5 ms·

The untold promise of IA is to replace labor. That's probably the only reason why some people are willing to spend trillions of dollars in pursuing this technol

The untold promise of IA is to replace labor. That's probably the only reason why some people are willing to spend trillions of dollars in pursuing this technology. Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. It's no surprise that people are getting angry, even though many are using AI in their everyday life.

gruez 3mo ago
>The untold promise of [tractors] is to replace labor. [...] Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.
- vitorfblima 3mo ago
  We're talking about ALL labor.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    Do you think the average dirt farmer in the 1800 is going to be assuaged by the prospect of almost all farm work being mechanized, because he can be a "medical and health services manager" or "data scientist" instead? https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm
    - dofm 3mo ago
      What's a dirt farmer?
      - vitorfblima 3mo ago
        You guessed it.
      - alamortsubite 3mo ago
        As opposed to a moisture farmer, presumably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_Islands#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_Islands#History If you're never seen Man of Aran, you're in for a treat! Far more thought provoking than the fluff Lucas made, but by which I always assumed his fictional homestead on Tatooine was inspired.
    - justonepost2 3mo ago
      In this case there is, by definition, no “medical and health services manager” or “data scientist” in the future. Nothing comes next.
      - yunwal 3mo ago
        > "by definition" Who's definition are we talking about here
        justonepost2 3mo ago
        The definition of AGI?
        yunwal 3mo ago
        Nobody has mentioned AGI in this thread until this comment. And either way, there's no evidence that AGI as you're defining it is going to be solved anytime soon. Sam Altman and Dario may claim it will to pump their incoming IPOs, but outside of la la land, OpenAI and Anthropic aren't making any big robotics plays, which leaves a huge chunk of the "G" in AGI completely unattended to.
        dofm 3mo ago
        Literally Sam and Dario's.
        yunwal 3mo ago
        Ok, the 2 CEOs want investors to believe their technology is all-powerful. Is that assessment worth anything?
        dofm 3mo ago
        I wasn't saying it is or isn't. But it unambiguously is who is leading the promise to replace labour; it is whose bullshit is provoking the backlash. It is whose variously-confident definition of near-term AGI involves completely eliminating a large enough shar of jobs that Altman thinks he has to talk about UBI and fund pilot studies so he doesn't lose all his cool California friends. It is who has set the tone for the entire punditsphere and everyone who emulates them. Their definition is the one the media and governments have swallowed; they need the fear so they get regulatory capture. I will tell you that I think though: I think Sam Altman should be nowhere near the power and proximity to power that he has, band I think Dario Amodei would be better off tucked away in a research unit where the only person who has to listen to him tolkien bollocks is his immediate boss. I think they are manipulating truly grotesque amounts of fear that are in many ways worse than the fear we felt in the COVID pandemic, and I think they are doing it for money and power. But I also think people have listened and the message has not got through to tech people that they aren't good people and they are fucking weird.
    - watwut 3mo ago
      What I do think is that your comparison have squat zero with history, society or tech of 1800. People like to make historical comparisons based on pure fantasies and this is one of them.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  - phantompeace 3mo ago
    Do you really think an LLM will replace a surgeon?
    - dieselgate 3mo ago
      I don't think so but it will not stop folks from trying. The panacea of AI is AGI which basically, in theory, will replace any human/thing.
    - phantompeace 3mo ago
      Why are we believing in marketing lies? For instance, crypto is useful (in a narrow context) even if it's 99.99% scams, and has positively impacted at least some people (the unbanked), even if it fell short of replacing the world's banking system. It's good tech. Similarly with LLMs, it's good tech, but I do not believe for a single second that these things will ever replace anyone who is remotely skilled. People will be augmented by them. They won't be fully replaced. Well, I hope not anyway.
    - esafak 3mo ago
      Surgery is a regulated field with high barriers to entry. Even if surgeons did not get replaced, displaced humans in other fields would not find employment in surgery.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
      Why not? Surgeons already perform remote surgery, so physical dexterity isn't the issue. What do you think the moat is? Computer vision? Surgical technique? Surgical knowledge? Medical knowledge? Maybe surgeons will be smart enough not to allow AI to be trained to do what they do, but it seems that training data is the only real barrier.
  - yunwal 3mo ago
    AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon. AI is not making my meals anytime soon. It's not organizing events, or doing anything in the real world. It's not doing my open heart surgery. Robots are still doing this in 2026 https://www.news.com.au/sport/carnage-at-start-of-robot-marathon/video/46ebc8457f01447b6a1da22bde4bdbb4 https://www.news.com.au/sport/carnage-at-start-of-robot-mara... We might have to get off the computer, and we might have to rethink how we organize the world economically, but there is still work to be done everywhere.
    - dofm 3mo ago
      > AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon. This is an absolutely bizarre pitch for labour replacement for the very obvious reason that the rate at which the world's hair grows is not going to increase and nor are we going to suddenly discover a great need for new high maintenance hair styles to increase the work available. There are clearly at a first approximation enough barbers and hairdressers already to cut the world's hair at the rate it is growing.
      - yunwal 3mo ago
        Ok, are there enough doctors? seems really weird that you left out the other jobs I mentioned
        dofm 3mo ago
        They are all actually quite a lot like the barbers/hairdressers thing! We're more or less getting along with who we have. Essentially every single medical school in the USA is vastly oversubscribed with qualified applicants, as far as I am aware. And most specialist residencies are too. But you know you can't just become a doctor, right? You don't just lose your job and become a doctor, or a trained nurse the next day. That is a ten, twelve year lead time thing for doctors, two or three for a nurse, and it favours the young. People who lose their jobs mid career essentially never become doctors. Some do become nurses, but it still favours the young. Plus, even if there is a shortage beyond that, and in general pratice there is, we don't need hundreds of millions more doctors around the world, I suspect, but that is how many jobs AI threatens to displace according to the FUD. We maybe need a few tens of millions more nurses. And if you expand the healthcare and training system to train up and employ more people — where does the money for that come from? People who simultaneously go along with the idea AGI will eliminate large swathes of human labour but somehow magically think everyone will find a new job so there is no retail and service demand collapse or tax revenue collapse are everywhere, serving up the tractor analogy, which is where we started in this thread. It's horseshit.
- greenavocado 3mo ago
  The end goal is to mechanize and automate everything to "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." They are literally telling you this; it's written in stone. Once this is achieved, everyone else can turn into compost.
  - LPisGood 3mo ago
    Are you talking about that rock art sculpture in the southern United States? I really think you’re giving the system too much credit if you believe there is such a grand plan
    - greenavocado 3mo ago
      If you think the freemasons who erected it aren't serious, you aren't paying attention. Look at your c-suite executive team and you'll find it stacked with them.
      - AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
        If you think that the freemasons who erected it are running the AI revolution, I think that you aren't serious.
- justonepost2 3mo ago
  How do people still conflate “sectoral changes in the labor market” with “humans become zoo animals”? The scale just seems fundamentally different.
  - BeetleB 3mo ago
    > The scale just seems fundamentally different. Not at all. I doubt LLMs will result in a 90x drop in the overall labor workforce. The agricultural shift was likely greater than the shift due to LLMs will be.
    - justonepost2 3mo ago
      So you don’t believe in AGI then?
    - HEmanZ 3mo ago
      This requires an assumption that humans have some capacity that LLMs/machines can not fundamentally match (or match cheaply, or we’ll make matching it illegal). That’s fine, but one of those assumptions has to be the case for your statement to be true. If they meet or exceed all productive human capacities at lower cost, are not stopped by regulations or some kind of near insurmountable “exponential cost of intelligence”, then this is completely utterly different than the agriculture shift. My generals observation about people like you is that you assume “the future form of ai is just a chat bot, like today” and that is just not the case, and it’s not what anyone is worried about. Many of us are “playing” with real agents, grafting together agentic memory systems, kicking around early experimental harnesses, seeing what kind of self learning loops we can hack, perfecting evals, wiring in eyes and ears and a heart-beat to these things. And those of us who are often take a look at the Frankenstein result and go “ya, this could completely replace us with enough iterations”. We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital.
      - BeetleB 3mo ago
        > We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital. Oh, as a SW engineer, I assure you I am scared. My profession will be one of the most impacted ones. My point is that a lot more than 10% of the labor that is done out there involves things that require physical work, and that is a tougher problem to solve than pure reasoning. I'm not saying the changes won't be drastic - just not a 90x drop.
- hatefulheart 3mo ago
  Are you suggesting we can make this comparison because there are no meaningful differences in society from the early 20th century to today? I reject this argument as bad faith from the start.
- watwut 3mo ago
  I don't know how tractors were sold initially, but AI is sold with open goal of making majority of the people unemployable, "obsolete" and keep it that way. That is literal rhetoric of those companies. Tractors are tools to make hard boring labor easier.
  - greenavocado 3mo ago
    It's not theoretical. I am literally in corporate meetings where leadership is automating away labor by directly comparing total cost of operations against the current human operator's salary to calculate ROI. The direct purpose is to eliminate jobs (and do things more reliably, ideally, since bots don't sleep or get sick). The question is whether those people will be able to find meaningful new work.
    - yunwal 3mo ago
      This was absolutely happening with tractors too. Not in a board room or whatever, but people were definitely getting laid off because of tractors.
      - vitorfblima 3mo ago
        Not in the speed and scale you would imagine, luckily.
  - greenavocado 3mo ago
    Tractors at least grant some degree of agency to their operators.
- markus_zhang 3mo ago
  1. It is to replace humans, or at least the majority of them, especially if they can get into Robotics as well, but that's a long shot I think. 2. If 1 happens, it is foreseeable that they don't even need that many slaves to tend to the machines, so not many "new" jobs created I'm afraid. Comparing that to the computer -- yes if you are a typist you are doomed -- but they still need someone to type -- just not on a typewriter. And there are suddenly countless new requirements (e.g. video games, CGI, etc.) getting created from thin air. I don't really see this happening for AI -- like, do you see any NEW requirements getting created? Sure we are getting endless AI slop games/videos/fictions, but are they new? People can only consume that many products and pumping 100x into the system doesn't work -- except to make profit drop to ZERO for every ordinary creator out there. BTW I do think there will be new requirements -- robotics combined with AI (e.g. who doesn't want a handsome husband or a beautiful wife?) -- but again it is to replace humans. 3. Apparently, accountability has dropped to a new low, since the end of the Cold War. So naturally cattle and sheep (I mean, us, ordinary people) are scared. Back then at least the elites were willing to make gestures and put up facades. Nowadays they simply don't GAF.
- speak_plainly 3mo ago
  I think the technology industry has a long track record of selling false promises, dead ends, and over-hyped solutions. AI is an interesting experiment with some real-world applications, but it’s no tractor or mechanical loom... not yet, at least, and it’s far from clear that it ever will be. As things stand today, AI is not the future. It’s a tool with genuine uses that is being marketed as a revolution.
- fireflash38 3mo ago
  Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it? The industrial revolution came along with massive production of goods that people need and desire. Even then, there was still a huge amount of pushback (it still echoes in a lot of communities today!). Do you see any differences compared to the AI revolution we're being sold?
  - BeetleB 3mo ago
    > Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it? Do you not think the ultimate outcome was worth it?
    - fireflash38 3mo ago
      Where is the glut of food and consumer products from AI?
      - BeetleB 3mo ago
        Where was the glut of food and consumer products 4 years into the Industrial Revolution?
        fireflash38 3mo ago
        The onus is on you to prove the claim that AI is equivalent or better. But if you're not a troll, from the very fucking start of it there was a boom of products. Like it's practically the definition of it. Are you seriously thinking that they just burned a bunch of coal for fun?
        BeetleB 3mo ago
        > The onus is on you to prove the claim that AI is equivalent or better. I never claimed it. But if we play along, and if I claim AI is equivalent, then once again ... why ask about glut of food and consumer products only a few years in, when that wasn't the case with the Industrial Revolution? > But if you're not a troll, from the very fucking start of it there was a boom of products. It began in 1760 in England. Can you compare 1764 with 1760 and itemize this "boom" you speak of? The changes the Industrial Revolution brought about was slow - it took several decades. Correspondingly, the change in labor took that long as well.
- estearum 3mo ago
  Sure, here's a direct answer: Even after the mechanical loom was created, figuring out the next most important problem to work on was a job that humans did. Unless you believe there's some hard limit on AI intelligence that will constrain it below the intelligence of a particular earthbound hairless ape, then eventually AI will be perfectly sufficient and probably better at figuring out the next most important problem to work on. Ta-da, humans are completely removed from the value chain. Neither the loom nor the tractor could not do such a thing.
  - tengbretson 3mo ago
    That assumes that a value-judgement can be optimally made with intelligence alone.
    - estearum 3mo ago
      In every sense that economically matters (i.e. in every sense that will actually attract the resources required to realize such a determination), it can be.
      - LocalH 3mo ago
        The problem is that the economic matters are not the only relevant issues, and I would argue they're not the most important ones either
        estearum 3mo ago
        When it comes to what actually gets encoded into reality, it certainly is the most salient factor
        LocalH 3mo ago
        That truly does speak to the problems we have in modern society. The biggest issue we face today is the incessant nature of economists to try to reshape reality to match economic theory, and not the other way around
- dofm 3mo ago
  Tractors and looms displaced labour. Those people got other jobs. In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work. The pitch for AI is that it's affordable at the insane valuations because it replaces labour. It takes work out of the labour market entirely — fewer salaries means more money can be freed up that can go to the giant intelligence tap. Not just some sectors — really all non-manual work sectors at once. Isn't that what the e/acc guys were open about at the beginning? Learn AI or you won't have a job? Sam Altman was so open about this that he funded a UBI study.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    >In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work. source?
    - dofm 3mo ago
      Literally any history of the industrial revolution in Britain (and I imagine the USA) Farmers went from working outside at a stable work pace (and in many cases farming a small patch of their own land as part payment, so eating at least functionally well) to being forced out of their farming work by the second agricultural revolution (leading to the Swing Riots, Tolpuddle Martyrs etc.) and to living in cramped industrial slums, working in appallingly dangerous and polluted factories, long hours, terrible food, toxic chemicals, severe health issues. Subsequent infant mortality in industrial area families was about twice the rate in industrial areas as it was in rural areas because of appalling living conditions and poor food. It's the underpinning story of the second agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. An interesting link here: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/victorian-industrial-towns/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/vict... But this is well-studied history. The industrial revolution did not liberate the poor until labour law changed to stop them being expendable; living standards took the best part of a hundred years, until as late as the early 1900s, to return to a level where people were as healthy as they were or to live as long.
    - 3mo ago
- strogonoff 3mo ago
  If comparing past industrialisation and automation events with hypothetical LLM dominance in the workforce, some of my questions would be: (0) how limited is the change to a specific industry (e.g., weaving vs. most of intellectual and creative work by everyone starting from children as soon as they can read and type to the elderly)? (1) how many people are affected—in absolute terms not just percentages that ignore population growth? (2) how quickly are they affected? (3) what can people do—where can people move to where they can keep working (e.g., operating/maintaining/manufacturing tractors and looms, intellectual/white collar work, etc.)? (4) what are the organised reskilling processes in place that facilitate said migration? (5) how competitive and diverse, vs. monopolistic and regulated, are the new industries that power the change? how concentrated is created wealth and how many new jobs do they create? (6) what laws (in letter or in spirit) are violated as the change is happening? (7) if it is shown that the current change is about similar to the past in above aspects, does that imply it’s OK that it happens all over again and we have not learned a lesson to go ahead with these things more carefully so that the majority doesn’t suffer as much?
- montjoy 3mo ago
  It’s different because those were singular technological advances, each in their own niche. They spread out change between time, geography, and industries. The fear is this will replace engineers, scientists, accountants, lawyers, service workers, etc, etc all within a small time window. Investment types have shown repeatedly that their primary concern is money, not workers. There is no reason to believe that those currently in power are open to sharing their wealth or influence.
- ndiddy 3mo ago
  Well the Industrial Revolution was objectively a worse deal for the average worker. The average preindustrial peasant worked 8-12 hour days, but had Sundays off and at least 120 rest days and holidays. Depending on how good wages were at the time, they may have only had to work between 120 and 180 days per year. Compare that to the 70+ hour weeks workers were made to work all year in factories during the period immediately following the Industrial Revolution. It took over 100 years of collective struggle through the labor movement, as well as technological advances, before labor conditions improved to be something along the lines of what they were in the preindustrial period (at least going by hours worked/year). If you're arguing that AI is going to be similar to this, I do not want to be a wage worker in the period where this takes place, just like I would not have liked to be a wage worker during the Industrial Revolution.
  - spwa4 3mo ago
    No, it wasn't. And it wasn't because of government regulation. The land you require for preindustrial peasanting was, of course, tightly regulated and owned by ... well, not you. Read the whole "tragedy of the commons", especially the part about government deciding to just sell the whole thing to the highest bidder, which instead of fixing the problem, set off another wave of city migration. If you stayed on the land you had to work, not quite like a slave, but close. And if you disagreed with this, the government had an army that convinced you ... Factories offered a better alternative than that, and yes, mostly because the agricultural option was just not open, and just not worth it. They also offered a great density of people that made the labor movement possible in the first place.
    - watwut 3mo ago
      Pretty much all historians writing about industrial revolution are claiming completely opposite of what you do. Industrial revolution was a catastrophe for an average worker. The child mortality went up during industrial revolution. Social problems went up. It took quite a lot of violence for things to settle.
      - spwa4 3mo ago
- hodgesrm 3mo ago
  > How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today. Regarding US agricultural labor displacement. * It happened over a period of 200 years or so in the USA. [0] That's a key difference. * Starting in the late 1800s manufacturing rose to a peak of 38% in 1944. [1] This absorbed a lot of the available labor, often at better rates of pay than farm work. It's a common pattern in industrializing nations where manufacturing absorbs labor freed up by more productive agriculture. Manufacturing labor is no longer growing, so that cannot help with employment. That's not to say it was pleasant for all concerned. I would argue, however, that black swan events like the Dust Bowl caused more disruption and trauma than the steady displacement of farm labor by technology. [0] https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-agriculture/ https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-ag... [1] https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work/ https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work... Edit: clarity
- malfist 3mo ago
  > After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today And how many years did that take to happen? 3 or 4? That's what the AI companies are promising. 89% of you will be unemployed in the next couple years. All that wealth you'd be making from working will now be going to the company owners and you're out on your own. Good luck!
- insane_dreamer 3mo ago
  Here's the difference: The 90% of workers in agriculture found jobs in industry and services. Those industry and services will soon largely be performed by AI, with the exception of the lowest paying jobs that are hard or expensive to replace with robots (construction, plumbing, hair styling) or for which demand for actual humans is a key ingredient (prostitution, live entertainment). So the 90% of workers in today's industry and services will find jobs in ... (fill in the blank) The problem is, I have not read a single reasonably logical prediction of what _blank_ might be.
baron816 3mo ago
This is just how productivity works. If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output. People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.
- HEmanZ 3mo ago
  I don’t think the claim is that people will be less productive, the world will be far more productive. The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.
  - bensyverson 3mo ago
    People need to Google Jevons Paradox, smdh
    - HEmanZ 3mo ago
      I think you have no idea what Jevons Paradox is if you think it is a retort to what I just said.
    - sbayg 3mo ago
      That’s what the growing hoards of permanently unemployable people will do, sit around and google jevons paradox and the lump of labor fallacy and ponder whether economists have ever been wrong in the past about such matters, and whether AGI is really all that different from the steam engine anyway. Tech sector is just tech, like it’s always been.
    - lelanthran 3mo ago
      > People need to Google Jevons Paradox, smdh You're talking to a group who has seen a comment similar to yours every day of the week for two years. That also means that they have already seen the rebuttals. So have you, too, maybe?
kakacik 3mo ago
Yeah I don't know a single normal peer who is properly happy with AI, folks are not stupid. There is like 1-2 semi-autistic high performing folks who have tunnel vision, 0 emotional intelligence/empathy and are just happy to have some powerful toys. Every single expert I asked in our circle had at least serious doubts they will have jobs in 10 years. Doctors, lawyers, assistants, of course IT folks, various other white collar jobs. Of course managers with FIRE button are very anxious and feel like firing should have been done yesterday as long as resulting damage is manageable, quietly hoping they will not be also made redundant because at the end same logic applies to them and they often add little on top of simple yes/no decisions sucked out of a thumb. How disconnected somebody has to be to think folks would cheer on something that will cause absolute catastrophe for them and their families. Literally everybody groks it. Nobody expects employers to have any empathy when they could be removed. I view AI research and dev folks in similar vein as nazi bureaucrats - quietly working efficiently behind the desk, making vast machineries work, without a care in the world on impacts of such work on fellow man. One hopefully positive aspect is - prices are rising, and when SHTF they should be on level which makes them long term sustainable, making obvious how costly such replacement would be. But I think it will still be worth it in high cost societies unless governments add regulatory & financial friction, in similar vein ie chinese cars have high import fees. If that fails, resulting situation will be a catastrophe since I don't believe in some form of UBI promise as sustainable long term situation, people are way too nasty, greedy etc.
continuational 3mo ago
Well, what if it "just" increased white collar productivity by 1.5x, what would that be worth?
627467 3mo ago
> untold promise of IA is to replace labor Untold? AI going for (insert your favorite) jobs has been on headlines, conferences, substacks, etc non-stop before chatgpt was able to consistently reply twice without hallucinating
- vitorfblima 3mo ago
  That's part of it, sure, but the starting narrative has always been to make people more productive.

gruez 3mo ago

>The untold promise of [tractors] is to replace labor. [...] Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

vitorfblima 3mo ago
We're talking about ALL labor.
- gruez 3mo ago
  Do you think the average dirt farmer in the 1800 is going to be assuaged by the prospect of almost all farm work being mechanized, because he can be a "medical and health services manager" or "data scientist" instead? https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm
  - dofm 3mo ago
    What's a dirt farmer?
    - vitorfblima 3mo ago
      You guessed it.
    - alamortsubite 3mo ago
      As opposed to a moisture farmer, presumably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_Islands#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_Islands#History If you're never seen Man of Aran, you're in for a treat! Far more thought provoking than the fluff Lucas made, but by which I always assumed his fictional homestead on Tatooine was inspired.
  - justonepost2 3mo ago
    In this case there is, by definition, no “medical and health services manager” or “data scientist” in the future. Nothing comes next.
    - yunwal 3mo ago
      > "by definition" Who's definition are we talking about here
      - justonepost2 3mo ago
        The definition of AGI?
        yunwal 3mo ago
        Nobody has mentioned AGI in this thread until this comment. And either way, there's no evidence that AGI as you're defining it is going to be solved anytime soon. Sam Altman and Dario may claim it will to pump their incoming IPOs, but outside of la la land, OpenAI and Anthropic aren't making any big robotics plays, which leaves a huge chunk of the "G" in AGI completely unattended to.
      - dofm 3mo ago
        Literally Sam and Dario's.
        yunwal 3mo ago
        Ok, the 2 CEOs want investors to believe their technology is all-powerful. Is that assessment worth anything?
        dofm 3mo ago
        I wasn't saying it is or isn't. But it unambiguously is who is leading the promise to replace labour; it is whose bullshit is provoking the backlash. It is whose variously-confident definition of near-term AGI involves completely eliminating a large enough shar of jobs that Altman thinks he has to talk about UBI and fund pilot studies so he doesn't lose all his cool California friends. It is who has set the tone for the entire punditsphere and everyone who emulates them. Their definition is the one the media and governments have swallowed; they need the fear so they get regulatory capture. I will tell you that I think though: I think Sam Altman should be nowhere near the power and proximity to power that he has, band I think Dario Amodei would be better off tucked away in a research unit where the only person who has to listen to him tolkien bollocks is his immediate boss. I think they are manipulating truly grotesque amounts of fear that are in many ways worse than the fear we felt in the COVID pandemic, and I think they are doing it for money and power. But I also think people have listened and the message has not got through to tech people that they aren't good people and they are fucking weird.
  - watwut 3mo ago
    What I do think is that your comparison have squat zero with history, society or tech of 1800. People like to make historical comparisons based on pure fantasies and this is one of them.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- phantompeace 3mo ago
  Do you really think an LLM will replace a surgeon?
  - dieselgate 3mo ago
    I don't think so but it will not stop folks from trying. The panacea of AI is AGI which basically, in theory, will replace any human/thing.
  - phantompeace 3mo ago
    Why are we believing in marketing lies? For instance, crypto is useful (in a narrow context) even if it's 99.99% scams, and has positively impacted at least some people (the unbanked), even if it fell short of replacing the world's banking system. It's good tech. Similarly with LLMs, it's good tech, but I do not believe for a single second that these things will ever replace anyone who is remotely skilled. People will be augmented by them. They won't be fully replaced. Well, I hope not anyway.
  - esafak 3mo ago
    Surgery is a regulated field with high barriers to entry. Even if surgeons did not get replaced, displaced humans in other fields would not find employment in surgery.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
    Why not? Surgeons already perform remote surgery, so physical dexterity isn't the issue. What do you think the moat is? Computer vision? Surgical technique? Surgical knowledge? Medical knowledge? Maybe surgeons will be smart enough not to allow AI to be trained to do what they do, but it seems that training data is the only real barrier.
- yunwal 3mo ago
  AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon. AI is not making my meals anytime soon. It's not organizing events, or doing anything in the real world. It's not doing my open heart surgery. Robots are still doing this in 2026 https://www.news.com.au/sport/carnage-at-start-of-robot-marathon/video/46ebc8457f01447b6a1da22bde4bdbb4 https://www.news.com.au/sport/carnage-at-start-of-robot-mara... We might have to get off the computer, and we might have to rethink how we organize the world economically, but there is still work to be done everywhere.
  - dofm 3mo ago
    > AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon. This is an absolutely bizarre pitch for labour replacement for the very obvious reason that the rate at which the world's hair grows is not going to increase and nor are we going to suddenly discover a great need for new high maintenance hair styles to increase the work available. There are clearly at a first approximation enough barbers and hairdressers already to cut the world's hair at the rate it is growing.
    - yunwal 3mo ago
      Ok, are there enough doctors? seems really weird that you left out the other jobs I mentioned
      - dofm 3mo ago
        They are all actually quite a lot like the barbers/hairdressers thing! We're more or less getting along with who we have. Essentially every single medical school in the USA is vastly oversubscribed with qualified applicants, as far as I am aware. And most specialist residencies are too. But you know you can't just become a doctor, right? You don't just lose your job and become a doctor, or a trained nurse the next day. That is a ten, twelve year lead time thing for doctors, two or three for a nurse, and it favours the young. People who lose their jobs mid career essentially never become doctors. Some do become nurses, but it still favours the young. Plus, even if there is a shortage beyond that, and in general pratice there is, we don't need hundreds of millions more doctors around the world, I suspect, but that is how many jobs AI threatens to displace according to the FUD. We maybe need a few tens of millions more nurses. And if you expand the healthcare and training system to train up and employ more people — where does the money for that come from? People who simultaneously go along with the idea AGI will eliminate large swathes of human labour but somehow magically think everyone will find a new job so there is no retail and service demand collapse or tax revenue collapse are everywhere, serving up the tractor analogy, which is where we started in this thread. It's horseshit.
greenavocado 3mo ago
The end goal is to mechanize and automate everything to "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." They are literally telling you this; it's written in stone. Once this is achieved, everyone else can turn into compost.
- LPisGood 3mo ago
  Are you talking about that rock art sculpture in the southern United States? I really think you’re giving the system too much credit if you believe there is such a grand plan
  - greenavocado 3mo ago
    If you think the freemasons who erected it aren't serious, you aren't paying attention. Look at your c-suite executive team and you'll find it stacked with them.
    - AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
      If you think that the freemasons who erected it are running the AI revolution, I think that you aren't serious.
justonepost2 3mo ago
How do people still conflate “sectoral changes in the labor market” with “humans become zoo animals”? The scale just seems fundamentally different.
- BeetleB 3mo ago
  > The scale just seems fundamentally different. Not at all. I doubt LLMs will result in a 90x drop in the overall labor workforce. The agricultural shift was likely greater than the shift due to LLMs will be.
  - justonepost2 3mo ago
    So you don’t believe in AGI then?
  - HEmanZ 3mo ago
    This requires an assumption that humans have some capacity that LLMs/machines can not fundamentally match (or match cheaply, or we’ll make matching it illegal). That’s fine, but one of those assumptions has to be the case for your statement to be true. If they meet or exceed all productive human capacities at lower cost, are not stopped by regulations or some kind of near insurmountable “exponential cost of intelligence”, then this is completely utterly different than the agriculture shift. My generals observation about people like you is that you assume “the future form of ai is just a chat bot, like today” and that is just not the case, and it’s not what anyone is worried about. Many of us are “playing” with real agents, grafting together agentic memory systems, kicking around early experimental harnesses, seeing what kind of self learning loops we can hack, perfecting evals, wiring in eyes and ears and a heart-beat to these things. And those of us who are often take a look at the Frankenstein result and go “ya, this could completely replace us with enough iterations”. We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital.
    - BeetleB 3mo ago
      > We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital. Oh, as a SW engineer, I assure you I am scared. My profession will be one of the most impacted ones. My point is that a lot more than 10% of the labor that is done out there involves things that require physical work, and that is a tougher problem to solve than pure reasoning. I'm not saying the changes won't be drastic - just not a 90x drop.
hatefulheart 3mo ago
Are you suggesting we can make this comparison because there are no meaningful differences in society from the early 20th century to today? I reject this argument as bad faith from the start.
watwut 3mo ago
I don't know how tractors were sold initially, but AI is sold with open goal of making majority of the people unemployable, "obsolete" and keep it that way. That is literal rhetoric of those companies. Tractors are tools to make hard boring labor easier.
- greenavocado 3mo ago
  It's not theoretical. I am literally in corporate meetings where leadership is automating away labor by directly comparing total cost of operations against the current human operator's salary to calculate ROI. The direct purpose is to eliminate jobs (and do things more reliably, ideally, since bots don't sleep or get sick). The question is whether those people will be able to find meaningful new work.
  - yunwal 3mo ago
    This was absolutely happening with tractors too. Not in a board room or whatever, but people were definitely getting laid off because of tractors.
    - vitorfblima 3mo ago
      Not in the speed and scale you would imagine, luckily.
- greenavocado 3mo ago
  Tractors at least grant some degree of agency to their operators.
markus_zhang 3mo ago
1. It is to replace humans, or at least the majority of them, especially if they can get into Robotics as well, but that's a long shot I think. 2. If 1 happens, it is foreseeable that they don't even need that many slaves to tend to the machines, so not many "new" jobs created I'm afraid. Comparing that to the computer -- yes if you are a typist you are doomed -- but they still need someone to type -- just not on a typewriter. And there are suddenly countless new requirements (e.g. video games, CGI, etc.) getting created from thin air. I don't really see this happening for AI -- like, do you see any NEW requirements getting created? Sure we are getting endless AI slop games/videos/fictions, but are they new? People can only consume that many products and pumping 100x into the system doesn't work -- except to make profit drop to ZERO for every ordinary creator out there. BTW I do think there will be new requirements -- robotics combined with AI (e.g. who doesn't want a handsome husband or a beautiful wife?) -- but again it is to replace humans. 3. Apparently, accountability has dropped to a new low, since the end of the Cold War. So naturally cattle and sheep (I mean, us, ordinary people) are scared. Back then at least the elites were willing to make gestures and put up facades. Nowadays they simply don't GAF.
speak_plainly 3mo ago
I think the technology industry has a long track record of selling false promises, dead ends, and over-hyped solutions. AI is an interesting experiment with some real-world applications, but it’s no tractor or mechanical loom... not yet, at least, and it’s far from clear that it ever will be. As things stand today, AI is not the future. It’s a tool with genuine uses that is being marketed as a revolution.
fireflash38 3mo ago
Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it? The industrial revolution came along with massive production of goods that people need and desire. Even then, there was still a huge amount of pushback (it still echoes in a lot of communities today!). Do you see any differences compared to the AI revolution we're being sold?
- BeetleB 3mo ago
  > Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it? Do you not think the ultimate outcome was worth it?
  - fireflash38 3mo ago
    Where is the glut of food and consumer products from AI?
    - BeetleB 3mo ago
      Where was the glut of food and consumer products 4 years into the Industrial Revolution?
      - fireflash38 3mo ago
        The onus is on you to prove the claim that AI is equivalent or better. But if you're not a troll, from the very fucking start of it there was a boom of products. Like it's practically the definition of it. Are you seriously thinking that they just burned a bunch of coal for fun?
        BeetleB 3mo ago
        > The onus is on you to prove the claim that AI is equivalent or better. I never claimed it. But if we play along, and if I claim AI is equivalent, then once again ... why ask about glut of food and consumer products only a few years in, when that wasn't the case with the Industrial Revolution? > But if you're not a troll, from the very fucking start of it there was a boom of products. It began in 1760 in England. Can you compare 1764 with 1760 and itemize this "boom" you speak of? The changes the Industrial Revolution brought about was slow - it took several decades. Correspondingly, the change in labor took that long as well.
estearum 3mo ago
Sure, here's a direct answer: Even after the mechanical loom was created, figuring out the next most important problem to work on was a job that humans did. Unless you believe there's some hard limit on AI intelligence that will constrain it below the intelligence of a particular earthbound hairless ape, then eventually AI will be perfectly sufficient and probably better at figuring out the next most important problem to work on. Ta-da, humans are completely removed from the value chain. Neither the loom nor the tractor could not do such a thing.
- tengbretson 3mo ago
  That assumes that a value-judgement can be optimally made with intelligence alone.
  - estearum 3mo ago
    In every sense that economically matters (i.e. in every sense that will actually attract the resources required to realize such a determination), it can be.
    - LocalH 3mo ago
      The problem is that the economic matters are not the only relevant issues, and I would argue they're not the most important ones either
      - estearum 3mo ago
        When it comes to what actually gets encoded into reality, it certainly is the most salient factor
        LocalH 3mo ago
        That truly does speak to the problems we have in modern society. The biggest issue we face today is the incessant nature of economists to try to reshape reality to match economic theory, and not the other way around
dofm 3mo ago
Tractors and looms displaced labour. Those people got other jobs. In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work. The pitch for AI is that it's affordable at the insane valuations because it replaces labour. It takes work out of the labour market entirely — fewer salaries means more money can be freed up that can go to the giant intelligence tap. Not just some sectors — really all non-manual work sectors at once. Isn't that what the e/acc guys were open about at the beginning? Learn AI or you won't have a job? Sam Altman was so open about this that he funded a UBI study.
- gruez 3mo ago
  >In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work. source?
  - dofm 3mo ago
    Literally any history of the industrial revolution in Britain (and I imagine the USA) Farmers went from working outside at a stable work pace (and in many cases farming a small patch of their own land as part payment, so eating at least functionally well) to being forced out of their farming work by the second agricultural revolution (leading to the Swing Riots, Tolpuddle Martyrs etc.) and to living in cramped industrial slums, working in appallingly dangerous and polluted factories, long hours, terrible food, toxic chemicals, severe health issues. Subsequent infant mortality in industrial area families was about twice the rate in industrial areas as it was in rural areas because of appalling living conditions and poor food. It's the underpinning story of the second agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. An interesting link here: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/victorian-industrial-towns/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/vict... But this is well-studied history. The industrial revolution did not liberate the poor until labour law changed to stop them being expendable; living standards took the best part of a hundred years, until as late as the early 1900s, to return to a level where people were as healthy as they were or to live as long.
  - 3mo ago
strogonoff 3mo ago
If comparing past industrialisation and automation events with hypothetical LLM dominance in the workforce, some of my questions would be: (0) how limited is the change to a specific industry (e.g., weaving vs. most of intellectual and creative work by everyone starting from children as soon as they can read and type to the elderly)? (1) how many people are affected—in absolute terms not just percentages that ignore population growth? (2) how quickly are they affected? (3) what can people do—where can people move to where they can keep working (e.g., operating/maintaining/manufacturing tractors and looms, intellectual/white collar work, etc.)? (4) what are the organised reskilling processes in place that facilitate said migration? (5) how competitive and diverse, vs. monopolistic and regulated, are the new industries that power the change? how concentrated is created wealth and how many new jobs do they create? (6) what laws (in letter or in spirit) are violated as the change is happening? (7) if it is shown that the current change is about similar to the past in above aspects, does that imply it’s OK that it happens all over again and we have not learned a lesson to go ahead with these things more carefully so that the majority doesn’t suffer as much?
montjoy 3mo ago
It’s different because those were singular technological advances, each in their own niche. They spread out change between time, geography, and industries. The fear is this will replace engineers, scientists, accountants, lawyers, service workers, etc, etc all within a small time window. Investment types have shown repeatedly that their primary concern is money, not workers. There is no reason to believe that those currently in power are open to sharing their wealth or influence.
ndiddy 3mo ago
Well the Industrial Revolution was objectively a worse deal for the average worker. The average preindustrial peasant worked 8-12 hour days, but had Sundays off and at least 120 rest days and holidays. Depending on how good wages were at the time, they may have only had to work between 120 and 180 days per year. Compare that to the 70+ hour weeks workers were made to work all year in factories during the period immediately following the Industrial Revolution. It took over 100 years of collective struggle through the labor movement, as well as technological advances, before labor conditions improved to be something along the lines of what they were in the preindustrial period (at least going by hours worked/year). If you're arguing that AI is going to be similar to this, I do not want to be a wage worker in the period where this takes place, just like I would not have liked to be a wage worker during the Industrial Revolution.
- spwa4 3mo ago
  No, it wasn't. And it wasn't because of government regulation. The land you require for preindustrial peasanting was, of course, tightly regulated and owned by ... well, not you. Read the whole "tragedy of the commons", especially the part about government deciding to just sell the whole thing to the highest bidder, which instead of fixing the problem, set off another wave of city migration. If you stayed on the land you had to work, not quite like a slave, but close. And if you disagreed with this, the government had an army that convinced you ... Factories offered a better alternative than that, and yes, mostly because the agricultural option was just not open, and just not worth it. They also offered a great density of people that made the labor movement possible in the first place.
  - watwut 3mo ago
    Pretty much all historians writing about industrial revolution are claiming completely opposite of what you do. Industrial revolution was a catastrophe for an average worker. The child mortality went up during industrial revolution. Social problems went up. It took quite a lot of violence for things to settle.
    - spwa4 3mo ago
hodgesrm 3mo ago
> How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today. Regarding US agricultural labor displacement. * It happened over a period of 200 years or so in the USA. [0] That's a key difference. * Starting in the late 1800s manufacturing rose to a peak of 38% in 1944. [1] This absorbed a lot of the available labor, often at better rates of pay than farm work. It's a common pattern in industrializing nations where manufacturing absorbs labor freed up by more productive agriculture. Manufacturing labor is no longer growing, so that cannot help with employment. That's not to say it was pleasant for all concerned. I would argue, however, that black swan events like the Dust Bowl caused more disruption and trauma than the steady displacement of farm labor by technology. [0] https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-agriculture/ https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-ag... [1] https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work/ https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work... Edit: clarity
malfist 3mo ago
> After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today And how many years did that take to happen? 3 or 4? That's what the AI companies are promising. 89% of you will be unemployed in the next couple years. All that wealth you'd be making from working will now be going to the company owners and you're out on your own. Good luck!
insane_dreamer 3mo ago
Here's the difference: The 90% of workers in agriculture found jobs in industry and services. Those industry and services will soon largely be performed by AI, with the exception of the lowest paying jobs that are hard or expensive to replace with robots (construction, plumbing, hair styling) or for which demand for actual humans is a key ingredient (prostitution, live entertainment). So the 90% of workers in today's industry and services will find jobs in ... (fill in the blank) The problem is, I have not read a single reasonably logical prediction of what _blank_ might be.

baron816 3mo ago

This is just how productivity works. If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output. People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.

HEmanZ 3mo ago
I don’t think the claim is that people will be less productive, the world will be far more productive. The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.
- bensyverson 3mo ago
  People need to Google Jevons Paradox, smdh
  - HEmanZ 3mo ago
    I think you have no idea what Jevons Paradox is if you think it is a retort to what I just said.
  - sbayg 3mo ago
    That’s what the growing hoards of permanently unemployable people will do, sit around and google jevons paradox and the lump of labor fallacy and ponder whether economists have ever been wrong in the past about such matters, and whether AGI is really all that different from the steam engine anyway. Tech sector is just tech, like it’s always been.
  - lelanthran 3mo ago
    > People need to Google Jevons Paradox, smdh You're talking to a group who has seen a comment similar to yours every day of the week for two years. That also means that they have already seen the rebuttals. So have you, too, maybe?

kakacik 3mo ago

Yeah I don't know a single normal peer who is properly happy with AI, folks are not stupid. There is like 1-2 semi-autistic high performing folks who have tunnel vision, 0 emotional intelligence/empathy and are just happy to have some powerful toys. Every single expert I asked in our circle had at least serious doubts they will have jobs in 10 years. Doctors, lawyers, assistants, of course IT folks, various other white collar jobs. Of course managers with FIRE button are very anxious and feel like firing should have been done yesterday as long as resulting damage is manageable, quietly hoping they will not be also made redundant because at the end same logic applies to them and they often add little on top of simple yes/no decisions sucked out of a thumb. How disconnected somebody has to be to think folks would cheer on something that will cause absolute catastrophe for them and their families. Literally everybody groks it. Nobody expects employers to have any empathy when they could be removed. I view AI research and dev folks in similar vein as nazi bureaucrats - quietly working efficiently behind the desk, making vast machineries work, without a care in the world on impacts of such work on fellow man. One hopefully positive aspect is - prices are rising, and when SHTF they should be on level which makes them long term sustainable, making obvious how costly such replacement would be. But I think it will still be worth it in high cost societies unless governments add regulatory & financial friction, in similar vein ie chinese cars have high import fees. If that fails, resulting situation will be a catastrophe since I don't believe in some form of UBI promise as sustainable long term situation, people are way too nasty, greedy etc.

continuational 3mo ago

Well, what if it "just" increased white collar productivity by 1.5x, what would that be worth?

627467 3mo ago

> untold promise of IA is to replace labor Untold? AI going for (insert your favorite) jobs has been on headlines, conferences, substacks, etc non-stop before chatgpt was able to consistently reply twice without hallucinating

vitorfblima 3mo ago
That's part of it, sure, but the starting narrative has always been to make people more productive.