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I think it's clear to me that AI will be both things: 1) as in the article it's a contraction of work- industrialization getting rid of hand-made work or the c

• hnthrow0287345 6mo ago
  >That it's all about cost-cutting? Cost cutting has less uncertainty than making something new, so they do that first. If something else comes along, then great. This is also why the people should make the transition as difficult as possible for companies doing layoffs when the companies are paying proportionally very little in taxes compared to the people they are laying off.
• damnesian 6mo ago
  Hard to understand, when essential human nature is so predictable? Sure, we will do novel things with it. But society in the main will use to it exploit labor. same as it ever was.
  • anthonypasq 6mo ago
    are you under the impression life was better before capitalism?
    • sweezyjeezy 6mo ago
      That's a false-dichotomy. Capitalism was good for artisanal workers before the industrial revolution, and then it became pretty goddamn bad for them. We're worried we're staring down the barrel of that right now - just saying 'well it was even worse before capitalism' does nothing for us.
      • anthonypasq 6mo ago
        yes it does, it says that trying to prevent technology in order to protect the interests of some special class up people at the expense of everyone else is dumb and shortsighted. If if people actually listened to the people wailing "but what about the horse carriage business!!!" in the 20th century, it would have been a disaster.
        • sweezyjeezy 6mo ago
          Sure, but AI pessimism is allowed to be personal. Am I supposed to be optimistic that I feel I'm about to get shafted? Should I be less concerned that I need to provide for my family, because in the long term this is going to be a great step forward for humanity?
          • anthonypasq 6mo ago
            youre allowed to be personally pessimistic, but if you actually do anything to prevent it from happening i think that is incredibly selfish. it would be like an oncologist trying to stop an anti-cancer pill because theyd be out of a job.
      • simianwords 6mo ago
        You are addressing something totally different to the original claim - which tried to say that capitalism is inherently exploitative on labour which is just outdated Marxism
        • sweezyjeezy 6mo ago
          To be frank, I thought trying to twist this into an argument about whether capitalism is inherently exploitative was a complete waste of time and I replied as such. If you'll recall what we were originally talking about here - "AI, should HN users be optimistic?"
          • simianwords 6mo ago
  • simianwords 6mo ago
    “Exploit labour” is just outdated Marxism. No self respecting economist believes this kind of rhetoric anymore but it only exists amongst west coded leftist. It’s a sort of cynical fatalism to think everything is exploitation — directly coming from Marx. It’s not exploitation to mutually agree on a deal. Most of population know this except Marxists!
    • cmrdporcupine 6mo ago
      Ah, peak HN pseudo-libertarianism a) just hand wave away that there is a massive power and wealth differential involved in this "mutual agreement" b) dismiss all discussions which recognize that fact... as "outdated Marxism" Plenty of mainstream economists are capable of seeing the real world which you are pretending doesn't exist. Even Marx meant the word "exploit" in relatively value neutral terms, just recognizing that in any economy built on private property we exploit humans the same way we do any "resource". It's up to the reader whether they see that as having any moral connotation.
      • simianwords 6mo ago
        Massive power and wealth differential is just simply a reason to be jealous. It is precisely this concept of mutual agreement (capitalism) that brought most of humanity out of poverty. >Plenty of mainstream economists are capable of seeing the real world which you are pretending doesn't exist. Not really. There are total of zero economic policies made by analysing economy through Labour Theory of Value or whatever other crap Marxists believe. The above poster used "exploit" in non value neutral terms. Marx tried very hard to be value neutral about it (but its clear what the intentions were) but his readers don't play that game.
• dodu_ 6mo ago
  > do people really believe no novel things will be unlocked with this tech? Yes. It's a mostly shitty but very fast and relatively inexpensive replacement for things that already exist. Give your best example of something that is novel, ie isn't just replacing existing processes at scale. It's been 3 and a half years now since the initial hype wave. Maybe I genuinely missed the novel trillion dollar use case that isn't just labor disruption.
  • vjvjvjvjghv 6mo ago
    "Yes. It's a mostly shitty but very fast and relatively inexpensive replacement for things that already exist." Wouldn't that apply to most technological advances? Cars, computers, cell phones.
    • dodu_ 6mo ago
      Yes, but I'm not the one who introduced the "novel" constraint to the argument. e: Also I don't know that I'd strictly bucket these specific examples you gave as shittier versions, though I guess that's a matter of perspective.
  • jenniferhooley 6mo ago
    I think that most people are pretty short-sighted about the utility cases right now (which is understandable given the negative feelings about a lot of what's currently going on). There are a lot of really useful things that were impossible before. But none of these use cases are "easy," and they all take years of engineering to implement. So, all we see right now are trashy, vibe-code style "startups" rather than the actual useful stuff that will come over the years from experienced architects and engineers who can properly utilize this technology to build real products. I'm someone who feels very frustrated with most of the chatter around AI - especially the CEOs desperate to devalue human labor and replace it - but I am personally building something utilizing AI that would have been impossible without it. But yeah, it's no walk in the park, and I've been working on it for three years and will likely be working on it for another year before it's remotely ready for the public. When I started, the inference was too slow, the costs were too high, and the thinking-power was too poor to actually pull it off. I just hypothesized that it would all be ready by the time I launch the product. Which it finally is, as of a few months ago.
• throwaway613746 6mo ago
  It's been a few years and I have yet to see a single novel thing come out of it. Even chatbots weren't novel when ChatGPT came out.
  • jimbokun 6mo ago
    It's disingenuous to say ChatGPT is not novel relative to older chatbots. The capabilities of ChatGPT compared to what came before were astonishing and continued to improve at a rapid rate.
• butlike 6mo ago
  So now the ancillary question from your example is: "Is hand-spun cotton better than industrialized polyester?"
  • TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    Define better. Fast fashion sucks, but hand-spun cotton won't give you Kevlar or modern wind-resistant clothing or fireproof materials for your furniture or... <insert half thousand different things adjacent to modern textile production>. It's always win some, lose some with the economy, but technology itself opens previously impossible capabilities.
    • TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
      It used to open them to most of the population - at least that was the ideal for a couple of decades - but now it seems to be opening them to oligarchs more than workers. It's essentially a political energy source. It heats everything up. Eventually it either explodes, goes through a phase change to a new (meta)stable state, or collapses back to a previous state.
    • jimbokun 6mo ago
      What is the AI equivalent of wind-resistant clothing or fireproof materials? So far the only product AI is producing is layoffs.
      • TeMPOraL 6mo ago
        > wind-resistant clothing Better autocomplete/autocorrect, "circle on screen" -> OCR anywhere, high-quality automated background removal[0]. > fireproof materials No big examples to point at now, except maybe whatever security fixes that'll come out of Glasswing Project[1]. > So far the only product AI is producing is layoffs. AI-related[2] layoffs are a direct consequence of useful things AI is delivering. -- [0] - Super useful for e.g. making ID photos, which I notice I need to do increasingly often, which is likely a consequence of proliferation of remote/digital ID verification, which nicely ties us back to question 'butlike expressed, i.e. how much is technological progress actually improving things. [1] - https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing [2] - As opposed to "we wanted to lay off people anyway, AI just provided a socially-acceptable excuse".
• isodev 6mo ago
  > AI pessimism is hard to understand Well, it really isn’t. First, this entire post makes two assumptions: 1) that AI adds more value to the process than it removes and 2) that it’s sustainable. It’s not pessimism to want to validate these first. Are AI “gains” really transformative or simply random opportunities for automation which we can achieve by other means anyway? Can the world continue to afford “AI as a service” long enough for the gains to result in improvements that make it sustainable? Are we dooming our kids to a hellishly warm planet with no clear plan how to fix it? It’s not pessimism, just simple project management if you ask me.
  • fridder 6mo ago
    Also I think over the past few years/decade the tech sector has lost any benefit of the doubt that everything that comes out of it is a "good thing".
  • packetlost 6mo ago
    > Are AI “gains” really transformative They're transformative in the sense that will shrink the optimal team size, but I don't expect the jobs to actually go away unless these things both get substantially better at engineering (they're good at generating code but that is like 20% of engineering at best) and we have a means of giving them full business/human levels of context. Really basic stuff gets a lot easier but the needle doesn't move much on the harder stuff. Without some sort of "memory" or continuous feedback system, these models don't learn from mistakes or successes which means humans have to be the cost function. Maybe it's just because I'm burnt out or have a miner RSI at the moment, but it definitely saves me a bit of time as long as I don't generate a huge pile and actually read (almost) everything the models generate. The newer models are good at following instructions and pattern matching on needs if you can stub things out and/or write down specs to define what needs to happen. I'd say my hit rate is maybe 70%
    • mlcruz 6mo ago
      > we have a means of giving them full business/human levels of context Trust me, this is a work in progress. Right now most corporations do not have their data organized and structured well enough for this to be possible, but there is a lot of heat and money in this space. Imo, What most of the people that are not directly working in this space get wrong is assuming swes are going to be hit the hardest: There are some efficiency gains to be won here, but a full replace is not viable outside of AGI scenarios. I would actually bet on a demand increase (even if the job might change fundamentally). Custom domain made software is cheaper as it has ever been and there is a gigantic untapped market here. Low complexity to medium complexity white colar jobs are done for in the next decade through. This is what is happening right now in finance: if models stopped improving now, the technology at this point is already good enough to lower operational costs to the point where some part of the workforce is redundant.
• sweezyjeezy 6mo ago
  Well this is HN so a lot of us are pretty terrified of your 1). We went from 'you have a good job for the next couple of decades' to 'your job is at extreme risk for disruption from AI' in the space of like 5 years. Personally I have a family, I'm a bit old to retrain, but I never worked at a high-comp FAANG or anything so I can't just focus on painting unless my government helps me (note - not US/China). That's extremely anxiety-inducing, that a vague promise of novel new things does not come close to compensating.
  • Jcampuzano2 6mo ago
    I'm 33 and I feel sort of lucky that I'll still potentially have time to retrain. I'm fully prepared to within the next 5 years or so (and potentially much less) I'll probably need to retrain into a trade or something to stay relevant in any sort of field. Many people claim its going to become a tool we use alongside our daily work, but its clear to me thats not how anybody managing a company sees it, and even these AI labs that previously tried to emphasize how much its going to augment existing workforces are pushing being able to do more with less. Most companies are holding onto their workforce only begrudgingly while the tools advance and they still need humans for "something", not because they're doing us some sort of favor. The way I see it unless you have specialized knowledge, you are at risk of replacement within the next few years.
    • sweezyjeezy 6mo ago
      I also have contemplated just retraining now to try and get ahead of the curve, but I'm not confident that trades can absorb the shock of this - both in terms of supply (more unemployment) and demand (anything non-commercial will be hit by capital flight on the customer-side). I figure I will just try and make as much money on a higher wage as I can and hope for the best...
    • bluefirebrand 6mo ago
      > I'm 33 and I feel sort of lucky that I'll still potentially have time to retrain. I'm fully prepared to within the next 5 years or so (and potentially much less) I'll probably need to retrain into a trade or something to stay relevant in any sort of field. The problem is that there are not many fields that are going to be immune to AI based cost cutting and there surely will not be enough work for all of us even if we all retrain. If we all do, then it will create a n absolutely massive downward pressure on wages due to massive oversupply in other lines of work too So there's really just no good way out
• jimbokun 6mo ago
  > do people really believe no novel things will be unlocked with this tech? That it's all about cost-cutting? The cost cutting is the only revenue producing models for the AI companies so far. It's being pitched as a way for corporations to fire a lot of employees and save money. Revenue for the consumer facing products is not very impressive. Consumers are mostly satisfied with the free versions and very resistant to adding yet another channel to shove advertising at them.
• jillesvangurp 6mo ago
  Change is a constant in history. Stuff happens, and then we adjust. Big changes may result in short term confusion, anger, etc. All the classic signs of the five stages of grief basically. If you step back a little, a lot of people simply don't see the forest for the trees and they start imagining bad outcomes and then panic over those. Understandable but not that productive. If you look at past changes where that was the case you can see some patterns. People project both utopian and dystopian views and there's a certain amount of hysteria and hype around both views. But neither of those usually play out as people hope/predict. The inability to look beyond the status quo and redefine the future in terms of it is very common. It's the whole cars vs. faster horses thing. I call this an imagination deficit. It usually sorts itself out over time as people find out different ways to adjust and the rest of society just adjusts itself around that. Usually this also involves stuff few people predicted. But until that happens, there's uncertainty, chaos, and also opportunity. With AI, there's going to be a need for some adjustment. Whether people like it or not, a lot of what we do will likely end up being quite easy to automate. And that raises the question what we'll do instead. Of course, the flip side of automating stuff is that it lowers the value of that stuff. That actually moderates the rollout of this stuff and has diminishing returns. We'll automate all the easy and expensive stuff first. And that will keep us busy for a while. Ultimately we'll pay less for this stuff and do more of it. But that just means we start looking for more valuable stuff to do and buy. We'll effectively move the goal posts and raise the ambition. That's where the economical growth will come from. This adjustment process is obviously going to be painful for some people. But the good news is that it won't happen overnight. We'll have time to learn new things and figure out what we can do that is actually valuable to others. Most things don't happen at the speed the most optimistic person wants things to happen. Just looking at inference cost and energy, there are some real constraints on what we can do at scale short term. And energy cost just went up by quite a lot. Lots of new challenges where AI isn't the easy answer just yet.
  • dinfinity 6mo ago
    We are the horses, though. At some point those became almost fully obsolete in a productive economical sense (they're just fancy toys now, basically). No 'raising the ambition' is ever going to change that. They are what they are and they can do what they can do. I don't know about you, but if the something in "we'll find something to do" is becoming a toy for AI or very rich people, I'm not exactly hopeful about the future.
• bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  > But also, the AI pessimism is hard to understand in this context- do people really believe no novel things will be unlocked with this tech? That it's all about cost-cutting? I frankly do not care how much novel stuff is "unlocked" with AI tech if it means I become unemployable due to it replacing all of my skills
• cheesecompiler 6mo ago
  > the AI pessimism is hard to understand in this context This is a burden of proof inversion: historically new technology has not resulted in optimistic outcomes. Quality of life improvements were side effects of capital accruing. AI optimism is the naïve option that requires justification.
• ryandrake 6mo ago
  Both 1) and 2) represent value almost entirely captured by businesses / business owners, and not captured by workers. For 1) the economic boost is captured by business while the losses are captured by workers. For 2) in theory, some new ideas will be created by individual people who get lucky and grow them into their own businesses, but if history is an accurate guide, most of the benefits of new inventions and technology will be captured by existing players.
• lofaszvanitt 6mo ago
  The problem is, at the moment llms are not capable of proper brainstorming. And humans are quite shit in coming up with unique ideas. The great bottleneck is still money and dissemination of given product (marketing). So nothing changes. Just the usual capitalist thing where humans will be squeezed even further and revenue funneled from more entities to fewer ones.