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I heard this canard my entire life. It’s been said for centuries. If you want maximum employment pass a law that says all grass must be cut with scissors. Other

I heard this canard my entire life. It’s been said for centuries. If you want maximum employment pass a law that says all grass must be cut with scissors. Otherwise let productivity gains diffuse out - that’s the only way to increase true wealth

jayd16 7mo ago
We can use technology to increase production and have a progressive tax. There is absolutely no reason we need to endure the extreme wealth divide.
- monero-xmr 7mo ago
  If there is a need that people pay for, and it took 10 people, and technology comes and it can now be done by 1 person, that is a great thing. That’s not a bad thing at all. That’s exactly how the world progresses forwards. Everyone can get the need met, and at a cheaper cost, while freeing the other 9 people to do something else useful. That is why we have the standard of living we have today
  - zahlman 7mo ago
    I genuinely cannot understand why this comment was killed. Even if you disagree with the position, there's nothing at all objectionable about how it's being presented.
    - acdha 7mo ago
      I think it’s because it’s ignoring the impact of concentration and the range of affected jobs. When, say, people switched from animals as the primary source of motive power for shipping, relatively few people immediately lost their livelihood because the things now using engines still employed tons of people (a delivery guy had to learn to drive but the rest of the job was similar) and a bunch of new jobs were created. Now we’re being promised a wide range of white-collar jobs all being affected at the same time, always in a way which reduces the number of total jobs and concentrates power in people with assets. The position that people will find new things is begging the critical question of whether those people will have the money to get started or customers who can afford to buy from them, especially when sharecropping using someone else’s models with no guarantee of non-competition.
      - monero-xmr 7mo ago
        Perhaps white collar employees have felt jobs not conducted in an office are beneath them. Because a wide range of physical jobs pay a lot more than office work already
        joquarky 7mo ago
        Great, just point me to the physical jobs that will hire someone over 50.
        monero-xmr 7mo ago
        [dead]
        acdha 7mo ago
        Not many pay “a lot more”—your plumber is not taking home what she charges you—and that often comes with unpleasant working conditions, overtime, or extended time away from home. That’s like talking about tech salaries as if most people are L7 staff engineers at big tech companies. Most people are not making that much in blue collar work, but even if they were, it’s also not like freshly-laid off people can just switch overnight. Lots of that work isn’t great for middle aged people, etc. and anyone retraining is going to need support for training, certifications, etc. but that’s happening when they have the financial obligations of a successful mid-career person. For example, say Google actually developed AGI and canned everyone. What happens to the market in Mountain View when everyone is trying to enter construction work or become auto mechanics at the same time that those industries are hammered by a lack of customers, and the real-estate market suddenly has entire blocks for sale? That last part might seem extreme but I saw it in San Diego in the 90s: the defense contractors laid tons of people off after the Cold War collapse, and that meant that entire neighborhoods went from having streets of engineers who worked at the same places all scrambling at the same time. Fortunately, that wasn’t permanent or every sector of the economy (and some of them were able to repurpose things like carbon fiber aerospace techniques into golf clubs and bicycle frames) but there were literally people with engineering Ph.Ds competing for $15/hour QA jobs just to have health insurance.
- johndhi 7mo ago
  The govt can't spend money well
haxiomic 7mo ago
You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest. We have analogs we can compare to: massive wealth injections through a natural resource such as oil. Now what happens to that wealth is not obvious; for some countries it's a curse with radical inequality and pernicious and robust power structures, in fewer it has been bestowed to the heritage of the people (think Norway) Now, the nature of AI is to change the balance of the labour trade. We have a notion of the “economic value of the average person” which is presently very high in the western world. What happens when the median figure drops through 0 thanks to AI? Do the remaining wealth owners share their wealth? How often does this occur in existing systems we can compare against? The cost of primary resources to products also goes toward 0, perhaps this offsets the decreasing economic power of the average person. But what forces protect them if their bargaining power is lost?
- ajross 7mo ago
  > You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest. Do we? I mean, isn't "because they always have" enough of an argument on its own? I am hardly a libertarian ideologue nor AI-first LLM jockey. But I do think people tend to catastrophize too much. Blacksmiths were killed dead by the industrial revolution. "Secretary" is a forgotten art. It's been decades since an actuary actually calculated a sum on an actual table. And the apocalypse didn't arrive. All those jobs, and more, were backfilled by new stuff that was previously too expensive to contemplate. We're eating at more restaurants. We can find jobs as content creators and twitch streamers. Life not only goes on after rapid technological change, it improves. That's not to say that every individual is going to appreciate it in the moment or that regulation and safety net work needs to happen at the margins. But, we'll all be fine. AGImageddon is, at its core, just another economic phenomenon driven by technology. And that's basically always worked to society's benefit over the long term.
  - piva00 7mo ago
    There's an argument about the speed of change though, a society going through the technological evolution from blacksmithing to industrial metallurgy didn't experience it happening in the short-medium term (1-10 years), it had a gradient of change. Over time with the speed of technological development compounding on itself, the rate of change becoming much more acute, there's a debate to happen on the "what if this change happens over 5-10 years"? Can you imagine a world where in 10 years most well-paid office jobs are automated away, there's no generational change to re-educate and employ people, there would be loads of unemployable people who were highly-specialised to a world that ceased to exist, metaphorically overnight in the span of a human life. Pushing this concern away with "it happened in history and we're fine" leaves a lot of room for catastrophising, at least a measured discussion about this scenario needs to be had, just in case it happens in a way that our historical past couldn't account for. No need to be a doomer, nor a luddite, to have the discussion: can we be in any way prepared for this case?
AdamN 7mo ago
Who are you responding to? OP made a moral argument for sure but he wasn't pushing for maximum employment.
skeeter2020 7mo ago
and (likely) your entire life we've seen concentration of wealth and resources in the west. It's not about maximum employment but about much more basic things like utilization and purpose. There has been no general productivity diffusion on a national basis. Gains have come from outsourcing the lower productivity jobs without acknowledging the cost: the destination subsidizes by not investing growth in their own people but by maintaining an artificially lower-cost region, and the outsourcer (i.e. the US) finances with their currency.

jayd16 7mo ago

We can use technology to increase production and have a progressive tax. There is absolutely no reason we need to endure the extreme wealth divide.

monero-xmr 7mo ago
If there is a need that people pay for, and it took 10 people, and technology comes and it can now be done by 1 person, that is a great thing. That’s not a bad thing at all. That’s exactly how the world progresses forwards. Everyone can get the need met, and at a cheaper cost, while freeing the other 9 people to do something else useful. That is why we have the standard of living we have today
- zahlman 7mo ago
  I genuinely cannot understand why this comment was killed. Even if you disagree with the position, there's nothing at all objectionable about how it's being presented.
  - acdha 7mo ago
    I think it’s because it’s ignoring the impact of concentration and the range of affected jobs. When, say, people switched from animals as the primary source of motive power for shipping, relatively few people immediately lost their livelihood because the things now using engines still employed tons of people (a delivery guy had to learn to drive but the rest of the job was similar) and a bunch of new jobs were created. Now we’re being promised a wide range of white-collar jobs all being affected at the same time, always in a way which reduces the number of total jobs and concentrates power in people with assets. The position that people will find new things is begging the critical question of whether those people will have the money to get started or customers who can afford to buy from them, especially when sharecropping using someone else’s models with no guarantee of non-competition.
    - monero-xmr 7mo ago
      Perhaps white collar employees have felt jobs not conducted in an office are beneath them. Because a wide range of physical jobs pay a lot more than office work already
      - joquarky 7mo ago
        Great, just point me to the physical jobs that will hire someone over 50.
        monero-xmr 7mo ago
        [dead]
      - acdha 7mo ago
        Not many pay “a lot more”—your plumber is not taking home what she charges you—and that often comes with unpleasant working conditions, overtime, or extended time away from home. That’s like talking about tech salaries as if most people are L7 staff engineers at big tech companies. Most people are not making that much in blue collar work, but even if they were, it’s also not like freshly-laid off people can just switch overnight. Lots of that work isn’t great for middle aged people, etc. and anyone retraining is going to need support for training, certifications, etc. but that’s happening when they have the financial obligations of a successful mid-career person. For example, say Google actually developed AGI and canned everyone. What happens to the market in Mountain View when everyone is trying to enter construction work or become auto mechanics at the same time that those industries are hammered by a lack of customers, and the real-estate market suddenly has entire blocks for sale? That last part might seem extreme but I saw it in San Diego in the 90s: the defense contractors laid tons of people off after the Cold War collapse, and that meant that entire neighborhoods went from having streets of engineers who worked at the same places all scrambling at the same time. Fortunately, that wasn’t permanent or every sector of the economy (and some of them were able to repurpose things like carbon fiber aerospace techniques into golf clubs and bicycle frames) but there were literally people with engineering Ph.Ds competing for $15/hour QA jobs just to have health insurance.
johndhi 7mo ago
The govt can't spend money well

haxiomic 7mo ago

You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest. We have analogs we can compare to: massive wealth injections through a natural resource such as oil. Now what happens to that wealth is not obvious; for some countries it's a curse with radical inequality and pernicious and robust power structures, in fewer it has been bestowed to the heritage of the people (think Norway) Now, the nature of AI is to change the balance of the labour trade. We have a notion of the “economic value of the average person” which is presently very high in the western world. What happens when the median figure drops through 0 thanks to AI? Do the remaining wealth owners share their wealth? How often does this occur in existing systems we can compare against? The cost of primary resources to products also goes toward 0, perhaps this offsets the decreasing economic power of the average person. But what forces protect them if their bargaining power is lost?

ajross 7mo ago
> You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest. Do we? I mean, isn't "because they always have" enough of an argument on its own? I am hardly a libertarian ideologue nor AI-first LLM jockey. But I do think people tend to catastrophize too much. Blacksmiths were killed dead by the industrial revolution. "Secretary" is a forgotten art. It's been decades since an actuary actually calculated a sum on an actual table. And the apocalypse didn't arrive. All those jobs, and more, were backfilled by new stuff that was previously too expensive to contemplate. We're eating at more restaurants. We can find jobs as content creators and twitch streamers. Life not only goes on after rapid technological change, it improves. That's not to say that every individual is going to appreciate it in the moment or that regulation and safety net work needs to happen at the margins. But, we'll all be fine. AGImageddon is, at its core, just another economic phenomenon driven by technology. And that's basically always worked to society's benefit over the long term.
- piva00 7mo ago
  There's an argument about the speed of change though, a society going through the technological evolution from blacksmithing to industrial metallurgy didn't experience it happening in the short-medium term (1-10 years), it had a gradient of change. Over time with the speed of technological development compounding on itself, the rate of change becoming much more acute, there's a debate to happen on the "what if this change happens over 5-10 years"? Can you imagine a world where in 10 years most well-paid office jobs are automated away, there's no generational change to re-educate and employ people, there would be loads of unemployable people who were highly-specialised to a world that ceased to exist, metaphorically overnight in the span of a human life. Pushing this concern away with "it happened in history and we're fine" leaves a lot of room for catastrophising, at least a measured discussion about this scenario needs to be had, just in case it happens in a way that our historical past couldn't account for. No need to be a doomer, nor a luddite, to have the discussion: can we be in any way prepared for this case?

AdamN 7mo ago

Who are you responding to? OP made a moral argument for sure but he wasn't pushing for maximum employment.

skeeter2020 7mo ago

and (likely) your entire life we've seen concentration of wealth and resources in the west. It's not about maximum employment but about much more basic things like utilization and purpose. There has been no general productivity diffusion on a national basis. Gains have come from outsourcing the lower productivity jobs without acknowledging the cost: the destination subsidizes by not investing growth in their own people but by maintaining an artificially lower-cost region, and the outsourcer (i.e. the US) finances with their currency.