[HN Gopher] Robots have been about to take all the jobs for 100 ...
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Robots have been about to take all the jobs for 100 years
Author : ronitmndl
Score : 96 points
Date : 2023-03-22 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org)
| lnsru wrote:
| Everything that can be automated is being automated and will be
| automated even more. There is no fear. It's economics 101.
| Businesses are not welfare programs, they are profit oriented.
| p0pcult wrote:
| >Businesses are not welfare programs, they are profit oriented.
|
| So, we change that by requiring corporations that want to
| continue indemnifying their owners from damanges become
| workfare programs and less profit oriented. The current regime
| sure aint working, and I think it is fair to expect businesses
| that benefit from public infrastructure have some skin in the
| societal game as well.
| bloppe wrote:
| Functional capitalism serves 2 main purposes:
|
| 1. Money encourages people to help each other by facilitating
| reciprocation: I do something for you and you pay me, someone
| else does something for me and I pay them, etc.
|
| 2. Private ownership fosters accountability: People maintain
| their own houses because it's theirs. See also tragedy of the
| commons.
|
| If these purposes are not being served for a majority of people,
| they will reject capitalism. But the right regulatory environment
| can ensure that they are. In a distant future with extreme levels
| of automation, people will still need help from one another and
| people will still want to own their own things. We just have to
| make sure it's possible. Progressive tax schemes and UBI,
| possibly in the form of equity, could accomplish that.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Robots did take all the jobs. We live in a world without
| lamplighters and knockeruppers and scribes and pinsetters and
| elevator operators and switchboard operators and a whole host of
| other professions that we now consider comically unnecessary.
| Other professions like farming and steelmaking remain, but
| require many orders of magnitude less labor for the same amount
| of productivity. Still other jobs like textile and shoe
| production have basically disappeared from the developed world
| and are only still done by humans because of the extreme
| exploitative situations available in some developing countries.
| There are very few people today in professions that existed a
| century ago, and even these have seen the tasks they do and
| skills involved change dramatically in that time. Pretty much the
| only people doing things today directly comparable to how they
| were done a century ago are those doing it for artisanal or
| ceremonial reasons.
|
| People will continue to do things for so long as people prefer
| receiving money to doing nothing, but people won't be doing what
| we're doing now for long.
| wubbert wrote:
| [dead]
| blodkorv wrote:
| They haven taken our jobs. But they have made the buying power of
| workers lesser by time. Try buying a house today with an avarage
| sallary.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| It's just like any project that's "just about to finish". It'll
| probably happen, just on a much longer timeline than anticipated.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| 1930:
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...
| rank0 wrote:
| The majority of comments I read/hear about openAI are horrible
| takes. It makes me believe most of the people haven't taken the
| time to evaluate the output of these LLMs.
|
| Programmers aren't going anywhere. ChatGPT doesn't "understand"
| things. It optimizes its output for some set of scoring metrics.
| It sees from it's training data that tokens score better (on
| average) in a particular order or that some tokens are associated
| with some sentiment. It doesn't see english words.
|
| With code generation the biggest benefit is generating code
| scaffolding. That's nice and all, but certainly NOT where the
| heavy lifting happens during system development. The scaffolding
| it shits out usually needs to be heavily modified by a human. The
| amount of capital, compute, memory, and energy it requires is
| insanely inefficient for generating boilerplate code. Don't even
| get me started on the privacy implications...
|
| OpenAI will make programmers more productive by reducing time
| spent on trivial/mundane tasks. That's awesome! However, it's not
| going to replace the SWE industry.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| Population growth correlates heavily with technological growth in
| the sense that the higher the tech the lower the population
| growth.
|
| Correlation does not equal causation but you cannot deny the
| possibility of causal connections here.
|
| Generally the lower tech the area than the more children you have
| the better off you are economically. Mainly because children can
| function as manual labor. With much of manual labor replaced with
| automation, nowadays having more children is more of a burden.
|
| Robots have not only been about to take our jobs. They have been
| taking our jobs. It's just it's so subtle it's hard to see it.
| jve wrote:
| Thats why I don't believe in AIpocalypse.
| not_enoch_wise wrote:
| With that attitude, we'll never get rids of humans!
| peteradio wrote:
| Has the prediction been wrong all those years? 99% of work that
| used to be done is arguably being done by robots, we just be doin
| different things now instead. IMO it is a bit worrisome that our
| abilities get further and further from their natural roots. Ever
| notice how when you look around yourself you couldn't make damn
| near anything that you are looking at, not even your bare
| essentials?
| Loquebantur wrote:
| This is indeed a vastly underappreciated point.
|
| One issue here is the resulting fragility of the economy. If
| crucial nodes of competence were to be wiped out by disaster,
| domino effects could have system-level implications as recovery
| might take too long.
|
| On a more personal level, people more and more lack the
| competence to understand non-local connections of the world
| they live in. Resulting in them not being able to judge
| consequences and making according mistakes.
| foxtacles wrote:
| Related video illustrating your last point using the example of
| a pencil: https://youtu.be/IYO3tOqDISE
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| This time it's different!
|
| Because the population is so large and the planet so far into
| ecological overshoot that there won't be any jobs to take... in
| 100 years? :)
| bnwert wrote:
| An automobile replacing horses frees the mind for different
| tasks. Using a centralized AI provider who tracks every thought
| and idea is utterly dystopian.
|
| A whole generation thinks it's normal that every thought is
| logged, stored, censored, sold and supervised by a third party.
|
| Get out pencil and paper!
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This logic is fundamentally faulty. Suppose, for example, that
| you're on "the front side" of a bell curve. As you go up the bell
| curve, until you near the peak, you can look behind you and think
| "Look at this, we've been going up for 100 years, and we're still
| going up!" But, if/when you _do_ near the peak, it actually can
| turn quite drastically, and quickly.
|
| The primary issue for me is the _rate_ at which technological
| progress is moving is making it ever more difficult for humans to
| adjust. I mean, suppose that in 10 years we have fully capable
| self driving cars. I 'm not necessarily saying that's going to
| happen (in fact I actually think it won't), but I _do_ think it
| will happen at some point. Right now, truck driver is the most
| common job in that vast majority of US states. When self driving
| cars do eventually come, all of those jobs will disappear pretty
| quickly. Do you honestly think someone who has been driving a
| truck for 20 years will be able to "retrain" quickly?
|
| And it's certainly not just truck drivers. Count me as one of the
| people who are astonished by ChatGPT's programming abilities.
| While I don't believe it's "there yet", I was pretty amazed that
| I was able to ask ChatGPT to program something for me, and it did
| quite well but the code had a subtle bug, and then when I pointed
| out the bug _ChatGPT was able to fix it itself_. And this wasn 't
| even on the GPT-4 version. This stuff only gets better with time.
| nradov wrote:
| Progress on autonomous vehicles appears to have mostly stalled.
| And even if it can eventually be made to work on some roads,
| truck drivers do a lot more than just drive the truck.
|
| There is no guarantee that the overall rate of technological
| progress will continue to increase. The opposite could well
| happen. Right now we are seeing the effects of multiple
| S-curves stacked on top of each other but progress is already
| slowing in many fields because the low-hanging fruit has been
| picked. For example, civil aviation has only eked out a few
| percentage points of improvement in efficiency and safety over
| the past couple decades; the latest airliners are actually
| _slower_ than their predecessors. Or in medicine we seem to be
| running out of new small-molecule drugs to find and thus on
| average with all the failures it now takes more work than ever
| before to bring a new drug to market.
| valine wrote:
| I expect there is lots of low hanging fruit to be picked from
| LLMs.
|
| Imagine an LLM running locally on your car, refined to pick
| your lane based on the current traffic conditions and
| upcoming map data.
|
| Many of the problems with self driving come for a lack of
| basic reasoning ability, an ability LLMs seem to emulate
| quite well. For example you can lay out driving scenarios to
| ChatGPT and get reasonable responses back.
|
| It's not as simple as running a Llama instance on your Tesla,
| but I expect language models will have had a big part to play
| when we finally get self driving to work.
| nradov wrote:
| Large _language_ models are totally unsuitable to
| autonomous vehicles. No one is going to write code to
| describe a dynamic driving situation as static text which
| could be used as an LLM prompt.
|
| Some of the underlying core technology could theoretically
| be used in that way by taking input from multiple
| videocameras and other sensors as input. But that approach
| is a dead end for consumer product development until
| someone solves the testing and explainability problem.
| Current limited AI systems are too unpredictable for safety
| critical applications. Just because AI software seems to
| work in testing doesn't mean you can have any confidence
| that it won't do something wildly dangerous in a novel real
| world situation. Vehicle manufacturers and their insurers
| will not take on the high potential liability even if
| autonomous systems are on average safer than human drivers.
| meh8881 wrote:
| That's not really what happens though. Truck drivers don't
| disappear. They just become "truck driver attendants" who serve
| only to attend to occasional human requiring edge cases. They
| don't require a commercial driver license and they pay minimum
| wage. And thus the lower class grows.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| But do you really think we'll see the same number of truck
| driver attendants as truck drivers? Heck, one of the things
| that _already_ exists is autonomous truck caravans, where one
| driver can "drive" a fleet, of say, 5-10 cars.
| meh8881 wrote:
| I think we will see more attendants than truck drivers now,
| because without truck drivers, trucks are cheaper, and we
| will want more trucks. Probably smaller trucks too.
|
| I don't have strong opinions on the ratio of attendants to
| trucks. You may be correct.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > one of the things that already exists is autonomous truck
| caravans, where one driver can "drive" a fleet, of say,
| 5-10 cars.
|
| Trains long predate the truck, and allow a single driver to
| drive hundreds of cars. But the major advantage of trucks
| is last-mile logistics - going from the depot where large
| volumes of cargo pass through to the specific place the
| cargo is needed. The number of truck drivers, and of future
| truck attendants, is proportional to the number of stops,
| not the amount of material being delivered. If anything,
| removing the bottleneck of requiring a person with a CDL to
| make a pickup or delivery will cause the number of truck
| attendants to be much larger than the current number of
| truck drivers (as already seen for example with Amazon
| delivery services, UPS trucks, etc).
| lsy wrote:
| It's interesting to see people who have been working as software
| engineers worrying that codegen LLMs will take their job. In the
| past week the amount of work that consisted of writing well-
| defined code was pretty much zero, and the actual core logic I
| have written lately has been almost mindlessly trivial. I spent
| _much_ more time discussing requirements, arriving at consensus
| on where components should live, determining whether change
| requests should go forward, determining how changes affected
| latency or disk space, and debugging nuanced issues that required
| multiple engineers to slowly reveal the problem.
|
| If your programming job consists of simply receiving a greenfield
| spec and banging out the code for it over and over, LLMs might be
| an issue. But most jobs are not like this. The bulk of the work,
| as always, is in dealing with the people at either end of the
| process. And knowing what the computer is doing and how it works
| will continue to be invaluable when an LLM writes logically
| perfect code that happens to run slowly or do the wrong thing
| once it makes contact with the real world.
| vsareto wrote:
| Hot take, but if you're doing a lot of soft skills work with
| non-developers, you might be carrying the team too much. You're
| very much right that those jobs won't go away because that
| would mean people around the developer would then have to do
| more work and be more technical.
|
| What would be great is for senior ICs to push into non-IC roles
| (ideally: ICs can use AI, so you need less ICs but this is
| unproven). Technical skills and knowledge applied to writing
| requirements cuts down on the number of conversations around
| those requirements. Then you get closer to a "greenfield spec
| -> bang out AI-generated code" situation because you're not
| slogging and negotiating through requirements written by non-
| technical people.
| alexpotato wrote:
| This reminds me of a quote from Joel Spolsky in the early
| 2000's but he was talking about offshoring:
|
| "There is always a global shortage of developers who know what
| they are doing"
|
| At the time, I wasn't sure if this was the case but two things
| have helped me believe that this is true:
|
| 1. a few years ago there was a stat going around on HN that
| something like less than 5% of the US population could even
| write a Hello World application in ANY language
|
| 2. 15+ years of working in tech and 5+ years of being a hiring
| manager have shown me that even people with great looking
| resumes often fail the Fizz Buzz test
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I suppose what people are afraid of is that the devs who can
| do Hello World + pass Fizz Buzz might use AI to orchestrate
| sophisticated systems which actually are effective in
| reducing a lot of menial work, which could eliminate a non-
| trivial number of jobs through sheer reduction of necessary
| labour/brain power.
|
| I agree though, off-shoring could have been the cheap labour
| which displaced a lot of devs, but I actually found a lot of
| work cleaning up off-shored applications and made great money
| doing it. It's perfectly possible that some horrible
| amalgamations of software will be puked out by AIs for a few
| years and ultimately create as much work as it displaced.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| At many of the FAANGs, it's not uncommon to spend 4 hours of
| testing for every one 1 of programming.
|
| Considering how important it is to _not_ have bugs - we 're
| extremely unlikely to have an LLM writing code at an acceptable
| level of quality, and anyone being qualified to verify that
| quality beside an eng, before I'm retired.
|
| But I'm confident many 22 year-old new grads will reply to tell
| me how wrong I am, and how I'll be starving to death under the
| burden of unemployment by next week.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Probably worth calling out the two of the biggest observable
| negative effects of automation that _have_ occurred over time:
|
| 1. We've decimated the bottom end of the skills market in
| developed countries. Something often touted in the psychometrics
| literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85
| are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15%
| of the population who are close to un-employable.
|
| 2. People who spend years or decades on a skillset see it
| devalued and their income drops. It is often difficult to get a
| "second shot" at a new career in your 40s and can be deeply
| disruptive to you and your family's lives. Growing up I watched
| this happen to the parents of several friends who'd made careers
| in things like printing that were obsoleted by digital
| revolution. None of those people achieved the monetary success
| they might have in an un-disrupted industry.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I don't know to what degree automation was involved, but we
| also spent the last 60+ years socially devaluing jobs that
| don't require a college degree.
|
| My grandfather is about as smart as I am, but he never went to
| college (nor did well over 90% of his cohort). Now about half
| the population goes to college, and more than a third graduate.
|
| That's a massive transformation in two generations, and its
| exacerbated by the degree to which it segregates. I've never
| eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend
| college.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger,
| who didn't attend college
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-
| anythin...
|
| It is completely wild to me how effectively society has self
| segregated to the point of just straight up never, not even
| once, interacting with the other group without even realizing
| it.
| [deleted]
| irrational wrote:
| Number 1 is my big concern. I have a son that is on the autism
| spectrum. He graduated from high school with a modified diploma
| when he was 20 and they decided to just send him along. He has
| managed to get a job doing baggage at the airport, which is
| pretty the limit of his abilities. What if all similar jobs
| were automated?
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| > What if all similar jobs were automated?
|
| Hopefully, we would reach a Star Trek-like utopia where
| people aren't required to work in order to live.
|
| More realistically, the middle class just disappears, and we
| have nothing but the super-rich and the destitute left.
| bilater wrote:
| Contrary point - technology enables people with disabilities
| to match or even exceed their peers?
|
| Someone in a wheelchair 50 years ago could not do a lot of
| jobs vs now that's not even a factor in a software job.
| waboremo wrote:
| Does that even matter when they still aren't being hired?
| Hiring statistics for those with disabilities are really
| horrible. We still hold biases about what makes one
| "productive" that stem from our very early hunter gatherer
| days, and these are still to this day negatively affecting
| the hiring potential of those with disabilities.
| akokanka wrote:
| The scariest thing is that they will eventually allow
| euthanasia for your child and others like him. Economically
| unpleasant people are not needed in capitalism. The
| governments are already starting to prepare laws on it .
| tarboreus wrote:
| Canada's MAID is well ahead of the curve on this. You can
| qualify just for saying you're depressed in some cases.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I think it's scarier that you believe this.
| aldarisbm wrote:
| "Manual" jobs, per the OpenAI whitepaper, seem to be the
| least susceptible to being automated. The robotics just isn't
| there yet. Blessings to your family.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| As in "Manual jobs that weren't made obsolete in the
| previous automation revolution" I suppose ? Like
| construction machines and lavor-saving tools ? On the top
| of my head I am thinking hair dresser, nail care (I
| wouldn't risk going to hair dresser or barber robot shop).
| vkou wrote:
| Manual mid-range jobs were the first that _were_ automated,
| due to the industrial revolution, and later during the
| robotics revolution.
|
| They've been automated for so long and so thoroughly that
| you didn't even think of them as 'having been automated
| away'.
|
| Look at any commercial kitchen, any farm, inside any
| factory. Look at the grocery store, and its self-checkout
| machines. Look at parking attendants and toll booths. Look
| at the labour-saving devices employed at any construction
| site. Look at the demise of cottage industries - which used
| to be _the_ economic driver of productive output, and are
| now limited to kitschy crafts on Etsy. Look at the cargo-
| container shipping yard, where a hundred dock-workers are
| now do the work that used to take tens of thousands. Look
| at the answering machine, and the utter insanity that is
| the modern automated customer support directory.
|
| What hasn't been automated are jobs like janitors - where
| the work that they do is highly varied, and requires
| manipulation of different tools, in different spaces. We
| can automate a floor-mopping machine, or a vaccum cleaner,
| but we can't (yet) build a robot that will vaccum, and
| water the plants, and scrub a toilet, and clean up vomit,
| and refill the paper towel dispenser, all in one package.
| eep_social wrote:
| > grocery store, and its self-checkout machines
|
| Which aren't automation or even new technology. The
| stores just cleverly moved the work that must be done to
| unpaid laborers. The self-checkout machines are an
| inferior tool with an escape hatch (customer service is
| on the way) to the real tool which must be operated by an
| employee.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Surely the ability to easily type and search for items is
| new technology. Customers do not have to memorize the
| codes, they can look them up.
|
| I find self checkout very beneficial, as I frequently
| have few items to purchase, and there are more self
| checkout registers available more consistently than there
| would be staff.
|
| For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it
| takes me very little time to self checkout. For people
| with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned
| conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of
| the many self checkouts.
| Avicebron wrote:
| The question seems to be, will those manual jobs be valued
| and economically rewarded, or will automation increasingly
| concentrate wealth into smaller and smaller groups while
| manual work will be low paying with low social mobility.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Depends on the supply of labor for those manual jobs.
| Jobs that require skill and/or have low quality of life
| at work such as requiring traveling/crawl
| spaces/outdoors/sewers/dangerous machinery/hazardous
| materials will probably pay well.
|
| Manual jobs that are relatively safe, close to home,
| steady, and easy to learn will probably have a lot of
| people vying for them, hence lower pay.
| iamerroragent wrote:
| Government can/does provide aid to those with disabilities
| that prevent them from being able to attain and keep regular
| employment.
|
| In the U.S. I believe it's through Social Security.
|
| So as more jobs are automated and the base level of ability
| required to get hired goes up so does the need to expand who
| qualifies for social programs.
|
| Productivity will be increasing with automation so it's a
| matter of distributing resources more efficiently and fairly
| than it is about making sure there is labor for everyone to
| get a job.
| satellites wrote:
| Social Security in the U.S. is typically for retired people
| age ~65 or older. There are other social programs for low-
| income people, but they are abysmally insufficient for what
| we're talking about. Usually disabled people are paid by
| "disability insurance" but you have to get a job first to
| even qualify for that. So that's usually for injuries etc.
|
| If you don't live in the U.S. it's hard to grasp just how
| hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower
| and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support
| people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work
| elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the
| hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family
| ffs, but we can't even fix that. There is zero political
| will to provide robust social programs here, despite any
| evidence that shows it might improve society.
|
| Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few
| decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close
| to zero chance of the solutions you're describing.
| Loquebantur wrote:
| You too over-generalize when extrapolating past behavior
| linearly into the future.
|
| Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be
| able to learn from their mistakes and implement change
| accordingly.
|
| This presupposes one refrains from defeatist refusal to
| engage those problems of course.
| satellites wrote:
| How long have you been following politics and economics
| in a serious capacity?
|
| > Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to
| be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change
| accordingly.
|
| We sure _ought_ to, I agree with you there.
| Loquebantur wrote:
| The minimum level of cognitive ability necessary for
| employment providing a reasonable degree of autonomy is bound
| to rise inexorably. So this concern will be shared by ever
| growing numbers.
|
| The contemporary habit of envisioning people as some sort of
| disposable artifice is dehumanising at its core and just
| serves to rid those in lucky positions of superfluence from
| responsibility.
|
| Society needs to learn to recognize interpersonal differences
| in terms other than self-serving judgemental dismissal.
| lp4vn wrote:
| The scariest thing of all is how the average citizen is in a
| certain sense not reaping the benefits of automation.
|
| You would think that automating your job would make you free
| to work less. No, of course not, you end up either unemployed
| or working at least as much as you used to or more.
|
| A lot of the comments here on this thread are already
| pessimistic in relation to the automation because people low
| key know that in the last decades almost all societal changes
| have come to the detriment of general population.
| betaby wrote:
| Western ideology is mostly about taxing the salaries. While
| xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods. But
| then again xUSSR "did't work" and capitalism "worked". How
| it even possible to reap anything from the automation if
| tax base is people's salaries and VAT?
| user432678 wrote:
| > While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the
| goods
|
| Yeah, ask my grand grand father how great that worked. Oh
| sorry, you can't, he was shot in the gulag in 1937 for
| anti revolution activities (and rehabilitated in 60s,
| saying it was a terrible mistake, that's a relief,
| right?).
| [deleted]
| flangola7 wrote:
| The failures of the USSR does not mean the US is
| succeeding. It is possible for more than one thing to be
| bad. Power/wealth imbalances are bad wherever they
| appear. The USSR no longer exists, but the US does, and
| its imbalance is growing worse rapidly.
| bradDonniger wrote:
| USSR style communism was really an authoritarian
| dictatorship.
|
| In capitalist west, capitalism was also about
| distribution of goods but literally being nice about it.
| Working together.
|
| The language is meaningless gibberish. The tone and
| emotional spin, roleplay are what's important.
|
| In the US we're enabling iron fisted oligarchs like the
| USSR once had. Those who refuse to share without extreme
| deference and idolatry, not because they're that
| important to the well being of billions (they're not) but
| because they're important to the political actors that
| insulate them from taxation.
| ben_w wrote:
| Nothing's so clear-cut as history lessons might have you
| believe.
|
| The USSR et al had many more problems than most people in
| the west, at least of my generation, properly appreciate
| -- the Holomodor and the irony of the Berlin Wall's
| official name ([?] anti-fascist protection barrier) being
| the most pertinent in my mind.
|
| Conversely, while the USA was a symbol of hope and
| freedom in my childhood, that childhood was oblivious to
| the official segregation of the USA even in the 60s, let
| alone the unofficial segregation whose continued
| existence was the basis for the term "woke" prior to it
| being appropriated by all the political talking heads to
| mean everything and nothing.
|
| The oligarchy in the USA today is not one I favour, but
| it is kinder than the... I was going to reference the
| events of the Homestead strike, but it turns out I must
| remember my own words, for that too is less clear-cut
| than I had heard:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
|
| But yeah, reality is a complicated mess.
|
| My opinion is that laissez-faire capitalism is BS, that
| the Roosevelt New Deal marked an end to that era for the
| same reason that the equivalent living conditions ended
| Soviet-style communism; that other forms of communism and
| capitalism exist; that both over-simplify human nature
| and that a superior alternative to both can be designed
| with careful effort; that such a thing probably won't be
| taken seriously until the current system is utterly
| broken because of those with power in the current system;
| and that by default AI and robotics is a lot closer to
| communism than anything else because "from each according
| to ability" requires much less personal consideration
| when everyone has a dozen droid servitors at their
| disposal.
| peterbell_nyc wrote:
| Presumably the model for sufficiently wealthy countries
| would be to effectively tax the corporations either based
| in those countries or that wanted to sell to people in
| those countries. You then redistribute a subset of that
| as UBI or some other form of payment for either the
| subset affected by unemployability or to everyone.
| Melatonic wrote:
| In addition to UBI if we effectively taxed corporations
| we could have massive job programs for workers that
| either do get automated out of a job or work in a job
| that becomes obsolete. Just because you specialized in
| one thing and that thing becomes obsolete when you turn
| age 40 does not mean you do not have all kinds of other
| skills that will make it easier to start anew.
| pydry wrote:
| The USSR succumbed to the resource curse and an
| unstoppable arms race. In the 50s when they were still on
| somewhat friendly terms American newspapers were openly
| fretting that the Soviet economy was _too_ efficient and
| growing _too_ fast.
|
| Its intrinsic economic woes were overplayed by western
| elites who were terrified of communist contagion.
|
| Western ideology is about the primacy of property
| ownership. It's not economically efficient in the
| slightest but it's the only game in town these days.
| bloppe wrote:
| Property tax and inheritance tax can both be thought of
| as wealth tax, and are quite common. More general wealth
| taxes. Many European countries currently have or used to
| have more general wealth taxes. Lots of Americans support
| a general wealth tax. See Bernie Sanders.
| betaby wrote:
| I fail to see how wealth tax (my car and home is my
| wealth I suppose) going to 'reap' the automation
| advances. Please elaborate.
| cwmoore wrote:
| I fail to see how your example of basic requirements for
| normal life is wealth. Tax second and third homes, places
| with eleven bedrooms when the owners live elsewhere.
| People who own the robots that replace workers. Are you
| just trolling? This seems like a bad faith comment of
| unimaginable ignorance.
| betaby wrote:
| Comment I was replying is about wealth, article and my
| original comment are about automation. Yet somehow you
| are now talking about 11 bedrooms somehow. Anyways...
| kevviiinn wrote:
| People have been brainwashed into thinking that normal
| requirements for living somewhere are investments
| slg wrote:
| More generally the number of jobs hasn't seemed to drop
| drastically during any of these waves of automation, but the
| number of people employed in certain fields has including some
| jobs disappearing entirely. That means automation doesn't
| present a problem for the economy overall, but it does present
| a problem for individuals who need to exist in the
| transitioning economy. The US in particular has done an awful
| job easing those individuals during the transition. The economy
| becoming more efficient is good. We should use some of the
| surplus value of increased efficiency to care for the people
| harmed by that transition.
| meh8881 wrote:
| 1. Is completely wrong. We have vastly grown the bottom end of
| the skills market by automating jobs to levels so simple that
| anyone can do it. They are bad jobs. But there are many of
| them. The problem is that we have people with normal IQs doing
| these jobs too, because there is not enough jobs above them.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| You're arguing in March of 2023 that the issue is a _lack of
| jobs_?
| klyrs wrote:
| I'd summarize their comment as "the issue is a lack of
| _skilled_ jobs. "
| CPLX wrote:
| If you're interested in topic #1 here I highly recommend the
| book "Dignity" by Chris Arnade. It's not like this concept was
| literally new to me but the grace with which he talks about it
| and the specific stories he encounters made me see things in an
| entirely different light. x
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is
| that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite
| rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the
| population who are close to un-employable.
|
| This is because we decide it's better to pay people to do
| nothing than to clean streets and medians and countless other
| things that need done.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| And ironically by paying them just for existing, they are
| ending up as the only group capable of reproducing at higher
| than replacement rate.
|
| We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce
| and dooming ourselves.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >We are artificially selecting the worst people to
| reproduce and dooming ourselves.
|
| The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart'
| children and the same for 'dumb' people.
|
| I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter
| than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be
| smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.
|
| I hope not. I saw a pretty funny meme on Reddit today
| that went something like "50 years ago car manuals
| explained how to adjust the valves in your engine. Now
| they ask that you don't drink the battery fluid".
|
| I think another big downside of so much technological
| progress is that people no longer need to understand, and
| get the benefit of learning, how things work. Yeah, it
| was a PITA that 35 years ago I had to muck with
| config.sys and autoexec.bat files, but it helped me have
| a better understanding of how things worked under the
| covers. There was some discussion on HN recently about
| how many Gen Z folks are woefully unprepared _digitally_
| for the workforce because they are so used to iPhones
| /iPads/apps, etc., that you don't know how thing actually
| work - like people not understanding what the file system
| is.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Sure, but that's an argument against
| abstraction/specialization that is also somewhat hard to
| really buy into.
|
| How do you smelt bronze? How do you grow crops? How do
| you build a lean-to?
|
| Knowing how to do all those things _does_ give you a very
| intrinsic understanding of a lot of things, but it 's
| probably not wise to force _everyone_ to learn those
| things.
|
| EDIT: Apparently you don't smelt bronze, you smelt pure
| metals out of ores. lol.
| stonogo wrote:
| I saw that meme too, except the version I saw had the top
| comment included in the crop, which was something to the
| effect of "warnings are put on products in response to
| customer behavior, not as a preventative measure.
| somebody's parents tried to drink battery acid."
| alach11 wrote:
| > The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have
| 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people.
|
| What makes you say that's a fallacy? Everything I've read
| has shown intelligence to be highly hereditable. I'm not
| saying we should make policy changes based on that, but
| the science behind intelligence being (at least
| partially) hereditable seems pretty conclusive.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Also the rate at which people with lower IQs reproduce
| isn't really alarmist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fe
| rtility_and_intelligence#:....
| akavi wrote:
| Both "smart people have smart children" and 90% of this
| forum being smarter than their parents could be true if
| "being on this forum" was selected on intelligence.
|
| I don't have the time to work through the math
| concretely, but intuitively, imagine that the
| intelligence of parents is normally distributed, and the
| intelligence of their children is a tighter normal
| distribution around the parents' intelligence. Set the
| cutoff for "participating on HN" to to some threshold.
| Given the right set of parameters, most of the "weight"
| in the aggregate child distribution above the threshold
| will come from the long tails of the child distributions
| of parents in the fat part of the parent distribution.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal
| distribution around the parents' intelligence.
|
| Again, this is _the core_ fallacy of eugenics.
|
| How many current US PhD's are the children/grandchildren
| of immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked
| education and worked manual jobs (or maybe even went
| through extended periods of unemployment)?
|
| EDIT: To be clear, I know Western culture has pushed a
| narrative that intelligence is an intrinsic thing that
| anyone can have, but in practice, it's a reflection of
| learned skills like reasoning and abstraction. That's
| _the entire point of education,_ if you don 't practice
| those skills (with some exceptions), you are likely worse
| at them.
|
| https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/how-much-
| does-...
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked
| education and worked manual jobs_
|
| Why are you conflating immigrants from underdeveloped
| countries with low intelligence? The parents could be
| have been (likely were) highly intelligent, just lacking
| the opportunity or access to education.
|
| The current US PhD's that are the children/grandchildren
| of immigrants aren't a random selection, they are the
| product of smart motivated parents working the system
| (immigration system, education system, admissions system)
| for and with their children.
|
| The core fallacy of Eugenics is not that intelligence is
| heritable, it is that you can avoid terrible moral
| hazards when you try to meddle in this stuff.
| lnsru wrote:
| There are enough teachers and doctors from other
| countries working as post delivery drivers in Germany
| because their education isn't being accepted in Germany.
| [deleted]
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| No one talks about the lift attendants! <<The person who
| operated the lifts (elevators) in old shopping houses or
| buildings was called an "elevator operator" or "lift
| attendant." Their primary responsibility was to manually
| control the elevator, ensuring that it stopped accurately at
| each floor and that passengers were transported safely. They
| would also assist passengers by opening and closing the
| elevator doors and providing information about the different
| floors or departments within the building.>>
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is
| that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite
| rare in the US where once they were common
|
| I think Jordan Peterson quoted the stats as people with IQ
| under 83 are completely unemployable i.e. even the army can't
| get a net positive out of them. I found that deeply concerning
| in several ways.
|
| IMHO we need to work on reducing the cost of living so people
| can mostly opt-out without losing their home and dying. Instead
| it's always push harder, more growth, etc...
| phphphphp wrote:
| [flagged]
| bee_rider wrote:
| I understand that the market is mysterious and confusing, but
| it has always struck me as bizarre that our society is
| structured in such a way that automating a task away has ended
| up as a bad thing. The thing you were doing has been done,
| therefor society as a whole at least wouldn't be harmed by just
| paying you (Your old salary - amortized yearly cost of the
| machine) to do nothing.
| klipt wrote:
| Paying someone to idle is certainly harmful to society if you
| could pay them the same to do something productive.
| bee_rider wrote:
| But it is strictly better than the pre-automation
| situation.
| klipt wrote:
| Maybe if you ignore the effects of competition. If you're
| paying someone you no longer need and your competitors
| (who have access to the same automation) aren't, they'll
| outcompete you.
| Aloha wrote:
| Another problem is, that minimum required IQ number keeps
| rising too.
|
| A healthy society needs to have means to support people of all
| intelligence levels, we need the equivalent of jobs for ditch
| diggers, and those jobs need to be respected lines of work for
| people.
|
| Work has more value than just money, and whether people like it
| or not, it gives value and meaning to peoples lives. The value
| we assign (and pay) for work shouldnt just be governed by the
| economic value it generates, it needs to be enough to meet
| basic needs, to engender respect.
|
| The basic point I'll make here, using ditch digging is - have
| you dug a ditch? I have, its hard work, and mine was just a
| small one in my back yard.
| area51org wrote:
| Meanwhile, it's the knuckle-dragging cro mags who are having
| all the babies. I wonder how this ends.
| ben_w wrote:
| Correlation!= causation.
|
| Our default is "lots of babies"; women getting more
| education and economic liberty decrease that number. Poor
| places don't generally have significant educational budgets
| or opportunities for women, but as that specific set of
| things changes -- education and freedom, not even always
| money -- there is a corresponding change to number of
| births per woman.
|
| It also means that rich couples in societies that lack
| women's lib still have more kids, even where you can infer
| high intellect without the convenient proxy of the women
| being allowed to go to university and giving you a test to
| score against.
| klipt wrote:
| In the short run, people can act against their own
| evolutionary fitness, but in the long run, evolutionary
| pressures should push those people to the wayside.
| Aloha wrote:
| I've also seen two parents of below average intelligence
| make children who are of above average intelligence, and
| thats not even uncommon.
| klipt wrote:
| Well yeah in fact regression to the mean predicts that
| below average people will on average have children
| smarter than themselves while above average people will
| have children less smart than themselves (but still
| smarter than average).
|
| That's not my point, my point is more that it's funny
| that people do things like going to college when this
| predictably causes them to have fewer children i.e.
| college actually _hurts_ their evolutionary fitness.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is
| that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite
| rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the
| population who are close to un-employable.
|
| Although I was completely unaware of this literature, I have
| spent the last few years essentially making the same point with
| regard to automation: you don't need a super-duper ASI to cause
| severe employment problems, all you need is something with an
| IQ of 85 that costs at most minimum wage to run (modulo
| robotics keeping up and being part of that price), and then 16%
| of the population are permanently and irreversibly no longer
| economically employable.
| bloppe wrote:
| There are many things a robot with "IQ" 85 cannot do that a
| human with "the same" IQ can: childcare / elder care, social
| work, basically anything that requires garnering trust and a
| lot of social interaction, but not necessarily complex
| skills. There will probably be more jobs like this in the
| future. Even now, people pay extra for handmade items when
| the technology to mass-produce the same thing for cheaper has
| been around for decades, so even if a robot can do your job,
| that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.
| ben_w wrote:
| > There are many things a robot with "IQ" 85 cannot do that
| a human with "the same" IQ can:
|
| Only if you don't take IQ tests seriously -- I think I've
| heard them dismissed as "only good at measuring your score
| on an IQ test".
|
| If you do take them seriously, then by definition an AI
| which _genuinely_ scores 85 (and isn 't, say, just
| programmed to be good at that specific set of puzzles),
| then it must be able to do what a human of that IQ can do.
|
| In this case I mean the latter, what with it _being a
| thought experiment to demonstrate why we get problems well
| before having to ask if the AI can take over_.
|
| Practical issues like "a native speaker with IQ 85 is
| almost certainly more fluent than an IQ 160 polyglot on
| their 53rd, but for an AI they're all equal", or "we can
| easily hard-code in an algorithm for winning chess and
| another for doing calculus" likewise don't really matter.
|
| > childcare / elder care, social work, basically anything
| that requires garnering trust and a lot of social
| interaction, but not necessarily complex skills
|
| One of the problems right now with ChatGPT is that people
| trust it waaaay too much, and it's not really even trying.
|
| > that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.
|
| worthless != longer economically employable
|
| The arts have significant social value, and I suspect may
| be to humans what tails are to peacocks; but at the same
| time, painters and novelists and musicians and actors and
| playwrights are infamous in their collective struggles to
| earn enough to get by on those careers alone.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > then it must be able to do what a human of that IQ can
| do.
|
| Has anyone ever said this about any test? Are there any
| tests that are so general that anyone who does better on
| it is better at every single task than someone who does
| worse? Is such a test even possible?
| sharperguy wrote:
| Automation in theory SHOULD, in the process of destroying
| jobs, make many things cheaper so people are able to afford
| things that were previously out of reach, creating new jobs
| in those sectors.
| brunoborges wrote:
| Last I checked, no grocery store got price drops thanks
| to self-checkout.
| klipt wrote:
| Due to stickiness prices almost never drop, but they can
| grow slower than inflation, which in the limit has the
| same effect.
| ben_w wrote:
| In addition to the other comment, the cashier is almost
| none of the price.
|
| Assuming PS10/hour and a cashier that can scan an average
| of 20 items per minute (which is probably 20 items in 20
| seconds and then waiting 40 more for the customer to dig
| out their wallet), that's 20*60 items per hour = 1200
| items per hour = 120 items/PS1.
|
| I assume it's mainly useful for other reasons?
| gecersiznick wrote:
| It's safe to talk about EQ in addition to IQ regarding some
| jobs then. It's more and more going to be about EQ jobs
| where AI feels lacking now, emphasis on the now.
| antod wrote:
| Yeah, I think something that gets missed by the decriers of
| pessimism is that over time we really do seem to be throwing a
| new strata currently at the bottom of the workforce onto the
| scrapheap.
|
| The "optimists" might not take notice because they've been in
| the layers that can keep playing musical chairs and adjust, and
| things might even seem good - especially when the pool of money
| available gets more concentrated.
|
| What has been a slow gradual frog boiling process could very
| well accelerate with AI reaching this level though. I can't
| think of earlier developments being as widely applicable and
| moving as fast as this before.
|
| I worry for my kids generation, and personally wish I was 10yrs
| closer to retirement.
| twblalock wrote:
| A few years ago the NYT editorial board argued that inflation was
| going to be transitory because "it's not the 1970s." It was a
| smug, dismissive, and ultimately incorrect argument. Appealing to
| the past doesn't mean much because we don't live there.
|
| This argument about automation is no different. _We don 't know_
| what is going to happen because of AI. We don't even know where
| AI is going to go as a product/feature/whatever. It could totally
| make obsolete an entire class of lower-earning white collar
| workers whose main contribution is writing things. On the other
| hand, it could fizzle out and we could be comparing Bing Chat to
| Clippy a few years from now and laughing at all the investors who
| wasted their money on the next big thing after crypto.
|
| Pointing to times in the past when people feared automation, and
| showing how those fears did not pan out, is not a good argument.
| Everything in history is contingent, everything could have gone a
| different way if a few people made different decisions at a few
| key times, and fear of automation may have motivated some of
| those people to make the decisions that prevented automation from
| destroying all the jobs.
|
| To put it another way: If you play Russian Roulette with a six-
| shot revolver and you survive five rounds, should you be more or
| less likely to believe that you will survive the sixth round?
| People who look to the past and say "bad thing that was predicted
| did not happen then so it won't happen now" are guilty of
| thinking that if they survived five rounds then they will
| definitely survive the next one.
| Loquebantur wrote:
| Falling from a high place only temporarily provides comfort of
| weightlessness.
|
| People seemingly like to fall prey to this particluar incarnation
| of over-generalization. For obvious reasons, as they simply don't
| know what to do about the impending demise of the established
| economic order.
|
| Where are the essays proposing solutions?
| antibasilisk wrote:
| Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore John Kazycnski
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > The rise of horseless carriages, mass production and other new
| forms of automation in the first two decades of the 20th century
| created anxieties about the future of work and employment.
|
| I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto
| oxen and other beasts of burden.
|
| Recording and mechanical reproduction _did_ cause the social(!)
| and economic value of small-time talent in the arts to plummet
| from "pretty high, actually" to "basically zero". That never
| recovered.
|
| To no small degree, the US has coped with the effects of
| automation with huge public spending on the military (a massive
| blue-collar jobs program, effectively) and a painfully-
| inefficient healthcare system (a massive white-collar jobs
| program). Both are post-war (as in, WWII) developments. I have a
| feeling our optimism about the effects of further automation on
| unemployment would be _rather bleaker_ without the action of
| those two very-expensive systems in mitigating the effects of
| past automation.
|
| [EDIT] Oh, you can add the effects of pushing a whole lot more
| people into college to the list of expensive things we do that
| mitigate the effects of automation on employment. Keeping
| millions more people out of the workforce for an extra four years
| or more is a pretty big deal. Also a post-war development (the GI
| Bill was what kicked off that trend)
| vkou wrote:
| > I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job.
| Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.
|
| Exactly. The buggy drivers became tax drivers, the horses
| became glue.
|
| The automobile was a great invention for the participants on
| the right side of that bell-curve, and absolutely horrible for
| the participants on the left side of the bell-curve.
|
| There's no guarantee, universal law, or dogmatic hit-the-brakes
| switch which will ensure that (without a major economic
| adjustment) further technological development won't put an
| ever-growing fraction of people to the left of the 'useful
| enough to be employable for a living wage' side of the
| bellcurve.
| brwck wrote:
| > I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job.
| Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.
|
| Don't forget farmers. Most americans were farmers in the early
| 1900s. Today it's about 1%.
|
| Sure, jobs were eventually created for the unemployed farmers
| but "robots taking all the jobs" was a cataclysmic event in the
| early 1900s. You could argue it was the driving force for much
| of the 20th century. WW1 was primarily a result of european and
| american societies having excess population to "thin out". The
| excess population was also a reason for the anti-immigration
| movement that dominated the first half of the 1900s.
|
| "Robots taking our jobs" isn't the end of the world. But it can
| be very painful.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I actually wonder if the farmer metric is true ?
| peteradio wrote:
| Get outta here robut!
| thewarpaint wrote:
| > WW1 was primarily a result of european and american
| societies having excess population to "thin out".
|
| Source?
| glitcher wrote:
| The end of the article rings true for me:
|
| "It is much easier to imagine someone losing their job to a new
| technology, than it is to imagine many people gaining jobs that
| haven't been invented yet."
|
| When I was in school in the pre-Internet era, I had one very
| insightful teacher comment that many of the jobs we may end up
| working in hadn't even been invented yet. Turned out to be true
| in my case.
| nanna wrote:
| Quite striking that this piece doesn't mention that the very term
| robot was coined just over 100 years ago, with Karel Capek's
| Rossums Universal Robots
| juvvel wrote:
| What worries me is not so much the fear of a certain job becoming
| obsolete, but the fear of the alternative new jobs becoming
| inaccessible to those left behind by automation. You can have a
| good and stable career and do everything "right" and still end up
| a complete beginner a few years later because your skills are
| worthless now. Especially after a certain age, employers won't
| choose you over fresh graduates who are knowledgeable in the new
| tech. The standard advice is to "always keep learning" but not
| every job will give you the opportunity to do so. Someone's gotta
| do what has to be done, we can't all just learn new things all
| the time. Also I wonder how much we'll realistically be able to
| keep up because the pace of new change has been steadily
| increasing. We've seen AI breakthroughs over the course of
| months.
| adventured wrote:
| > You can have a good and stable career and do everything
| "right" and still end up a complete beginner a few years later
| because your skills are worthless now.
|
| Nothing about that is new. It has been a common fear and very
| real issue since the industrial revolution took hold.
| juvvel wrote:
| Just that it's happening faster and more ruthlessly than ever
| before.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Is it? I'd say a lot of stuff around a century or two ago
| was far worse than what we're going through.
| marcusverus wrote:
| It's more ruthless than the industrial revolution? Are you
| surfing HN from a workhouse?
| juvvel wrote:
| If it has been that bad or worse before, I wonder why
| we're not learning from it then. Humanity as a whole will
| be fine but tons of individuals are going to have their
| lives ruined.
| Zetice wrote:
| Is there an "ought" argument that deals with the "left behind"
| concept?
|
| Obviously there are tons of practical considerations to deal
| with, but in a theoretical, general sense, is "left behind" a
| problem? Shouldn't lifelong learning be a thing everyone is
| indeed capable of?
| Riverheart wrote:
| In an ideal world but this one isn't and even if it were the
| purpose of life is living not keeping up with a endless rat
| race of employability in a world that doesn't know when to
| slow down.
|
| Leaving people behind is problematic because not everyone can
| keep up or has the time and means to do so. Should a single
| mother be expected to put in hours every week learning some
| crap on top of working and raising kids or can that person
| just breathe and deal with their other problems? Full time
| house parent that loses a spouse and has to start working.
| Someone in a low income house that can't afford professional
| courses/books or even has access to a computer.
|
| You ever see those commercials about kids that can't focus on
| school because they're hungry? Yeah it's not just them. When
| people are deprived of life essentials or dealing with
| personal problems studying is the last thing on their minds.
|
| Here we have people in tech burning themselves out and we
| want to export that mentality to everywhere else instead of
| seeing it as a problem.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I saw an interview with Ray Kurzweil recently who is a huge
| driver and influencer of a lot of these changes towards AI
| everything.
|
| Ray is a trans humanist who believes we're on the cusp of
| eternal life via the singularity.
|
| One of the things he is relying on is that people will keep
| up with technology through computer brain interfaces like
| Neural Link but faster.
|
| We should be seeing this come to market sometime around
| now.
|
| It's not here so I guess that's not good.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykY69lSpDdo
|
| Worth a watch...
| klipt wrote:
| > Ray is a trans humanist who believes we're on the cusp
| of eternal life via the singularity.
|
| https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968#comi...
| ncallaway wrote:
| Yes, we "ought" not let people starve, go without heating, or
| become homeless because their skills were obsoleted by
| automation.
|
| We "ought" to share the rewards and efficiencies of
| automation with the people that it displaces, rather than
| solely with the owners of capital.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| The challenge is not people's inability to learn new skills
| but employers unwillingness to accept the risk of hiring mid-
| life new-learners.
| [deleted]
| Zetice wrote:
| This is an example of a practical concern that I'm not sure
| meshes with what we might presume is our shared
| philosophical underpinnings.
|
| Why is the burden placed on the employer to grow their
| employee and not the human being to grow themselves? In a
| generic sense, it could be outside of the purview of the
| employer to consider the employee's future in _that_
| specific way (in other ways it makes more sense, like
| health and happiness while employed).
|
| It seems oddly paternalistic, to me, and once you remove
| that moral presumption doesn't the conversation become more
| complex?
| juvvel wrote:
| Since companies do need workers and working is mandatory
| in our society, it seems weird to expect people to always
| be ready (and able) to mold themselves into whatever a
| company wants at the snap of a finger just so they're
| "allowed" to work in the first place.
| jjk166 wrote:
| When you have a large pool of qualified mid-life new
| learners available for hire while fresh graduates are
| scarce, why wouldn't employers hire them?
|
| This is only an issue if either there are genuinely not
| enough jobs in the field lots of people are trying to go
| into, in which case people should not be encouraged to go
| into it; or if older people demand higher compensation for
| the same skillset as younger people based purely on age, in
| which case that doesn't seem fair anyways.
|
| And realistically, a mid-life learner is generally the
| better option to begin with - it's nearly impossible that
| someone after years of working has picked up no
| transferrable hard or soft skills and made no network
| connections of any value.
| juvvel wrote:
| You may think so, companies are notorious for rejecting
| middle aged applicants in favor of 20-somethings because
| the latter are considered more malleable and eager to
| prove themselves.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > more malleable and eager to prove themselves.
|
| That's just a polite way of saying "willing to work for
| less" which again means either somebody's asking for too
| much or someone's being exploited, which is the real
| issue.
|
| Obviously its mere anecdote, but every company I have
| ever worked for has gladly hired middle aged entry level
| employees. If anything they have been preferred.
| juvvel wrote:
| So software engineer salaries will experience a race to
| the bottom because you'd have to be grateful to be hired
| as one. That's just the way it is, I guess, but I can't
| fault people for feeling bitter that the skills they've
| built over many years or decades will be massively
| devalued. I often wonder which profession is safe from
| others working as hard as they can to make it less
| valuable. Probably you'd have to get on the side of those
| building the automations. Become an AI/ML engineer or
| starve, basically.
| obmelvin wrote:
| There are certainly plenty of people with learning
| disabilities, etc. Yes, most of us will have to adapt
| throughout our life, but not everyone is as fortunate
| (possibly not the right word).
| juvvel wrote:
| I literally addressed this in my comment.
| [deleted]
| Zetice wrote:
| Do you believe I agree that you addressed "this" in your
| comment? Or would it be more likely that I implicitly
| categorized your comment as a practical argument, without
| really addressing the moral underpinnings in what you're
| describing?
|
| For example you place the burden of "learning new things"
| at the feet of the employer, but you don't really justify
| that. Why, in a general sense, can people not learn on the
| remaining hours of the day?
|
| Your comment is riddled with moral presumption and I think
| it's worth figuring out what those are.
| juvvel wrote:
| And you seem to think it's every human's moral obligation
| to not only spend the majority of their waking hours at
| work, but also their free time on making themselves more
| valuable to corporations. And that's not a moral
| presumption? Where does that leave time for anything else
| in life?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > The standard advice is to "always keep learning" but not
| every job will give you the opportunity to do so.
| dangerwill wrote:
| 100% and this has ruined millions of lives throughout history,
| most notably in the Rust Belt. A heck of a lot of auto workers
| had their job automated away and weren't able to make the jump
| to white collar work or another trade profession and so fell
| into unemployment or much less lucrative service employment.
| And the country ignored the pain and despair of these folks
| because they were a concentrated group of people, outside of
| the Coastal bubble.
|
| The people on this forum who go on and on about "we have gone
| through this before and society kept going, people were fine in
| the end" are half right. Society as a whole did keep going and
| people outside of the Rust Belt weren't directly affected.
|
| But what is different this time is that this is going to
| annihilate 70-90% of jobs in the "knowledge sector" and it is
| going to do so very, very quickly. This will knock out most of
| us comfortable engineers, but also middle management,
| consultants, journalists, writers, artists, paralegals,
| influencers, wall street traders, maybe even teachers, lawyers,
| and doctors to an extent.
|
| I don't know what the US will do with the middle/top of the
| income brackets all across the country suddenly facing mass
| unemployment and then the subsequent race to fill service or
| trade jobs. How is a software engineer who got a 30 year
| mortgage that costs $3k a month going to survive going from a
| $180k a year salary to being an electrician apprentice at $50k
| a year? And that is in an environment where this hypothetical
| former engineer was the top candidate out of 100 other former
| engineers vying for a spot. GPT-4 will kill many people via
| unemployment unless it is paired with a UBI, or at least that
| is my pessimistic view.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> A heck of a lot of auto workers had their job automated
| away
|
| And a lot of the remaining jobs went to Mexico.
| newmanah223 wrote:
| I agree. Automation is getting to the point where it isn't
| just replacing manual jobs but now it is going to replace
| most creative jobs.
|
| And it isn't going to be a high tech utopia, because a small
| group at the top is going to capture 95% of the wealth
| generated.
|
| I would predict serious social unrest. The problem is people
| won't understand why they don't have jobs, so they will blame
| x country or z group for their problems which will lead to
| extremism.
|
| I would argue many of the major historical events in the US,
| such as civil war, great depression, WW2, great recession
| were actually connected to automation requiring a reset of
| society.
| alexpotato wrote:
| > wall street traders
|
| When I started working in FinTech at a big bank, our Managing
| Director mentioned that he was told:
|
| "In 2 years, there will no longer be the job of 'trader'"
|
| This quote was from 2005 and he was sharing it with us in
| 2007.
|
| While, yes, there are a LOT less traders than there used to
| be, it is certainly not zero.
| biohax2015 wrote:
| > there are a LOT less traders than there used to be
|
| That is the core of the problem, which has been iterated
| several times in this thread.
|
| Where do those traders that used to be there go?
| Historically, switching careers or positions has not been
| insanely difficult. But as there are fewer and fewer jobs,
| it becomes more and more difficult for people to retrain.
| [deleted]
| vondur wrote:
| I believe that most of the rust belt jobs were sent to
| countries with lower wages/more lax environmental laws.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Who is this super-layman that can sit down in front of
| ChatGPT5, ask it to produce a highly technical document and
| then immediately implement it's recommendations?
|
| The man is going to ask it for explanations for days, throw
| something together that kinda works and hire an expert
| 'consultant' that should have been an employee, when it
| inevitably breaks or requirements change.
|
| Who would bet the legal success of their company on the
| 'truthiness' of ChatGPT?
|
| The skilled knowledge workers just got upgraded to a better
| set of tools and the layman is as equally clueless as ever.
| C++ didn't get easier to read, we just got a robot teacher.
| dangerwill wrote:
| Yeah but the point isn't that all engineers will go away,
| but there will be a much lower need for them at scale. Who
| is going to have use for a bunch of junior/mid level
| engineers when the job becomes purely specification writing
| and verification? 1 senior engineer who also plays double
| duty as project manager will be able to replace a team that
| had been like 8 people before. We aren't going to all of a
| sudden have 8x more projects to work on, we are going to
| have 8x fewer engineers. And companies will LOVE this
| because it will become a rat race down to the bottom salary
| wise as people get desperate for any job at all
| barrysteve wrote:
| The loss of low-hanging fruit is likely, I agree. Same as
| most mature technological markets. Making an iPhone app
| today is a saturated proposition, compared to a decade
| ago.
|
| But the paradigm that websites, iphone apps and windows
| programs are the breadwinners, can very well change.
|
| If we're really getting on the 'gpt engineering
| revolution' bandwagon, then it must logically bring
| quantum computing, metaverse, more cybersecurity
| vulnerabilities, more sophisticated internet backbone and
| better computing hardware with it. (And fusion power and
| flying pigs, ect idealism).
|
| A revolution for one, will bring a revolution for
| everything and that involves an awful lot of developer-
| hours, once we have changed the target market from "http-
| websites and apps" to the next market.
| skee8383 wrote:
| i hope robots do take all the jobs. jobs today are terrible. they
| don't pay enough and you have to take orders from a class of
| managers that fancy themselves as feudal lords and you their
| serfs. so yea. good riddance to the "jobs". everything is made up
| in this system anyway, everyone knows it. just do crypto ubi and
| let the robots do all the drudge work.
| jtode wrote:
| Title is sarcastic to the idea that robots take jobs, while we
| have already automated the shit out of our production processes
| and any grownup has seen people lose their entire livelihood more
| than once.
|
| See who's still laughing in a couple more years.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Was anyone ever laughing though? This isn't comeuppance. This
| is the other half of the Titanic sinking.
| jtode wrote:
| Scoffing might be a better word. It's been ignorable by
| privileged people like us for a long time because the jobs
| being lost (and the people doing those jobs) were
| "unimportant".
|
| I will indeed laugh when the lawyer market collapses
| shockingly soon.
| jacknews wrote:
| Previous tech has replaced drudgery and allowed humans to focus
| on or move onto doing something else. Typically something
| requiring more creativity or intelligence.
|
| What new things will humans do in the face of automated
| intelligence and creativity?
| throwaway38290 wrote:
| Things requiring less intelligence and creativity - since Bill
| Gates' reassurance was "but we'll still need carers" maybe
| we'll just watch ourselves die out for a few generations
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