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by ryandvm 4mo ago

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deepsun 4mo ago
You can reply to emails faster and so have more time for hobbies. /s
- gdhkgdhkvff 4mo ago
  I’m very on the pro-ai side (check my comment history for proof), but this “ai will give us more free time” logic is seeming more and more patronizing (to be clear, I understand that you are being sarcastic haha). I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump). It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*. The unfortunate reality is: Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier. Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
  - __s 4mo ago
    Yep. With ai tooling I can keep prompting at 3am while sleep deprived. As a result I have mountains of slop plans / code to review. Hours of work which can't be matched by anyone who thinks they can poke a prompt for the day & go
    - 9cb14c1ec0 4mo ago
      It turns out the demand for software is so great that even when it can be produced instantly at zero cost demand still far outstrips supply.
  - chrisandchris 4mo ago
    Just as happened with the horse, with the car, with the steam machine, with the industrialization in general, ... oh wait, we still have to work 8-10 hours 5 days a week, times two, to make enough for a living. So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
    - theobreuerweil 4mo ago
      I guess the argument would go that your income is significantly higher in the sense that the quantity and complexity of stuff that you can afford now is vastly greater than 100 years ago (e.g. washing machines, cars, clothes, computers). I’m not that saying it’s making anyone happier, mind you
      - philistine 4mo ago
        It's all a matter of perspective. 100 years ago, the middle class' purchasing power is far bigger. Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer.
        SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
        The typical middle class family 50 years ago lived in a house you’d consider small and dingy, ate food you’d consider poverty meals, and drove a car you’d consider a poorly assembled death trap. Ask your parents or grandparents how often they got to have real butter growing up.
        lanstin 4mo ago
        Or fresh oranges.
        fl4regun 4mo ago
        This is a truth very few people are willing to confront. My grandmother lived in a village, on a farm, growing her own food and slaughtering her own animals, with no working plumbing, using a well for water. Of course a lot of that changed even just moving up to the 70s, but at that point there still wasn't quite the consumerist "buy whatever you want from wherever and whomever you want and have it almost immediately" environment. I can go to a grocery store here in Canada, buy tropical fruits year round that grow nowhere near me. I never have to concern myself with "this ingredient won't be here because it is seasonal", it'll be there, it'll just be more expensive out of season, worst case I just have to go a bit farther out to a different grocer than I usually go to.
  - dheera 4mo ago
    Capitalism, by nature, will want to force everything to the limit. It's the same thing that happens to housing. People complain housing gets expensive because of "tech workers". No. The reality is greedy landlords can charge 20% more so they charge 20% more. They could be happy with what they make now, but no, they'd rather have the extra 20%. And so housing prices go up 20%. The thing is, it's not just landlords that are greedy. Everyone is greedy. Companies are greedy. Yeah, you can get the same amount of work done in 1/5 the hours per day. But why not do 5x the work instead?
colechristensen 4mo ago
Personally, I can do more than I could before as the result of AI. Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference. The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours. The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
- sarchertech 4mo ago
  I could “retire” to a senior level role and run at 10% capacity with zero AI use at a bigco and nobody would know the difference.
  - sublinear 4mo ago
    Yup. Everything after the first decade of a career is either jockeying for a promotion, jumping ship-to-ship as needed, or sitting around in meetings. It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.
- sillysaurusx 4mo ago
  Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things. Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important. I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
  - colechristensen 4mo ago
    Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those. Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor. AI is far cheaper to fire than a person. "Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
neonstatic 4mo ago
Well, it's a mania, it's stupid now and it will correct itself. There will be pain. There's always pain after stupidity. Then we will see if LLMs are as useful as we were told.
- sylos 4mo ago
  The only correction will be anyone not in the concentrated wealth part being left out to rot. There is no upside for pretty much anyone posting on hacker news
  - illiac786 4mo ago
    That’s not correction though, that’s perpetuation or acceleration of last 40 years‘ trend. Not that I disagree otherwise though.
    - DarkUranium 4mo ago
      There's a (IMO) great, if a bit long, article making exactly your argument. I found it on HN a few days ago: (lost the HN link, sorry) https://matthewbutterick.com/extinction-level-capitalism.html https://matthewbutterick.com/extinction-level-capitalism.htm...
  - neonstatic 4mo ago
    I'm sorry for stirring up your communist fantasy.
xdennis 4mo ago
> When exactly are the upsides going to hit? Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
root-parent 4mo ago
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- throwup238 4mo ago
  Rovers of Wrath? East of Olympus Mons? The next great American novels.
- KellyCriterion 4mo ago
  At least, Trillions+ I'd guess if I read the project right? :-D
  - root-parent 4mo ago
    They are are hiring AI Ethics Officers for robots deciding who gets the last potato.
- jayd16 4mo ago
  A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.
  - eecc 4mo ago
    Reminds me of a film I saw… ;)
    - sciencejerk 4mo ago
      Bladerunner?
  - EasyMark 4mo ago
    Like in "Hello, Tomorrow" ?
  - root-parent 4mo ago
    Do you know how many jobs there will be on Mars? Go west young man..
claudiug 4mo ago
you know how many r are in strawberry
- sciencejerk 4mo ago
  It's the human superpower!
throwitaway222 4mo ago
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- mark242 4mo ago
  Toothpaste making did not completely take over the world's supply of plastic for caps.
moralestapia 4mo ago
The upside is c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality
- ymolodtsov 4mo ago
  I don't care about inequality, I care about the median.
  - outside1234 4mo ago
    These two things are linked because the outcomes are power law.
  - dakolli 4mo ago
    This is a literal Evil (I mean literally) idea wrapped up with statistical terminology and made to seem "logical". You should re-evaluate this.
    - thegrimmest 4mo ago
      How are we torturing morality so that the median quality of life rising by just about every metric is "Evil"?
Kon5ole 4mo ago
Your complaints could have been made in the 80s as well. When the personal computer was introduced it removed tons of jobs, Bill Gates became the first 100 billionaire. But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years. The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity? I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet. Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
Yizahi 4mo ago
We won't need to write our obituaries ;)
- varispeed 4mo ago
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- moomoo11 4mo ago
  He wasn't just a software enginer — he was also a true innovator.
  - black_knight 4mo ago
    Memories of his work will forever live in the models trained on his GitHub repositories.
  - jrave 4mo ago
    :chef's kiss:
ericd 4mo ago
So far, there are more jobs.
- dakolli 4mo ago
  What's your source? The Bureau of labor statistics that is marking most of unemployed people as "not seeking employment" because they aren't walking into workforce centers?
  - ericd 4mo ago
    Payrolls are up about 214k in March, 180k in April, and 140k in May. The BLS data is from broad monthly surveys, not people showing up in workforce centers.
    - BeratnaGas 4mo ago
      Of the 172,000 (adjusted) new jobs in May, 70,000 are attributed to hospitality when 14,000/month is the norm. World Cup temporary jobs. Hourly average earnings rose 12 cents in May while the average price of gas rose $1.17/gallon since the start of the war. One could argue that some of the people participating in the surveys have a vested interest in the numbers looking good. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm
      - ericd 4mo ago
        Ok, still over 100k not including those temporary jobs. I’m not arguing that the overall picture is amazing, just that it doesn’t seem like the narrative that AI is causing massive net job loss is true yet.
tptacek 4mo ago
Why does there need to be an "upside" legible to our profession?
- windexh8er 4mo ago
  Because the alternative is admitting the main upside so far is: a few VCs and early employees get yacht money while everyone else gets a gate-kept chatbot and constant fear mongering. But hey, I guess we all have our own opinion of "upside".
  - akerl_ 4mo ago
    Isn’t this the same thing every other industry and market has been experiencing with technology, automation, etc. for decades, while tech workers basked in their joy at being safe from being replaced because we were the ones powering the replacing?
    - kpcyrd 4mo ago
      This. Capitalism only became problematic the minute it stopped having a cozy spot for software developers~ And even then people prefer blaming the prediction machine instead of recognizing their situation as the logical conclusion of capitalism.
      - throwway120385 4mo ago
        I always thought raw, unchecked Capitalism sucked. I've thought that my whole life. "Welcome to the asylum" and all that.
    - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4mo ago
      Yep. 100%. Developers are getting a taste of their own medicine for about the first time ever, and it’s seldom acknowledged. This is why you won’t find me begging for sympathy in any of these conversations. Developers have had it so good for so long. The moment SV startup dweebs are exposed to actual market forces for 0.01 seconds and it’s like the sky is falling. Pathetic.
colesantiago 4mo ago
There will be new jobs.
- jplusequalt 4mo ago
  What are these jobs? I mean for God's sake, people have been saying this shit for 3 years now, but nobody can fathom what those jobs may be.
  - paulinho1 4mo ago
    I hold the same job title as 2 years ago but my job duties are vastly different now. So yeah new jobs are being created it's just hard to be creative enough to name them properly
  - FridgeSeal 4mo ago
    Just trust us bro!!!! Just some more ai investment please! The jobs will totally come from like, the ai and stuff! We promise!! Just another billion dollars! /s
- fireflash38 4mo ago
  Are the new jobs in the room now? Or perhaps they're somewhere in West Virginia.
  - jcgrillo 4mo ago
    Best state in the country, jobs or no.
- thayne 4mo ago
  Will those new jobs be as good as or better than the jobs that were lost? Will those jobs appear shortly, or will it be decades before they appear? Will the people who lost jobs get free education and training for these jobs that will supposedly appear?
flossly 4mo ago
Upsides will be seen into societies that are not capital-above-govt, but govt-above-capital. China for instance: they will show advantages of AI (amongst other technologies). Sure they've got surveillance there, but there's also surveillance in the west. In China you have clean streets and low crime, while in the west it's surveillance without tangible benefit for the common people.
- kelnos 4mo ago
  There are many places in the West with clean streets and low crime that don't use China's economic or political model.
- includenotfound 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - conception 4mo ago
    Texas at least disagrees with you - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG-119-JU01-20250122-SD004.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG... Do you have statistics to back your assertions that disagree with this data?
    - dmitrygr 4mo ago
      https://www.scup.com/doi/10.1080/14043858.2014.926062 https://www.scup.com/doi/10.1080/14043858.2014.926062 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08862605241311611 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08862605241311611
    - includenotfound 4mo ago
      I do in fact. Germany: https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/PolizeilicheKriminalstatistik/2024/Bund/Tatverdaechtige/BU-TV-22-T62-TV-Staatsangehoerigkeiten_xls.html https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/Pol... Total N = ~2.2M Germans = ~1.2M (~58%) Non-Germans = ~900k (~42%) Population: Germans ~71M (~85%), foreign ~12M (~15%) Per-capita, non-Germans show up ~2.8x more. Approximate rates: Germans: ~1,786 per 100k (baseline) All Non-Germans: ~7,365 per 100k (~4.1× German rate) Syria: ~12,900 per 100k (~7.2×) Afghanistan: ~12,300 per 100k (~6.9×) Romania: ~8,450 per 100k (~4.7×) Turkey: ~6,660 per 100k (~3.7×) Poland: ~6,640 per 100k (~3.7×) Ukraine: ~5,130 per 100k (~2.9×) --- Some other countries (Switzerland, Denmark) also publish per-nationality data and it doesn't look any better. The other comment shows data from Norway/Finland/Sweden which is more of the same. The US is a different topic (but strong arguments with clear data can be made as well), so I'll refrain from engaging it here to avoid further derailing the thread.
ksec 4mo ago
>(world's first trillionaire anyone?) With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX. >When exactly are the upsides going to hit? A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI. The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
- FridgeSeal 4mo ago
  Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that, instead of it all going solely to resource guzzling data centres selling opaque models whilst simultaneously destroying the pricing for local hardware!
  - ksec 4mo ago
    >Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that, We are only 1 to 2 year into a cycle and we expect a lot of things to happen. Even the business decisions of things were decided before the cycle happened, as if they are fortune teller or God, the hardware lead time would meant it will be next year at best before we see results. And Nvidia has already moved at a faster pace than most imagined. Latest GPU R&D are now fully amortised on the AI server front. GPU now move to leading edge node faster than before and iterate on a shorter cycle. I have yet to read a single comments on either HN, Reddit or wider internet that appreciate this. And as to NAND and DRAM, which most people are concern. We only need a few companies to commit to long term ( 3 - 5 years ) agreement on pricing and quantity, DRAM and NAND will increase supply or new fabs accordingly. This isn't new and is exactly what Apple did with iPod. But no companies wants to do that, as they all want lowest price and little commitment, while foundry don't want to bare the risk of new fab and over supply in the long term. This is just classic commodity supply and demand scenario. On a simpler terms, no one asked why Toilet paper companies aren't putting up more factory just to output more paper rolls during COVID. And If you need 5 to 10 years just to earn back the cost of additional supply line, why risk that?
nelsonfigueroa 4mo ago
I think the upsides already hit, they just weren't meant for you and I
skissane 4mo ago
> exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?) How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth? If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.
erulastiel 4mo ago
Quality of life for basically everyone and percentage of the earth living in poverty are getting much better.
thelastgallon 4mo ago
The upsides are going to be everyone freed up from their menial corporate jobs so they can be a trader/'investor' and buy nft, crypto, SpaceX, AI stocks. Everyone becomes a millionaire on speculation. There will be Universities offering courses and degrees. Influencers selling their own courses.
buredoranna 4mo ago
If you're interested in upsides, I can highly recommend the book "Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future", by Johan Norberg [1]. I was able to borrow the audio book from my library... absolutely worth the listen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress:_Ten_Reasons_to_Look_Forward_to_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress:_Ten_Reasons_to_Look_... (edit: formatting)
- eichin 4mo ago
  2016 - so, generic upsides of global capitalism, but nothing specific to the AI bubble?
  - buredoranna 4mo ago
    Fair point... but I feel awash in doom, gloom and other apocalyptic predictions. I found this book to be a welcome breath of fresh air, and I enjoyed listening to it. It revealed to me that maybe, just maybe (we can only hope) things aren't quite as bad as we've been lead to believe... and while ai is obviously not mentioned, it does help cast modern tech developments in a more favorable light. One specific upside from ai? I no longer have to write systemd unit files. That alone may be worth the cost.
jadar 4mo ago
What about all the employees who had options at SPCX and are now > millionaires?
ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
With all the AI stuff available everyone, does anyone actually work any less? 4 hours per day instead of 8? Or even less? More vacation days? Anything? I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.
jacobsenscott 4mo ago
The upside will mostly be the schadenfreude we'll get when, coming in Q4 of this year, the managerial class is finally called on to show ROI for the $100,000+ (depending on company size) per employee they shunted to anthropic and openai. Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.
ffsm8 4mo ago
You forgot tariffs, you can see the difference in the price increase between the US and the other places...
sakesun 4mo ago
The upside is that people will no longer be obligated to struggle.
thisisit 4mo ago
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out. Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today. Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s. And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money. Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.
- mullingitover 4mo ago
  The railroad bubble and the dotcom bubble feature prominently as disastrous misallocations of capital in one of my favorite books: "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation." Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
- Valakas_ 4mo ago
  The comparison with the internet is not valid, and I can immediately give you one reason. I was there (3000 years ago) when the internet was in its infancy. When the dot com bubble was going on, the internet was a fringe thing for most people. People didn't really use it, didn't know how to use it, didn't trust it (for purchases, for information). The investors were still right, but they were too ahead of their time, by almost a decade. AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.
anonzzzies 4mo ago
> When exactly are the upsides going to hit? Look again in 1000-10000 years.

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by ryandvm 4mo ago

[flagged]

deepsun 4mo ago

You can reply to emails faster and so have more time for hobbies. /s

gdhkgdhkvff 4mo ago
I’m very on the pro-ai side (check my comment history for proof), but this “ai will give us more free time” logic is seeming more and more patronizing (to be clear, I understand that you are being sarcastic haha). I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump). It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*. The unfortunate reality is: Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier. Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
- __s 4mo ago
  Yep. With ai tooling I can keep prompting at 3am while sleep deprived. As a result I have mountains of slop plans / code to review. Hours of work which can't be matched by anyone who thinks they can poke a prompt for the day & go
  - 9cb14c1ec0 4mo ago
    It turns out the demand for software is so great that even when it can be produced instantly at zero cost demand still far outstrips supply.
- chrisandchris 4mo ago
  Just as happened with the horse, with the car, with the steam machine, with the industrialization in general, ... oh wait, we still have to work 8-10 hours 5 days a week, times two, to make enough for a living. So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
  - theobreuerweil 4mo ago
    I guess the argument would go that your income is significantly higher in the sense that the quantity and complexity of stuff that you can afford now is vastly greater than 100 years ago (e.g. washing machines, cars, clothes, computers). I’m not that saying it’s making anyone happier, mind you
    - philistine 4mo ago
      It's all a matter of perspective. 100 years ago, the middle class' purchasing power is far bigger. Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer.
      - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
        The typical middle class family 50 years ago lived in a house you’d consider small and dingy, ate food you’d consider poverty meals, and drove a car you’d consider a poorly assembled death trap. Ask your parents or grandparents how often they got to have real butter growing up.
        lanstin 4mo ago
        Or fresh oranges.
        fl4regun 4mo ago
        This is a truth very few people are willing to confront. My grandmother lived in a village, on a farm, growing her own food and slaughtering her own animals, with no working plumbing, using a well for water. Of course a lot of that changed even just moving up to the 70s, but at that point there still wasn't quite the consumerist "buy whatever you want from wherever and whomever you want and have it almost immediately" environment. I can go to a grocery store here in Canada, buy tropical fruits year round that grow nowhere near me. I never have to concern myself with "this ingredient won't be here because it is seasonal", it'll be there, it'll just be more expensive out of season, worst case I just have to go a bit farther out to a different grocer than I usually go to.
- dheera 4mo ago
  Capitalism, by nature, will want to force everything to the limit. It's the same thing that happens to housing. People complain housing gets expensive because of "tech workers". No. The reality is greedy landlords can charge 20% more so they charge 20% more. They could be happy with what they make now, but no, they'd rather have the extra 20%. And so housing prices go up 20%. The thing is, it's not just landlords that are greedy. Everyone is greedy. Companies are greedy. Yeah, you can get the same amount of work done in 1/5 the hours per day. But why not do 5x the work instead?

colechristensen 4mo ago

Personally, I can do more than I could before as the result of AI. Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference. The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours. The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)

sarchertech 4mo ago
I could “retire” to a senior level role and run at 10% capacity with zero AI use at a bigco and nobody would know the difference.
- sublinear 4mo ago
  Yup. Everything after the first decade of a career is either jockeying for a promotion, jumping ship-to-ship as needed, or sitting around in meetings. It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.
sillysaurusx 4mo ago
Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things. Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important. I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
- colechristensen 4mo ago
  Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those. Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor. AI is far cheaper to fire than a person. "Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.

neonstatic 4mo ago

Well, it's a mania, it's stupid now and it will correct itself. There will be pain. There's always pain after stupidity. Then we will see if LLMs are as useful as we were told.

sylos 4mo ago
The only correction will be anyone not in the concentrated wealth part being left out to rot. There is no upside for pretty much anyone posting on hacker news
- illiac786 4mo ago
  That’s not correction though, that’s perpetuation or acceleration of last 40 years‘ trend. Not that I disagree otherwise though.
  - DarkUranium 4mo ago
    There's a (IMO) great, if a bit long, article making exactly your argument. I found it on HN a few days ago: (lost the HN link, sorry) https://matthewbutterick.com/extinction-level-capitalism.html https://matthewbutterick.com/extinction-level-capitalism.htm...
- neonstatic 4mo ago
  I'm sorry for stirring up your communist fantasy.

xdennis 4mo ago

> When exactly are the upsides going to hit? Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

root-parent 4mo ago

[flagged]

throwup238 4mo ago
Rovers of Wrath? East of Olympus Mons? The next great American novels.
KellyCriterion 4mo ago
At least, Trillions+ I'd guess if I read the project right? :-D
- root-parent 4mo ago
  They are are hiring AI Ethics Officers for robots deciding who gets the last potato.
jayd16 4mo ago
A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.
- eecc 4mo ago
  Reminds me of a film I saw… ;)
  - sciencejerk 4mo ago
    Bladerunner?
- EasyMark 4mo ago
  Like in "Hello, Tomorrow" ?
- root-parent 4mo ago
  Do you know how many jobs there will be on Mars? Go west young man..

claudiug 4mo ago

you know how many r are in strawberry

sciencejerk 4mo ago
It's the human superpower!

throwitaway222 4mo ago

[flagged]

mark242 4mo ago
Toothpaste making did not completely take over the world's supply of plastic for caps.

moralestapia 4mo ago

The upside is c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality

ymolodtsov 4mo ago
I don't care about inequality, I care about the median.
- outside1234 4mo ago
  These two things are linked because the outcomes are power law.
- dakolli 4mo ago
  This is a literal Evil (I mean literally) idea wrapped up with statistical terminology and made to seem "logical". You should re-evaluate this.
  - thegrimmest 4mo ago
    How are we torturing morality so that the median quality of life rising by just about every metric is "Evil"?

Kon5ole 4mo ago

Your complaints could have been made in the 80s as well. When the personal computer was introduced it removed tons of jobs, Bill Gates became the first 100 billionaire. But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years. The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity? I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet. Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)

Yizahi 4mo ago

We won't need to write our obituaries ;)

varispeed 4mo ago
[flagged]
moomoo11 4mo ago
He wasn't just a software enginer — he was also a true innovator.
- black_knight 4mo ago
  Memories of his work will forever live in the models trained on his GitHub repositories.
- jrave 4mo ago
  :chef's kiss:

ericd 4mo ago

So far, there are more jobs.

dakolli 4mo ago
What's your source? The Bureau of labor statistics that is marking most of unemployed people as "not seeking employment" because they aren't walking into workforce centers?
- ericd 4mo ago
  Payrolls are up about 214k in March, 180k in April, and 140k in May. The BLS data is from broad monthly surveys, not people showing up in workforce centers.
  - BeratnaGas 4mo ago
    Of the 172,000 (adjusted) new jobs in May, 70,000 are attributed to hospitality when 14,000/month is the norm. World Cup temporary jobs. Hourly average earnings rose 12 cents in May while the average price of gas rose $1.17/gallon since the start of the war. One could argue that some of the people participating in the surveys have a vested interest in the numbers looking good. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm
    - ericd 4mo ago
      Ok, still over 100k not including those temporary jobs. I’m not arguing that the overall picture is amazing, just that it doesn’t seem like the narrative that AI is causing massive net job loss is true yet.

tptacek 4mo ago

Why does there need to be an "upside" legible to our profession?

windexh8er 4mo ago
Because the alternative is admitting the main upside so far is: a few VCs and early employees get yacht money while everyone else gets a gate-kept chatbot and constant fear mongering. But hey, I guess we all have our own opinion of "upside".
- akerl_ 4mo ago
  Isn’t this the same thing every other industry and market has been experiencing with technology, automation, etc. for decades, while tech workers basked in their joy at being safe from being replaced because we were the ones powering the replacing?
  - kpcyrd 4mo ago
    This. Capitalism only became problematic the minute it stopped having a cozy spot for software developers~ And even then people prefer blaming the prediction machine instead of recognizing their situation as the logical conclusion of capitalism.
    - throwway120385 4mo ago
      I always thought raw, unchecked Capitalism sucked. I've thought that my whole life. "Welcome to the asylum" and all that.
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4mo ago
    Yep. 100%. Developers are getting a taste of their own medicine for about the first time ever, and it’s seldom acknowledged. This is why you won’t find me begging for sympathy in any of these conversations. Developers have had it so good for so long. The moment SV startup dweebs are exposed to actual market forces for 0.01 seconds and it’s like the sky is falling. Pathetic.

colesantiago 4mo ago

There will be new jobs.

jplusequalt 4mo ago
What are these jobs? I mean for God's sake, people have been saying this shit for 3 years now, but nobody can fathom what those jobs may be.
- paulinho1 4mo ago
  I hold the same job title as 2 years ago but my job duties are vastly different now. So yeah new jobs are being created it's just hard to be creative enough to name them properly
- FridgeSeal 4mo ago
  Just trust us bro!!!! Just some more ai investment please! The jobs will totally come from like, the ai and stuff! We promise!! Just another billion dollars! /s
fireflash38 4mo ago
Are the new jobs in the room now? Or perhaps they're somewhere in West Virginia.
- jcgrillo 4mo ago
  Best state in the country, jobs or no.
thayne 4mo ago
Will those new jobs be as good as or better than the jobs that were lost? Will those jobs appear shortly, or will it be decades before they appear? Will the people who lost jobs get free education and training for these jobs that will supposedly appear?

flossly 4mo ago

Upsides will be seen into societies that are not capital-above-govt, but govt-above-capital. China for instance: they will show advantages of AI (amongst other technologies). Sure they've got surveillance there, but there's also surveillance in the west. In China you have clean streets and low crime, while in the west it's surveillance without tangible benefit for the common people.

kelnos 4mo ago
There are many places in the West with clean streets and low crime that don't use China's economic or political model.
includenotfound 4mo ago
[flagged]
- conception 4mo ago
  Texas at least disagrees with you - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG-119-JU01-20250122-SD004.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG... Do you have statistics to back your assertions that disagree with this data?
  - dmitrygr 4mo ago
    https://www.scup.com/doi/10.1080/14043858.2014.926062 https://www.scup.com/doi/10.1080/14043858.2014.926062 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08862605241311611 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08862605241311611
  - includenotfound 4mo ago
    I do in fact. Germany: https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/PolizeilicheKriminalstatistik/2024/Bund/Tatverdaechtige/BU-TV-22-T62-TV-Staatsangehoerigkeiten_xls.html https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/Pol... Total N = ~2.2M Germans = ~1.2M (~58%) Non-Germans = ~900k (~42%) Population: Germans ~71M (~85%), foreign ~12M (~15%) Per-capita, non-Germans show up ~2.8x more. Approximate rates: Germans: ~1,786 per 100k (baseline) All Non-Germans: ~7,365 per 100k (~4.1× German rate) Syria: ~12,900 per 100k (~7.2×) Afghanistan: ~12,300 per 100k (~6.9×) Romania: ~8,450 per 100k (~4.7×) Turkey: ~6,660 per 100k (~3.7×) Poland: ~6,640 per 100k (~3.7×) Ukraine: ~5,130 per 100k (~2.9×) --- Some other countries (Switzerland, Denmark) also publish per-nationality data and it doesn't look any better. The other comment shows data from Norway/Finland/Sweden which is more of the same. The US is a different topic (but strong arguments with clear data can be made as well), so I'll refrain from engaging it here to avoid further derailing the thread.

ksec 4mo ago

>(world's first trillionaire anyone?) With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX. >When exactly are the upsides going to hit? A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI. The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.

FridgeSeal 4mo ago
Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that, instead of it all going solely to resource guzzling data centres selling opaque models whilst simultaneously destroying the pricing for local hardware!
- ksec 4mo ago
  >Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that, We are only 1 to 2 year into a cycle and we expect a lot of things to happen. Even the business decisions of things were decided before the cycle happened, as if they are fortune teller or God, the hardware lead time would meant it will be next year at best before we see results. And Nvidia has already moved at a faster pace than most imagined. Latest GPU R&D are now fully amortised on the AI server front. GPU now move to leading edge node faster than before and iterate on a shorter cycle. I have yet to read a single comments on either HN, Reddit or wider internet that appreciate this. And as to NAND and DRAM, which most people are concern. We only need a few companies to commit to long term ( 3 - 5 years ) agreement on pricing and quantity, DRAM and NAND will increase supply or new fabs accordingly. This isn't new and is exactly what Apple did with iPod. But no companies wants to do that, as they all want lowest price and little commitment, while foundry don't want to bare the risk of new fab and over supply in the long term. This is just classic commodity supply and demand scenario. On a simpler terms, no one asked why Toilet paper companies aren't putting up more factory just to output more paper rolls during COVID. And If you need 5 to 10 years just to earn back the cost of additional supply line, why risk that?

nelsonfigueroa 4mo ago

I think the upsides already hit, they just weren't meant for you and I

skissane 4mo ago

> exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?) How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth? If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.

erulastiel 4mo ago

Quality of life for basically everyone and percentage of the earth living in poverty are getting much better.

thelastgallon 4mo ago

The upsides are going to be everyone freed up from their menial corporate jobs so they can be a trader/'investor' and buy nft, crypto, SpaceX, AI stocks. Everyone becomes a millionaire on speculation. There will be Universities offering courses and degrees. Influencers selling their own courses.

buredoranna 4mo ago

If you're interested in upsides, I can highly recommend the book "Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future", by Johan Norberg [1]. I was able to borrow the audio book from my library... absolutely worth the listen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress:_Ten_Reasons_to_Look_Forward_to_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress:_Ten_Reasons_to_Look_... (edit: formatting)

eichin 4mo ago
2016 - so, generic upsides of global capitalism, but nothing specific to the AI bubble?
- buredoranna 4mo ago
  Fair point... but I feel awash in doom, gloom and other apocalyptic predictions. I found this book to be a welcome breath of fresh air, and I enjoyed listening to it. It revealed to me that maybe, just maybe (we can only hope) things aren't quite as bad as we've been lead to believe... and while ai is obviously not mentioned, it does help cast modern tech developments in a more favorable light. One specific upside from ai? I no longer have to write systemd unit files. That alone may be worth the cost.

jadar 4mo ago

What about all the employees who had options at SPCX and are now > millionaires?

ajsnigrutin 4mo ago

With all the AI stuff available everyone, does anyone actually work any less? 4 hours per day instead of 8? Or even less? More vacation days? Anything? I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.

jacobsenscott 4mo ago

The upside will mostly be the schadenfreude we'll get when, coming in Q4 of this year, the managerial class is finally called on to show ROI for the $100,000+ (depending on company size) per employee they shunted to anthropic and openai. Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.

ffsm8 4mo ago

You forgot tariffs, you can see the difference in the price increase between the US and the other places...

sakesun 4mo ago

The upside is that people will no longer be obligated to struggle.

thisisit 4mo ago

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out. Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today. Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s. And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money. Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.

mullingitover 4mo ago
The railroad bubble and the dotcom bubble feature prominently as disastrous misallocations of capital in one of my favorite books: "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation." Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
Valakas_ 4mo ago
The comparison with the internet is not valid, and I can immediately give you one reason. I was there (3000 years ago) when the internet was in its infancy. When the dot com bubble was going on, the internet was a fringe thing for most people. People didn't really use it, didn't know how to use it, didn't trust it (for purchases, for information). The investors were still right, but they were too ahead of their time, by almost a decade. AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.

anonzzzies 4mo ago

> When exactly are the upsides going to hit? Look again in 1000-10000 years.