5 ms·

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes i

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it. Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.

roenxi 9mo ago
And it isn't like people can't do still everything they could do yesterday. There are just more and better options. Economically AI is no particular threat to the median human and even knowledge workers are still going to have fine lives. Maybe not as knowledge workers. The real risk here is the military implications of pairing AI and robots. If the army doesn't need lots of people then there is a real problem. But robotics will take a long time to get there even in an optimistic case. Labour will still have value for a long time to come.
- mitthrowaway2 9mo ago
  Right, you can still do everything you could yesterday. You can still hand-weave cloth and sell it if you want to, just like your ancestors could do three hundred years ago; you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread, because even though bread is cheaper than it used to be, your customer's next best alternative is an automatic loom, and those move very quickly these days.
  - roenxi 9mo ago
    I'm pretty sure you're literally just wrong on that one - no special knowledge of the weaving market but it seems people do still make a living from hand-weaving fabric. Eg, I found https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics - they claim to have a shop in New York. They can probably afford bread - bread is quite cheap. The issue is if bread becomes insanely cheap and cloth becomes insanely cheap, then a very inefficient weaver can still afford food. It runs in to comparative advantage theory eventually - just because someone else is much more efficient than you at literally everything doesn't mean you can't still do something inefficiently and set up a win-win situation. Although there might still be something better to put your time towards. I recommend managing your own capital - maybe even building it and maintaining it yourself - but people seem dead set against the idea for some reason. I dunno why geohotz thinks in this article that shares in a granary are a bad idea, someone has to profit from storing food. May as well be me. I'll do it if he won't. I like granaries.
    - DiscourseFan 9mo ago
      It is a luxury good like Art, which is an elevated form of labor that is only possible on account of the development of technology like the automated loom, which provides clothes for most people at almost no cost, affording some lucky individuals the leisure time to do things like hand weave cloth or argue about capitalism on Hacker News.
      - roenxi 9mo ago
        Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own. And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they can make a living hand-weaving anyway and do not need to weave 3,000x faster. They weave at a similar pace to that people always have. They can still afford bread. Society will almost give bread away to people, it is absurdly cheap.
        DiscourseFan 9mo ago
        Bread is only cheap on account of mechanization. Before technological innovations bread was often paid in wages, like those of the workers who built the pyramids.
        johnnyanmac 9mo ago
        At this point it really seems like your taking bread too literally here. To put it more simply, you won't keep a roof over your head by only selling baskets to your local village these days. You can scale it up, but by that point you need much more than a craftman to maintain a business and keep up with a minimum wage lifestyle.
    - mitthrowaway2 9mo ago
      This is one of those cases where it's really important to remember the assumptions built into comparative advantage theory, such as "no mobility of labor". If the Green-country people are more productive at all tasks than the Blue-country people, they can still both profit from trade with each other. But that does not represent the maximum productivity allocation of resources. Output can be increased still further by the Green people replacing the population of the Blue-country with more Green people, in which scenario the optimal resource allocation to sustaining the Blue people is unfortunately zero. This is why the population of labor animals plummeted in the 20th century. And to put it plainly, it means that there's no guarantee you can always sell labor for enough to keep your home from getting paved over for a data center.
  - derangedHorse 9mo ago
    > you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread Who's to say that a loaf of bread will be that much more valuable? You acknowledge that bread is cheaper than it used to be, but baselessly assert that an automatic loom will accentuate the value differential rather than lessen or maintain it with the innovations in bread making.
MattGaiser 9mo ago
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. In general, yes. For many groups, no. It assumes that there is something of value for them to do and as shown by masses of long term unemployed in many areas, that is not always the case. For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment. Because of various limitations, there is nothing for them to do in many cases. The market should have corrected this (especially over the long term) if reconstitution was consistently possible. If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart. There is also a large portion of the population on social assistance so while there are things they can do, the market value of what they can do is often well below their needs.
- eddythompson80 9mo ago
  > For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment. > If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart. I think the problems here is you’re comparing a relative minority to “all humans”. Unfortunately, what affects a minority of society, inherently, has a small effect on society as a whole. If “all humans” now have no employment value because AI or automation can do it all, there will still be a cost to that production. Even if you assume the AI part is $0, the power needed or the raw materials becomes the main cost as opposed to labor. Then you need to have enough demand from those non-working non-wage-earning humans for whatever that AI is producing. Otherwise, what is the point of the production in the first place. Maybe extreme automation would put the wealth gab on hyper drive. Only those handful who happen to own an automated production company can have any income. However, what do you imagine the final outcome of that would be in a democratic society? Like I know it’s fashionable to cry at the state of democracy, but despite the recent inflation and affordability crisis and income insecurity etc, we don’t have an “all humans” levels of unemployments. What do you think would happen if we automate, and subsequently fire, “all humans”? Let’s assume AI will actually replace 99% of jobs eventually. Society will completely change at that time to adapt. What else is the point? Are AIs gonna be producing stuff for other AIs leisure? The problem is that the road to there might be painful before society is forced to change to adapt. It won’t all happen at once so it’ll keep happening in waves and waves will be painful until they get better then another wave again. That’s assuming the prophecy of “all humans” labor is no longer needed.
mitthrowaway2 9mo ago
I don't know about your labor, but as far as my labor goes, there are basically only three things I am capable of doing: manual labor with my hands and legs, mental labor with my mind, and selling personal charm with my handsome face. If you can perform all the same jobs I can for a penny a day, and food and rent cost a dollar a day, I'll have a hard time earning enough to remain fed and housed. Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans who needed to eat and pay rent, so I've never had to worry about the labor price floor too much.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans Unless you're a few centuries old, you haven't. You've had the potential to be competing agaist industrial and computational technology your whole life. Go back further, and the prevalence of slaves served as a similar cost differential (free humans versus enslaved, human versus AI).
  - mitthrowaway2 9mo ago
    Yes, and even in prehistoric eras people could attempt to compete with the wind at blowing air, but I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted to the point where I couldn't hope to make a living. So I've written off the once-profitable career of "calculator" from the get-go. Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers.
    - JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
      > I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted Then you've constructed a tautology. Humans remain competitive in various applications of their labour, broadly defined, despite entire categories having become uncompetitive. If we exempt those categories then the historical record looks static. But only because we defined away the change. > Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers I believe there is evidence for this all over the place. By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans. This places a floor on the price of AI and thus human labour that competes with it. (Though that floor, as with pre-information age floors, is well below almost everyone on this forum.)
Llamamoe 9mo ago
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is. It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it solely because they have very little better choice. Furthermore, this power inequality directly translates to influence over economic output of our civilization - by the time value of human menial or cognitive labor goes low enough to delete jobs, all that will be left will be various equivalents of being a sugar baby for the rich - fulfilling their emotional, sexual, and social needs. Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively. > Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism. The middle class is a tiny, tiny fraction of the population nowadays. Even among those working high-earning jobs like tech/healthcare/finance, most are just upper worker class.
- DiscourseFan 9mo ago
  You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? Its the complete opposite: there is now a massive sector of highly skilled, specialized labor that produces the very data which trains these models, a task that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models. That is a massive amount of bargaining power. It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution, and that whatever that would be would be bad for everyone.
  - Llamamoe 9mo ago
    Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete. THE reason why they pay so high is because their end-goal is not having to pay anyone anymore ever again. (or at least, only pay a comparatively tiny amount of people for producing the data)
    - 9mo ago
lurk2 9mo ago
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. We’re nowhere near it, but there is a point at which the marginal utility of laborers is worth less than the security risk the laborers represent by continuing to exist. This is already happening with a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction. > This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it. What if I consider the labor conditions that exist after this transformation to be undignified?
- mmaunder 9mo ago
  Interesting comments. Thanks. A long time ago I worked for DeBeers diamond and gold mining in South Africa and Namibia as a Microsoft systems engineer out in the desert. These days I’m a cybersecurity expert. Given that context, these are excellent points.
WithinReason 9mo ago
Let's say a truck driver's job gets fully automated by self-driving trucks. How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new? #learntocode? How about SW developers? What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out?
- derangedHorse 9mo ago
  > How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new? That's for the job market to decide. It'll be whatever people still find valuable to do. > What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out? What if a capable computer needed to stay competitive costs $10k? Or if all SW jobs turned remote and electricity costs for computers cost $10k? I think the problem with this line of thinking is there was no logical path to this happening that was presented. You're raising a problem of an unrealized conclusion without a solid premise.
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    >It'll be whatever people still find valuable to do. So you never considered 1. Some are simply permanently displaced and homeless 2. What the market wants is an arguable set back to overall society? If all white collar work is obselete and you can't retrain, you're back to working on the fields or being sent to die in wars. If you have a bad leg or arm or eye, you're discarded by society. Is that a future to strive for?
- dpc050505 9mo ago
  Then you sell your labour to a capitalist who owns the model. Most people are already doing something like that.
ben_w 9mo ago
Labour is not a single task, sure, but it's also a fallacy to say "labor is not a single task category that technology can delete". Before I say why though, there's a lot of bad futures possible even with remote controlled humanoid robots whose only true AI are the basics, to keep themselves standing upright and to walk and run on command without falling over. All those people (even here on HN) who claim (to quote a recent exchange) "Every $1 taken by illegal workers is $1 stolen from Americans", how are they going to react to finding every minimum wage job in the US has been replaced with a Tesla Optimus whose "AI" is "actually Indians" thanks to a low-latency Starlink connection to Jodhpur? How do anti-authority protests (whether anti-ICE or anti-Iranian-government) work with any robots where the "AI" is smoke and mirrors of remote control? This is plenty enough for techno-feudalism, even without AI replacing all jobs. But back to the original. As a proof of possibility that tech can, in fact, delete labour: Labour is made of atoms. We have always known, for as long as records show, how to make a bunch of atoms that can be forced to do labour for us, even though we have not understood the details of production until very recently. It's called "slavery", and the rules enforcing and maintaining slavery are encoded into the oldest laws we know of, and that text itself references older laws we've not yet been able to identify[0]. That just leaves a question: can technology also arrange atoms to solve arbitrary labour? Yes, obviously we can physically do it, we're a species that rearranges them at every level, from disassembling mountains for ore, to re-engineering DNA and RNA for crops and medicine and making animations by moving around single atoms. But that leads to a more precise question: can we learn what pattern we need to do this deliberately, and not with a 20 year delay from simply using our existing biology? There's a quote for that, too: If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t. I consider intelligence to be the inverse of how many examples you need to learn something, by which standard all machine learning is very very stupid, and only makes up for it to an extend by being very very stupid very very quickly. Will we solve how to reduce that to only "very stupid", or even just "stupid"? Perhaps, perhaps not. Without improvements, machine learning systems will not take all our jobs, but may still make slaves of us for the reasons previously given, remote controlled robotics. Current ML approaches still have yet to solve for fully-general all-conditions self-driving even in the easy mode that is the USA, they need too many examples to take all our driving jobs despite millions of vehicles on the road gathering training data from the behaviour of all the vehicles they can observe. When you say: > This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it. some sure fear that way, e.g. it sure was weird to see the exchange with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, and the response from Altman which is pretty close to what you're saying rather than "let me rephrase that, we're all going to die if we get this wrong": I think you have said in fact, and I'm gonna quote, development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. End quote. You may have had in mind the effect on, on jobs, which is really my biggest nightmare in the long term. - https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-subcommittee-hearing-on-oversight-of-ai/ https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-sub... Not that it takes much intelligence to become an existential threat: ML may only improve at the per-example rate of evolution, but evolution created covid and ebola and the black death and HIV. But yeah, techno feudalism? All that needs is for Optimus' on-board AI to not fall over when told to walk and run, to keep its balance while holding heavy objects or wielding a nightstick or firing a gun. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu
_DeadFred_ 9mo ago
Ah the magic 'jobs always come' thinking. The post industrial revolution jobs market from 1880-1940s was pretty crappy for labor, and we have no idea how things turned out for the average displaced workers. We do know that there were whole sections of towns called skid rows, we know that there were flop houses. We know huge sections of men lived in boarding homes, and women stayed living with their parents. We've read things like Steinbeck and get a glimpse of the life of desperation at the time. Don't let people fool you that the labor market will look like post WW2 America. It will look like 1880-1940s, during which there were huge labor fights and things were so bad there were 2 world wars.

roenxi 9mo ago

And it isn't like people can't do still everything they could do yesterday. There are just more and better options. Economically AI is no particular threat to the median human and even knowledge workers are still going to have fine lives. Maybe not as knowledge workers. The real risk here is the military implications of pairing AI and robots. If the army doesn't need lots of people then there is a real problem. But robotics will take a long time to get there even in an optimistic case. Labour will still have value for a long time to come.

mitthrowaway2 9mo ago
Right, you can still do everything you could yesterday. You can still hand-weave cloth and sell it if you want to, just like your ancestors could do three hundred years ago; you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread, because even though bread is cheaper than it used to be, your customer's next best alternative is an automatic loom, and those move very quickly these days.
- roenxi 9mo ago
  I'm pretty sure you're literally just wrong on that one - no special knowledge of the weaving market but it seems people do still make a living from hand-weaving fabric. Eg, I found https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics - they claim to have a shop in New York. They can probably afford bread - bread is quite cheap. The issue is if bread becomes insanely cheap and cloth becomes insanely cheap, then a very inefficient weaver can still afford food. It runs in to comparative advantage theory eventually - just because someone else is much more efficient than you at literally everything doesn't mean you can't still do something inefficiently and set up a win-win situation. Although there might still be something better to put your time towards. I recommend managing your own capital - maybe even building it and maintaining it yourself - but people seem dead set against the idea for some reason. I dunno why geohotz thinks in this article that shares in a granary are a bad idea, someone has to profit from storing food. May as well be me. I'll do it if he won't. I like granaries.
  - DiscourseFan 9mo ago
    It is a luxury good like Art, which is an elevated form of labor that is only possible on account of the development of technology like the automated loom, which provides clothes for most people at almost no cost, affording some lucky individuals the leisure time to do things like hand weave cloth or argue about capitalism on Hacker News.
    - roenxi 9mo ago
      Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own. And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they can make a living hand-weaving anyway and do not need to weave 3,000x faster. They weave at a similar pace to that people always have. They can still afford bread. Society will almost give bread away to people, it is absurdly cheap.
      - DiscourseFan 9mo ago
        Bread is only cheap on account of mechanization. Before technological innovations bread was often paid in wages, like those of the workers who built the pyramids.
      - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
        At this point it really seems like your taking bread too literally here. To put it more simply, you won't keep a roof over your head by only selling baskets to your local village these days. You can scale it up, but by that point you need much more than a craftman to maintain a business and keep up with a minimum wage lifestyle.
  - mitthrowaway2 9mo ago
    This is one of those cases where it's really important to remember the assumptions built into comparative advantage theory, such as "no mobility of labor". If the Green-country people are more productive at all tasks than the Blue-country people, they can still both profit from trade with each other. But that does not represent the maximum productivity allocation of resources. Output can be increased still further by the Green people replacing the population of the Blue-country with more Green people, in which scenario the optimal resource allocation to sustaining the Blue people is unfortunately zero. This is why the population of labor animals plummeted in the 20th century. And to put it plainly, it means that there's no guarantee you can always sell labor for enough to keep your home from getting paved over for a data center.
- derangedHorse 9mo ago
  > you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread Who's to say that a loaf of bread will be that much more valuable? You acknowledge that bread is cheaper than it used to be, but baselessly assert that an automatic loom will accentuate the value differential rather than lessen or maintain it with the innovations in bread making.

MattGaiser 9mo ago

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. In general, yes. For many groups, no. It assumes that there is something of value for them to do and as shown by masses of long term unemployed in many areas, that is not always the case. For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment. Because of various limitations, there is nothing for them to do in many cases. The market should have corrected this (especially over the long term) if reconstitution was consistently possible. If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart. There is also a large portion of the population on social assistance so while there are things they can do, the market value of what they can do is often well below their needs.

eddythompson80 9mo ago
> For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment. > If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart. I think the problems here is you’re comparing a relative minority to “all humans”. Unfortunately, what affects a minority of society, inherently, has a small effect on society as a whole. If “all humans” now have no employment value because AI or automation can do it all, there will still be a cost to that production. Even if you assume the AI part is $0, the power needed or the raw materials becomes the main cost as opposed to labor. Then you need to have enough demand from those non-working non-wage-earning humans for whatever that AI is producing. Otherwise, what is the point of the production in the first place. Maybe extreme automation would put the wealth gab on hyper drive. Only those handful who happen to own an automated production company can have any income. However, what do you imagine the final outcome of that would be in a democratic society? Like I know it’s fashionable to cry at the state of democracy, but despite the recent inflation and affordability crisis and income insecurity etc, we don’t have an “all humans” levels of unemployments. What do you think would happen if we automate, and subsequently fire, “all humans”? Let’s assume AI will actually replace 99% of jobs eventually. Society will completely change at that time to adapt. What else is the point? Are AIs gonna be producing stuff for other AIs leisure? The problem is that the road to there might be painful before society is forced to change to adapt. It won’t all happen at once so it’ll keep happening in waves and waves will be painful until they get better then another wave again. That’s assuming the prophecy of “all humans” labor is no longer needed.

mitthrowaway2 9mo ago

I don't know about your labor, but as far as my labor goes, there are basically only three things I am capable of doing: manual labor with my hands and legs, mental labor with my mind, and selling personal charm with my handsome face. If you can perform all the same jobs I can for a penny a day, and food and rent cost a dollar a day, I'll have a hard time earning enough to remain fed and housed. Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans who needed to eat and pay rent, so I've never had to worry about the labor price floor too much.

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans Unless you're a few centuries old, you haven't. You've had the potential to be competing agaist industrial and computational technology your whole life. Go back further, and the prevalence of slaves served as a similar cost differential (free humans versus enslaved, human versus AI).
- mitthrowaway2 9mo ago
  Yes, and even in prehistoric eras people could attempt to compete with the wind at blowing air, but I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted to the point where I couldn't hope to make a living. So I've written off the once-profitable career of "calculator" from the get-go. Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers.
  - JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
    > I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted Then you've constructed a tautology. Humans remain competitive in various applications of their labour, broadly defined, despite entire categories having become uncompetitive. If we exempt those categories then the historical record looks static. But only because we defined away the change. > Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers I believe there is evidence for this all over the place. By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans. This places a floor on the price of AI and thus human labour that competes with it. (Though that floor, as with pre-information age floors, is well below almost everyone on this forum.)

Llamamoe 9mo ago

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is. It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it solely because they have very little better choice. Furthermore, this power inequality directly translates to influence over economic output of our civilization - by the time value of human menial or cognitive labor goes low enough to delete jobs, all that will be left will be various equivalents of being a sugar baby for the rich - fulfilling their emotional, sexual, and social needs. Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively. > Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism. The middle class is a tiny, tiny fraction of the population nowadays. Even among those working high-earning jobs like tech/healthcare/finance, most are just upper worker class.

DiscourseFan 9mo ago
You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? Its the complete opposite: there is now a massive sector of highly skilled, specialized labor that produces the very data which trains these models, a task that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models. That is a massive amount of bargaining power. It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution, and that whatever that would be would be bad for everyone.
- Llamamoe 9mo ago
  Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete. THE reason why they pay so high is because their end-goal is not having to pay anyone anymore ever again. (or at least, only pay a comparatively tiny amount of people for producing the data)
  - 9mo ago

lurk2 9mo ago

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. We’re nowhere near it, but there is a point at which the marginal utility of laborers is worth less than the security risk the laborers represent by continuing to exist. This is already happening with a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction. > This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it. What if I consider the labor conditions that exist after this transformation to be undignified?

mmaunder 9mo ago
Interesting comments. Thanks. A long time ago I worked for DeBeers diamond and gold mining in South Africa and Namibia as a Microsoft systems engineer out in the desert. These days I’m a cybersecurity expert. Given that context, these are excellent points.

WithinReason 9mo ago

Let's say a truck driver's job gets fully automated by self-driving trucks. How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new? #learntocode? How about SW developers? What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out?

derangedHorse 9mo ago
> How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new? That's for the job market to decide. It'll be whatever people still find valuable to do. > What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out? What if a capable computer needed to stay competitive costs $10k? Or if all SW jobs turned remote and electricity costs for computers cost $10k? I think the problem with this line of thinking is there was no logical path to this happening that was presented. You're raising a problem of an unrealized conclusion without a solid premise.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  >It'll be whatever people still find valuable to do. So you never considered 1. Some are simply permanently displaced and homeless 2. What the market wants is an arguable set back to overall society? If all white collar work is obselete and you can't retrain, you're back to working on the fields or being sent to die in wars. If you have a bad leg or arm or eye, you're discarded by society. Is that a future to strive for?
dpc050505 9mo ago
Then you sell your labour to a capitalist who owns the model. Most people are already doing something like that.

ben_w 9mo ago

Labour is not a single task, sure, but it's also a fallacy to say "labor is not a single task category that technology can delete". Before I say why though, there's a lot of bad futures possible even with remote controlled humanoid robots whose only true AI are the basics, to keep themselves standing upright and to walk and run on command without falling over. All those people (even here on HN) who claim (to quote a recent exchange) "Every $1 taken by illegal workers is $1 stolen from Americans", how are they going to react to finding every minimum wage job in the US has been replaced with a Tesla Optimus whose "AI" is "actually Indians" thanks to a low-latency Starlink connection to Jodhpur? How do anti-authority protests (whether anti-ICE or anti-Iranian-government) work with any robots where the "AI" is smoke and mirrors of remote control? This is plenty enough for techno-feudalism, even without AI replacing all jobs. But back to the original. As a proof of possibility that tech can, in fact, delete labour: Labour is made of atoms. We have always known, for as long as records show, how to make a bunch of atoms that can be forced to do labour for us, even though we have not understood the details of production until very recently. It's called "slavery", and the rules enforcing and maintaining slavery are encoded into the oldest laws we know of, and that text itself references older laws we've not yet been able to identify[0]. That just leaves a question: can technology also arrange atoms to solve arbitrary labour? Yes, obviously we can physically do it, we're a species that rearranges them at every level, from disassembling mountains for ore, to re-engineering DNA and RNA for crops and medicine and making animations by moving around single atoms. But that leads to a more precise question: can we learn what pattern we need to do this deliberately, and not with a 20 year delay from simply using our existing biology? There's a quote for that, too: If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t. I consider intelligence to be the inverse of how many examples you need to learn something, by which standard all machine learning is very very stupid, and only makes up for it to an extend by being very very stupid very very quickly. Will we solve how to reduce that to only "very stupid", or even just "stupid"? Perhaps, perhaps not. Without improvements, machine learning systems will not take all our jobs, but may still make slaves of us for the reasons previously given, remote controlled robotics. Current ML approaches still have yet to solve for fully-general all-conditions self-driving even in the easy mode that is the USA, they need too many examples to take all our driving jobs despite millions of vehicles on the road gathering training data from the behaviour of all the vehicles they can observe. When you say: > This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it. some sure fear that way, e.g. it sure was weird to see the exchange with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, and the response from Altman which is pretty close to what you're saying rather than "let me rephrase that, we're all going to die if we get this wrong": I think you have said in fact, and I'm gonna quote, development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. End quote. You may have had in mind the effect on, on jobs, which is really my biggest nightmare in the long term. - https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-subcommittee-hearing-on-oversight-of-ai/ https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-sub... Not that it takes much intelligence to become an existential threat: ML may only improve at the per-example rate of evolution, but evolution created covid and ebola and the black death and HIV. But yeah, techno feudalism? All that needs is for Optimus' on-board AI to not fall over when told to walk and run, to keep its balance while holding heavy objects or wielding a nightstick or firing a gun. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu

_DeadFred_ 9mo ago

Ah the magic 'jobs always come' thinking. The post industrial revolution jobs market from 1880-1940s was pretty crappy for labor, and we have no idea how things turned out for the average displaced workers. We do know that there were whole sections of towns called skid rows, we know that there were flop houses. We know huge sections of men lived in boarding homes, and women stayed living with their parents. We've read things like Steinbeck and get a glimpse of the life of desperation at the time. Don't let people fool you that the labor market will look like post WW2 America. It will look like 1880-1940s, during which there were huge labor fights and things were so bad there were 2 world wars.