5 ms·
Apart from being all AI-written: > Reality: It’s not fear; it’s math. If 30% of the workforce is displaced, and the remaining 70% have to pay for the social sa
by Aerolfos 9mo ago
Apart from being all AI-written:
> Reality: It’s not fear; it’s math. If 30% of the workforce is displaced, and the remaining 70% have to pay for the social safety net (or UBI) required to keep the displaced alive, the math breaks.
The argument being given simply avoids the question of where the economy itself is in all this. The workers pay taxes, the taxes pay for infrastructure, sure. But the workers aren't doing work (it got taken), so they aren't earning money, so what do they pay taxes on?
It's all just efficiency gains and everyone currently employed stays employed? Not a single AI company wants that. Not a single tech company wants that. Not only do they want layoffs, they're already happening. So that's not going to work out.
Which means there's less workers being paid, less taxes, less money to be spent on the economy, which means less money to pay workers, which means... the logical conclusion is "no economy at all". Taxes are the last thing to worry about then.
- arm32 9mo ago[flagged]
- peteforde 9mo agoAlso, when are people going to get tired of assuming that em dashes automatically mean something was written by an LLM? At this stage, this is such a tired observation that it's unproductive to repeat.
- Aerolfos 9mo agoI don't pay attention to em dashes, they're overused as a pithy saying for sure The actually useful tips are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
- emodendroket 9mo agoOne problem with any shibboleths people are looking for is as people see more AI writing they're more likely to begin to pick up AI phrasing. I mean, if the power of Web apps can revive the past participle "gotten" in the UK, it shouldn't be surprising it can get people to use the verb "delve" more often.
- twoodfin 9mo agoThe shibboleths aren’t the problem with AI writing; the problem is that it’s bad writing. Good writing uses novel combinations of tools (vocabulary, rhetoric, metaphor) to communicate novel ideas. Bad writing is a cargo cult of those tools.
- emodendroket 9mo agoThat’s a bit of a different problem. I’m talking about people specifically wanting to know whether AI was used. There are lots of bad writers out there with or without AI assistance.
- awesome_dude 9mo agoI find it crazy on the basis that the LLMs shouldn't/wouldn't be using them if they weren't in use... in the training set, in the first place.
- BoorishBears 9mo agoThey literally conclude by quoting Gemini 3: > As my AI assistant gemini-3-flash-preview put it so blindly today: So I can excuse someone for jumping to the conclusion the rest of it was LLM assisted too. I read it and while I didn't think it was LLM writing (until the literal LLM writing), it's an incredibly grating style of writing that would earn ridicule before LLMs. Obnoxiously building up straw men in section headers then knocking them down with "Reality:" is just not a way to have a useful conversation about a topic. Yuck.
- nothrabannosir 9mo agoAuthor confirmed they used an LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46427769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46427769
- satvikpendem 9mo agoDid you, or did you not, use any AI or LLMs in the process of writing this article?
- joquarky 9mo agoWho cares? A lot of people with disabilities are also using LLMs to level the playing field and to compete with non-disabled people. Are you going to be the person who tells them they need to stay out, stop using this technology, and stay in their "place"?
- satvikpendem 9mo agoDon't argue against a strawman, no one was disagreeing that disabled people use AI.
- nospice 9mo agoThat sounds evasive. I share the parent's view that the article appears to be largely LLM-written. Given that you cite "your AI assistant", I'm guessing you did lean on an LLM here, perhaps without realizing that it imparted a very distinctive tone. And honestly, it just cracks me up that it's usually the authors writing about AI lean on the tech. Including the critics...
- arm32 9mo agoBusted. I am a human-in-the-loop. I think everybody should use LLMs to polish their language. This topic is important to me and I want to communicate as effectively as possible. I stand by every character of the article regardless of which fancy autocomplete I used to polish it. I use spellcheck, too, and a digital tuner for my guitar. Just want to reiterate: https://alec.is/posts/ai-employees-dont-pay-taxes/#:~:text=I%20am%20an%20optimist%20when%20it%20comes%20to%20LLMs%20and%20the%20possibilities%20they%20unlock%20(especially%20in%20SWE) https://alec.is/posts/ai-employees-dont-pay-taxes/#:~:text=I...
- satvikpendem 9mo agoBut people don't want to read something they can tell is AI, and thus you lose more authority and respect from your readers. If you are interested in getting your words out, and presumably you are as otherwise this wouldn't be a public article, the use of AI does in fact hurt that goal, ironic. Finally, I will link this, about how "it's insulting to read your AI generated article:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722069
- Ancapistani 9mo agoI have a quibble here: the people who post in response don’t want to read content they know is AI-generated. There exists some proportion of people who don’t mind and don’t care about it enough to comment on the topic.
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
- numpad0 9mo agoEm dashes aren't rare because of disuse. It's a Unicode character that can't be easily typed from a Western language keyboards -- real humans shouldn't be able to vocalize it. Hence it's considered an AI giveaway.
- tick_tock_tick 9mo ago> It's all just efficiency gains and everyone currently employed stays employed? Not a single AI company wants that. Not a single tech company wants that. Not only do they want layoffs, they're already happening. So that's not going to work out. Every single AI company and tech company would be 100% ok with just efficiency gains. They want to make money and proving efficiency is more then enough for that.
- nradov 9mo agoIt's always hilarious to see lazy, innumerate people claiming that "it’s math" when in reality they just made up numbers and didn't do any calculations.
- satvikpendem 9mo agoYou're assuming it's even a person when the author admitted they used an LLM for writing this article.
- zrn900 9mo ago> the logical conclusion is "no economy at all" Marx called it 150 years ago. Its happening precisely how it said it would.
- mystraline 9mo agoExactly. A lot of people think he only wrote about Communism. And he also wrote how capitalism has failed since John Smith first wrote of it. Is pure communism the right answer? Of course not. But mixing elements would avoid the worst of capitalism and communism.
- pton_xd 9mo ago> Apart from being all AI-written I think nearly 100% of blog posts are run through an LLM now. The author was lazy and went with the default LLM "tone" and so the typical LLM grammar usage and turns of phrase are too readily apparent. It's really disheartening as I read blogs to get a perspective on what another human thinks and how their thought process works. If I wanted to chat with a LLM, I can open a new tab.
- satvikpendem 9mo agoYou might be interested in this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722069
- satisfice 9mo agoI never use an LLM for blog posts. Seemed like you need to hear more people telling you that. Only amateurs and scammers use LLMs for writing.
- AnthonyMouse 9mo ago> Which means there's less workers being paid, less taxes, less money to be spent on the economy, which means less money to pay workers, which means... the logical conclusion is "no economy at all". Except that's not how the economy works. Suppose you automate web development. Fewer people get paid for that anymore. Does it increase long-term unemployment? Not really, because it creates surplus. Now everybody else has a little extra money they didn't have to spend on web development, and they'll want to buy something with it, so you get new jobs making whatever it is they want to spend the money on instead. The only way this actually breaks down is if people stop having anything more they want to buy. But that a) seems pretty unlikely and b) implies that we've now fully automated the production of necessities, because otherwise there would be jobs providing healthcare, growing food, building houses, etc.
- tomrod 9mo agoYour implicit assumption with the web dev is that this scales. Unfortunately, that may not be the case.
- AnthonyMouse 9mo agoIt's not a matter of scale. If people don't have to spend as much on X then they end up with extra money and will spend it on Y. Jobs then shift from X to Y. This has been happening for centuries. The large majority of people used to work in agriculture. Now we can produce food with a low single digit percentage of the population. Textiles, transportation, etc. are all much less labor intensive than they were in the days of cobblers and ox carts, yet the 20th century was not marked with a 90% unemployment rate. It's either one of two things. Either post-scarcity is possible because machines that can collect and assemble resources into whatever anybody wants at no cost are possible, and then nobody needs to work because everything is free. Or it isn't, there are still things machines can't do, and then people have jobs doing that.
- morkalork 9mo agoLook at any non-Western country with a massive population, how is their excess labour faring?
- _DeadFred_ 9mo agoBillionaires (that REALIZE gains on their investments via loans based on the investments' current value and not the original value)and AI Companies are about representation without taxation, while those that are taxed get their voice drowned out by those same actors.
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago> It's all just efficiency gains and everyone currently employed stays employed? Not a single AI company wants that. I disagree with your assertion. Efficiency, production improvements are exactly what many companies are going for. We already have a huge deficit of software that needs to be written that cannot be written with the current Human programming resources available. We have plenty of things, infrastructure and otherwise, that don’t get built because of a lack of human labor to do them. We haven’t colonized the solar system yet due to a lack of resources, etc… It’s really pessimistic to think that all this tech is going to go to maintaining the current status quo with just much less labor.
- jaybrendansmith 9mo ago100% this. I run a software company and we never run out of new things to build. Our issue is velocity, we would be foolish to lay off employees, rather we must use AI to build things 50% faster if we can. What AI will do is further level the playing field in software, just like tractors allowed farms to expand in size.
- palmotea 9mo ago> Which means there's less workers being paid, less taxes, less money to be spent on the economy, which means less money to pay workers, which means... the logical conclusion is "no economy at all". Taxes are the last thing to worry about then. Assuming the hype pans out and we get AGI, the end result won't be "no economy at all," it'll be a really weird one that does nothing to satisfy the common man's needs (because they will be of no economic use to the owners of the technology). All the world's resources will be harness to satisfy the whims of a very few trillionaires, and there will be no place for you (except perhaps as a cultish sycophant, if you're lucky)