looked back upon in the same context as we do the Amish today. As an aside, if we place pro-technological development philosophy under the religious umbrella of Capitalism, I think your same critiques apply for many of the prior centuries as well. Specifically with regards to the primary benefactors being cis white men. Additionally, I do not think the racial angle is a fair critique of the Amish, which is a religious ethno-racial group in a similar vein of the Jewish community.
- case 1y agoGlad to see the Luddites getting a shout out here. This is a new / recent book about the Luddite movement and it’s similarities to the direction we are headed due to LLMs: https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/ https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-t... Enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it!
- zb3 1y agoYes and thanks to this we're working more and more because most of the profit goes to the top as the inequality is rising. At some point it will not be possible to put up with this.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- shortrounddev2 1y agoManual labor was replaced with factory labor, factory labor replaced with knowledge work. If knowledge work is replaced with AI, what do we go to then? Not to mention that the efficiency gains of the modern tech industry are not even remotely distributed fairly. The logical extreme conclusion of an AI company would be where the CEO, Founder, 100% owner, and sole employee coordinates some underling AIs to run the entire company for him while he collects the entire profit and shares it with no one, because American government is an oligarchy
- gaul_bladder 1y ago> what do we go to then? You’ll waste away for a little while in some sort of slum and then eventually you’ll head to the Soylent green factory, but not for a job. After that problem solved!
- overgard 1y ago"we made a machine to do everything so nobody does anything" is a lot different though
- merth 1y agoWe invent machines to free ourselves from labour, yet we’ve built an economy where freedom from labour means losing your livelihood.
- Ray20 1y agoBecause we invent machines not to free ourselves from labor (inventing machines is a huge amount of labor by itself), but to overcome the greed of the workers.
- fainpul 1y ago> We invent machines to free ourselves from labour That's a very romantic view. The development, production and use of machines to replace labour is driven by employers to produce more efficiently, to gain an edge and make more money.
- brandensilva 1y agoI would hope that people realize that money in itself is merely digits on a computer and that the real power of this stuff belongs to the people since the AI inherited and learned from us. I know that's a simplification but we uphold this contract that controls us. The people get to decide how this plays out and as much as I'm hopeful we excel into a world that is more like star trek, that skips over the ugly transition that could succeed or fail to get us there. But we aren't that far off of a replicator if our AI models become so advanced in an atomic compute world they can rearrange atoms into new forms. It seemed fiction before but within reach of humanity should we not destroy ourselves.
- anon7725 1y agoOur moral and political development severely lags our technological development. I have very little confidence that it will ever catch up. Looking back over the post-WW2 era, we have seen improvements (civil rights, recognition of past injustices, expansion of medical care in many countries) but also serious systemic regressions (failure to take climate change seriously, retreat to parochial revenge-based politics, failure to adequately fund society's needs, capture of politics and law by elites). My main concern about AI is not any kind of extinction scenario but just the basic fact that we are not prepared to address the likely externalities that result from it because we're just historically terrible at addressing externalities.
- itsnowandnever 1y ago> isn't "we made a machine to do something that people used to do" basically the entire history of of technology? kinda, I guess. but what has everyone on edge these days is humans always used technology to build things. to build civilization and infrastructure so that life was progressing in some way. at least in the US, people stopped building and advancing civilization decades ago. most sewage and transportation infrastructure is from 70+ years ago. decades ago, telecom infrastructure boomed for a bit then abruptly halted. so the "joke" is that technology these days is in no way "for the benefit of all" like it typically was for all human history (with obvious exceptions)
- _heimdall 1y agoIf ML is limited to replacing some tasks that humans do, yes it will be much like any past technological innovation. If we build AGI, we don't have a past comparison for that. Technologies so far have always replaced a subset of what humans currently do, not everything at once.
- scotty79 1y agoI love SF, but somehow I don't find it very good foundation for predicting the future. Especially when people focus of one, very narrow theme of SF and claim with certainty that's what's gonna happen.
- Ray20 1y agoI mean, yes. The invention of AI that replaces virtually all workers would certainly pose a serious challenge to society. But that's nothing compared to what would happen if Jesus descended from the sky and turned off gravity for the entire planet.
- stevedonovan 1y agoHeh,I read SF as San Francisco; point remains true. Except the Valley wants to force a future, not describe it
- Flere-Imsaho 1y ago> I love SF, but somehow I don't find it very good foundation for predicting the future. Nineteen Eighty-Four would like to have a word with you! Out of all SF, I would probably want to live in The Culture (Iain M. Banks). In these books, people basically focus on their interests as all their needs are met by The Minds. The Minds (basically AIs) find humans infinity fascinating - I assume because they were designed that way.
- nearbuy 1y agoNineteen Eighty-Four captures the political zeitgeist of when it was written (~1949) and the following years better than it captures that of 1984. This was the era of the cold war and McCarthyism. Describing the present often seems surprisingly prescient to later generations.
- Keyframe 1y agoisn't "we made a machine to do something that people used to do" basically the entire history of of technology? yes, until we reached art and thinking part. Big part of the problem might be that we reached that part first before the chores with AI.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Ray20 1y agoHasn't every such technological development been accompanied by opponents of its implementation? At least now, things aren't so bad, and today's Luddites aren't trashing offices of ai-companies and hanging their employees and executives on nearby poles and trees.
- only-one1701 1y agoCan you imagine? Ha ha. Wow that would be crazy. Damn. I’m imagining it right now! Honestly it’s hard to stop imagining.
- blibble 1y agothey haven't started... yet billions of unemployed people aren't going to just sit in poverty and watch as Sam Altman and Elon become multi-trillionaires (why do you think they are building the bunkers?)
- no_wizard 1y agoThe vast majority of the movement was peaceful. There is one verified instance where a mill owner was killed and it was condemned by leaders of the movement. It was not a violent movement at its core. Second, the movement was certainly attacked first. It was mill owners who petitioned the government to use “all force necessary” against the luddites and the government acting on behalf of them killed and maimed people who engaged in peaceful demonstrations before anyone associated with the Luddite movement reacted violently, and again, even in the face of violence the Luddite movement was at its core non violent.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zzzeek 1y ago> I kind of get it, but at the same time...isn't "we made a machine to do something that people used to do" basically the entire history of of technology? this is not about machines. machines are built for a purpose. who is "building" them for what "purpose" ? if you look at every actual real world human referenced in this website, they all have something in common. which is that they're billionaires. this is a website about billionaires and their personal agendas.
- hsavit1 1y agoI feel like technology should exist to enhance the human experience, not eliminate the human experience?
- rhetocj23 1y agoYes.
- happytoexplain 1y ago>we should have figured out You would think! But it's not the type of problem Americans seem to care about. If we could address it collectively, then we wouldn't have these talking-past-each-other clashes where the harmed masses get told they're somehow idiots for caring more about keeping the life and relative happiness they worked to earn for their families than achieving the maximum adoption rate of some new thing that's good for society long term, but only really helps the executives short term. There's a line where disruption becomes misery, and most people in the clear don't appreciate how near the line is to the status quo.
- AviationAtom 1y agoI always compare it to the age of the industrial revolution. I have no doubt you had stubborn old people saying: "Why would I need a machine to do what I can do just fine by hand??" Those people quickly found themselves at a disadvantage to those who choose not to fight change, but to embrace it and harness technological leaps to improve their productivity and output.
- happytoexplain 1y agoMost people are not in a position to choose whether to embrace or reject. An individual is generally in a position to be harmed by or helped by the new thing, based on their role and the time they are alive. Analogies are almost always an excuse to oversimplify. Just defend the thing on its own properties - not the properties of a conceptually similar thing that happened in the past.
- rhetocj23 1y agoThank you for saying this.
- beeflet 1y agoThe difference is that in the industrial revolution there was a migration from hard physical labor to cushy information work. Now that information work is being automated, there will be nothing left! This "embrace or die" strategy obviously doesn't work on a societal scale, it is an individual strategy.
- brainwad 1y agoMost people are not doing "information" work. They provide interpersonal services, such as health/aged/childcare or retail/hospitality/leisure. Techies are angsty because they are the small minority who will be disrupted. But let's not pretend most of the economy is even amenable to this technology.
- anon7725 1y ago
- newsclues 1y agoReplacing dirty, dangerous jobs, and allowing people to upskill and work better jobs is one thing. Firing educated workers en mass for software that isn’t as good but cheaper, doesn’t have the same benefits to society at large. What is the goal of replacing humans with robots? More money for the ownership class, or freeing workers from terrible jobs so they can contribute to society in a greater way?
- Ray20 1y ago> doesn’t have the same benefits to society at large. The benefits to society will be larger. Just think about it: when you replace a dirty dangerous jobs, the workers simply have nowhere to go, and they begin to generate losses for society in one form or another. Because initially, they took this dirty, dangerous jobs because they had no choice. But when you firing educated workers en mass, society not only receives from software all the benefits that it received from workers, but all other fields are also starting to develop because these educated workers are taking on other jobs, jobs that have never been filled by educated workers before. Jobs that are understaffed because they are too dirty or too dangerous. This will be a huge boost even for areas not directly affected by AI.
- newsclues 1y agoI don’t think you are considering the negative consequences. When you fire massive amounts of educated works to replace them with AI you make a mess of the economy and all those workers are in a worse situation. Farming got more productive and farmers became factory workers, and then factory workers became office workers. The people replaced by AI don’t have a similar path.
- Ray20 1y ago> make a mess of the economy You're not taking something into account. The economy is becoming stronger, more productive, and more efficient because of this. The brain drain from all other fields to the few highest-paying ones is decreasing. > The people replaced by AI don’t have a similar path. They have a better path: get a real job that will bring real benefit to society. Stop being parasites and start doing productive work. Yes, goods and services don't fall from the sky, and to create them, you have to get your hands dirty.
- theptip 1y ago> AI can do anything a human can do - but better, faster and much, much cheaper. Should be pretty clear that this is a different proposition to the historical trend of 2% GDP growth. Mass unemployment is pretty hard for society to cope with, and understandably causes a lot of angst.
- brandensilva 1y agoAnd that comes down to the moral and social contract we have and the power we give to digital money and who owns it. We either let the peoples creativity and knowledge be controlled and owned by a select few OR we ensure all people benefit from humanities creativity and own it. And the fruits that it bears advance all of humanity. Where their are safety nets in place to ensure we are not enslaved by it but elevated to advance it.
- qgin 1y agoWe’re working on all-purpose human replacements. Imagine if the tractor made most farm workers unnecessary but when they flocked to the cities to do factory work, the tractor was already sitting there on the assembly line doing that job too. I don’t doubt we can come up with new jobs, but the list of jobs AGI and robotics will never be able to do is really limited to ones where the value intrinsically comes from the person doing it being a human. It’s a short list tbh.
- FloorEgg 1y agoEvery time it happens it's a bit different, and it was a different generation. We will figure it out. It will be fine in the end, even if things aren't fine along the way. I'm starting to come around to the idea that electricity was the most fundamental force that drove WW1 and WW2. We point to many other more political, social and economic reasonings, but whenever I do a kind of 5-whys on those reasons I keep coming back to electricity. AI is kind of like electricity. Were also at the end of a big economic/money cycle (Petro dollar, gold standard, off gold standard, maxing out leverage). The other side will probably involve a new foundation for money. It might involve blockchain, but maybe not, I have no idea. We don't need post-scarcity so much as we just need to rebalance everything and an upgraded system that maintains that balance for another cycle. I don't know what that system is or needs, but I suspect it will become more clear over the next 10-20 years. While many things will reach abundance (many already have) some won't, and we will need some way to deal with that. Ignoring it won't help.
- collinmanderson 1y ago> isn't "we made a machine to do something that people used to do" basically the entire history of of technology? I know, right? Machines have been gradually replacing humans for centuries. Will we actually get to the point where there are not enough jobs left? It doesn't seem like we're currently anywhere close to the point of not having any jobs available. Has anyone thought about how the Federal Reserve plays a role with this? Automation puts downward pressure on inflation, because it doesn't cost as much to make stuff. The Federal Reserve will heavily incentivize job creation if inflation is low enough and there aren't enough jobs available, right?
- beeflet 1y agoWe're already here. Most jobs are fake.
- collinmanderson 1y agoIt seems like the _quality_ of the jobs (or median job) may have gone down, but the _quantity_ of jobs relative to population has remained roughly steady, right?
- beeflet 1y agoI don't mean the quality is bad, it's just that most jobs in the first world seem to be redundant or abstracted from the keys of power. I think David Graeber wrote a book about it. Here is a guy talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lDTdLQnSQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lDTdLQnSQo
- intended 1y agoThe idea is that there will be newer jobs that come up. The issue is that there will be no one earning money except the owners of OpenAI. Take outsourcing - the issue in developed nations was underemployment and the hollowing out of industrial centers. You went from factory foreman to burger flipper. However, it did uplift millions out of poverty in other nations. So net-net, we employed far more and distributed wealth. With Automation, we simply employ fewer people, and the benefits accrue to smaller groups. And above all - these tools were built, essentially by mass plagiarism. They train even now, on the random stuff we write on HN and Reddit. TLDR: its not the automation, its the wealth concentration.
- brandensilva 1y agoThe problem isn't the failure of the mathematicians and engineers who succeeded at the task of automating humanities mundane tasks in life. It's that the people failed to elect and wield a government that ensures all humanity benefits from it and not a select few who control it all. And I think it will become clear that the governments that are investing in it to benefit their people who have ownership versus the ones who invest in it to benefit just a handful of the rich are the ones who will keep society stable while this happens. The other path we are going down is you will have mass unrest, move into a police state to control the resistance like America is doing now, and be exactly what Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Larry Ellison want with AI driven surveillance and Orwellian dystopian vision forcing people to comply or be cut out of existence deactivating their Digital IDs.
- array_key_first 1y agoYou eventually run out of jobs. Every time we progress with new tech and eliminate jobs, the new jobs are more complicated. Eventually people can't do them because they're not smart enough or precise enough or unique enough. Each little step, we leave people behind. Usually we don't care much. Sure some people are destined to a life of poverty, but at least most people aren't. Eventually though even the best of the humans can't keep up, and there's just nothing left.
- classified 1y ago> we should have figured out how to cope with the "but what about the old jobs" problem We did figure that out. The ingenious cope we came up with is to entirely ignore said problem.