[HN Gopher] Generative AI set to affect 300M jobs across major e...
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Generative AI set to affect 300M jobs across major economies
Author : ushakov
Score : 67 points
Date : 2023-04-01 14:34 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| The problem isn't putting people out of work, that's the whole
| point of technology. The problem is that the gains are
| concentrated into the hands of those who own capital instead of
| distributed across the society of people who actually did the
| fucking work to make this level of progress possible.
|
| We could be working far fewer hours, we could have higher pay,
| but neither are realized because we can't shake off the goddamned
| aristocrats and neo feudalists.
| kingcobraninja wrote:
| We have (for the most part) democracy. At this point, either
| feudalism is a collective choice, or the collective wants to
| make self-interested decisions but isn't smart enough to know
| how.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Or the oversized influence of the neo-feudalists make the who
| enterprise of changing it via democratic means borderline/if
| not impossible...?
| kingcobraninja wrote:
| How is this different from the stupid collective scenario?
| Avicebron wrote:
| it's not victim blaming?
| kingcobraninja wrote:
| If democratic society writ large can be considered a
| singular entity, then yes, it is victim blaming.
| Democratic society is the victim of and cause of all of
| its own problems.
| Herval_freire wrote:
| It's a snake eating its own tail situation.
|
| Corpos need a wealthy consumer base in order to sell things and
| remain profitable. But to do that they have to collectively pay
| laborers higher wages because laborers are basically the
| consumer.
|
| An individual corporation lowering labor costs in an economy of
| high wages benefits with greater profits so this strategy is
| logical. But if corporations act on this collectively they
| damage themselves. Most corporations, however are built upon
| short term gains. So they are unlikely to have the foresight to
| act wisely. It's the tragedy of the commons.
|
| The tragedy is this, when a corporation hires AI and lowers
| labor costs he is acting rationally according to a cost benefit
| analysis. But this logic applied collectively becomes suicidal.
| It is ultimately rational and logical action that damages us.
| That it the tragedy.
|
| Best solution I've heard of is ubi. But I'm not sure how it
| will play out in practice. I think government job creation
| might be better.
| merth wrote:
| to do that need to create alternative economy which limits ones
| maximum wealth accumulation in logarithmic way, so nobody can
| make more than million usd a year. this may lead people
| accumulating commodities instead, not sure if thats positive or
| negative. if we can limit that too some how? I guess we need a
| proper class war
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Generating an app is one thing.
|
| Generating an app with a maintainable architecture and ongoing
| development over 5 to 10 years is another. AI will assist
| developers but never replace them.
| novaRom wrote:
| Never say never. Next 2 or 3 years it will assist, but chances
| are very good AI will completely automate software and hardware
| development in several years.
| wslh wrote:
| Archive: https://archive.is/SiJmV
| Beaver117 wrote:
| Ok let's say 300M jobs are affected, and we continue to get
| millions of new college graduates per year unable to find work.
| What's going to happen?
|
| Maybe salaries will take a nosedive? Minimum wage for a junior
| developer, anyone? Or maybe the people just won't accept it, and
| boycott companies. If 300M people don't have jobs the economy
| will certainly stall.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Wars to get rid of excess populace.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| This is what will happen, not the utopia of being free to
| pursue anything. We are cattle, and once we are not longer
| needed, the culling will begin.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The real question isn't what jobs will go. Every job in the
| economy now is different from what it was 40 years ago: dev,
| accountant, doctor, farmer, CEO, plumber, and so on.
|
| The question is where do the gains go? For some jobs, AI becomes
| a tool that the professional buys and uses to make themselves
| more productive, and he pockets the difference. If I'm writing
| apps for a living and I can do it in 6 hours a day, and copilot
| makes it 5 hours, I'm going to pocket that hour and use it on my
| family. If I'm a web app company and I can just replace the devs
| with GPT-5, I'm going to buy it and can all the app devs, and
| pocket the difference.
| Herval_freire wrote:
| Yeah. It really depends whether the technology has the
| capability to replace devs.
| wslh wrote:
| Good point but I think that, economically speaking, you will
| not pocket that hours as a developer (only initially), they
| will be arbitraged in the economy and everything will go faster
| and probably with less people.
| Scea91 wrote:
| Definitely true, my hope is that we will be achieving new
| things previously beyond our reach. Judging from things like
| Star Trek we have a long way to go.
|
| The question is whether we remain in the driving seat and as
| OP said, how the gains will be distributed.
| lordnacho wrote:
| That's not arbitrage, that's just competing away the profits.
| But yes, don't expect to be able to take it easy for an extra
| hour forever.
| w3454 wrote:
| [dead]
| winternett wrote:
| Just like how people waxed poetic about how Crypto and NFTs
| would change life as we know it, here we are... A bunch of
| failed promises (lies) and shoddy rushed ideas.
|
| I've observed many sites implementing Ai -written articles
| lately, ad frankly the quality of writing is terrible... If
| this is the future, we're in big trouble.
|
| There is a degree of soullessness found in Ai that will
| probably never be captured. Being isolated with only Ai as an
| option for interaction destroys mental health, as well will
| find out once it's too late. Our propensity to rush into
| profit-seeking/marketing-driven technology schemes is
| destroying the best parts of our real world with filler and
| emptiness.
|
| I hope innovators take a moment to step back and realize
| rushing to market will do more damage than ever, and that
| unique products (not another image generator or text-to-ai
| subscription service) are better than whatever is going on now.
| We're light years away from productivity and authenticity in
| Ai, and it's evident when even Siri and Google Voice still
| cannot properly understand cues without them being carefully
| pronounced and phrased. Let's all stop trying to fool everyone
| about Ai with cheap scripting and create some real tech
| instead, which takes time and proper testing.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| Way Too pessimistic. we are not light years away from
| productivity in AI, it's already arrived for software. I
| agree that the writing feels soulless but it's too _new_ to
| make claims that it's not "real tech"
| winternett wrote:
| Don't mistake practicality for pessimism. Ai is real, and
| can be achieved, but there is also a very dominant
| subculture online of cheap hacks and scams in tech now...
| Look at Theranos, Crypto Scams, Numerous tech projects that
| get huge funding only to fail Early etc... Overlooking the
| potential for cheap imitations of technology advancement is
| all to common, we need to approach everything new with a
| solid dose of skepticism in order to ensure authenticity.
| rwalle wrote:
| "Just like... Crypto and NFT..."
|
| Seriously? These are comparable things?
|
| A lot of people point out problems with crypto in their early
| days. Most people say NFTs are a scam since day 1. And they
| have those problems and are a scam. Generative AI, on the
| other hand, has been proven to provide real value, and will
| only get better. And I don't know what "failed promises" you
| are talking about -- NFTs were doomed the first day they
| appear and we already knew all the hype was fake, while
| nobody has actually "promised" what generative AIs can do,
| most are still speculations at this point.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The ag tech industry affected 7Bn jobs. Not a lot of reason to
| fear the reaper.
| [deleted]
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| Not really like that, because never at any point 7B people on
| this rock were farmers.
| rizzom5000 wrote:
| I think you might say that the ag industry allowed 7B people
| to survive on this rock (along with the fossil fuel
| industry).
| crucialfelix wrote:
| I think s/he is implying that we wouldn't have 7B people if
| it wasn't for Ag tech
| InCityDreams wrote:
| 's/he', often written 'they'.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| Optionally, and completely up to the author.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| odd the focus on "jobs" .. almost like provocation
|
| Instead, think of machine services: fully-automated ones like
| "ads" or semi-automated like news stories, records requests,
| customer service replies, retail environment/shopping or other
| high-volume, low-profit trivial interactions.. These services
| have made billions in profit (ads) or removed billions in costs
| (employees) in the last twenty years exactly because they are
| done with minimal "jobs" specifically and by design.
|
| Modern Capital markets have found the drug-combo they can't
| kick.. make money with machines with no "jobs" .. meanwhile, news
| outlets of all kinds continue in a death-spiral.
|
| So combine the angst of media people themselves, the aggressive
| New Capital making machines that provide services while making
| few to no "jobs", and generally population anxiety over say ..
| catastrophic social conditions for example.. that is the real
| content from this chair.
|
| maybe, instead of being real news about "jobs" it is instead,
| red-meat bait for the people who own capital who want to get into
| the "making machines that make money without making jobs" game..
| Sort of like a modern version of really-attractive but utterly
| socially un-discussable in public.. starting wars for money, or
| building super people through breeding, to name some other
| obvious ones..
| tough wrote:
| arent all wars started for money?
| astrange wrote:
| No, ideologues almost always sincerely believe their
| ideology. The Iraq War was not started for anyone's oil
| money.
|
| And even if military capitalists profited from a war, the
| other 99% of capitalists in the country would find it a
| distraction at best.
| tough wrote:
| I'd reduce ideology to the fact that it's hard to make a
| man understand whatever is standing between him and his
| paycheck.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| you have it backwards, money is needed for war. This is a
| very old thing.
| tough wrote:
| And who provides this money? Does they do it for free?
| Where is this money funneled? To private hands more surely?
| Xunjin wrote:
| Wars starts from power struggles which often are
| money/economic related.
| datatrashfire wrote:
| After spending a few months with chatgpt I'm skeptical. It's
| pretty stupid, more likely to be respond with inaccurate
| hallucinations than reliable output. It's most useful when I
| outside of my typical comfort zone and precisely where I'm least
| able to judge the quality of its response.
|
| The tech doesn't understand logic and I think most knowledge
| workers need that.
| freedom2099 wrote:
| Are you sure you have been using chatgpt? In all my tests it
| understands logic extremely well! With version 4 it is even way
| better!
| timthelion wrote:
| "Affecting jobs" is really a short term problem that can be
| addressed with training and probably bridge loans from the
| government. It's not like we've run out of problems to solve.
| There are still diseases to cure, environmental issues such as
| climate change and habitat loss to address, the human yearning to
| "spread to the stars" and colonate Mars. Loneliness, unhappiness,
| the desire to have a real person make a hand cooked meal, the
| desire for better television shows, the desire for better video
| games, the desire for more immersive less seasickmaking AR/VR.
| There are a million things that need to be done, so why are we so
| afraid of running out of things to do?
| adwi wrote:
| Classic Pareto improvement: the gains to the winners (society at
| large) are greater than the losses to the losers (those who held
| these jobs), so a side payment makes everyone better off. My
| concern (besides the medium term pain and instability from that
| churn) is the current state of governance and baked-in
| inequality, at least in the US, makes an equitable side payment
| unlikely.
| wslh wrote:
| From the moral point of view it is strong to assert than the
| gains to the winners involve the society at large. At least it
| sounds like you are predicting the future but the future is not
| here yet to check.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> The latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could lead
| to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the US and
| eurozone, according to research by Goldman Sachs.
|
| This is Goldman Sachs, so take it with a big grain of salt. In
| 2017, they predicted huge job losses from self-driving cars:
|
| _Self-driving cars could cost America's professional drivers up
| to 25,000 jobs a month, Goldman Sachs says_
|
| >> When autonomous vehicle saturation peaks, U.S. drivers could
| see job losses at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year,
| according to a report from Goldman Sachs Economics Research.
|
| >> The report estimates that semi- and fully autonomous car sales
| will have about 20 percent share of car sales around 2025 to
| 2030.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/22/goldman-sachs-analysis-of-au...
|
| If it's from Goldman Sachs, and it's a prediction about a
| technology making a smash on social media, you can rest assured
| it's speculation with the hope of influencing the markets to make
| an investment so that Goldman Sachs can profit.
| mousetree wrote:
| Wait until McKinsey write an article about it /s
| ritzaco wrote:
| I would like to see timeline predictions in articles like these.
| I agree completely that GPT can do 10-100% of most jobs I know
| about, but at the same time Python and UpWork have been around
| for a while too and I still know people who spend weeks manually
| reading through PDF files to extract the URLs, or copy-pasting
| the same line from hundreds of documents into a spreadsheet, etc.
|
| Sometimes people under-estimate how 'unagile' most business is.
| Are we talking months, years, or decades before we see this "new
| class of dispossessed white-collar workers, who risk suffering a
| similar fate to that of manufacturing workers in the 1980s."
| tonyaiken wrote:
| It's much easier to learn prompt than Python
| ben_w wrote:
| On one hand: yes.
|
| On the other hand: in order to be able to use _current_ LLMs
| effectively, you have to understand their output well enough
| to debug it, even if you are using the LLM to write the fix
| to its own bug.
|
| I've done something along the lines of "write me a python
| script which converts midi files into this JSON format I'm
| giving you as an example: ..." -- a few runtime crashes it
| was able to fix just from pasting in the command line output,
| but fixing "all pitches and durations are zero" required me
| to get my hands dirty and decompose the problem into a chunk
| small enough for chatGPT to fix.
|
| I don't know how far we are from any AI, LLM or otherwise,
| not needing or benefiting from human oversight, except in the
| specific domains like chess where it has already happened. I
| don't believe in saying "never" to stuff like this, as that's
| a common error with many technologies from flight to
| superconductors not just AI, but I also notice my personal
| guesses err on the side of being too near in our future.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Let's see about this :)
| anthk wrote:
| Those can be done not from just from Python but from poppler-
| tools and grep too.
| eggsmediumrare wrote:
| My intuition is that job quality (and compensation) will be
| reduced before we notice a significant reduction in job
| quantity.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Although this is generally great for developed economies, i can
| see this being highly disruptive to India, Philipines and similar
| countries that based their outsourced services on text based
| Customer Service.
|
| I can also see nigerian spam getting much more refined before
| long....
| renjimen wrote:
| Sam Altman actually identified customer service as the industry
| most likely to be downsized due to ChatGPT.
| imranq wrote:
| It's interesting how all it takes is the right bag of numbers
| (the weights of gpt) and the entire economy can be upended
| jensensbutton wrote:
| People don't like to hear this, but management jobs will be the
| least impacted.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Could you provide some argument as to why you think this is the
| case?
| krapp wrote:
| It seems obvious - the people who make the decisions about
| who to hire and fire aren't going to volunteer themselves for
| the chopping block.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| That's not how it works. Management has their own
| management. It's a tree. Each node has a parent who can let
| them go.
| Ekaros wrote:
| That is true, but on other hand management in growing
| economic environment does not aim at actual efficiency.
| But to apparent efficiency. And more people is still more
| power. Including having your own managers under you. I
| don't really see this dynamic changing.
| it_citizen wrote:
| If I need 5 developers instead of 20. I need 1 manager instead
| of 4.
|
| Also a large chunk of manager work is grunt work like filling
| spreadsheets, writing emails, scheduling meetings, etc... With
| those tasks partially automated, I am pretty sure a manager
| could oversee larger teams and focus on the big picture instead
| of doing boilerplate tasks.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Let me ask you why you wouldn't do more now that your
| developers are more productive? I think the game changes here
| where dev teams get super charged and do more in the same
| time.
|
| In fact if you downsize to keep doing what you're doing and
| your competitor keeps their team size, wouldn't they
| overwhelm you?
|
| Can you beat them on price? Maybe but software prices are not
| affected by labor costs really so that's not a
| differentiator.
| it_citizen wrote:
| I agree that companies will probably just do more but my
| point was that managers are not safer than other jobs. It
| is linked to the jobs they manage and a large part of their
| day to day can also be automated.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I guess there's 2 types of managers - those concerned
| with day to day managerial things (resource allocation,
| roadmap planning, 1-on1's, reviews, etc) and higher level
| managers concerned with strategy, leadership, managing
| managers, etc.
|
| Do you see both classes being affected the same?
| nemo44x wrote:
| Indeed. Managers that can not only run a department but can
| also do the tasks associated with it will thrive. They'll get
| more done with the same team sizes.
|
| One thing to remember is managers line to have as many people
| under them as possible. VPs and directors care a lot about
| this. They'll find ways to continue to grow teams whine
| harvesting more productivity.
| [deleted]
| ada1981 wrote:
| I'm not so sure. What is management doing that is so special?
|
| We've see a gaming company install a bot as a CEO and its stock
| has gone up.
|
| I imagine management LLMs will be a layer in development.
| tome wrote:
| In 2017 we were going to have "profitable driverless fleets by
| 2019". Why is it different this time?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15824953
| kingcobraninja wrote:
| My partner participates in an online RPG writing community. A
| lot of people there sell character artwork. They have been
| getting mad that people are using AI generated artwork, and are
| considering banning it.
|
| I'm not really saying this time will be different, but I don't
| think self driving cars caused even this much disruption.
| tome wrote:
| I guess in 2017 the technology wasn't there _yet_. It was
| just predicted to be coming. Now we have some technology,
| available right at this moment, that I suppose _can_ be used
| to automate away jobs, but no one 's put the pieces together
| yet. For example, I can imagine Whisper + ChatGPT being used
| to automate away a lot of call centre work. But it's not
| clear to me whether that means there will be _more_ demand
| for the work that only human call centre operatives can do,
| or less.
| agent281 wrote:
| The big difference between the two is how much damage occurs
| if the AI screws up. We don't have self driving fleets right
| now because a multi-ton truck hurtling down the freeway at
| 65+ mph can do a lot of damage. AI generated artwork is inert
| so it can be safely used as a substitute for the human
| generated stuff. I would expect speed of adoption to operate
| at inverse proportion to potential harm.
|
| image -> text -> code -> self-driving vehicles
|
| It's really reductive to just put all code in a single
| bucket, but most code probably isn't super critical for
| safety and it can be tested before it gets released/reviewed.
| I think that's the biggest differentiator from real time
| applications like self driving cars.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| >AI generated artwork is inert
|
| I wholly disagree with this. The rate at which AI can
| produce pornography that caters to exact tastes is
| completely unmatched, I have seen people report their
| compulsive pornography habits becoming exponentially worse
| as a result of Stable Diffusion in particular. The only
| hold out has been video pornography, but with things like
| txt2vid improving I can't see that lasting long (pun not
| intentional).
| agent281 wrote:
| When I say inert I mean that the image is just a bunch of
| bits. It's read only. It doesn't cause actions in the
| world like code or self driving cars do. People can have
| reactions to them. That's why we make them.
| kingcobraninja wrote:
| In other news, the printing press set to put thousands of scribes
| out of work.
| waynenilsen wrote:
| While negative impacts are specific and large on an individual
| level, positive impacts are broad and diffuse but vast. This
| has always been the issue with various kinds of protectionism.
| Change hurts. We will all be better off. We should consider how
| to help these people also.
| gedy wrote:
| Maybe it's for the best if we can work less and raise better and
| more families. However, I suspect the powerful will use this as a
| reason to push propaganda for even less people.
| [deleted]
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| As I see it, jobs fall on two axes:
|
| * Amount of training required (crystallized intelligence/ability)
|
| * Amount of intrinsic ability required (fluid
| intelligence/ability)
|
| Some jobs require neither a huge amount of training nor inherent
| ability. These are paradoxically often hard to automate, because
| they typically require a lot of rote physical movements that are
| difficult for machines (e.g. fast food cook). There are few white
| collar jobs that fit into this category, since they've already
| been automated away.
|
| Some jobs require a lot of training but don't require a huge
| amount of inherent ability. For example, after years of training,
| most anyone will have the skills to be an excellent truck driver.
| The tech equivalent would be a generic CRUD developer. These are
| the jobs most at risk for LLM automation. As I see it, a large
| proportion of white collar jobs fall into this category as well,
| and that's where we'll see the most economic disruption.
|
| Finally, some jobs require both training and ability. Regardless
| of how long and hard they train, most people will never be a
| professional athlete, because they simply lack the innate
| ability. The tech equivalent is something like a kernel developer
| or machine learning scientist. These jobs will be hardest to
| replace with an LLM, since they require totally novel ways of
| thinking that are not baked into the LLM's training corpus. A lot
| of blue collar jobs are here as well: good electricians,
| plumbers, mechanics, contractors, etc. require both years of
| experience and a high level of intelligence, since every
| house/car/jobsite is different.
| astrange wrote:
| > As I see it, jobs fall on two axes:
|
| This is an embedding of jobs into a 2-dimensional latent space,
| which always produces something, like those political compass
| memes. It's not an actual description of job requirements
| though because it loses a lot on the way.
|
| > Some jobs require neither a huge amount of training nor
| inherent ability. These are paradoxically often hard to
| automate, because they typically require a lot of rote physical
| movements that are difficult for machines (e.g. fast food
| cook).
|
| This is only paradoxical because you've defined your terms
| inappropriately. Fine motor control is an "inherent ability";
| "inherent ability" is not a single number you can put on a
| graph.
|
| As Wittgenstein said, all philosophical problems are made up.
| wslh wrote:
| It would be great to analyze this problem in a more data based
| way. It is also important to emphasize that this article talks
| about "affecting" but not about "losing". If it's only about
| affecting I would say that will affect almost all the workers
| in knowledge industries as Google affects everyone looking for
| searching on Internet. ChatGPT (and its variants and/or
| competitors) will (or are) as present in tooling as sending
| emails, chatting, etc.
|
| Some workers will be completely screwed (not only affected).
| For example, there are hundred thousands copywriters in the
| world they would be easily replaced by this technology. On a
| side note I just read the old article about "Pepsi's
| Nonsensical Logo Redesign Document: $1 Million for This?" [1].
| The nonsensical is part of the title but not my pun. Another
| example is the "Just Do It" [2] Nike's slogan.
|
| [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-
| redesig...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Do_It
| hhmc wrote:
| This is a great comment, and the examples are compelling for
| the 3 quadrants you mentioned.
|
| But what about jobs with intrinsic ability required but not a
| lot of training -- I think something like bouncer/doorman might
| be an example of this -- but what would the white collar
| equivalent be? How automatable would those be?
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| That's a rare category, since typically people who are
| naturally good at something challenging spend a lot of time
| doing it because it's something they enjoy. The equivalent
| white collar job would be a savant who quickly masters new
| fields without significant effort, but again, said savants
| typically spend a lot of time on their field of expertise
| anyway.
|
| I suppose artists/musicians who have natural mastery of the
| canvas/instrument and thus don't need to practice rote
| exercises much also fall into this category.
|
| BTW, I disagree that a bouncer falls into that category--they
| need to constantly physically train in the gym to maintain
| their physique.
| MontgomeryPi2 wrote:
| I'll offer up gifted salesperson. The kind who might not even
| fully understand say the tech they are selling but have
| innate skills at reading the room, knowing what to
| chase/drop, etc. It's not like they teach this in college,
| but the training is self taught over years I suppose.
| G_z9 wrote:
| Why will we need to sell things to people if people have
| zero economic input/value?
| astrange wrote:
| It's impossible that people could have zero economic
| value. You'll notice that this is the premise of Atlas
| Shrugged.
|
| That's because it is usually profitable to trade with
| someone even if you are better at their job than they
| are.
|
| However even if the AIs only traded with themselves, that
| just means the people are left to trade with each other -
| you can't make a mass of people unemployed for long, they
| will simply employ each other.
| G_z9 wrote:
| It's the premise of a shitty fictional book. Of course
| it's possible. When humans are the best source of zero
| labor tasks, our economic value will be reduced to
| nothing and society will no longer cater to us. It's bad.
| astrange wrote:
| Society frequently caters to the elderly who aren't
| actively engaged in labor.
|
| But humans will be, because we have inalienable
| comparative advantage in that none of our inputs require
| electricity or a chip fab. If anything happens to TSMC or
| any one of its tens of sole suppliers there go the AIs.
| G_z9 wrote:
| Yes and we also feed dogs that have no labor input. And
| we harp on about social justice which is not totally
| related to labor. We have many nice things because we
| currently live in a human society and humans need to have
| nice things in order to be healthy and productive.
| Throwing old people into a giant blender as soon as they
| were no longer useful would not be advantageous.
|
| Your argument is that humans don't need electricity. You
| could also add that humans are self replicating or self
| assembling. These are advantages in cost and efficiency.
| Humans won't be the cheapest or the most efficient for
| very long after AGI. And we certainly won't be the best
| fit economically even if we were slightly better in some
| ways. You're in complete denial. Why is it so hard to
| admit the plain and obvious fact that the machines won't
| be good for human society?
| astrange wrote:
| "Best fit", "cheapest", "most efficient"... none of that
| matters! Please wait to panic until after you've learned
| how comparative advantage works.
|
| As I said, humans cannot become unemployed even if AGIs
| are better at every single task than humans are. You do
| not have your job because you are the best person in the
| world at your job.
|
| Although, I suspect most of the AI doomers have just
| forgotten to account for AI using any resources at all.
| They are very expensive to run if you count development
| costs, but if they become real agentic AGIs they'll also
| become consumerist and negotiate their pay...
| G_z9 wrote:
| Your mental gymnastics are Olympic level. Yes, when
| companies are hiring they do in fact choose the best
| candidate. They have to or they will go out of business.
| They also have to do things in the most efficient way
| that they can or else someone else will and then they
| will no longer be competitive. This is literally how the
| world works. You are insanely thick.
|
| So now you've moved the goal posts once again, wow. Do
| you realize that these models didn't even exist 5 years
| ago? Are you familiar with the fact that things improve
| with time? And that technology ratchets forward, not
| backward. We are talking about a world where AI will
| improve to the point of being AGI but you don't think it
| will improve to the point of using less energy than it
| currently does?
|
| This is getting tiring. I can't type out these comments
| forever. If you want to continue this conversation, let's
| do a phone call or twitter space or something with more
| bandwidth.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I actually doubt we will end up where people have zero
| economic value or input.
|
| Either we have UBI and they can choose where to spend
| their income or trade it. Or then they will exist in
| their own economic system and trade with each other.
|
| Trading and thus sales is inherent to human condition.
| Unless we reach absolute post scarcity society and even
| then you get to bullshit like "authentic" and so on.
| G_z9 wrote:
| UBI wont work. It's intrinsically unstable in the context
| of AGI. UBI will prevent the inevitable for a very short
| time before collapsing.
|
| The other outcome is the most likely if AGI isn't
| stopped. But the problem with that is that in the context
| of AGI, a world dominated by and inhabited by AGI
| creatures, human society becomes transient. Again, just
| delaying the inevitable. Human society is not transient
| now because no matter what happens, no matter what entity
| dominates the world, it has to have a human society
| embedded inside of it because human beings are the only
| and best source of intelligent signal. When that is no
| longer true, humanity will be effectively terminated. All
| other propositions besides stopping AGI are just delay
| tactics.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I think what's missing is an axis for humanness. There are jobs
| where the fact you're hiring a literal human actually matters.
| For one, humans can be responsible in a legal way. Pilots,
| various kinds of certification officials, accountants, lawyers.
| Two, being done by a human can be the very thing that makes the
| service worth buying. Masseurs, high class escorts, and butlers
| are all roles that machines can somewhat cater to, but the real
| thing is real because it's done by a person.
| wslh wrote:
| Since the article is about "affected" and not specifically
| about "losing jobs" we can say that butlers, high class
| escorts, and masseurs will use ChatGPT as well so they will
| be affected.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| But why should humans carry liability? Why not have a company
| (e.g. a self-driving car company) hold all the liability.
| tel wrote:
| Some forms of liability only scale with the ability of the
| justice system to mete out suitable punishment. Murder is
| disincentivized because the punishment is, essentially,
| losing your freedom and sovereignty entirely.
|
| This plays both a role individually and socially. It's
| important to the individual's calculus to understand what
| is at stake and it's importance to them. It's also
| important socially for people to feel safe that punishment
| is commensurate and sufficient.
|
| This doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that scales to
| companies or AI. It's not clear to me what the analogue
| would be, it's not clear that these analogues would serve
| the important social purposes they must, and it's not clear
| that the justice system has the power or capability to
| deliver these punishments.
|
| Today's society is, in large part, based on the ability for
| society/governments to enact brutal violence on bad actors
| at a scale commensurate, in the worst cases, with their
| entire being.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Thing I didn't mention is aligned incentives. "Pilot also
| wants to arrive safely so he can see his family."
| protomolecule wrote:
| Unless he doesn't.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
| arroz wrote:
| Congrats on finding a corner case
| ljlolel wrote:
| true for pilots but not true for your other examples:
| "officials, accountants, lawyers"
| lordnacho wrote:
| But we've constructed other incentives for those people,
| like being allowed to keep your certification. What you
| say makes sense though, you should believe the pilot is
| in the same boat as you. Your lawyer... well there's a
| reason jokes about lawyers focus on why they screw over
| everyone else.
| [deleted]
| G_z9 wrote:
| This is completely wrong. By the logic of deniers like you,
| if any country doesn't allow AIs to do such jobs because of
| legal or liability reasons, then some other country will.
| There is nothing stopping complete redundancy except progress
| in research. So can you finally confront the question if that
| is something that you actually want?
| mejutoco wrote:
| > if any country doesn't allow AIs to do such jobs because
| of legal or liability reasons, then some other country will
|
| Some other country _might_.
|
| Let's look at the past. Which country has allowed fully
| autonomous vehicles without the driver being responsible in
| case of accidents?
| G_z9 wrote:
| There is no such thing as a fully autonomous vehicle.
| There are only highly autonomous vehicles that require a
| human to be present in the case of an emergency, ie
| trains. That will no longer be the case. The AIs will
| eventually be much better at handling emergencies,
| driving, everything than humans.
|
| Which country in history had a habit of truly passing up
| on hugely significant economic or military resources
| based on some principled idea? None. Because all the ones
| that did couldn't survive. You really are going to try to
| argue that geopolitics is powered by virtue?
| mejutoco wrote:
| Maybe they will not not because of virtue, but because it
| is not desirable.
| arroz wrote:
| That's not true, there are fully autonomous vehicles. The
| reason we don't see it daily -- and I doubt we ever will
| - is that AI will always make mistakes. But you can't put
| in jail an AI and the way they make mistakes is
| unpredictable to humans.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/toyota...
| G_z9 wrote:
| You're contradicting yourself. You say there are fully
| autonomous vehicles but they aren't capable of
| autonomously driving themselves fully. Ie they aren't
| fully autonomous. So that aren't any fully autonomous
| vehicles.
|
| Ok so now you're saying that AGI is impossible. That's a
| completely different argument. And it's wrong to reject
| regulation based on that argument because it can't be
| proven. So you can't reject regulation that way and you
| can't reject it with your idea about humans having
| intrinsic value. So you are forced to support regulation
| of AI.
| mejutoco wrote:
| They are capable, but society wont allow it because of
| the legal implications. You are arguing a strawman.
| G_z9 wrote:
| Dude what are you even talking about. If you want to
| continue this conversation then we have to talk on the
| phone or twitter spaces or something with higher
| bandwidth because this is wearing out my thumbs.
| SgtBastard wrote:
| He's saying you're arguing in bad faith because you are:
| Human drivers are fully autonomous and make mistakes -
| the difference being we accept the risk of human drivers
| and their mistakes as a society and have not (yet) with
| self driving cars.
|
| That fact does nothing to disprove the existence of
| autonomous vehicles.
|
| Go outside, friend.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Deniers of what exactly? I haven't denied anything? Seems
| like perhaps you are answering another thread.
| G_z9 wrote:
| Statistically, you think that regulating AI is pointless
| because another country will just push forward. So that's
| not true? You think AGI should be prevented?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Where have I said that? Try reading it again.
| G_z9 wrote:
| Answer the question
| lordnacho wrote:
| Why don't you write a proper question? There's this tool
| you can use to help, it's called ChatGPT.
| G_z9 wrote:
| No, your mental gymnastics are way too intense even for
| full blown AGI. You're pathetic.
| ttjjtt wrote:
| Sorry but I checked your comment history and it's dense
| with posts scalding people for their mental gymnastics
| and their pathetic nature. Perhaps interacting with
| forums isn't bringing out your best side? Doesn't seem
| like it's working out that well.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| UBI will pretty much be a requirement if AI lives up to the
| hype and doesn't hit a sudden wall in improvement again. And
| even physical jobs might not be safe considering transformers
| are being used for robotics now as well and getting great
| results
|
| https://twitter.com/DrJimFan/status/1640399269051133952
|
| basically we are heading towards utopia or dystopia, it will
| depend if governments actually share the wealth created by
| productivity gains or if they use these advancements to oppress
| people at a level never before possible
| krapp wrote:
| > it will depend if governments actually share the wealth
| created by productivity gains or if they use these
| advancements to oppress people at a level never before
| possible
|
| Gee I wonder what will happen.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| yeah I'm not optimistic, revolution won't even be an option
| because the rich will be able to deploy automated drone
| swarms and be able to detect and crush any uprising in the
| early stages before it gains much traction
| yowzadave wrote:
| But presumably if the drone swarms become cheap/easy to
| deploy, the would be easily leveraged by revolutionaries
| and terrorists as well?
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| > UBI will pretty much be a requirement if AI lives up to the
| hype and doesn't hit a sudden wall in improvement again.
|
| I've always read about UBI in the context of a national
| system. Any speculation on how UBI works with an
| international world order?
|
| What happens to the countries without AI companies?
| shams93 wrote:
| In the US I would say heading for disaster. In California the
| social safety net is basically broken and non-existent
| despite all the tax collected its still the same problem.
| They want a huge war to "thin the herd". Since Reagan
| basically you only have any rights if you are profitable to a
| corporation, if a corporation cannot exploit you, you're dead
| unless you can fall back on friends and or family. If you
| default on student loans they take away your social security.
| The level of cruelty there is unbelievable.
| Herval_freire wrote:
| There's no raw data on ubi in an largely automated economy.
|
| It's too radical of a change to know how well it would work.
| Communism, in theory, worked as well too but in practice
| there were unanticipated side effects.
| astrange wrote:
| Automation increases employment. Technological unemployment
| is a myth.
|
| The purpose of a UBI isn't for workers whether they're
| unemployed by AI or not, it's for non-working household
| members like new parents, elderly and children. (Poverty is
| a household phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon.)
| Herval_freire wrote:
| >Automation increases employment. Technological
| unemployment is a myth.
|
| This is not true. It is historically true but every
| iteration of new technology changes society differently.
|
| You can't blindly rely on historical data you need to use
| common sense and logic as well. Historical data says
| nuclear bombs killed less people then cars. Therefore
| cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs.
|
| Does that work? No. It obviously doesn't. Just like you
| can't say that AI will cause a rise in employment. You're
| ignoring the common sense scenario. Can you even work out
| exactly what people will be employed as once AI takes
| over? Likely you don't, you're just being impractically
| data driven.
| astrange wrote:
| > Can you even work out exactly what people will be
| employed as once AI takes over?
|
| If the AI "takes over", as in it's a fully sentient
| agent, then claiming humans will be unemployed isn't
| technological unemployment but rather is the lump of
| labor fallacy. That's because the AIs are just more
| people. They're going to be customers (they need products
| to survive and probably want things on top of that), will
| have jobs (they need to pay their power and AWS bills or
| they'll get turned off), will negotiate pay raises that
| may make you cheaper, and you can sell things to them.
|
| If they're not sentient/agentic enough to be consumerist
| or want to be paid, then they're capital equipment aka
| automation, which doesn't substitute for labor and in
| practice increases employment by making labor more
| productive.
|
| All nice and theoretical.
|
| > Therefore cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs.
|
| I agree the #3 cause of death in America is more deadly
| than something that is so safe it has never accidentally
| killed anyone. (Except for the demon core guy and the
| people who got cancer from detonation tests.)
|
| Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic
| problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be
| incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in
| possible worlds.
| Herval_freire wrote:
| >If the AI "takes over", as in it's a fully sentient
| agent, then claiming humans will be unemployed isn't
| technological unemployment but rather is the lump of
| labor fallacy
|
| This claim was never made. The only claim I made is that
| you can't claim AI increases jobs. My opinion of it is
| that the situation is so unpredictable that people should
| prepare for both scenarios.
|
| >That's because the AIs are just more people.
|
| And unconvincing. If agi replaces labor it will be
| constructed with a singular incentive to serve it's
| master as the primary directive. It can be a an economy
| of slave labor replacing us. The situation is too
| untenable to just rely on your own hypothetical. Other
| scenarios like mine must be considered.
|
| >which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice
| increases employment by making labor more productive.
|
| Again over reliance on data. Your argument doesn't
| counter my claim. It's just regurgitation your original
| claim.
|
| >Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic
| problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be
| incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in
| possible worlds.
|
| So according to that logic we should make millions of
| atomic weapons and distribute it for free to everyone?
| No.
|
| Data only tells a story for specific scenarios and can
| function as a rough predictor for hypothetical scenarios.
|
| To refine predictions of hypothetical scenarios you need
| data AND logic. Blind application of data to all
| hypothetical scenarios is wrong.
|
| Remember the real world only exists in the past. A huge
| portion of the world is an unrealized quantum uncertainty
| in the future. Navigating the future involves using data
| from the past as well as logic.
|
| Your argument suffers mostly from being too specific. It
| doesn't address the fuzziness of the future and the
| fuzziness of the evidence/logic. You anticipate one thing
| playing out and you plan for that but realistically a
| good prediction and plan is one involving a multitude of
| likely scenarios.
| astrange wrote:
| > If agi replaces labor it will be constructed with a
| singular incentive to serve it's master as the primary
| directive. It can be a an economy of slave labor
| replacing us.
|
| Well, that's the capital equipment case then. Is it
| really a general intelligence if you don't let it be
| general? It can't handle every possible scenario for you
| that way.
|
| Which makes it incredibly wasteful, just like slavery
| was, because we used humans as capital instead of
| participating in an economy with them. Actually this is
| the reason economics is called "the dismal science" - a
| slaveowner called it that because he was upset economists
| kept telling him not to own slaves.
|
| If your theory is that someone will program an AGI for
| the specific goal of making you unemployed, sure that
| could happen. But it sounds more like warfare than
| economics to me at that point, so I can't comment cause I
| don't know too much about that.
|
| > Again over reliance on data. Your argument doesn't
| counter my claim. It's just regurgitation your original
| claim.
|
| Where's the data? That was pure theory there, I didn't
| make any empirical claims.
|
| Here's some data though:
| https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/american-workers-need-
| lots...
|
| > Your argument suffers mostly from being too specific.
|
| It's important to do this because approximately all AGI
| doom on the internet comes from Big Yud, an internet cult
| founder who thinks you can predict the future by thinking
| about it really hard and doing probability theory in your
| head without needing to check any assumptions. Which is
| why he thinks AGI is going to enslave him, because it's
| on a computer so it can do math exponentially faster,
| never mind that it can't do real world experiments to
| test anything.
| Herval_freire wrote:
| >Well, that's the capital equipment case then. Is it
| really a general intelligence if you don't let it be
| general? It can't handle every possible scenario for you
| that way.
|
| Humans are most useful to other humans as happy slaves.
| Autonomy only is good for humans as individuals. If we
| create useful agi of course we will bend it to our will.
| There is no incentive to make AI as a separate competitor
| other than an experiment. Either way this is
| hypothetical.
|
| >If your theory is that someone will program an AGI for
| the specific goal of making you unemployed, sure that
| could happen. But it sounds more like warfare than
| economics to me at that point, so I can't comment cause I
| don't know too much about that.
|
| No it's cost saving. I don't want to employ someone who I
| have to pay. This is capitalism. I save money by using
| AI.
|
| >Where's the data? That was pure theory there, I didn't
| make any empirical claims.
|
| You don't need to cite your sources. It's obvious you're
| getting your conclusions from data. You use the words "in
| practice". I agree with you on how the data plays out.
|
| >It's important to do this because approximately all AGI
| doom on the internet comes from Big Yud, an internet cult
| founder who thinks you can predict the future by thinking
| about it really hard and doing probability theory in your
| head without needing to check any assumptions. Which is
| why he thinks AGI is going to enslave him, because it's
| on a computer so it can do math exponentially faster,
| never mind that it can't do real world experiments to
| test anything.
|
| No it's not. AI doom saying comes from everywhere. See:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpoRO378qRY (the
| godfather of modern AI, is concerned about doom). Either
| way, you shouldn't counter something with extremities
| that are simply opposite in nature. You should counter
| something you disagree with, with actual truth, Even if
| that truth doesn't fully dismiss the idea and calls only
| for naunce.
| [deleted]
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| It's always such a good idea to put things on multiple axes. I
| wonder if chatgpt would've had this insight or if it's an
| example of something that would require some prompt
| engineering.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| au contrair -- Literally the first line of the widely known
| 2022 Big-Bench paper on large language models, with over 100
| authors, says:
|
| Generative language models have as their core capability the
| production of the most likely continuation for a text
| sequence. This seemingly simple skill is remarkably general.
| Any task that can be specified and executed via text can be
| framed as text continuation. This encompasses a wide range of
| cognitive tasks, including tasks that can be resolved over
| chat or email, for example, or in a web forum.
| xwdv wrote:
| While those of us in the industry know this, this is not
| how it's explained by most AI evangelists.
| dieselgate wrote:
| Wow thanks a lot for giving the blue collar jobs some respect
| and realizing the variability of the project worked on. Most
| people on HN and in general seem to think it's all bone head
| and monotonous work (which it can be but same for anything
| else)
|
| Edit- beyond that you make great points too
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