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Real question: who honestly believes that labor is going away? Throughout history, technologists have promised that increased efficiency will mean that people c

Real question: who honestly believes that labor is going away? Throughout history, technologists have promised that increased efficiency will mean that people can work fewer hours—or not at all. But it has never materialized. Not during the Industrial Revolution, not in the 1950s, not during the dawn of the Information Age. What makes us so confident that "this time it's different?"

kjs3 5mo ago
I don't think anyone seriously believes 'labor' in the abstract is going away (well...I'm sure some people do, but not the people at the core of "use our AI product it'll be awesome trust us..."). The issue (IMHO) is that it will be "the labor opportunities left to you will suck way, way more than the ones that have been obsoleted/eliminated".
- fuzzzerd 5mo ago
  This is exactly the concern folks I talk with have. With all of the force reductions in the last few years attributed (real or not its how they're marketed) to AI gains, It's hard not to see that as a trend.
tombert 5mo ago
Sample size of one, so take this for what it is, but I was initially kind of depressed when I started using Codex and Claude Code, because it did kind of feel like I was being automated away. However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do. Suddenly, it became so much more interesting. I have started multiple porting-to-WASM projects, a Jellyfin clone that I am already running on my home server written in Erlang, new themes for my blog, and many other things. I realized that over the years there has been dozens (hundreds?) of projects that I have wanted to do, but I never really got around to doing them because it was just too much effort and I couldn’t justify the time sink. By having multiple agents working at once, I can work on multiple projects concurrently, and I can focus on the harder (and more fun) parts of programming.
- krupan 5mo ago
  Are you getting paid to do any of these? Do you feel like porting projects from one language to another is actually that productive? Like, that's fine if you are having fun, but that has no bearing on this overall discussion about automating all the useful work so that we are no longer needed
  - tombert 5mo ago
    I am arguing, and I thought this was obvious but I guess not, that that scope of work in general increases. My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”, I broadened the scope. I feel like people are making an incorrect assumption that “labor”, even white collar labor, is a fixed-size problem. I don’t agree with that: there’s never going to be a point where we say “shit, there is literally nothing left to do”.
    - luke5441 5mo ago
      Is the scope is actually increasing, that would be the question. Are we re-allocating the labor from the work that got easier (let's assume SaaS) and reallocating it to something that needs doing, e.g. cancer research. To me looks like we aren't and your personal projects don't support the opposite.
      - krupan 5mo ago
        Right and that's something I probably shouldn't have left unsaid. Yes, AI can do these relatively simple tasks like porting from one language to another, but you can't prompt it to cure cancer in one window and prompt it to solve climate change in another and watch it go
      - tombert 5mo ago
        I wasn’t going to be curing cancer regardless so I am not sure I fully understand your point. Like most people reading this forum I am a relatively normal person who has a comfortable life but will be doomed to obscurity with no notable achievements when I die. I use Codex for work, and I feel like I accomplish more with it than I would have without it. I juggle a lot more projects concurrently and can broaden the scope of what I am doing. Now we can argue what I do is “easy”, and you’re probably not wrong, but most white collar work is pretty easy and being able to accomplish more easy tasks is still potential productivity. For that matter, if I am not distracted with the trivial tasks I can dedicate more of my time working on hard problems, maybe even ones we would call “important”.
sp527 5mo ago
You sound blissfully ignorant. I'd honestly advise staying that way. The alternative is depressing af.
- bensyverson 5mo ago
  My bröther, I am burning so many tokens it is unimaginable. I do not think human employees are anywhere near becoming obsolete.
  - sp527 5mo ago
    Depends on the "human employee." If you're burning an "unimaginable" number of tokens, you're already in the top decile of employees, at least. Will the top decile not become obsolete? Maybe. I certainly hope so, just out of sheer survival instinct. But I shudder to contemplate what will be inflicted on everyone else.
krupan 5mo ago
Seriously. The AI psychosis that has people actually believing this stuff is far scarier to me than what might maybe possibly could happen if AI somehow actually performs to the level that the people selling it say it will.
- ryeights 5mo ago
  The antidote to AI psychosis is not denial. We owe it to ourselves to be humble and consider the possibility that LLM technology leads to general intelligence. The capabilities of coding agents today are certainly outside my wildest imagination circa GPT-3 launch in 2020.
  - krupan 5mo ago
    For many of us the release of GPT-3 appeared like a huge step function, a gigantic leap forward, but the fact is, it wasn't that huge. We've been researching computers and AI for around 70 years now. We had productive "machine learning" and pattern completion for a good what, 10 or 15 years before GPT-3 was released. Your phone could auto complete. Computers could win at chess. I worked on working autonomous flying drones back in 2008. In 2020 I joined an autonomous car company that had been slowly grinding for 10 years beforeI joined. The growth is there but not at the blinding rate you think. One thing I have seen no evidence of is AI being smarter than the smartest humans. It's still just a search engine (with an impressive human language UI) of existing human knowledge. It cannot do anything it has not been trained on.
    - ryeights 5mo ago
      In what sense is an LLM analogous (much less reducible to) a search engine?
      - krupan 5mo ago
        Search engine: crawl the entire Internet and create an index. When you ask it a question it uses that index to point you to an answer among all the information it crawled. LLM: crawl the entire Internet and train a model. When you ask it a question, it uses that model to spit out an answer. Worse than a search engine though, if it can't come up with a good answer it just makes shit up Both use the same sources of information. Neither can produce a (correct) answer that doesn't exist somewhere in that information source
ryeights 5mo ago
The cynical conclusion of AGI is that most humans will be enslaved or disposed of. We won't be forced to continue working for pay despite being slower, less intelligent, and more expensive than machines.
- tombert 5mo ago
  Are people really basing their world view off The Terminator? Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.
  - ryeights 5mo ago
    You saw something kinda analogous in a movie once, therefore it's impossible? Am I the one basing my views off of science fiction?
    - tombert 5mo ago
      It just seems like people are asserting that AI will enslave humanity without any reason to actually think that outside of speculative fiction.
      - ryeights 5mo ago
        I’m trying to discuss a scenario where the labor class becomes extraneous/unnecessary to the elite class, not an AI takeover.
        hackable_sand 5mo ago
        Yeah, you guys do that a lot Write a book about it then?
  - hackable_sand 5mo ago
    Idk. They're trying to manifest their weird cyber-dystopia head-canon Why? Idk
kypro 5mo ago
This time isn't different. History has repeatedly shown us isolated examples of completely replacing the need for human labour. The industrial revolution did destroy jobs, but back then labour was incomprehensibly unproductive. So much so that around 200 years ago 50% of the entire workforce worked in agriculture. This meant that although a large percentage of the total workforce was affected by the industrial revolution the total percentage of jobs that machines could do was absolutely tiny. Even where machines could typically only automate some percentage of the total work. For example, in agriculture although machines could do a lot of the work, there was still a need for humans to operate the machines. However, there were some exceptions. Texture weavers were completely replaced by machines – it didn't make them more efficient it made them unemployed. More recently human calculators have been completely replaced. And more recently still checkout staff at supermarkets are being replaced by self-service systems. Again, a self-checkout machine doesn't make a job more productive, it entirely replaces the need for a human to do it. Even today there's still relatively very few jobs which can be entirely done by machines, but for the first time ever, we're starting to see how this could change. Then the question then is what new jobs might be created if you no longer need graphic designers or VFX artists or lawyers? If humans aren't good for physical labour or mental labour then what are they good for? The assumption that humans will remain employable assumes that humans will still be able to provide some economic value which machines cannot. That humans unlike horses won't be sent to the glue factory because there will still be some economic use for us so that we can still be net providers and not a net-burden. Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of jobs which machines won't be able to do, if you have the entire workforce competing for those jobs then you'll probably be paid so poorly you might as well not have a job. Would be interested what you disagree with. Is it that you don't believe that AI will be able to replace humans entirely? If so what jobs do you think are safe? Or is it that you believe new jobs will be created? If so can you describe what these jobs might involve that machines cannot do?
- stevepotter 5mo ago
  This is a good take. I’d like to know how you think this is going to shake out over the next few decades
daedrdev 5mo ago
Horse labor went away is a objectively decent argument
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  It is not. Horses are chattel, bred by humans for the purposes of serving them. Humans, even the poorest humans, are free creatures and not analogous to horses.

kjs3 5mo ago

I don't think anyone seriously believes 'labor' in the abstract is going away (well...I'm sure some people do, but not the people at the core of "use our AI product it'll be awesome trust us..."). The issue (IMHO) is that it will be "the labor opportunities left to you will suck way, way more than the ones that have been obsoleted/eliminated".

fuzzzerd 5mo ago
This is exactly the concern folks I talk with have. With all of the force reductions in the last few years attributed (real or not its how they're marketed) to AI gains, It's hard not to see that as a trend.

tombert 5mo ago

Sample size of one, so take this for what it is, but I was initially kind of depressed when I started using Codex and Claude Code, because it did kind of feel like I was being automated away. However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do. Suddenly, it became so much more interesting. I have started multiple porting-to-WASM projects, a Jellyfin clone that I am already running on my home server written in Erlang, new themes for my blog, and many other things. I realized that over the years there has been dozens (hundreds?) of projects that I have wanted to do, but I never really got around to doing them because it was just too much effort and I couldn’t justify the time sink. By having multiple agents working at once, I can work on multiple projects concurrently, and I can focus on the harder (and more fun) parts of programming.

krupan 5mo ago
Are you getting paid to do any of these? Do you feel like porting projects from one language to another is actually that productive? Like, that's fine if you are having fun, but that has no bearing on this overall discussion about automating all the useful work so that we are no longer needed
- tombert 5mo ago
  I am arguing, and I thought this was obvious but I guess not, that that scope of work in general increases. My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”, I broadened the scope. I feel like people are making an incorrect assumption that “labor”, even white collar labor, is a fixed-size problem. I don’t agree with that: there’s never going to be a point where we say “shit, there is literally nothing left to do”.
  - luke5441 5mo ago
    Is the scope is actually increasing, that would be the question. Are we re-allocating the labor from the work that got easier (let's assume SaaS) and reallocating it to something that needs doing, e.g. cancer research. To me looks like we aren't and your personal projects don't support the opposite.
    - krupan 5mo ago
      Right and that's something I probably shouldn't have left unsaid. Yes, AI can do these relatively simple tasks like porting from one language to another, but you can't prompt it to cure cancer in one window and prompt it to solve climate change in another and watch it go
    - tombert 5mo ago
      I wasn’t going to be curing cancer regardless so I am not sure I fully understand your point. Like most people reading this forum I am a relatively normal person who has a comfortable life but will be doomed to obscurity with no notable achievements when I die. I use Codex for work, and I feel like I accomplish more with it than I would have without it. I juggle a lot more projects concurrently and can broaden the scope of what I am doing. Now we can argue what I do is “easy”, and you’re probably not wrong, but most white collar work is pretty easy and being able to accomplish more easy tasks is still potential productivity. For that matter, if I am not distracted with the trivial tasks I can dedicate more of my time working on hard problems, maybe even ones we would call “important”.

sp527 5mo ago

You sound blissfully ignorant. I'd honestly advise staying that way. The alternative is depressing af.

bensyverson 5mo ago
My bröther, I am burning so many tokens it is unimaginable. I do not think human employees are anywhere near becoming obsolete.
- sp527 5mo ago
  Depends on the "human employee." If you're burning an "unimaginable" number of tokens, you're already in the top decile of employees, at least. Will the top decile not become obsolete? Maybe. I certainly hope so, just out of sheer survival instinct. But I shudder to contemplate what will be inflicted on everyone else.

krupan 5mo ago

Seriously. The AI psychosis that has people actually believing this stuff is far scarier to me than what might maybe possibly could happen if AI somehow actually performs to the level that the people selling it say it will.

ryeights 5mo ago
The antidote to AI psychosis is not denial. We owe it to ourselves to be humble and consider the possibility that LLM technology leads to general intelligence. The capabilities of coding agents today are certainly outside my wildest imagination circa GPT-3 launch in 2020.
- krupan 5mo ago
  For many of us the release of GPT-3 appeared like a huge step function, a gigantic leap forward, but the fact is, it wasn't that huge. We've been researching computers and AI for around 70 years now. We had productive "machine learning" and pattern completion for a good what, 10 or 15 years before GPT-3 was released. Your phone could auto complete. Computers could win at chess. I worked on working autonomous flying drones back in 2008. In 2020 I joined an autonomous car company that had been slowly grinding for 10 years beforeI joined. The growth is there but not at the blinding rate you think. One thing I have seen no evidence of is AI being smarter than the smartest humans. It's still just a search engine (with an impressive human language UI) of existing human knowledge. It cannot do anything it has not been trained on.
  - ryeights 5mo ago
    In what sense is an LLM analogous (much less reducible to) a search engine?
    - krupan 5mo ago
      Search engine: crawl the entire Internet and create an index. When you ask it a question it uses that index to point you to an answer among all the information it crawled. LLM: crawl the entire Internet and train a model. When you ask it a question, it uses that model to spit out an answer. Worse than a search engine though, if it can't come up with a good answer it just makes shit up Both use the same sources of information. Neither can produce a (correct) answer that doesn't exist somewhere in that information source

ryeights 5mo ago

The cynical conclusion of AGI is that most humans will be enslaved or disposed of. We won't be forced to continue working for pay despite being slower, less intelligent, and more expensive than machines.

tombert 5mo ago
Are people really basing their world view off The Terminator? Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.
- ryeights 5mo ago
  You saw something kinda analogous in a movie once, therefore it's impossible? Am I the one basing my views off of science fiction?
  - tombert 5mo ago
    It just seems like people are asserting that AI will enslave humanity without any reason to actually think that outside of speculative fiction.
    - ryeights 5mo ago
      I’m trying to discuss a scenario where the labor class becomes extraneous/unnecessary to the elite class, not an AI takeover.
      - hackable_sand 5mo ago
        Yeah, you guys do that a lot Write a book about it then?
- hackable_sand 5mo ago
  Idk. They're trying to manifest their weird cyber-dystopia head-canon Why? Idk

kypro 5mo ago

This time isn't different. History has repeatedly shown us isolated examples of completely replacing the need for human labour. The industrial revolution did destroy jobs, but back then labour was incomprehensibly unproductive. So much so that around 200 years ago 50% of the entire workforce worked in agriculture. This meant that although a large percentage of the total workforce was affected by the industrial revolution the total percentage of jobs that machines could do was absolutely tiny. Even where machines could typically only automate some percentage of the total work. For example, in agriculture although machines could do a lot of the work, there was still a need for humans to operate the machines. However, there were some exceptions. Texture weavers were completely replaced by machines – it didn't make them more efficient it made them unemployed. More recently human calculators have been completely replaced. And more recently still checkout staff at supermarkets are being replaced by self-service systems. Again, a self-checkout machine doesn't make a job more productive, it entirely replaces the need for a human to do it. Even today there's still relatively very few jobs which can be entirely done by machines, but for the first time ever, we're starting to see how this could change. Then the question then is what new jobs might be created if you no longer need graphic designers or VFX artists or lawyers? If humans aren't good for physical labour or mental labour then what are they good for? The assumption that humans will remain employable assumes that humans will still be able to provide some economic value which machines cannot. That humans unlike horses won't be sent to the glue factory because there will still be some economic use for us so that we can still be net providers and not a net-burden. Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of jobs which machines won't be able to do, if you have the entire workforce competing for those jobs then you'll probably be paid so poorly you might as well not have a job. Would be interested what you disagree with. Is it that you don't believe that AI will be able to replace humans entirely? If so what jobs do you think are safe? Or is it that you believe new jobs will be created? If so can you describe what these jobs might involve that machines cannot do?

stevepotter 5mo ago
This is a good take. I’d like to know how you think this is going to shake out over the next few decades

daedrdev 5mo ago

Horse labor went away is a objectively decent argument

bigstrat2003 5mo ago
It is not. Horses are chattel, bred by humans for the purposes of serving them. Humans, even the poorest humans, are free creatures and not analogous to horses.