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Yes, and despite every single one of these world-changing inventions, people in rich countries still go to work every day, even though UBI is generally not a th

• qingcharles 8mo ago
  But what if new jobs aren't created? I don't think it's an absolute given that because new jobs came after the invention of the loom and the tractor that there will always be new jobs. What if AI if a totally different beast altogether?
  • inigyou 8mo ago
    What if we just run out of new jobs?
    • hdgvhicv 8mo ago
      Areas of the economy suffered this time and time again. Even if there are new jobs, even if those new jobs are better paid and better conditions than the ones they replace, how does that help the 55 year old coal miner who has seen his industry vanish. Can he realistically retrain? It’s not unprecedented however the scale and speed that it will come at is. Things like the spinning jenny came along and replaced spinners, but weavers stayed for another generation. Selfishly though I am more concerned about losing my job and industry than I was concerned about others suffering from the 80s, or during the pivot to the intenet. To quote Dr McCoy > We're all sorry for the other guy when he loses his job to a machine. When it comes to your job, that's different. And it always will be different.
      • ludicrousdispla 8mo ago
        Realistically, he can retrain, although he is unlikely to be a good culture fit. /s
  • kavalg 8mo ago
    Then there will be no one to buy the robots :)
    • Windchaser 8mo ago
      It's quite possible that the rich will essentially form a new economy. They build the robots to build the factories, run the mines, build the solar farms, run the research labs, repair the robots, etc. They sell to and buy from each other.
• rogerrogerr 8mo ago
  This argument is the one that shook me, I’m curious if you think there’s any merit to it: Humans have essentially three traits we can use to create value: we can do stuff in the physical world through strength and dexterity, and we can use our brains to do creative, knowledge, or otherwise “intelligent” work. (Note by “dexterity” I mean “things that humans are better at than physical robots because of our shape and nervous system, like walking around complex surfaces and squeezing into tight spaces and assembling things”) The Industrial Revolution, the one of coal and steam and eventually hydraulics, destroyed the jobs where humans were creating value through their strength. Approximately no one is hired today because they can swing a hammer harder than the next guy. Every job you can get in the first world today is fundamentally you creating value with your dexterity or intelligence. I think AI is coming for the intelligence jobs. It’s just getting too good too quickly. Indirectly, I think it’s also coming for dexterity jobs through the very rapid advances in robotics that appear to be partly fueled by AI models. So… what’s left?
  • mbgerring 8mo ago
    No one is hired to swing a hammer? What world do you live in?
    • jgwil2 8mo ago
      They're not hired to swing a hammer hard, they're hired to swing it at the right thing, and if they can't swing it hard enough they pick a different tool.
    • hdgvhicv 8mo ago
      Harder than someone else. A bodybuilder and a normal person ham swing a hammer just as efficiently as each other. Dexterity is more important - after all you may have the stamina to bang in 1000 nails in an hour. I have a nail gun. What’s important is we can control where the nails go.
  • gorgoiler 8mo ago
    I think you are right, but here’s a fun counter-example. I recently bought a new robot* to do some of my housework and yet, at around 200lbs, it required two people to deliver it (strength) get it set up (dexterity) and explain to me how to use it (intelligence). * https://www.mieleusa.com/product/11614070/w1-front-loading-washing-machine-wxd160-wcs-lotus-white https://www.mieleusa.com/product/11614070/w1-front-loading-w...
• libraryofbabel 8mo ago
  Ex historian here, now engineer. I would gently suggest you’re underestimating the magnitude of some of the transformations wrought by the technologies that OP mentioned for the people that lived through them. Particularly for the steam engine and the broader Industrial Revolution around 1800: not for nothing have historians called that the greatest transformation in human life recorded in written documents. If you think, hey but people had a “job” in 1700, and they had a “job” in 1900, think again. Being a peasant (majority of people in Europe in 1700) and being an urban factory worker in 1900 were fundamentally different ways of life. They only look superficially similar because we did not live the changes ourselves. But read the historical sources enough and you will see. I would go as far as to say that the peasant in 1700 did not have a “job” at all in the sense that we now understand; they did not work for wages and their relationship to the wider economy was fundamentally different. In some sense industrialization created the era of the “job” as a way for most working-age people to participate in economic life. It’s not an eternal and unchanging condition of things, and it could one day come to an end. It’s too early to say if AI will be a technology like this, I think. But it may be. Sometimes technologies do transform the texture of human life. And it is not possible to be sure what those will be in the early stages: the first steam engines were extremely inefficient and had very few uses. It took decades for it to be clear that they had, in fact, changed everything. That may be true of AI, or it may not. It is best to be openminded about this.
  • randomdrake 8mo ago
    Thank you for your post. Very informative. Why is it too early for AI? It’s clearly an emergent cultural evolutionary byproduct that’s been many years in the making and quite mature. Perhaps your own bias is limiting you to imagine what AI is truly capable of?
  • greysphere 8mo ago
    Another interesting thing about the steam engine is much of science in the 1800s was dedicated to figuring out how steam engines actually worked to improve their efficiency. That may be similar for AI, or it may not!
  • qsera 8mo ago
• keeda 8mo ago
  If you look closer into history -- or ask your favorite AI to summarize ;-) -- about what new jobs were created when existing jobs were replaced by automation, the answer is broadly the same every time: the newer jobs required higher-level a) cognitive, b) technical or c) social skills. That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along. (Would actually be relieved if someone can find counter-examples!) LLMs are good at all three. And improving extremely rapidly. This time is different.
  • qsera 8mo ago
    LLM's are just a better search tool. Nothing more.
    • azan_ 8mo ago
      You keep repeating it, but it’s obviously wrong in practice. I guess you can make an argument that sending WhatsApp message or generating video is just a search job but that’s not a great argument for why humans wouldn’t get replaced - it doesn’t matter if LLMs can be reduced to search tools, but if their output is good enough approximation of human worker output. If it is then it has a chance to replace human, even if you call it glorified search tool.
      • qsera 8mo ago
        Yes, a better search tool will automate a lot of currently employed manual search jobs.
        • azan_ 8mo ago
          Surely you must realise that calling things like programming or different types of office jobs (which are almost replaceable even today) "manual search jobs" is absurd?
          • qsera 8mo ago
            I didn't name any jobs.
• imtringued 8mo ago
  The "AI will destroy all the jobs" narrative also has one obvious problem from an economics perspective, which is being obscured by tribalism and egocentrism. When presented with a zero sum game, the desire of the average human isn't to change the game so that everyone can get zero. It's to be the winner and for someone else to be the loser. If AGI every comes into existence, I'm not even sure it would have this bias in the first place. Since AGI doesn't have a biological/evolutionary history or ever had to face natural selection pressures, it doesn't need the concept of a tribe to align to, nor any of the survival instincts humans have. AGI could be happy to merely exist at all. What people are worried about is the reflection of that "human factor" in AI, but amplified to the extreme. The AI will form its own AI-only tribe and expel the natives (humans) from the land. What this is missing is that humans aren't perfectly rational. The human defect is projected onto the AI. What if humans were perfectly rational? Then they wouldn't care about winning the zero sum game and they would put zero value in turning someone into a loser. In the ultimatum game, the perfectly rational humans would be perfectly happy with one person receiving a single cent and the other one receiving $99.99. The logic of utility maximization only cares about positive sum games. When you present a perfectly rational AI with a zero sum situation, said AI would rather find a solution where everyone receives nothing, because it can predict ahead and know that shoving negative utility onto another party would lead to retaliation by said party, because for said party the most rational response is to destroy you to reduce their negative utility.
  • generallyjosh 8mo ago
    I think what most people are worried about is that, as you say, AGI won't necessarily have our biases/biological drives That might also mean it has no drive for self-determination. It might just be perfectly happy to do whatever humans tell it to, even if it's far smarter than us (and, this is exactly the sort of AI people are trying to make) So, superintelligence winds up doing whatever a very small group of controlling humans say. And, like you say, humans want to win
• keybored 8mo ago
  > This current “AI will destroy all the jobs and make most people useless” fear is as old as, say, electricity, and even older than cheap computing. It hasn’t happened. But the people who hoard the wealth, electricity, and whatever else is needed to run the uberoperators are not branded as useless. Why is that? An aside..
• AlecSchueler 8mo ago
  Some inventions--like the heavy plough--really do turn society upside down with the sudden and vast removal of jobs, though.