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> Key to this view is our expectation that over the long run AI will create many new jobs even as it destroys existing ones. Still waiting for anyone with this

> Key to this view is our expectation that over the long run AI will create many new jobs even as it destroys existing ones. Still waiting for anyone with this viewpoint to offer a single educated guess at what any of these created jobs might look like even in very broad terms. All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise. I get that previous automation waves have lead to new jobs in the past, but automating knowledge and intelligence is just fundamentally a different thing than anything we have automated in the past and what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized?

morkalork 4mo ago
I'm still waiting for this theory to demonstrate itself in countries that already have labour surplesses
otterdude 4mo ago
> All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise. Welcome to economics! Bullshit and conjecture all the way down.
- saimiam 4mo ago
  If it were all BS, how do you explain success stories like the Internet and the notion that countries on Dell’s supply chain won’t go to war with each other? Fundamentally, economics is the belief that humans have self-interests and act on them. Economics is obviously not 100% right - it’s not a physical science - but more often than not, you can see it in action. Economics is closer to weather science - we can make certain inferences and predictions which can be wrong but the basic working theory is broadly correct, imho.
  - otterdude 4mo ago
    I think youre confusing a religious like belief in capitalism that posits that "greed is good" despite any contra indication with economics, which is a discipline where conjecture is taught as fact and empiricism if frowned upon. I'm not even going to touch your examples. They are completely illogical? Dell? The Internet?? Thats one company, and a technology. If you read the wealth of nations, the only real promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices, and thats why its considered "good" not because it solves all problems. I believe that, the rest is ill-supported conjecture. To point out the global stupidity that is economics, there is absolutely no consideration for the concept of a constraint. Constraints are a fundamental problem in optimization. This article lays it out nicely. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-the-growth-imperative/?social_token=230e18b100d16cb57bb49a853c65e69e&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sm-direct https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-the-growth-imper... Research this topic and you'll find economists arguing insistently that the conservation of mass or energy don't exist.
    - saimiam 4mo ago
      Nowhere did I say that economics = greed is good capitalism. Economics is fundamentally a study of how human and human society processes self interest. It tries to find broad patterns in how we process self interest and then supports or subverts those patterns. To build on your example, capitalism reinforces self-interest while communism tries to regulate self interest. Both are economic theories. Two countries on Dell’s supply chain not wanting to fight against each other is an example of weighing self interest and deciding that participating in a global supply chain is worth more than fighting a war.
  - myaccountonhn 4mo ago
    The internet was in large part made possible because of government funded multi-year research during the cold war. It was largely ruined through commercialization and privatization, on all its layers.
    - saimiam 4mo ago
      The demand for Internet was an economic event where the efficiencies it afforded - quick, low cost communication, scale etc - made it attractive. Other countries had invented the Internet (France, I believe) but it went nowhere. Other comms technologies have been invented - Iridium satellites e.g. - but they died. Even distributed Internet based systems like Ipfs have the technology but not the adoption. Technology is a part of the story but the success and spread of the US backed Internet is an economic story. That the Internet has balkanised into walled gardens is downstream problem of successful products getting shittified until someone steps in a creates an alternative.
Waterluvian 4mo ago
I think a lot of jobs that have historically been automated were considered “intelligent” jobs. I’m not sure if this really is different or not. I also think there’s an enormous amount of white collar work that isn’t actually “intelligent” work. Especially in software development. The question I’ve been pondering isn’t about “where’s the intelligent work?” It’s, “what do we do when we’ve successfully vanquished work itself?” Will we move towards utopia? Or will the power disparity only grow and broken capitalism be used against us?
- sublinear 4mo ago
  > I also think there’s an enormous amount of white collar work that isn’t actually “intelligent” work. Especially in software development. That is begging the question pretty hard.
  - DrewADesign 4mo ago
    To be fair, that sort of haughty sentiment is very common among developers just before the job market demonstrates how special they’re not.
    - sublinear 4mo ago
      The most volatile jobs in software development have always been management. I'm not sure where you're going with the ragebait. I was asking a sensible question, not picking a dead-end argument.
    - majormajor 4mo ago
      >To be fair, that sort of haughty sentiment is very common among developers just before the job market demonstrates how special they’re not. What examples are you thinking of? Mainly what I remember is multiple waves of previous apocalypses not materializing. Off the top of my head: - programming will contract because of higher level languages, you won't need nearly as many people - outsourcing will kill programming job wages because one person can write the spec and ship it off to a team that will send back the working code for 1/10th the wage - better modeling methods will kill programming job wages because one person can write the spec and the machine will generate the code based no it Obviously that doesn't guarantee that this time will be the same. But you seem to be making a much stronger claim about what history tells us in the opposite direction...
senordevnyc 4mo ago
This is such a disingenuous comment. The entire rest of the section where you lifted this quote from directly addresses the thing you’re claiming no one will ever even try to address. And they even close the section by acknowledging that “this time it’s different” might actually be true with AI, and that we simply don’t have enough data to say for sure!
- bayarearefugee 4mo ago
  > The entire rest of the section where you lifted this quote from directly addresses the thing you’re claiming no one will ever even try to address. Please point me to what I asked for, an example of what this magical new job actually looks like. What does a person with that job do on a day to day basis, in very broad terms. I didn't spot anything like this in the paper. > And they even close the section by acknowledging that “this time it’s different” might actually be true with AI, and that we simply don’t have enough data to say for sure! The paper is basically a round-up of three different viewpoints. One of them (Acemoglu) I'm much more in agreement with than the others, and its his contributions you are referencing above. The quote I pulled came from Briggs. He's the one I want more information from on what these jobs will look like and in what ways these new jobs are safe from AI displacement when the lost jobs they replace are not.
  - senordevnyc 4mo ago
    This is the final two paragraphs of Briggs' section: The second more existential risk is that “this time is different” and AI is fundamentally a more labor-replacing technology than those that inform our historical analysis. While tech sector commentators extrapolating from their own experience tend to lean into this view, we believe that past technology shocks provide a useful guide to the likely labor displacement from AI automation (although effects could be larger if the eventual emergence of AGI eventually makes human input in knowledge-based work tasks redundant). That said, the answer to “is this time different?” will be hard to prove or disprove until the labor market holds up or doesn’t in the coming years. So, the debate around this question will remain lively for the foreseeable future.
carlosjobim 4mo ago
[flagged]
- nemomarx 4mo ago
  What kind of jobs? Say we get real time translation between various languages. What will I do?
  - carlosjobim 4mo ago
    It means you can communicate with people from anywhere in the world and do business with them. Real time or not. So whatever you do, now you have a larger market of potential customers, since your work in is not limited by language anymore. Tourism is the largest economic sector on this planet. And high quality, cheap translations increase the reach explosively both for seller and customer.
a34729t 4mo ago
I wish they would explore alternate hypotheses.
stale2002 4mo ago
The people saying that jobs will all go away because of technology have been wrong every single year, up to this year as well. The burden of proof seems like it's actually on you to show why this current tech boom is any different from previous ones. As to the answer to your question, well just look at what people are doing at their jobs today. Those are what replaced jobs from 2 years ago.
- ryeights 4mo ago
  OP already answered why this time is different. Previous technology has never reduced the scarcity of general intelligence, which has been the exclusive domain of humans.
- ks2048 4mo ago
  > The burden of proof seems like it's actually on you to show why this current tech boom is any different from previous ones. In past tech advances, there was always a long list of things that could not be automated by a machine. For some visions of "AI", almost by definition there is nothing left in that list. (Except some things, of course, where people want to interact with a human).
  - majormajor 4mo ago
    >For some visions of "AI", almost by definition there is nothing left in that list. >(Except some things, of course, where people want to interact with a human). And, of course, the things that the person holding the vision thinks they personally will still be doing. ;)
Gregaros 4mo ago
Onlyfans. Arguably, already began long before AI.
swalsh 4mo ago
Okay, work with me on this, because its a stretch. The new businesses created, might look very much like the old businesses that disappeared. But they're not focused on scale and profits. They're focused on an ideal of pushing the boundaries. Maybe a single craftsman making small one off hand made pieces. Maybe a pizzeria that puts out a small quantity of the best pizza. Little individual pursuits towards perfection. Enabled because economics is not important. If physical AI and super intelligence can do "everything" (work with me here) you're free to do small scale things you love. You're also free to raise children at home, work on mega projects, explore the world. The alternative is a small subset of an elite inherit the world's wealth, create a prison society of surveillance robots that keep the permanent underclass at bay with video games, tiktoks, and pills.
- bayarearefugee 4mo ago
  > If physical AI and super intelligence can do "everything" (work with me here) you're free to do small scale things you love. You're also free to raise children at home, work on mega projects, explore the world. Sounds fantastic(al). > The alternative is a small subset of an elite inherit the world's wealth, create a prison society of surveillance robots that keep the permanent underclass at bay with video games, tiktoks, and pills. I have to be honest with you, I'm not sure how anyone could be paying any attention at all to our current socioeconomic reality* and believe that the first alternative is likely to be the way this all goes (unless the issue is eventually forced through a massive, generational, bloody revolt). (* I am admittedly being US-biased here, some other countries may fare much better)
- majormajor 4mo ago
  Take all the countries in the world and split them by "the ruling class enables people to do whatever small things they want" vs "the ruling class puts its own interest above everyone else's and uses technology for their own advantage and to strengthen their control." Which count of countries comes out higher?
- noncoml 4mo ago
  Right. The uber rich are sure to share the wealth. Thanks for the laugh. Americans are fucked. European on the other hand may start bring out the guillotines again.
saimiam 4mo ago
1. AI weights managers - people whose job is to optimize model weights to yield highly specific outcomes 2. Agentic tourism - maybe you’ll be able to send your AI agent/robot to visit a place before you decide if it worth your time and investment 3. Vehicular trains on highways where vehicles going to similar destinations coordinate and move as a unit. There’ll be people optimising roads for this. E.g., exit lanes on highways are designed for a handful of cars to exit safely at a time. What if vehicular trains can be thousands of vehicles long like those going to Burning Man? 4. Hallucination historians - people whose job is to document how AI errors have led to changes in the course of history 5. Animal linguistics - people whose can finally study the correlations between how human and animal languages deliver the same information 6. People designing puzzles and challenges to keep AI engaged during routine maintenance 7. S3x workers who specialise in servicing AI bots 8. Cryptographers whose job if to encode content using non mathematical methods because math base cryptography has become a solved problem 9. Interior designers who specialise in humanised decor because everything else is now handled by AI 10. Lawyers who fight cases on AI’s right to participate in the world as equals of biologics
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- ks2048 4mo ago
  I don't see why any of these can't be done by AI. Except (7), which frankly, I don't understand what you mean.
  - saimiam 4mo ago
    7 - what if bots want to fcuk humans? You’re probably right that many jobs can eventually be done by AI but not on day 1. Between Day 1 of the brave new AI world and Day N, humans will be in the loop doing stuff that other humans will try to automate away ad nauseam. On Day N+1, there’ll be yet another HN question asking what exactly humans will be doing in the Braver Newer AI World.
    - noncoml 4mo ago
doobiedowner 4mo ago
Pid control was supposed to allow people that rotate valves to magically transform into software configurators. That never happened. Those people turned into janitors and an automated solution became a capital project. The janitorial staff gets fired in the end.
- noncoml 4mo ago
  This generation is f*cked, just like that generation was. The new jobs are for the next generation.
protocolture 4mo ago
>Still waiting for anyone with this viewpoint to offer a single educated guess at what any of these created jobs might look like even in very broad terms. Still waiting for mesopotamian farmers to imagine what all these workers will be doing after "the plough" automates farming. >All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise. I would rather see someone describe why Jevons doesnt apply to this one specific instance, without using big scifi imagery. >I get that previous automation waves have lead to new jobs in the past, but automating knowledge and intelligence is just fundamentally a different thing than anything we have automated in the past and what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized? Its yet to even be demonstrated that AI is going to take many/any jobs. Its yet to be demonstrated that it can. There was a great post here a few months ago showing how various technologies flagged as AI have a tendency to cap out at roughly 110% human capacity. And even for 110% there's no guarantee that this will be cheaper than hiring 1.1 humans instead of paying API fees. Theres also finance considerations, capex vs opex for deploying local models etc. The last time I felt like this, I was trying to talk other crypto speculators out of buying every hyped up shitcoin. AI at the moment feels like it is running very much on hype about future potential that has little to do with reality. I hate to use the term bubble, however. I was dealing with a support LLM just today, and all it did was give me nonsense to do before escalating. The human it escalated to immediately asked for the same nonsense. I just dont feel like reality has been as impacted by AI as people suggest.
- marcus_holmes 4mo ago
  > The last time I felt like this, I was trying to talk other crypto speculators out of buying every hyped up shitcoin. AI at the moment feels like it is running very much on hype about future potential that has little to do with reality. I hate to use the term bubble, however. Agree with this, but with nuance. One of the differences with the AI tech is that we have a split between the technology and the businesses. The current crop of large AI companies are totally in a bubble, and their economics make very little sense. That bubble is going to be extremely painful when it pops, and I hope we have the democratic fortitude to stop the losses being socialised through bailouts. But the underlying tech is still good, and doing useful things. There are good open-source LLMs that are not that far behind the proprietary models, and can produce useful results. Crypto had no use outside of the various currencies - there is not one successful use of blockchain tech that isn't a currency (or related), and the currency uses have been totally dominated by scammers and criminals. This is not the case with LLMs, which are useful tools, and will continue to be useful tools after the bubble bursts. So yes, the hypers are hyping bullshit that is going to burst, and that is like the crypto situation. But after that bursts and they all go away (or hopefully broke), there will still be useful things being done with LLMs.
geoduck14 4mo ago
I'm about to start a job where I expect AI to be a critical part. I will use AI to translate legal jargon to "simple English"
totetsu 4mo ago
Maybe they don't want to draw attention to the fact that it's all gig-work.
hcbbh76 4mo ago
Big one is keeping state or lets say world models in sync. You give 2 systems 2 seemingly different problems. They start building/updating tools and theories and their internal world model starts diverging. As we already see with human specialists. Now imagine 2000 different systems reality diverging. Keeping them all in sync becomes more work than the actual prob they work on.
FloorEgg 4mo ago
> what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized? Sample efficiency, energy efficiency and training data availability. The current tech stack is around 6 orders of magnitude behind human capabilities. We have scaled up a paradigm that's been built out continuously for decades (transistors, matrix multiplication). To close the gap requires completely reinventing the entire stack (e.g. spintronics, physical graph traversal). The most advanced tech that is only theorized and not yet even proven is still 4 orders of magnitude less energy efficient than a human, and we have no idea how to get close to the same sample efficiency. The question you are fretting won't matter for decades, and by then our culture, social and economic framework could be totally different than it is today. Rather than worry about something so abstract and misunderstood, I would suggest focusing your time and attention on what is within your control here and now: who do you want to help, and how can you be of help, such that your efforts are sustainable and rewarding. And if you really want to fret something at the edge of your control, fret about how AI is being used today to manipulate you and those you know into believing things that aren't in your best interest but are in someone else's best interest. If you aren't paying, you're the product. Most free media exists manipulate you, and if it has been designed to be addictive then it's virtually guaranteed.
ndm000 4mo ago
I have been struggling with the same thing. Reading the other comments make me agree with you even more. The best I can come up with is two fold. First that humans will have jobs verifying the verifiers. That is, for important initiatives where something must be right, agents can be doing most if not all of the work, but it will still be a human’s job to investigate what was done and sign off on it. The second is that humans will still have to make agreements with other humans for resources, capital, and the like. Somethings will be scarce, others will become scarce. And humans will always own scarce things that other humans will need to use - and they won’t be making deals with machines. Another frame I’ve heard is that people will only trust humans when it comes to their kids, health, and money. That’s the simpler view.
- skinfaxi 4mo ago
  > Another frame I’ve heard is that people will only trust humans when it comes to their kids, health, and money. That’s the simpler view. I don't think even these are bastions. We trust machines to monitor our health (even in hospitals you are connected), our children (ever use a baby monitor), and our money through index funds. The path is incremental but we have started down it.
marcus_holmes 4mo ago
I'm seeing quite a few small businesses / solo ventures locally who are using AI productively in ways that they would not be able to afford humans doing the same job. So while this is replacing humans, it is not destroying jobs - those businesses would not be able to afford a human to do this job anyway. It's a bit like Lean startup arising from Cloud computing - not having to provision your servers beforehand allowed a bunch of new small businesses (startups) to scale organically without needing vast amounts of capital locked up in hardware. Now AI is allowing a bunch of small businesses to operate with reduced expenses, enabling businesses that otherwise would not function, or would struggle. A local IT/dev provider is seeing an increase in business serving this exact same market - small businesses vibe-coding an MVP then need help getting it stable and to the next level. My guess is that this is the next Lean; small artisanal/local businesses that are enabled by the reduced costs from using AI in the business. And then the following wave of professional services that provide those functions at the next level as the artisanal businesses mature. Just a guess, though, I think it's too early to be really confident about it.
arecsu 4mo ago
In the camp of software development, if AI really increases productivity when it comes to development, thus making it cheaper in terms of human resources, there will be opportunities when it comes to offering custom development, software and services to sectors in society where it was pretty much an obscure idea due to costs. Small business who would otherwise rely on convoluted, inefficient workflows from non-specialized software given their needs, will be able to pay a developer who can provide them with custom tools and services. This is basically new opportunities for a huge number of people in the industry in both sides: developers and people who need them. Small analogy but this can be extrapolated to so many areas. You get the idea.

morkalork 4mo ago

I'm still waiting for this theory to demonstrate itself in countries that already have labour surplesses

otterdude 4mo ago

> All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise. Welcome to economics! Bullshit and conjecture all the way down.

saimiam 4mo ago
If it were all BS, how do you explain success stories like the Internet and the notion that countries on Dell’s supply chain won’t go to war with each other? Fundamentally, economics is the belief that humans have self-interests and act on them. Economics is obviously not 100% right - it’s not a physical science - but more often than not, you can see it in action. Economics is closer to weather science - we can make certain inferences and predictions which can be wrong but the basic working theory is broadly correct, imho.
- otterdude 4mo ago
  I think youre confusing a religious like belief in capitalism that posits that "greed is good" despite any contra indication with economics, which is a discipline where conjecture is taught as fact and empiricism if frowned upon. I'm not even going to touch your examples. They are completely illogical? Dell? The Internet?? Thats one company, and a technology. If you read the wealth of nations, the only real promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices, and thats why its considered "good" not because it solves all problems. I believe that, the rest is ill-supported conjecture. To point out the global stupidity that is economics, there is absolutely no consideration for the concept of a constraint. Constraints are a fundamental problem in optimization. This article lays it out nicely. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-the-growth-imperative/?social_token=230e18b100d16cb57bb49a853c65e69e&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sm-direct https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-the-growth-imper... Research this topic and you'll find economists arguing insistently that the conservation of mass or energy don't exist.
  - saimiam 4mo ago
    Nowhere did I say that economics = greed is good capitalism. Economics is fundamentally a study of how human and human society processes self interest. It tries to find broad patterns in how we process self interest and then supports or subverts those patterns. To build on your example, capitalism reinforces self-interest while communism tries to regulate self interest. Both are economic theories. Two countries on Dell’s supply chain not wanting to fight against each other is an example of weighing self interest and deciding that participating in a global supply chain is worth more than fighting a war.
- myaccountonhn 4mo ago
  The internet was in large part made possible because of government funded multi-year research during the cold war. It was largely ruined through commercialization and privatization, on all its layers.
  - saimiam 4mo ago
    The demand for Internet was an economic event where the efficiencies it afforded - quick, low cost communication, scale etc - made it attractive. Other countries had invented the Internet (France, I believe) but it went nowhere. Other comms technologies have been invented - Iridium satellites e.g. - but they died. Even distributed Internet based systems like Ipfs have the technology but not the adoption. Technology is a part of the story but the success and spread of the US backed Internet is an economic story. That the Internet has balkanised into walled gardens is downstream problem of successful products getting shittified until someone steps in a creates an alternative.

Waterluvian 4mo ago

I think a lot of jobs that have historically been automated were considered “intelligent” jobs. I’m not sure if this really is different or not. I also think there’s an enormous amount of white collar work that isn’t actually “intelligent” work. Especially in software development. The question I’ve been pondering isn’t about “where’s the intelligent work?” It’s, “what do we do when we’ve successfully vanquished work itself?” Will we move towards utopia? Or will the power disparity only grow and broken capitalism be used against us?

sublinear 4mo ago
> I also think there’s an enormous amount of white collar work that isn’t actually “intelligent” work. Especially in software development. That is begging the question pretty hard.
- DrewADesign 4mo ago
  To be fair, that sort of haughty sentiment is very common among developers just before the job market demonstrates how special they’re not.
  - sublinear 4mo ago
    The most volatile jobs in software development have always been management. I'm not sure where you're going with the ragebait. I was asking a sensible question, not picking a dead-end argument.
  - majormajor 4mo ago
    >To be fair, that sort of haughty sentiment is very common among developers just before the job market demonstrates how special they’re not. What examples are you thinking of? Mainly what I remember is multiple waves of previous apocalypses not materializing. Off the top of my head: - programming will contract because of higher level languages, you won't need nearly as many people - outsourcing will kill programming job wages because one person can write the spec and ship it off to a team that will send back the working code for 1/10th the wage - better modeling methods will kill programming job wages because one person can write the spec and the machine will generate the code based no it Obviously that doesn't guarantee that this time will be the same. But you seem to be making a much stronger claim about what history tells us in the opposite direction...

senordevnyc 4mo ago

This is such a disingenuous comment. The entire rest of the section where you lifted this quote from directly addresses the thing you’re claiming no one will ever even try to address. And they even close the section by acknowledging that “this time it’s different” might actually be true with AI, and that we simply don’t have enough data to say for sure!

bayarearefugee 4mo ago
> The entire rest of the section where you lifted this quote from directly addresses the thing you’re claiming no one will ever even try to address. Please point me to what I asked for, an example of what this magical new job actually looks like. What does a person with that job do on a day to day basis, in very broad terms. I didn't spot anything like this in the paper. > And they even close the section by acknowledging that “this time it’s different” might actually be true with AI, and that we simply don’t have enough data to say for sure! The paper is basically a round-up of three different viewpoints. One of them (Acemoglu) I'm much more in agreement with than the others, and its his contributions you are referencing above. The quote I pulled came from Briggs. He's the one I want more information from on what these jobs will look like and in what ways these new jobs are safe from AI displacement when the lost jobs they replace are not.
- senordevnyc 4mo ago
  This is the final two paragraphs of Briggs' section: The second more existential risk is that “this time is different” and AI is fundamentally a more labor-replacing technology than those that inform our historical analysis. While tech sector commentators extrapolating from their own experience tend to lean into this view, we believe that past technology shocks provide a useful guide to the likely labor displacement from AI automation (although effects could be larger if the eventual emergence of AGI eventually makes human input in knowledge-based work tasks redundant). That said, the answer to “is this time different?” will be hard to prove or disprove until the labor market holds up or doesn’t in the coming years. So, the debate around this question will remain lively for the foreseeable future.

carlosjobim 4mo ago

[flagged]

nemomarx 4mo ago
What kind of jobs? Say we get real time translation between various languages. What will I do?
- carlosjobim 4mo ago
  It means you can communicate with people from anywhere in the world and do business with them. Real time or not. So whatever you do, now you have a larger market of potential customers, since your work in is not limited by language anymore. Tourism is the largest economic sector on this planet. And high quality, cheap translations increase the reach explosively both for seller and customer.

a34729t 4mo ago

I wish they would explore alternate hypotheses.

stale2002 4mo ago

The people saying that jobs will all go away because of technology have been wrong every single year, up to this year as well. The burden of proof seems like it's actually on you to show why this current tech boom is any different from previous ones. As to the answer to your question, well just look at what people are doing at their jobs today. Those are what replaced jobs from 2 years ago.

ryeights 4mo ago
OP already answered why this time is different. Previous technology has never reduced the scarcity of general intelligence, which has been the exclusive domain of humans.
ks2048 4mo ago
> The burden of proof seems like it's actually on you to show why this current tech boom is any different from previous ones. In past tech advances, there was always a long list of things that could not be automated by a machine. For some visions of "AI", almost by definition there is nothing left in that list. (Except some things, of course, where people want to interact with a human).
- majormajor 4mo ago
  >For some visions of "AI", almost by definition there is nothing left in that list. >(Except some things, of course, where people want to interact with a human). And, of course, the things that the person holding the vision thinks they personally will still be doing. ;)

Gregaros 4mo ago

Onlyfans. Arguably, already began long before AI.

swalsh 4mo ago

Okay, work with me on this, because its a stretch. The new businesses created, might look very much like the old businesses that disappeared. But they're not focused on scale and profits. They're focused on an ideal of pushing the boundaries. Maybe a single craftsman making small one off hand made pieces. Maybe a pizzeria that puts out a small quantity of the best pizza. Little individual pursuits towards perfection. Enabled because economics is not important. If physical AI and super intelligence can do "everything" (work with me here) you're free to do small scale things you love. You're also free to raise children at home, work on mega projects, explore the world. The alternative is a small subset of an elite inherit the world's wealth, create a prison society of surveillance robots that keep the permanent underclass at bay with video games, tiktoks, and pills.

bayarearefugee 4mo ago
> If physical AI and super intelligence can do "everything" (work with me here) you're free to do small scale things you love. You're also free to raise children at home, work on mega projects, explore the world. Sounds fantastic(al). > The alternative is a small subset of an elite inherit the world's wealth, create a prison society of surveillance robots that keep the permanent underclass at bay with video games, tiktoks, and pills. I have to be honest with you, I'm not sure how anyone could be paying any attention at all to our current socioeconomic reality* and believe that the first alternative is likely to be the way this all goes (unless the issue is eventually forced through a massive, generational, bloody revolt). (* I am admittedly being US-biased here, some other countries may fare much better)
majormajor 4mo ago
Take all the countries in the world and split them by "the ruling class enables people to do whatever small things they want" vs "the ruling class puts its own interest above everyone else's and uses technology for their own advantage and to strengthen their control." Which count of countries comes out higher?
noncoml 4mo ago
Right. The uber rich are sure to share the wealth. Thanks for the laugh. Americans are fucked. European on the other hand may start bring out the guillotines again.

saimiam 4mo ago

1. AI weights managers - people whose job is to optimize model weights to yield highly specific outcomes 2. Agentic tourism - maybe you’ll be able to send your AI agent/robot to visit a place before you decide if it worth your time and investment 3. Vehicular trains on highways where vehicles going to similar destinations coordinate and move as a unit. There’ll be people optimising roads for this. E.g., exit lanes on highways are designed for a handful of cars to exit safely at a time. What if vehicular trains can be thousands of vehicles long like those going to Burning Man? 4. Hallucination historians - people whose job is to document how AI errors have led to changes in the course of history 5. Animal linguistics - people whose can finally study the correlations between how human and animal languages deliver the same information 6. People designing puzzles and challenges to keep AI engaged during routine maintenance 7. S3x workers who specialise in servicing AI bots 8. Cryptographers whose job if to encode content using non mathematical methods because math base cryptography has become a solved problem 9. Interior designers who specialise in humanised decor because everything else is now handled by AI 10. Lawyers who fight cases on AI’s right to participate in the world as equals of biologics

deleted 4mo ago
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ks2048 4mo ago
I don't see why any of these can't be done by AI. Except (7), which frankly, I don't understand what you mean.
- saimiam 4mo ago
  7 - what if bots want to fcuk humans? You’re probably right that many jobs can eventually be done by AI but not on day 1. Between Day 1 of the brave new AI world and Day N, humans will be in the loop doing stuff that other humans will try to automate away ad nauseam. On Day N+1, there’ll be yet another HN question asking what exactly humans will be doing in the Braver Newer AI World.
  - noncoml 4mo ago

doobiedowner 4mo ago

Pid control was supposed to allow people that rotate valves to magically transform into software configurators. That never happened. Those people turned into janitors and an automated solution became a capital project. The janitorial staff gets fired in the end.

noncoml 4mo ago
This generation is f*cked, just like that generation was. The new jobs are for the next generation.

protocolture 4mo ago

>Still waiting for anyone with this viewpoint to offer a single educated guess at what any of these created jobs might look like even in very broad terms. Still waiting for mesopotamian farmers to imagine what all these workers will be doing after "the plough" automates farming. >All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise. I would rather see someone describe why Jevons doesnt apply to this one specific instance, without using big scifi imagery. >I get that previous automation waves have lead to new jobs in the past, but automating knowledge and intelligence is just fundamentally a different thing than anything we have automated in the past and what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized? Its yet to even be demonstrated that AI is going to take many/any jobs. Its yet to be demonstrated that it can. There was a great post here a few months ago showing how various technologies flagged as AI have a tendency to cap out at roughly 110% human capacity. And even for 110% there's no guarantee that this will be cheaper than hiring 1.1 humans instead of paying API fees. Theres also finance considerations, capex vs opex for deploying local models etc. The last time I felt like this, I was trying to talk other crypto speculators out of buying every hyped up shitcoin. AI at the moment feels like it is running very much on hype about future potential that has little to do with reality. I hate to use the term bubble, however. I was dealing with a support LLM just today, and all it did was give me nonsense to do before escalating. The human it escalated to immediately asked for the same nonsense. I just dont feel like reality has been as impacted by AI as people suggest.

marcus_holmes 4mo ago
> The last time I felt like this, I was trying to talk other crypto speculators out of buying every hyped up shitcoin. AI at the moment feels like it is running very much on hype about future potential that has little to do with reality. I hate to use the term bubble, however. Agree with this, but with nuance. One of the differences with the AI tech is that we have a split between the technology and the businesses. The current crop of large AI companies are totally in a bubble, and their economics make very little sense. That bubble is going to be extremely painful when it pops, and I hope we have the democratic fortitude to stop the losses being socialised through bailouts. But the underlying tech is still good, and doing useful things. There are good open-source LLMs that are not that far behind the proprietary models, and can produce useful results. Crypto had no use outside of the various currencies - there is not one successful use of blockchain tech that isn't a currency (or related), and the currency uses have been totally dominated by scammers and criminals. This is not the case with LLMs, which are useful tools, and will continue to be useful tools after the bubble bursts. So yes, the hypers are hyping bullshit that is going to burst, and that is like the crypto situation. But after that bursts and they all go away (or hopefully broke), there will still be useful things being done with LLMs.

geoduck14 4mo ago

I'm about to start a job where I expect AI to be a critical part. I will use AI to translate legal jargon to "simple English"

totetsu 4mo ago

Maybe they don't want to draw attention to the fact that it's all gig-work.

hcbbh76 4mo ago

Big one is keeping state or lets say world models in sync. You give 2 systems 2 seemingly different problems. They start building/updating tools and theories and their internal world model starts diverging. As we already see with human specialists. Now imagine 2000 different systems reality diverging. Keeping them all in sync becomes more work than the actual prob they work on.

FloorEgg 4mo ago

> what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized? Sample efficiency, energy efficiency and training data availability. The current tech stack is around 6 orders of magnitude behind human capabilities. We have scaled up a paradigm that's been built out continuously for decades (transistors, matrix multiplication). To close the gap requires completely reinventing the entire stack (e.g. spintronics, physical graph traversal). The most advanced tech that is only theorized and not yet even proven is still 4 orders of magnitude less energy efficient than a human, and we have no idea how to get close to the same sample efficiency. The question you are fretting won't matter for decades, and by then our culture, social and economic framework could be totally different than it is today. Rather than worry about something so abstract and misunderstood, I would suggest focusing your time and attention on what is within your control here and now: who do you want to help, and how can you be of help, such that your efforts are sustainable and rewarding. And if you really want to fret something at the edge of your control, fret about how AI is being used today to manipulate you and those you know into believing things that aren't in your best interest but are in someone else's best interest. If you aren't paying, you're the product. Most free media exists manipulate you, and if it has been designed to be addictive then it's virtually guaranteed.

ndm000 4mo ago

I have been struggling with the same thing. Reading the other comments make me agree with you even more. The best I can come up with is two fold. First that humans will have jobs verifying the verifiers. That is, for important initiatives where something must be right, agents can be doing most if not all of the work, but it will still be a human’s job to investigate what was done and sign off on it. The second is that humans will still have to make agreements with other humans for resources, capital, and the like. Somethings will be scarce, others will become scarce. And humans will always own scarce things that other humans will need to use - and they won’t be making deals with machines. Another frame I’ve heard is that people will only trust humans when it comes to their kids, health, and money. That’s the simpler view.

skinfaxi 4mo ago
> Another frame I’ve heard is that people will only trust humans when it comes to their kids, health, and money. That’s the simpler view. I don't think even these are bastions. We trust machines to monitor our health (even in hospitals you are connected), our children (ever use a baby monitor), and our money through index funds. The path is incremental but we have started down it.

marcus_holmes 4mo ago

I'm seeing quite a few small businesses / solo ventures locally who are using AI productively in ways that they would not be able to afford humans doing the same job. So while this is replacing humans, it is not destroying jobs - those businesses would not be able to afford a human to do this job anyway. It's a bit like Lean startup arising from Cloud computing - not having to provision your servers beforehand allowed a bunch of new small businesses (startups) to scale organically without needing vast amounts of capital locked up in hardware. Now AI is allowing a bunch of small businesses to operate with reduced expenses, enabling businesses that otherwise would not function, or would struggle. A local IT/dev provider is seeing an increase in business serving this exact same market - small businesses vibe-coding an MVP then need help getting it stable and to the next level. My guess is that this is the next Lean; small artisanal/local businesses that are enabled by the reduced costs from using AI in the business. And then the following wave of professional services that provide those functions at the next level as the artisanal businesses mature. Just a guess, though, I think it's too early to be really confident about it.

arecsu 4mo ago

In the camp of software development, if AI really increases productivity when it comes to development, thus making it cheaper in terms of human resources, there will be opportunities when it comes to offering custom development, software and services to sectors in society where it was pretty much an obscure idea due to costs. Small business who would otherwise rely on convoluted, inefficient workflows from non-specialized software given their needs, will be able to pay a developer who can provide them with custom tools and services. This is basically new opportunities for a huge number of people in the industry in both sides: developers and people who need them. Small analogy but this can be extrapolated to so many areas. You get the idea.