4 ms·

Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? It sounds like the economy would largely reduce to the small minority class o

by layer8 5mo ago

Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? It sounds like the economy would largely reduce to the small minority class of independently wealthy people.

whatshisface 5mo ago
There were no knowledge workers in the middle ages.
- layer8 5mo ago
  There wasn’t 20x value to pay for in the middle ages either.
- wongarsu 5mo ago
  Back then people were mostly farmers, but we already automated that job away. Not completely, but compared to the middle ages we 50x'd their output. Which is a great illustration what it means to make a job 50 times more productive. We went from 80-90% of the population being required to barely make enough food for everyone to survive, to 4% of the population producing such an abundance that consuming too much food has become a systemic health issue
  - fodkodrasz 5mo ago
    At the mere cost of destroying soil, and polluting water and the atmosphere in only 200 years! Possibly this will also play out well, and there is a huge market of... maybe social media influencer economy to pick up those being automated out of their previous work... or rather identity, as actually much like in the middle ages, the modern world also makes the profession largely the identity of the individual. I'm pretty skeptical on the outcomes and the costs also (natural and social as well), but possibly we can have 50x or even more software in the end! The phrase will be truer than ever: > Software is eating the world!
    - coryrc 5mo ago
      Maybe ironically, but software and robotics should allow us to scale regenerative agriculture in a way that doesn't leave everyone in poverty. We already have lasers mounted to trailers doing precise weeding instead of broad herbicide usage. https://www.agtechmarket.net/news/laserweeding https://www.agtechmarket.net/news/laserweeding (random web search, I don't vouch for this site, it just looks legit at a glance) Next innovation could be to scale succession planting, which keeps the ground from being exposed in between crops and lets you transition from nitrogen fixers to users quicker, getting more food out per acre while reducing fertilizer usage. But you can't do that with current harvesters and human labor is too valuable to spend on this. Also take broccoli harvesting, typically you get a few big heads, then it keeps producing smaller heads, but it's not economical to harvest the smaller heads with human labor. Robotic harvesting lets the same plant produce more food per acre and uses the energy needed for new plants instead to keep producing food.
      - fodkodrasz 5mo ago
        Masses will be unemployed, due to robots displacing them, but human labor will also be too costly. We won't be able to afford a person shepherding, but we will need to produce "meat" (substitutes) in plants, or in inhumane animal-jail, and we'll need robot-weedkiller lasers to produce the feedstock instead of letting animals graze... and we'll give the food produced this way to people on UBI... This is where this is going, the whole industrialism is totally self-serving, and for every problem its answer is digging deeper in the rabbit hole, and creating 2 more problems in addition to solving the initial problem only half-way. I don't want to say what you are suggesting is not possibly useful, I just want to emphasize how stuff works out in reality, in addition to doing some nice stuff like what you called out (the halfway solution to the problems). All we get is more alienation and humans getting depressed and feeling a lack of purpose... but somehow we cannot afford to pay fair prices for the agricultural work, and pay fair prices for the food, and not overproduce and overpollute... and the same thing is happening in every aspect of the human condition, not only food production, which is the most basic and ancient activity we have been doing.
        5mo ago
- jrochkind1 5mo ago
  Relatively few anyway. Monks (who wrote and edited books and managed libraries, and also taught), artists and musicians, bookkeepers/treasury/exchequer, scribes/chancery (who were the administrators of the kingdoms), and bankers all existed in European "middle ages". But a significantly smaller part of economy/society compared to "western world" now, yes.
- thewebguyd 5mo ago
  There definitely were what could be considered knowledge workers in the (high) middle ages, it just wasn't the majority of work like today. The knowledge workers then were just a tiny, elite faction, mostly employed by the church or directly by nobility. Kindgoms were still big bureaucracies and needed scribes, theologians, academics, lawyers.
- skydhash 5mo ago
  Are you sure? Any functional organization requires keepers to oil the machine. First the government. The best examples were the chinese empire, the catholic church, and the various kingdoms. Or do you think that everyone was either fighting or farming? Stewardship is knowledge work. Bookkeeping is another.
simonw 5mo ago
The more time I spend using agent tools the less I worry about knowledge worker job loss. It takes a skilled knowledge worker to use these things.
- layer8 5mo ago
  Sure. I was challenging the parent on how the “game” they are positing would play out.
- kansface 5mo ago
  We'll get around to training job specific models or the equivalent. Thats just lower on the value chain for now.
- keeda 5mo ago
  Yes, but I do worry about junior knowledge worker job loss. These models are very good (and getting better) at the vast dark matter of "donkey work" that happens in knowledge-based industries -- work typically done by junior devs / analysts / lawyers / consultants, paralegals, admin assistants, customer success / support, etc. -- and those roles comprise the bulk of the workforce. And worse, these are the tasks that help the junior people eventually grow into the skilled knowledge workers required to operate models, so there's a pipeline problem too.
  - simplyluke 5mo ago
    I do too, but I think it currently has a lot more to do with the quasi-recession we've been in since the end of ZIRP and AI is a better excuse to stop training juniors than telling investors it's belt tightening, just like layoffs. I'm already seeing tech execs/hiring managers getting very frustrated at the lack of new-senior-engineers to hire. The market will correct for this in time.
    - rogerrogerr 5mo ago
      Curious if you can share any backing information from your last statement? As a senior engineer (well, that's my job title anyway), I find it encouraging.
rvz 5mo ago
> Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? They do not care unless these companies can get a bailout. UBI only exists for companies that are too big to fail. Case in point, 2008 and SVB when there was too much money on the line. One of the AI companies attempted to guarantee themselves a way for the government to bail them out if they were close to defaulting on the debt from the data center build out.
- mikeocool 5mo ago
  SVB didn't get bailed out, their investors and creditors were wiped out. You could argue depositors were bailed out -- as they took the undue risk of keeping more than $250k in a single bank (though as part of a requirement for getting a loan from SVB, you had to have your operating accounts with them. So lots of companies had no choice, as SVB was one of the few banks that would lend to them). Arguably, the main impact of securing SVB depositors above the $250k limit is that it prevented thousands of people from being laid off that week, as their employers wouldn't have had the money to make payroll the following Wednesday.
  - matwood 5mo ago
    Thank you for saying this. Continuing to point at SVB as a bailout is annoying. They were not bailed out. Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always. Without trusted banking we have no economy.
    - anonymars 5mo ago
      > Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always Sure, but is that the case now? Is everyone made whole when a bank fails and they have more deposits than the insurance limits? Or only when it's the well-connected / too-big-to-fail? Looks like the answer is no: https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/a-small-banks-failure-leaves-big-depositors-feeling-the-pain-574b83a2 https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/a-small-banks-failure-le... So I don't think it's unreasonable to describe SVB as a bailout. Not for the investors, but for the depositors. Has anything changed to reduce the moral hazard / make it less likely to recur?
regularfry 5mo ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300427 for an alternative take. I don't think either direction is inevitable, yet. To follow on from that comment, if the growth in breadth of capacity of AI leads to a decrease in the risk of running a smaller business, which I don't think is an unreasonable prediction, then it's not inevitable people do lose their jobs. Employers get smaller, higher-leverage, and more plentiful.

by layer8 5mo ago

Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? It sounds like the economy would largely reduce to the small minority class of independently wealthy people.

whatshisface 5mo ago

There were no knowledge workers in the middle ages.

layer8 5mo ago
There wasn’t 20x value to pay for in the middle ages either.
wongarsu 5mo ago
Back then people were mostly farmers, but we already automated that job away. Not completely, but compared to the middle ages we 50x'd their output. Which is a great illustration what it means to make a job 50 times more productive. We went from 80-90% of the population being required to barely make enough food for everyone to survive, to 4% of the population producing such an abundance that consuming too much food has become a systemic health issue
- fodkodrasz 5mo ago
  At the mere cost of destroying soil, and polluting water and the atmosphere in only 200 years! Possibly this will also play out well, and there is a huge market of... maybe social media influencer economy to pick up those being automated out of their previous work... or rather identity, as actually much like in the middle ages, the modern world also makes the profession largely the identity of the individual. I'm pretty skeptical on the outcomes and the costs also (natural and social as well), but possibly we can have 50x or even more software in the end! The phrase will be truer than ever: > Software is eating the world!
  - coryrc 5mo ago
    Maybe ironically, but software and robotics should allow us to scale regenerative agriculture in a way that doesn't leave everyone in poverty. We already have lasers mounted to trailers doing precise weeding instead of broad herbicide usage. https://www.agtechmarket.net/news/laserweeding https://www.agtechmarket.net/news/laserweeding (random web search, I don't vouch for this site, it just looks legit at a glance) Next innovation could be to scale succession planting, which keeps the ground from being exposed in between crops and lets you transition from nitrogen fixers to users quicker, getting more food out per acre while reducing fertilizer usage. But you can't do that with current harvesters and human labor is too valuable to spend on this. Also take broccoli harvesting, typically you get a few big heads, then it keeps producing smaller heads, but it's not economical to harvest the smaller heads with human labor. Robotic harvesting lets the same plant produce more food per acre and uses the energy needed for new plants instead to keep producing food.
    - fodkodrasz 5mo ago
      Masses will be unemployed, due to robots displacing them, but human labor will also be too costly. We won't be able to afford a person shepherding, but we will need to produce "meat" (substitutes) in plants, or in inhumane animal-jail, and we'll need robot-weedkiller lasers to produce the feedstock instead of letting animals graze... and we'll give the food produced this way to people on UBI... This is where this is going, the whole industrialism is totally self-serving, and for every problem its answer is digging deeper in the rabbit hole, and creating 2 more problems in addition to solving the initial problem only half-way. I don't want to say what you are suggesting is not possibly useful, I just want to emphasize how stuff works out in reality, in addition to doing some nice stuff like what you called out (the halfway solution to the problems). All we get is more alienation and humans getting depressed and feeling a lack of purpose... but somehow we cannot afford to pay fair prices for the agricultural work, and pay fair prices for the food, and not overproduce and overpollute... and the same thing is happening in every aspect of the human condition, not only food production, which is the most basic and ancient activity we have been doing.
      - 5mo ago
jrochkind1 5mo ago
Relatively few anyway. Monks (who wrote and edited books and managed libraries, and also taught), artists and musicians, bookkeepers/treasury/exchequer, scribes/chancery (who were the administrators of the kingdoms), and bankers all existed in European "middle ages". But a significantly smaller part of economy/society compared to "western world" now, yes.
thewebguyd 5mo ago
There definitely were what could be considered knowledge workers in the (high) middle ages, it just wasn't the majority of work like today. The knowledge workers then were just a tiny, elite faction, mostly employed by the church or directly by nobility. Kindgoms were still big bureaucracies and needed scribes, theologians, academics, lawyers.
skydhash 5mo ago
Are you sure? Any functional organization requires keepers to oil the machine. First the government. The best examples were the chinese empire, the catholic church, and the various kingdoms. Or do you think that everyone was either fighting or farming? Stewardship is knowledge work. Bookkeeping is another.

simonw 5mo ago

The more time I spend using agent tools the less I worry about knowledge worker job loss. It takes a skilled knowledge worker to use these things.

layer8 5mo ago
Sure. I was challenging the parent on how the “game” they are positing would play out.
kansface 5mo ago
We'll get around to training job specific models or the equivalent. Thats just lower on the value chain for now.
keeda 5mo ago
Yes, but I do worry about junior knowledge worker job loss. These models are very good (and getting better) at the vast dark matter of "donkey work" that happens in knowledge-based industries -- work typically done by junior devs / analysts / lawyers / consultants, paralegals, admin assistants, customer success / support, etc. -- and those roles comprise the bulk of the workforce. And worse, these are the tasks that help the junior people eventually grow into the skilled knowledge workers required to operate models, so there's a pipeline problem too.
- simplyluke 5mo ago
  I do too, but I think it currently has a lot more to do with the quasi-recession we've been in since the end of ZIRP and AI is a better excuse to stop training juniors than telling investors it's belt tightening, just like layoffs. I'm already seeing tech execs/hiring managers getting very frustrated at the lack of new-senior-engineers to hire. The market will correct for this in time.
  - rogerrogerr 5mo ago
    Curious if you can share any backing information from your last statement? As a senior engineer (well, that's my job title anyway), I find it encouraging.

rvz 5mo ago

> Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? They do not care unless these companies can get a bailout. UBI only exists for companies that are too big to fail. Case in point, 2008 and SVB when there was too much money on the line. One of the AI companies attempted to guarantee themselves a way for the government to bail them out if they were close to defaulting on the debt from the data center build out.

mikeocool 5mo ago
SVB didn't get bailed out, their investors and creditors were wiped out. You could argue depositors were bailed out -- as they took the undue risk of keeping more than $250k in a single bank (though as part of a requirement for getting a loan from SVB, you had to have your operating accounts with them. So lots of companies had no choice, as SVB was one of the few banks that would lend to them). Arguably, the main impact of securing SVB depositors above the $250k limit is that it prevented thousands of people from being laid off that week, as their employers wouldn't have had the money to make payroll the following Wednesday.
- matwood 5mo ago
  Thank you for saying this. Continuing to point at SVB as a bailout is annoying. They were not bailed out. Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always. Without trusted banking we have no economy.
  - anonymars 5mo ago
    > Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always Sure, but is that the case now? Is everyone made whole when a bank fails and they have more deposits than the insurance limits? Or only when it's the well-connected / too-big-to-fail? Looks like the answer is no: https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/a-small-banks-failure-leaves-big-depositors-feeling-the-pain-574b83a2 https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/a-small-banks-failure-le... So I don't think it's unreasonable to describe SVB as a bailout. Not for the investors, but for the depositors. Has anything changed to reduce the moral hazard / make it less likely to recur?

regularfry 5mo ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300427 for an alternative take. I don't think either direction is inevitable, yet. To follow on from that comment, if the growth in breadth of capacity of AI leads to a decrease in the risk of running a smaller business, which I don't think is an unreasonable prediction, then it's not inevitable people do lose their jobs. Employers get smaller, higher-leverage, and more plentiful.