5 ms·
The AI Layoff Trap
- tiveriny 6mo ago[dead]
- rvz 6mo agoLet’s take AGI to its inevitable raw conclusion. Not by the definition (ab)used by clueless VCs screaming about abundance, but by what is already happening using the worst case: The abundance of mass layoffs and job displacement due to funding and building of AI systems is the true definition of AGI. We might as well get there faster instead of delaying it. You have already seen Oracle and Block attributing their layoffs to AI so it is happening right now. So why delay any further and just get it over with.
- doesnt_know 6mo agoGet where faster? Get what over with? Aren’t you talking about destroying livelihoods? Pushing people into poverty and/or homelessness? What is the benefit exactly?
- Closi 6mo agoI guess the argument would go that a new economic model will be required at that stage. There isn't much point in having people do jobs they don't like which are trivial to automate just for money, but at the point where there isn't enough economically useful things for everyone to do, the current system falls down. > What is the benefit exactly? Well one benefit would be international competitiveness. The country that does it slowest will be the country doing more work for less output.
- samrus 6mo agoThe paper is suggesting such a new economic model. Do you have a another proposal?
- Closi 6mo agoWell, the paper suggests taxing businesses who automate which is more like trying to continue the current economic model by reducing the use of AI. I suspect if the 'AI-Maximalists' are true, it will need to be a more fundamental rewrite (e.g. UBI, Socialism etc)
- palmotea 6mo ago> I guess the argument would go that a new economic model will be required at that stage. > ...but at the point where there isn't enough economically useful things for everyone to do, the current system falls down. Not necessarily. To quote the Bobs from Office Space: "He won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally." No need to change, just let the plebs die out.
- phoronixrly 6mo ago> but at the point where there isn't enough economically useful things for everyone to do This assumes that for example a person who has been an artist for 20 years, can easily enough switch professions to a machinist, and the only reason for them not to do it is because the economy has no need for another machinist. An insane way to think. This is not how humans work. Let me see any HN dweller go from their cushy home office to butchering animals for meat on 12-hour shifts for example... Oh and btw, no safety net to give you food, housing and healthcare while you learn the new craft!
- Closi 6mo ago> Let me see any HN dweller go from their cushy home office to butchering animals for meat on 12-hour shifts for example I think that's the reality of lots of people when they face any redundancy situation - People take up jobs that they wouldn't traditionally want to do in order to survive or look after their family. I don't necessarily see why people on HN would be different.
- SilentM68 6mo agoExactly! As of now, there is no benefit to regular working people. Perhaps in the future, great abundance will occur, but as of now, there will only be job loss, fear, neo-luddism, and blame. Believe me when I say that I know people, some close to me, that are experiencing fear due to automated systems being installed and tested where they work. They are essentially witnessing start of their automated replacement robot workforce. Whatever is planned in terms of AI being used to help people needs to happen, sooner rather than later, because all I am seeing is chaos in the horizon. (⧘⟃⨅⟄⧘)≋≋≋⦻
- mullingitover 6mo agoThe article is saying that the solution here isn’t to just throw up our hands and commit suicide as a nation, it’s to simply tax the AI, punishing the negative externality. Seems like the obvious answer to the prisoner’s dilemma problem where everyone wants to lay off their workforce, but expects that they’ll be the only ones to get this bright idea.
- friendzis 6mo ago> it’s to simply tax the AI, punishing the negative externality. That "simply" is working overtime here.
- 542458 6mo agoWhat’s a bit hard for me to rationalize here is why are market shifts considered a negative externality here? We didn’t tax moulding machines because they reduced the demand for sculptors. Don’t get me wrong, I think the end goal of “Tax those who can pay for it to build a social safety net” is reasonable, I just don’t buy the “negative externalities” argument.
- mullingitover 6mo ago> We didn’t tax moulding machines because they reduced the demand for sculptors. AI isn't promising to be one machine, it's promising to be a general intelligence that could potentially send unemployment over 50%. We're talking about every truck driver, every warehouse worker, basically everyone who sits in front of a screen for a living being unemployed. This really changes things from 'social safety net' to 'prevent civil unrest that threatens continuity of government.'
- array_key_first 6mo agoWell because if you don't do something then everyone loses their jobs, and then there's no more consumers, and then the economy implodes, and then everyone dies, including the people utilitizing AI. It's kind of similar to how nobles fucked themselves in the middle ages. One would think having a lot of serfs is good, but no actually. Having a functioning economy would be better, and in the long run feudal economies stagnated. And that's why I, today, am effectively much more rich than a feudal lord.
- 542458 6mo agoI am thoughoughly unconvinced that the “AI-based layoffs” are actually caused by AI displacing workers and aren’t just regular layoffs caused by other factors with a smokescreen of “Actually we’re laying people off because we’re doing really well, please don’t dump your stock”.
- rsalus 6mo agoGreat paper. > If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them Big if.
- ithkuil 6mo agoConsequential enough that it's reasonable to plan for it.
- paulpauper 6mo agoIf AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. That is a huge "if" though. I am not sure either that the latter falls from this. When the US transitioned away from assembly lines or agriculture dominated, it's not as if consumer spending consequently collapsed.
- whazor 6mo agoEspecially also since AI providers are struggling with scaling up.
- thephyber 6mo agoWhen did the US transition away from agriculture? When did the US transition away from assembly lines? I don’t think you have thought through either one of these and I don’t think they are comparable to what we expect to see for AI’s changes to the job market.
- paulpauper 6mo agohere is the data. Farming as a percentage of the labor force fell considerably https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidUxnyIaNJ2HEmVZxxfM2FGOI040t2dpGdvK8c5kGRZUzieSdUxrMxmIl7b5n7Dn-QyUt7f8Ve-ToOYBN49f47rUkNBuGM1x60EbYpdmw1fYV3Rxne41-6RTg4QyoKW-_m6nS0/s1600/farmjobs.jpg https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi...
- semiinfinitely 6mo agoneo-luddism dressed up in economic jargon. the authors suggest the only effective tool is to tax companies based on how much automation they achieve. Penalizing efficiency is a guaranteed recipe for stagnation and if we'd done this at any point in our past we would have not made it out of the dark ages
- paulpauper 6mo agoThe Chicago School would probably hate it
- jaccola 6mo agoIt’s funny, I think most people roll their eyes when Trump says things like “you’ll be tired of winning, you’ll say ‘please no more winning’”. But recommendations to tax efficiency are unironically that (just dressed in more serious language). “Please stop giving us what we want so efficiently, we want to work more for it!”
- gostsamo 6mo agoThose winning and those asking for this to stop are two different categories of people. The former are the capital holders and the latter are those with no source of capital in their future. If you can merge the two categories, we may talk again. Until then, you need to come up with something better than trickle down in a world where there is no trickling.
- palmotea 6mo ago> But recommendations to tax efficiency are unironically that (just dressed in more serious language). “Please stop giving us what we want so efficiently, we want to work more for it!” You're trying to make it sound ridiculous, but most people aren't pure consumers. They're laborers and consumers. Policies that hurt while wearing the consumer hat may be more than justified by the benefits while wearing the labor hat.
- thewhitetulip 6mo agoLet companies manage to automate 100% of their processes by having their own country/law/constitution! Companies produce goods which people consume. If you hand everything over to the oligarch class, how will people consume products built by companies???
- drivebyhooting 6mo agoThe trick is bypassing the human consumer as well. Companies satisfy (human) consumer needs as a byproduct of profit maximization. But human consumers are inefficient. They have to sleep, require medical care, etc. A purely machine economy would be far more efficient. Therefore in the limit we should eliminate reliance on human labor and consumption to build a more perfect and efficient world.
- giacomoforte 6mo agoYou jest, but isn't this the logical conclusion? A sufficiently smart AGI has no need for humanity, at all.
- Incipient 6mo agoBut then, what need do we have for the AI?
- sheikhnbake 6mo agoAt this rate, I'm convinced our future AI overlords will put humanity down much more humanely than we are/will
- librasteve 6mo agoviz. Iain M. Banks culture, where the AI keep humans as pets
- rickydroll 6mo agoI know people like to make Matrix jokes about what the future of AGI would be like, but I suspect it would be more like the relationship between humans and Cheela in Dragon's Egg.
- paulpauper 6mo agoThe "economy on a chip" thought experiment .
- samrus 6mo ago
- slopinthebag 6mo agoStill looking for the AI in the room. Where is it exactly? Surely nobody is claiming LLMs are AI?
- querez 6mo agoAI doesn't need to be AGI to be useful. Surely, you've tried Claude Code before and found it more helpful than Clippy?
- slopinthebag 6mo agoI'm not talking about AGI. Microsoft Word is also more helpful than Clippy, is it also AI?
- IshKebab 6mo agoOf course it's AI. It's not AGI yet.
- nurettin 6mo agoWhile technically inaccurate, there is so much talk around it that when someone says AI everyone assumes LLM at this point.
- pjmlp 6mo agoDoing the translations and asset creations for CMS content, that used to be done previously by human teams, for example.
- xyzal 6mo agoI use AIs for coding with moderate success, but the more I work with them, the more I am convinced that "intelligence on tap" is a pipe dream, especially in domains where logical thinking in novel (ie not-in-dataset) contexts is required. Recently, I tasked it to study a new Czech building permit law in conjunction with some waste disposal regulations and the result was just tragic. The model (opus 4.6) just could not stop drawing conclusions from obsolete regulations in its training dataset, even when given the fulltext of the new law. The usual "you are totally right" also applied and its conclusions were most of the time obviously wrong even to a human with cursory knowledge of the subject. I ended with studying the relevant regulations myself over the weekend.
- lukan 6mo ago"The model (opus 4.6) just could not stop drawing conclusions from obsolete regulations in its training dataset" To be fair, humans are also often like this. If some rule/law/model was deeply ingrained into them, they often cannot stop thinking in terms of that rule, even if they are clearly in a new context (like a new country).
- xyzal 6mo agoWhen the mandatory speed limit in my country was reduced from 60km/h to 50km/h in cities, 95 percent of people instantly adapted.
- lukan 6mo agoBut that is pretty much the same rule, just the numbers slightly adjusted. What do you think would happen if they changed traffic from the right to the left lane?
- xyzal 6mo agoHeh, that would be surely funny :) But most people at least know there is a new permit law and if they are not sure, they are to seek expert guidance. The model is even with explicit notification unable to reflect upon this fact. How it is supposed to be useful then?
- isoprophlex 6mo agoSo... the solution is basically "pay tax on the demand that you're destroying". We can all hate on the premise (ai is good enough to do this) and/or the solution presented (centrally enforced taxation), but you gotta admit: the messaging from SV's AI leaders about how "ai will take all your jobs" is confused as fuck, because if so, who will be on the consuming end of things?
- ithkuil 6mo agoIf such tax would introduce an asymmetry that will favour human employment, then there should be enough buying power to create some demand
- palmotea 6mo ago> the messaging from SV's AI leaders about how "ai will take all your jobs" is confused as fuck, because if so, who will be on the consuming end of things? Maybe SV's AI leaders and other assorted trillionaires. A capitalist economy that drops any pretense of serving the needs of anyone except a tiny elite.
- joquarky 6mo agoThey don't care because they are set.
- khalic 6mo agoWhile I agree with the general sentiment that this requires monitoring and study, the abstract is _very_ tendentious, lays multiple hypothesis as facts and doesn’t provide any measurement or alternatives to their preferred solution. This isn’t a scientific study, it’s a militant manifesto
- bwhiting2356 6mo agoIf robotics progress starts to pick up, I'll take this more seriously. Right now, there's practically infinite demand for labor in construction, manufacturing, agriculture and many other industries. All kinds us good projects that could be happening, if you dig into why, labor intensive work is a factor. Why didn't the hydroponics project take off? Why is that still an empty lot instead of a new home? Why isn't there live theatre in this small city? Why is there a pot hole in the bike lane?
- Sharlin 6mo agoInfinite demand, maybe, but not at wages that most people are willing to accept. Of course, if there's literally no other work, then previously-middle-class people will take what's available and become homeless because the wage doesn't pay the bills (which are, in places, extremely inflated due to decades of jaw-droppingly bad housing and transport policies). Sounds like a highly desirable future.
- eru 6mo agoYes, but thanks to Baumol's cost disease productivity increases in other sectors can have spillover effects in terms of wages.
- tonyedgecombe 6mo agoThat assumes the current high wages are here to stay. This seems unlikely if AI consumes most white collar jobs.
- Sharlin 6mo agoUm, I expressly said that high wages wouldn't stay? If the choices are either being jobless and homeless, or doing some menial cotton-harvesting job while still being homeless, we got a slight social problem. The GP said that there's a lot of demand for menial labor. That demand only exists if you don't have to actually pay for said labor. In other words, it's not demand at all.
- bananaflag 6mo ago
- efitz 6mo agoAI layoffs are very shortsighted IMO and should be viewed by investors as a sign of weakness in management or the business itself. If everyone is going to increase productivity by some factor k per employee, then kx is the new norm of overall productivity of x employees. If you lay off some percentage Y of your work force, then your expected gains will only be k(x(100-y)/100). In other words, you will not recognize the same productivity gains as your competitors that chose not to lay off. Yes I realize it is more complex than that, because of reduced opex, but there are diminishing returns very quickly.
- fastforwardius 6mo agoThere are productivity gains to be had by reducing amount of communication and internal layers IMO. I believe there are also diminishing returns on new features/products (in general case). So you won't really need that many people.
- yobbo 6mo agoStart by shifting taxation from worker incomes to corporate incomes?
- akramachamarei 6mo agoWhat do you mean?
- incomingpain 6mo agoThe way I see OP: It's the Luddite Fallacy. Textile workers worried about machinery saying it's going to result in collapse of the economy when they lose their job. But every time there's a new technology that threatens some jobs because of an increase in efficiency but investment thus can be placed in other locations creating new jobs. different kinds of jobs. It's not different this time. Each time the luddite movement is wrong. They are solely concerned with their own selfish concerns and the demands to stop the technological improvement will not be heeded.
- dinfinity 6mo agoPast performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Your logic equates to "there will always be jobs for humans to do", which is naive. Remember that we're counting down in the number of things we do better than inorganic stuff. At some point our bodies (admittedly impressive when compared to other animals) will be surpassed in enough aspects that there isn't anything where we can provide enough value to live off.
- incomingpain 6mo agoThanks for the downvote. >will be surpassed in enough aspects that there isn't anything where we can provide enough value to live off. Regardless of that. AI is here to stay. Nobody is going to revoke the constitutions and criminalize AI to prevent this from happening. What's going to happen will happen.
- dinfinity 6mo agoI agree, but that was not the point of contention. I did not downvote you. I argued why your model of what the future will look like is wrong. That point still stands.
- jselysianeagle 6mo ago> Regardless of that. AI is here to stay. Nobody is going to revoke the constitutions and criminalize AI to prevent this from happening. > What's going to happen will happen. Username checks out.
- josefritzishere 6mo agoDApplying a Pigouvian tax to Ai companies might be difficult. None of them actually generate profit, nor have a model to ever do so. I think the huype machien needs to stop spinning before a solution like that would become practical.