[HN Gopher] Most AI value will come from broad automation, not f...
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Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
Author : ydnyshhh
Score : 190 points
Date : 2025-03-22 18:35 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (epoch.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (epoch.ai)
| techpineapple wrote:
| Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess
| one for the more common reason that it's displacing humanity with
| technology, but the second reason is just you can't get excited
| about a hype that is unlikely to manifest.
|
| It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
| api wrote:
| Replacing human labor with technology is usually a wonderful
| thing if the gains are generally realized. It means less time
| spent in 'toil' and more time to pursue one's true interests
| and desires.
|
| The reason it feels depressing is that if recent history is any
| guide, 0.0001% of the human race will receive almost all the
| benefit. A tiny number of richer-than-rich will get even richer
| and everyone else will stay the same or get poorer.
| decGetAc wrote:
| Agreed,only the super rich will get cars err electricity err
| I mean refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean
| mobile devices
|
| To be fair I think there's a lot of truth in your statement
| in the short term (and arguably in the long). But in the
| 'long' term , it sure does look like revolutionary technology
| makes everyday peoples life better (I didn't even go into
| transportation or health care/life expectency)
| exe34 wrote:
| How will you pay for the cars err electricity err I mean
| refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean
| mobile devices when you have no income?
| jajko wrote:
| There will be soon new type of stuff only for rich - clean
| air, safe healthy food, beautiful nature, stable climate
| location, safe from warfare... we are not heading for a
| rosy future.
|
| Sure everybody can be addicted to some crappy social
| service on their phones, but that's not a mark of progress
| in 2025 nor definition of life fulfillment/happiness, some
| would say in contrary. Obesity was also for a long time
| mark of wealth (and in some 3rd world countries it still
| is), and now its a sign of low social status and failure
| for various reasons.
|
| Btw life expectancy i starting to decline again in
| developed countries, its just 3rd world that has so much
| gap to cross that they still go up.
| api wrote:
| When I said recent history I meant the last roughly 20
| years, when the trend has been for gains to go to a smaller
| and smaller number of people.
|
| Of course historically this does seem to be a cycle.
| Usually it goes gilded age, revolution, broad-based growth,
| emergence of a new elite, repeat cycle. Unfortunately the
| revolution period is often very chaotic and destructive.
| gruntbuggly wrote:
| Sure, we have more consumer goods available to us, but I
| don't know if that's a great measure of a better life. We
| have supercomputers in our pockets but can't talk to our
| neighbors, AI with a warming planet, etc. It's all
| tradeoffs. A flourishing human life is independent of
| technology.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Let's be careful not to conflate (A) general technological-
| progress with (B) changes in economic organization and
| wealth distribution.
|
| The nice things from (A) don't necessarily require what co-
| occurred with (B). There is nothing in the physics or
| materials of a refrigerator which requires the assembler to
| have been paid less than the CEO.
| abenga wrote:
| It is possible for luxuries to become easier to have, but
| still have entire generations unable to buy homes or
| retire.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The rest (and most of us will see included on the rest
| category) will get soylent, if we are lucky.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Recent history is a poor guide that will give you a highly
| skewed view and won't really help you anticipate and plan for
| the future. You need to look at real history to get
| perspective. You don't even have to go back very far to see
| an tiny group of richer-than-rich people that didn't retain
| their power, an economic loop where this all happened before.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| > Recent history is a poor guide
|
| Wrong, It's the most important prior.
|
| Technology is vastly different now since your supposed
| "last time", to the point where it's an entirely different
| landscape for events to unfold.
|
| Look at the state of mass apathy and lack of accountability
| we have in society now. That tiny group has never been more
| unaccountable.
| signatoremo wrote:
| Can you be specific? Which technology only benefit the
| 0.0001%?
| api wrote:
| I was referring to the economic benefits being
| concentrated.
|
| AI and other automation allows more to be done with less
| labor which increases corporate profits, and all that is
| pocketed by a very small number of people. Meanwhile
| everyone else is unemployed. There is no mechanism to
| distribute these benefits to anyone.
|
| The money goes to inflate stock and other financial bubbles
| and asset prices, including housing, which makes living
| even more unaffordable.
|
| Long term this eventually collapses since the economy
| doesn't work with no customers.
| treis wrote:
| Median income in constant dollars in the US was about 60k 40
| years ago and now is about 80k. We can buy a lot better stuff
| with those dollars too.
| api wrote:
| Now check housing prices over that time.
| treis wrote:
| People don't buy houses by writing checks for the
| purchase price. They get a mortgage and pay monthly which
| is dependent on both housing price and interest. With a
| lot of hand waving that number isn't much worse than the
| 70s/80s because interest rates were high then.
|
| However, that's cyclical and we're in a really crappy
| local minima for affordability due to a rapid increase in
| interest rates.
| gruntbuggly wrote:
| IMO that disillusionment is rooted in identifying the myth of
| progress. But I tend towards Schopenhauer over Hegel
| henry2023 wrote:
| Only when looking at this through our common understanding of
| how societies work.
|
| Broad automation of tasks can be great for society if and only
| if the product of that automation is not treated as some kind
| of private property.
|
| I'm not hyped on an automated future because I find it quite
| unlikely but if it were to happen it has the potential to be
| transforming beyond expectations.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Broad automation of tasks can be great for society if and
| only if the product of that automation is not treated as some
| kind of private property.
|
| Star Trek or Bladerunner? That's a choice we can make.
| elzbardico wrote:
| No. Most of the time WE can't make this choice. It is
| imposed on us by the elites.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| We still have a lot of power to decide what we want, the
| problem is that this power is not well leveraged yet.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Do we have the choice? It feels like the market makes such
| decisions and regulation is not only a taboo but impossible
| with competition between states.
| NAHWheatCracker wrote:
| Yea. Watch a sci-fi film - nifty gadgets, robots taking care of
| chores, and widespread spaceflight. Real life is some
| unreliable chat bots.
|
| Then there's the depressing practical stuff. AI being forced
| down our throats. AI as an excuse lay people off. AI as an
| excuse for massive data hoarding. AI flooding the internet,
| making it harder to find good content.
| therein wrote:
| I find it extra surprising that people are advocating for
| transitioning to using AI while their proof of concept looks
| like this:
|
| do { resp = callAI(input); } while (!isOutputSane(resp) &&
| attempts++ < MAX_RETRY)
| jajko wrote:
| Nobody sane and smart I know is advocating for AI _now_.
| All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. Our megacorp very
| effectively blocked all of this and we don't have anything
| internal yet, but we are in specific market.
|
| And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people
| trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me
| bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start
| building trust. Sure assistants are nice but thats about
| it.
|
| Its just too flawed now to be dependable and reliable, it
| feels like typical 80/20 or 90/10 situation where
| inexperienced juniors are all over their head how future is
| now, and seniors just meh and go and do some work.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc.
|
| The parallels with crypto are amazing.
|
| > And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from
| people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here.
| Trust me bro...
|
| Cue some dude chiming in on how they are 1000% more
| productive now and wrote 100 apps in a weekend with
| Claude, etc.
|
| It is very tiresome indeed.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Except this time is quite real for some jobs, maybe
| programming will take a few more years, but for artistic
| fields, it is already here.
|
| Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of
| hiring artists is quite common.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > Except this time is quite real
|
| Oh it was very real during crypto hype cycle too. The
| crypto people were very annoying with it.
|
| > Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of
| hiring artists is quite common.
|
| I would imagine it is fine for some concept art, based on
| my experimentation with multiple models for Stable
| Diffusion.
|
| For generating actual assets that are consistent? I am
| highly skeptical. Unless we are talking about bottom of
| the barrel indie games.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Consistent enough for it to be an issue.
|
| And not only indies, when taking voice actors into
| consideration.
|
| https://www.ign.com/articles/horizon-actor-ashly-burch-
| says-...
|
| Or some well known studios,
|
| https://www.ign.com/articles/activision-finally-admits-
| it-us...
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Ah, it is bottom of the barrell AAA stuff instead.
|
| I am somehow unimpressed.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Besides the millions COD gets, more than a few wannabe
| startup owners on Y Combinator will ever achieve.
|
| There are people being affected by those decisions,
| effectively losing their jobs, and source of income, as
| unimpressed as you may be.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Yeah, COD sells a lot. Not that the sales it gets is
| testament of quality.
|
| FIFA (or whatever it is called nowadays) also sells
| plenty every year generating incredible revenue to EA,
| and every year is a poor quality game.
|
| This is why I am unimpressed that Activision is using AI
| in its games. I expect them to be of poor quality.
| pjmlp wrote:
| People losing their jobs due to AI being used, couldn't
| care less about the quality level.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I was very involved in the crypto scene, and really the
| only real utility was monero for buying the funny
| chemicals.
| jgilias wrote:
| Advocate or not, it's here to stay. And if you're not
| adjusting to it, you're doing yourself a disservice.
|
| Last week I did the amount of work that would've taken me
| give or take a month. A significant part of it was
| writing an API client for a system I needed to use.
| Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this 'by hand' just
| takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data
| structures, wire things up for the new call, write tests.
| With "the robot" once the framework was largely in place,
| you just paste API docs for the endpoint you need, and
| it's done in a minute. With tests and everything.
|
| Now, you could argue that this is not "senior level
| work". Sure, maybe. But the thing is, you need to use it
| to learn how to use it effectively, and more importantly
| to get the intuition about what it can help with best.
|
| So this is my thesis now - if you're a senior who
| neglects this new tool, you're going to be out of a job
| soon-ish.
| Scarblac wrote:
| But a solution that takes an OpenAPI spec and generates
| all of those things from templates would be much more
| reliably correct than letting an AI do it, and has
| already existed for years.
|
| I think AI is a game changer but not for things that can
| already be automated rigirously without AI.
| jgilias wrote:
| There was no OpenAPI spec. And it wasn't all it made
| faster to do.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Eventually only the arquitect will be required, no need
| for seniors, the offshoring team is the cloud instead of
| some folks on the other side of the planet.
|
| This is the future to prepare, not AI generating a couple
| of files.
| jgilias wrote:
| Maybe. But that future is definitely not yet here.
| Generating a couple of files though is here. And that
| compounds. So people who're still typing those files by
| hand... yeah.
| pjmlp wrote:
| For some things not yet yes, for others it is already
| here.
| jgilias wrote:
| Can you give some examples where "architect, no coders"
| is here already? Asking, because I'd rather try and
| adjust to the new world, than pretend it's not happening!
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not yet on that front, rather voice actors, artists
| producing digital assets on games, iconography for
| applications, decorating motives for clothing and
| furniture.
|
| On IT industry specially, I think LLMs generating code
| are going to become as transformative as compilers were
| to Assembly developers.
|
| Yes, currently they still go through "generate language
| XYZ" as intermediary step, however they eventually will
| improve to the point, that intermediary step will no
| longer be needed.
|
| And like the Assembly developers that deemed to manually
| assess the machine code generated by compilers and
| scoffed at the generated output, eventually had to cope
| with optimising compilers turning their knowledge into a
| niche field, same will happen with common programming
| languages.
|
| Yeah sure, there will be some Compiler Explorer kind of
| way to see how the AI maps its decisions to e.g. RISC-V
| Assembly, but only those in the know will bother looking
| into it, either by curiosity or need.
|
| Some current examples ongoing trends, more specifically
| IT, in enterprise consulting, we have evolved to less
| coding, more plumbing, where existing SaaS products get
| integrated with each other, mostly via configuration, or
| integration scripts.
|
| Well turns out, some of those common patterns can be used
| to teach AIs, and let them automate integrations, instead
| of manually write them by hand.
|
| https://blog.hoyack.com/top-7-tools-for-effective-agent-
| orch...
|
| Do they work as well as the sales pitch?
|
| Not yet, those optimising compilers also took a couple of
| decades to get right, still miss some stuff like auto-
| vectorization, however the job of Assembly programmer is
| for all practical purposes gone.
| goatlover wrote:
| The assembly programmers gave way to many more higher
| level programmers, as it became possible for more people
| to program, and more kinds of programs to be written.
| toogan wrote:
| > Last week I did the amount of work that would've taken
| me give or take a month. A significant part of it was
| writing an API client for a system I needed to use.
| Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this 'by hand' just
| takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data
| structures, wire things up for the new call, write tests.
| With "the robot" once the framework was largely in place,
| you just paste API docs for the endpoint you need, and
| it's done in a minute. With tests and everything.
|
| That just points to an inefficiency. Could be tackled in
| other ways than involving an LLM to produce essentially
| what's being done elsewhere every day over and over
| again. A framework automating and hiding all this would
| be just as effective. Perhaps even cleaner than all that
| duplication that the LLM created for you.
|
| In other words, that month of busywork that you just
| saved is inherently unnecessary to do. But progress is
| not linear in the number of lines of code that you
| produce. If you think hard about a good architecture and
| design, coming up with that after 2 weeks of hard
| thinking, that could be 90% of the work. The remaining
| 10% are writing all that down. That could take 3 more
| months, and it taking more than 10% of the time points to
| the existing inefficiency in tooling / framework / ...
| But making that more efficient isn't necessarily achieved
| the best by using an LLM and writing it all out. There
| are still huge redundancies, which is what made the LLM
| possible. Once you boil these down in some common
| frameworks or tools, the LLM will also just produce the
| same few lines that you'd need to produce to get those
| 10% done in then just 10% of the total time.
| stego-tech wrote:
| > So this is my thesis now - if you're a senior who
| neglects this new tool, you're going to be out of a job
| soon-ish.
|
| Work(ed) for a company super big on a force of agents.
| Brought them into my workflows early on, before the
| company even pivoted. Ran them at home on private
| hardware (that 3090 had to do _something_ ), at work when
| access was opened up. Provided valuable feedback on
| hallucinations (e.g., fabricating the existence of a
| MongoDB CLI module wholesale, documentation and all) and
| barriers to adoption. Pitched an integration of four
| disparate systems across ~20 data points to create
| tenancy in a core product line from scratch, with said AI
| at the center of it for customer service and workload
| creation, reducing engineers to approvals only for ~20
| tickets a week averaging ~40hrs of work, freeing up said
| engineers for actually valuable work instead of
| handholding customers through routine tasks. Got great
| feedback and enthusiasm on it.
|
| RIFed this year.
|
| Doesn't matter whether you're bullish or bearish on it,
| the only thing that ever really matters is if scrubbing
| your line item from a spreadsheet will net someone higher
| up than you a bonus. That's what's driving this AI mania,
| and what needs to be addressed via policy before these
| employers gut themselves and the economy in the process.
| jgilias wrote:
| Man, that's rough. I hope you're doing well!
|
| Totally agree with you on the line-item point. My point
| there was that if a 50% RIF is in the works, the people
| who haven't figured out how to become more efficient
| using AI would be more likely to be affected.
| Statistically.
|
| But again, hope you're doing well and everything has
| worked out for you!
| stego-tech wrote:
| I'm a month in, and it's rough as hell. But I at least
| have a runway for the first time in my career, so I'm
| profoundly grateful for that.
|
| Still optimistic that my generalist skillset and
| adaptability to new technologies (like AI) will make me
| an asset for IT teams who can't afford multiple
| specialists in rough economic times like these.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Work(ed) for a company super big on a force of agents.
|
| > RIFed this year
|
| Yeah that's why they are big on the force of agents, so
| they can justify trimming their workforce
|
| Anyone who doesn't see this is kind of a sucker
| stego-tech wrote:
| Oh, 100%, and I knew that going in. Still, I'm the type
| of worker (sucker? sap?) that will go down with the ship
| if it helps the rest of the folks get into lifeboats. I
| know I can take care of myself when stuff hits the fan,
| and I'm never one to half-ass my output because of my own
| cynicism.
|
| I'm hoping that pays off for me someday. Thus far, it's
| just been a lot of burnout/layoff cycles.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Still, I'm the type of worker (sucker? sap?) that will
| go down with the ship if it helps the rest of the folks
| get into lifeboats
|
| > engineers to approvals only for ~20 tickets a week
| averaging ~40hrs of work, freeing up said engineers for
| actually valuable work instead of handholding customers
| through routine tasks
|
| Not trying to be too judgy here but to me it sounds more
| like you are the one helping sink the ship than help
| everyone to life boats
|
| Something to think about. Agreeing to bring AI into our
| workflows is actually digging out the foundation beneath
| our own feet (and our coworkers feet)
| stego-tech wrote:
| The situation was way more complex than that - we were on
| borrowed time anyway, and this was our attempt to pivot
| away from a single on-prem private cloud group into the
| team overseeing both the enterprise pipeline and multi-
| cloud work. It would've freed us from busywork
| babysitting other teams' own stuff while we were
| gradually chipped away via a war of attrition so we could
| actually build useful stuff to justify our long term
| existence and make us indispensable, a strategy that had
| buy-in at the time.
|
| Ah well. At least seeing me get RIFed hopefully sent up
| signal flares with the rest of the team to GTFO while
| they can, and I had a lot of good accomplishments towards
| the end in particular. Take the good where I can find it,
| I suppose.
| jgilias wrote:
| Sure, but what choice do you have as an individual? Try
| and adjust to the new reality and maybe get RIFed anyway,
| or not adjust to it and get RIFed with 90% certainty.
| Power looms won.
| nukem222 wrote:
| > And if you're not adjusting to it, you're doing
| yourself a disservice.
|
| What does this even mean? AI is mostly forced in
| situations where it can't actually improve on the output,
| like at the top of a google search.
|
| > So this is my thesis now - if you're a senior who
| neglects this new tool, you're going to be out of a job
| soon-ish.
|
| If your job mostly consisted of writing api clients
| maybe, but that's a pretty odd job.
| regularjack wrote:
| > So this is my thesis now - if you're a senior who
| neglects this new tool, you're going to be out of a job
| soon-ish.
|
| Do you wanna bet?
| jgilias wrote:
| We're all already betting one way or another.
| patrick451 wrote:
| You have to balance this time savings with all the times
| the LLM is just making shit up. I can't the number of
| times I ask "how do I do X?", and says "call function Y"
| or "Use command line argument Z". Turns out Y doesn't
| exist and CLI doesn't take argument "Z". The frustration
| from that lying is immense. I'd rather take a little
| longer on some tasks and never deal with this lying.
| jgilias wrote:
| I see what you mean. The way I approach this is that I
| think of it as a very (very, very) elaborate auto-
| complete. Something that takes some text, and continues
| with the most likely continuation. Which is what it
| basically is, right?
|
| But that means that whatever rather impressive internal
| representation of knowledge it has encoded, that
| knowledge itself can't be trusted on a "factual" basis.
|
| This is where you have stopped, but you shouldn't.
| Because you're missing what it's great at. And it's great
| at "continuing" text in a longer context. So just use it
| with a longer context. Use the Search functionality in
| ChatGPT when asking it things such that you see where it
| got it from. Use it in a codebase context where you point
| it to the relevant parts. Give it examples it should
| follow, etc.
|
| For every task I have I try using AI in some way and form
| first. Because the downside is limited - I waste 5-7
| minutes figuring out that it's not going to work, and
| this is something I definitely need to do myself. But the
| upside is unlimited - the task is done in minutes.
| wolfcola wrote:
| but layoffs are happening _now_, purely based on what
| people who stand to benefit directly claim AI will do.
| Scarblac wrote:
| It's actually `letSlightlyDifferentAIJudgeOutputSanity()`
| rather than `isOutputSane()`, I think.
| fjdjshsh wrote:
| >AI as an excuse lay people off.
|
| Why do you think the managers/business owners need an excuse
| to lay people off? If it's legal and economically beneficial
| to them, they'll fire people. Having AI won't help them as an
| excuse. In fact, I would say it sounds like a much worse
| excuse than "the economy is on a rough spot" or something
| like that
| falkensmaize wrote:
| Are you serious? The obvious benefit is they get to lay a
| bunch of people off and pretend it's because they're
| forward thinking innovators instead of poor managers that
| are having difficulty growing their business. There's a
| huge incentive to present this fiction to stockholders,
| which is the only opinion they care about.
| nukem222 wrote:
| > If it's legal and economically beneficial to them,
| they'll fire people.
|
| More importantly, if they can imagine some economic
| benefit. Very plausible an executive might think a chatbot
| is as capable as an engineer when they don't know how to
| evaluate either.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The word you're looking for is 'dystopian'
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| And thats the "optimistic" outlook :\
|
| There's also a negative side . . .
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Technical progress would be fantastic if the benefits didn't go
| mainly to the top. I am pretty sure in the not too far future
| we will have enough technology that you can live off the land
| somewhere with the help of some robots. Or have them do all
| your housework. In principle, this is great, but our society is
| not set up for a lot of people not working while the technology
| is progressed by a relatively small number of highly qualified
| people.
|
| I am not sure where this is going but there will be some large
| changes to society needed if technology keeps progressing at
| current speed.
| sterlind wrote:
| I wanted fully-automated luxury communism, but I got fully-
| automated neo-feudalism instead. It feels bad.
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| Pretty much every piece of technology we have known so far
| which had creator restrictions has been jailbroken. Sure
| the future might be Elon & Bezos androids, but what's
| stopping us from jailbreaking them and using them off grid?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Police and military
| stego-tech wrote:
| Police forces protecting the interests of capital first,
| citizens second, e.g. private police forces (Pinkertons)
| and strikebreaking.
|
| Militaries being used by Governments to protect the
| interests of capital at the expense of citizens, e.g. the
| Battle of Blair Mountain.
|
| Government legislation enshrining the rights of capital
| and profit over the rights of citizens, e.g. copyright
| laws and DRM protections.
|
| Centralization of systems and dependency of products on
| remote compute, e.g. public cloud service providers,
| social media networks, shifting from wired to wireless
| home ISPs and networks to reduce stability of private
| hosting.
|
| They made it illegal to break DRM on their devices, send
| the police to protect their property, leverage the
| military to annihilate opposition, and now use modern
| technologies to prohibit end user control by requiring
| remote dependencies for operation.
|
| That's how they stop you.
| geysersam wrote:
| > I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have
| enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere
| with the help of some robots.
|
| I don't understand, what stops you from doing that today?
| oblio wrote:
| The fact that those robots don't exist :-)
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Those robots want to be all your tools, with subscription
| and expensive maintenance that you can no longer do it
| yourself. And with the obvious kill switch. From tractors
| to other things
| intrasight wrote:
| I think this is the part that classic sci-fi didn't get
| right. It assumed that we would own the robots instead of
| them being owned by corporations that would rent them
| out.
|
| Having a robot that I don't control that's stronger than
| me and smarter than me in my house does not sound at all
| comforting.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Capital, and its inequal distribution.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| The availability of fertile land.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Vertical farming / hydroponics will solve that.
| elcritch wrote:
| See the neo-feudalism comment below. Land and even
| vertical farming will be controlled by nobility /
| corporates in the neo-feudalism era.
| tkjef wrote:
| so what's your solution then? you realize corporations
| are just run by people? but yes they become cold,
| heartless soul sucking places. yes.
|
| make your own company and do something about it then. or
| STFU.
| daveguy wrote:
| Not the GP, but I'd rather reform our government to not
| be exclusively for money grubbing companies and
| billionaires who put profits over people.
| tkjef wrote:
| i absolutely hear you on that. it just seems too hard to
| do that.
|
| my solution is to make companies that are cool, fun to
| work at, push good values and make some money.
|
| then use that money to push for appropriate political
| moves like you are saying.
|
| how would you propose to reform the government? through
| voting? good effing luck. it will take $$$.
|
| additionally, i get really annoyed with all the
| complaining that is done about politics. did you vote?
| neat, that's the system we have. want to do something
| about it? make some money. that's the system we have.
|
| these people complaining about things instead of doing
| something will die complaining.
|
| coming from a liberal that is more in the center and
| annoyed with my overally liberal parents.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| Sometimes there just isn't a solution or it's not the
| right time. That's what bitching is good for. Imagine
| being the world's most dedicated republican in 1750s
| France. You could analyze the state of the world and
| everything required to fix it but no matter what you do
| there's still decades of feudalism left and feudalism
| fucking sucks. That's where we are today and these
| bandaid solutions like making "better" companies are like
| asking the King to be nicer. It changes nothing
| fundamentally..
|
| Maybe your lord is a great guy and he does everything
| right but tomorrow his son comes into power and he could
| whip you. That's what a good company is like. My new
| manager is an asshole who ruined my great job.
| tkjef wrote:
| that sucks. i just quit my job cuz i was pissed about a
| lot.
|
| but we can move to new feudal leaders or literally become
| a feudal leader ourself.
|
| America baby!
|
| Is it easy? nope. neither was getting a tech job or
| rising and surviving in it. but some of us do and some of
| us don't.
|
| anyone interested in some cold blooded american history
| from the mid-1800s should check out American Primeval on
| netflix. i really enjoyed it. it is a bit graphic.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| > we can move to new feudal leaders
|
| Working on it
|
| I love history. It's a great cope to see how people can
| live fulfilling lives under completely different
| conditions from the standard 2025 life path. Maybe I will
| check it out :)
| tkjef wrote:
| totally agree!
| danaris wrote:
| Ah, yes, I will take my $3000 of savings and start a
| company that can compete with triple-digit billionaire
| venture capital firms for prime farmland....
| tkjef wrote:
| you could. that's the beauty of America.
|
| Or you could raise the capital by pitching investors that
| have money because you actually have a good idea.
|
| or you don't have a good idea. you don't have any money.
| and you want to complain.
|
| what are you asking for? that your parents were more
| rich? that everyone has the exact same amount of money?
|
| what are you striving for in this comment? are you
| pointing out that life is unfair? i do agree with that.
| danaris wrote:
| First, and most obviously, I'm pointing out that any
| individual without massive wealth attempting to tackle
| such a thing on their own is inevitably doomed to fail.
|
| But more importantly, I'm pointing out that suggesting
| personal solutions to systemic problems is not only
| inevitably doomed to fail, but is promulgating the
| wrongheaded thinking that has created and sustained the
| crisis that brought us to this point.
|
| "I don't want all the land to be held by neofeudal
| corporations that exercise control over every aspect of
| our lives" cannot be solved by "so become a neofeudal
| overlord yourself!" Not only is it effectively impossible
| to achieve, at the _very best_ it only solves the problem
| for _you_.
|
| I don't want to just have a better life for myself. I
| want a better life for everyone.
| tkjef wrote:
| i'd say likely to fail, not doomed.
|
| if you want to have a better life for everyone then what
| is your solution? you do not provide one.
|
| my solution is if enough people with the right thinking
| also become neofeudal overlords then we can exercise the
| change you're talking about.
|
| do you think some day everything is just going to
| magically snap into place and everyone will just be fair?
|
| it has been fought for and died over for thousands of
| years to get where we are. and we are lucky that much
| less of us have to die in order to stand up for what we
| believe in.
|
| now we can just make money and use that to effect change.
| pretty cool evolution of civilization if you ask me.
|
| in addition, what's wrong with solving the problem for me
| first? then taking care of others? that's exactly the
| right approach.
|
| others can then follow the same approach. now we have a
| lot of feudal overlords.
|
| diversified micro feudalism is the term that this
| conversation has spurred. i like it!
| danaris wrote:
| The solution is to keep fighting, not give up and decide
| that we can only ever have corruption and despotism, with
| the only choice being whether we are the oppressed or the
| oppressors.
|
| A better world _is_ possible, whether _you_ believe in it
| or not.
| tkjef wrote:
| i agree with everything you say. i just think the first
| step is what i'm laying out.
|
| gotta show them we're not afraid to play their game and
| win it as well.
|
| we should be able to play any game, any time. But based
| on that direct the game to be of higher moral ground.
|
| editing this comment as apparently we've reached our
| thread comment limit.
|
| yes, bargaining from a position of power. that would
| allow to direct it to a more suitable place. banding
| together with individuals of power to produce combined
| power. you say it's impossible and then say exactly how
| we're going to do it. :)
|
| i hope you know this has been a very enjoyable
| conversation for me.
| danaris wrote:
| I don't see how "become the oppressors" can _possibly_ be
| read as having the "moral high ground."
|
| At best it's "bargaining from a position of strength."
|
| But, again, I apparently need to emphasize that what you
| suggest is, for any given individual, _effectively
| impossible_. The only way to achieve it would be to band
| together in such numbers that we could, instead, work to
| influence politics toward the ultimate goal of equality
| with much more success.
| tmnvix wrote:
| Doesn't work well for potatoes (and other carbohydrate
| heavy crops) as far as I'm aware.
| dingnuts wrote:
| the complexity and expense and necessity for expertise of
| today's farming machines aren't what the OP is talking
| about, which sounds more like something from Asimov's Caves
| of Steel
| Isamu wrote:
| Yes actually robotics is still in its infancy, it needs
| machine learning advances to become anything like the
| generalized problem solving worker that farms need,
| especially small family farms.
|
| Source: I have worked on both robots and small farms.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Agreed. But I expect huge progress in the next
| years/decades. It feels like a lot of things are finally
| coming together. The same happened in the 90s with the
| internet or the 2000s with cell phones. People are doing
| research in a lot of different areas and you see some not
| so great products that implement them. But then you have
| a point where all components come together in one really
| compelling product.
| goatlover wrote:
| But why would individuals own farms instead of big
| agriculture just using the robots to make food production
| even cheaper and more efficient? Of course some people
| will, but most people will live in urban areas and shop
| at grocery stores. That's been the trend since farming
| started being automated.
| danaris wrote:
| Because there's a very strong strain of (particularly
| American) thought that the Ideal Life is living off the
| land in a single-family house, far away from any cities
| and probably from most other people.
|
| And even the people who recognize that this ideal is
| utterly impractical can still be strongly influenced by
| it, such that when a set of technological advances
| promises the prospect of actually being able to realize
| it, they jump toward it with stars in their eyes.
|
| Unfortunately, it's not just impractical because of the
| lack of technology to support it (other obvious problems
| include the degree to which humans need social
| interaction to be healthy, the limited amount of land
| available, the number of things taken for granted in
| modern life that cannot be either grown or crafted alone,
| even with robotic help...). It's a fantasy, and always
| has been.
| ein0p wrote:
| You can live off the land today with no help from robots. I
| know a couple of folks who had enough of corporate America
| and now live on a farm in Florida. It's been almost 10 years,
| they're doing all right. It's not even that much work unless
| you grow stuff commercially.
|
| But I hear what you're saying. More "humane" progress would
| certainly be very welcome. In fact if neo-feudalism wins,
| most of us will have to "live off the land", whether we want
| to or not.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| If neo-feudalism wins the majority will be working on the
| goals of the feudal nobility, whatwver that may be.
| ein0p wrote:
| Robots will be doing that. There will also be a small
| workforce to repair the robots. The rest of us will have
| to learn to grow and preserve food. That is assuming the
| feudals leave us alone and don't exterminate us instead.
| somenameforme wrote:
| There's a simple litmus test for these sort of nearish future
| dystopias - how long before you have an 'AI plumber' or an
| 'AI electrician'? I'm not just listing random skilled trades,
| but listing jobs that are extremely complex, 100% context
| sensitive in a way that just doesn't generalize well,
| requires a mixture of high dexterity and high strength, and a
| million other things. To say nothing of the numerous [oft
| extremely expensive] task specific tools you also need.
|
| And those are only two of the jobs for maintaining
| households. If those two things aren't automated, we're not
| having these 'robo households' - period. Instead I think the
| future holds mostly the present - glorified clappers [1] and
| ad-tech masquerading as some sort of something that mostly
| does a mediocre to awful job of whatever it's supposed to be,
| Alexa.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTNuJXi6UUk
| luckydata wrote:
| You need more to maintain a house, drywaller, gardener,
| carpenter, painter. The most important robotic help though
| will be cleaner and nurse. As our population ages and
| shrinks home help will become scarce and we'll desperately
| need an alternative to take care of ourselves as we age.
| throw80521 wrote:
| Perhaps in response housing will become even more
| homogenized so that AI has an easier time maintaining it
| in a standardized way?
| somenameforme wrote:
| But is your house iHouse compatible, or only OpenHouse
| compatible?
| mikrl wrote:
| >not using GNoUse
|
| Why do you hate freedom?
|
| Wait brb, the ceiling fan I wrote in Lisp is spraying
| yogurt again
| goatlover wrote:
| Immigrants from countries whose populations aren't
| shrinking could fill that role.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Who will maintain their houses? Why would it be
| immigrants instead of an underclass of citizens already
| in the country?
| asdf6969 wrote:
| What houses? In Canada we stick 5 of them in every
| basement with no path to ownership. They're happy to
| share bedrooms because it's better than where they came
| from. The "underclass" of today got in early enough to
| own land and will be the landed gentry of tomorrow
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Central BC is full of low-skill nobody boomers who
| happened to have affordable Vancouver starter homes.
| These people are driving Porsches and sipping wine thanks
| to their good fortune.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| We do, however, have computer assisted plumbers,
| electricians, and other technicians. With nothing more than
| YouTube one can fix appliances and cars, or do some DIY
| home improvement, and the projects that are possible are
| much more involved than they were in the old days. It's
| very hard to pick up these skills from a book, but if
| there's a video to walk through the process - the projects
| become possible.
|
| AI-assisted plumbers will follow this archetype.
| teucris wrote:
| I have four books that I got from my dad - one for
| construction and repairs, one for electrical, one for
| plumbing, and one for landscaping. They're in simple
| English with excellent illustrations. Using those books,
| I've been able to fix/improve pretty much everything in
| my house for ten years.
| bennettnate5 wrote:
| Could you list the titles/author of these books? I'd
| actually really like to get more into DIY home
| improvement, and having a starting reference like this
| would be really valuable
| codpiece wrote:
| I know of a couple: - How to fix damned near everything
| [1] - Reader's Digest Fix it yourself [2] - Audel's
| Carpenters and Builders guide [3]
|
| That Audel's, my wife got me for Christmas a few years
| back at Lee Valley Tools, I think. Was about 1/3 of what
| the listed price is here.
|
| [1] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?ds=20&
| kn=how%...
|
| [2] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?ds=20&
| kn=read...
|
| [3] https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/audels-
| carpenters...
| teucris wrote:
| The electrical and plumbing books are from a series from
| Home Depot called "1-2-3": "Plumbing 1-2-3" and "Wiring
| 1-2-3". I love them but some other posters have shared
| books that look even better; I plan to check them out.
| The construction book is "Modern Carpentry" by Willis H.
| Wagner. I can't find the landscaping book - haven't
| needed that one as much - but in my stack I noticed
| Reader's Digest's "Home Improvements Manual" which I've
| also used quite a bit.
| bennettnate5 wrote:
| Thanks!
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's still a human doing it and not an AI or robot. All
| of these jobs are not uniform enough for a robot or AI to
| be able to handle everyone's uniquely built house.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| you also got standardized parts and plug-in systems that
| use them; standardized tools that were available for a
| reasonable cost; and you have basic health and mobility
| teucris wrote:
| You're absolutely correct. The point was that I don't
| need AI.
| paulmakl wrote:
| Would love to know what these books are.
| tkjef wrote:
| agree with all your points with the anecdata that the
| Roomba is awesome for dog hair. awesome.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| My Roomba painted the whole room With dog excrement. The
| roomba thus went straight in the trash.
| tkjef wrote:
| lol, that sounds crappy. there are some that avoid that
| and some that don't.
| treis wrote:
| I don't think we're that far away but I also think it looks
| different than humanoid robots.
|
| I can see a drain plumbing system that maps out a new
| construction home and some sort of automated robot that
| builds out large sections of pipe. It wouldn't completely
| eliminate the plumber. But it'd change it from something
| like measuring, cutting, and gluing 100 times to walking
| around with a camera for 5 minutes and then gluing 10
| things together.
| goatlover wrote:
| That's just for new construction though. What about all
| the existing homes that need repairs?
| tucnak wrote:
| Well, there's going to be less of those. As construction
| industry is further incentivised to use more efficient
| methods and materials for their plumbing, driven by the
| ever-competitive housing market (that would likely see a
| crash in our lifetime, you know?) making the point moot.
| I think nobody is delusional that there's blue ocean in
| plumbing, or some hidden plumbing Renaissance of human
| labour. Do people even want to do manual plumbing in the
| first place?
| thatcat wrote:
| Good luck given the codes in place for all these things,
| not to mention trade unions.
| tucnak wrote:
| The unions only protect employees from the employer, not
| the market. The point of contention here is whether
| modern-day trade school could ever provide that which
| they say they do--career security, that is. Nobody dreams
| about becoming a plumber when they're little. Clue
| treis wrote:
| Sure, but it's still an AI plumber even if it can't
| replace every single plumber.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Its more likely that we'll hire plumbers who are going to
| throw a robot at the job and double check the work
| derkster wrote:
| Absolutely. It will be a while before AI is the absolute
| replacement, AI will enable the people in these
| professions to do faster, better (hopefully) work.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| The most likely future is that we start standardizing
| infrastructure and building in a different way that's easy
| for robots to use. Kind of like how cars would suck if we
| didn't have roads and Benjamin Franklin couldn't have
| predicted power plants and wires to every home. Then people
| who can't afford the new stuff will keep paying plumbers
| but there's a slow path to get rid of them. The old stuff
| will always be around but much less important.
|
| I expect new "robo friendly" roads will be the first
| example but of course homes could do the same.
|
| Think like how the Catholic Church never disappeared but
| the rest of the world moved on around it. We will never get
| rid of context sensitive plumbing and electrical work but
| it just won't really matter
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Think like how the Catholic Church never disappeared
| but the rest of the world moved on around it
|
| What does this mean? The world didn't start Catholic and
| gradually reduce its Catholicism over time. There are
| apparently about 1.4bn Catholics out there[0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church
| fakedang wrote:
| The Catholic church once decided which kings and princes
| could marry which queens and princesses, which alliances
| would be allowed and which wouldn't. Now it's nothing but
| a shadow of its former self.
| hasmanean wrote:
| We have YouTube plumbers. Has destroyed the industry? No.
| But it's made plumbing accessible to a whole range of
| DIYers.
|
| Maybe AI will be just as productive.
|
| Seriously YouTube has been amazing for the world of self
| learning. AI could learn a lot from it.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| True. I have a serious DIY porn addiction due to Youtube.
| milesrout wrote:
| But do you actually do any DIY? And is it more than you
| would have done without watching hours of it on YouTube?
|
| I have at times watched a lot of videos of people making
| stuff or doing DIY. I suspect like 99% of the audience of
| those videos, they are just entertainment.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| not OP but I am forced to. Services are too expensive
| these days and even when you pay, the quality is usually
| very hit or miss. I have lost count the number of times
| where a mechanic does the job right but its sloppy. Even
| my plumber or electrician gets things done but my drive
| for perfection cringes at the sloppy craftsmanship. I'm
| not a multi millionaire so I can't get the people that
| supposedly made things like Apple Park. A DIYer might not
| be able to do every job but many of the low hanging fruit
| can be done well.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Yes, I do a lot. Everything I feel confident doing and
| have the time for.
| taneq wrote:
| The availability of (mostly) accurate, in depth
| information snout any rabbit hole you can think of has
| certainly impacted some industries. There's an entire
| generation of doctors who are infuriated by "Doctor
| Google" And another generation of doctors who embrace the
| ability to quickly research topics and fact check
| suggestions online collaboratively with their patients.
| mustyoshi wrote:
| 120 years ago 40% of Americans were farmers, today that
| number is under 2%.
|
| That technical progress resulted in a few companies and farm
| conglomerates becoming incredibly wealthy. But the benefits
| that we all received was we didn't have to toil in a field,
| and we get fresh beef on every corner.
|
| The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better
| off aren't mutually exclusive.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > The wealth gap growing, and the median person being
| better off aren't mutually exclusive.
|
| The wealth gap was growing since 1980. Is the median person
| better today when the median person cannot afford a college
| education or a house?
|
| Both of those were easily afforded in the 80s.
|
| Also remember: the average job didn't require a college
| education back then either. College has become a gatekeeper
| due to its rising costs and diminishing returns.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Why is "affording a house" the marker of a success? I
| would say just the opposite. Owning a home decreases
| mobility and the ability to move to where the jobs are.
|
| That being said, the home ownership rate in the US is 65%
| and almost anyone who wants to go to college can via
| loans and scholarships.
|
| Only around 40% of people in the US have a college
| education. But that doesn't mean that the other 60% are
| homeless and starving.
|
| Then cultural, as we see now, there is very much an anti-
| intellectual anti college bias by a major user of people
| in the country.
| OJFord wrote:
| Ok, 'having that much money (or credit worthiness to
| borrow it) regardless of what you do with it', then?
|
| Many people don't _want_ to be itinerant, they want a
| settled home to make their own and enjoy for a long time
| if not life. 'Forever home' is a phrase and a positive
| one because that is a goal people have.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And those same people who want their "forever home" and
| aren't willing to move to where the jobs are unemployed
| and underemployed.
|
| I _want_ a million dollars a year income. No one owes me
| that. Move to where the jobs are. I moved from my
| hometown in south GA the week I graduated from college
| because there were no jobs.
| achierius wrote:
| You can't both tout status-quo economic figures and then
| point at hypothetical alternatives. If people did as you
| say and took those lower-paying jobs, then the average
| person would be less well off -- perhaps closer to the
| experienced reality for many.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Take what lower paying jobs? I am saying they need to
| move to where the jobs are. Do those jobs require an
| education? Yes.
|
| Maybe rural America should stop voting for politicians
| who are opposed to affordable college education (or trade
| school) and student loan forgiveness.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Well the problem, and stick with me here, is that we have
| people _everywhere._ So, as a consequence of that, having
| broad opportunities for everyone to earn a decent living,
| in more than a handful of places in the entire country,
| is an unambiguously good thing. And like, maybe this is
| pink-haired commmie-scum thought of me to say, but
| perhaps you shouldn 't need to leave your childhood home,
| friends, support system, and familiar places when you
| finish your schooling in order to earn a living? Just
| because it's... really bad for you, and makes for a less
| stable you, which on balance over millions of times for
| everyone else who grew up with you, makes for a less
| stable society?
|
| > I want a million dollars a year income. No one owes me
| that.
|
| Why is this always where this type of conversation goes?
| No one has spoken about any entitlement here, but
| frankly, while you aren't owed a million dollars a year,
| I'd say you're owed _something._ Assuming you 're working
| full time, I'd say you're owed at least a living wage.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| What exactly does society even with a strong safety net
| (which I support) owe anyone? Universal healthcare? Yes.
| A method to enable people to have safe shelter? Yes. Even
| public transportation to get to jobs - Yes. I'm even in
| favor of affordable public college education.
|
| But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
|
| People today are living all across the country and not be
| homeless and the people who live in the poorest states
| repeatedly vote for politicians that want to cut
| government services and cut the safety nets. Right now
| they are cheering DOGE. Why should I feel sorry for rural
| America? They are getting exactly what they voted for.
|
| We are under no obligation as a country to make sure that
| people who want to live the rest of there life in the
| MiddleOfNowhere Oklahoma can stay there for the rest of
| their life who don't want to move. Besides again, these
| people overwhelmingly voted for politicians who don't
| want to help them.
|
| They are also cheering for the dismantling of the
| Education department, defunding colleges, cutting
| Medicaid, inflationary tariff policies, etc.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
|
| Do you seriously want to turn this discussion into lower-
| class rental / apartment discussion? Okay, fine. Lets go
| there.
|
| https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-
| yea...
|
| Average rent in 1980 was $243/month. Average rent in 2025
| is $1397/month.
|
| For those who cannot afford a home, life has gotten
| worse. For those who _can_ afford a home, their life has
| gotten worse. It doesn't matter where you plan to pivot
| this discussion, its all bad numbers for your discussion
| point.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Okay, so what do you propose? Rent control? That is going
| to decrease supply. Tariffs to encourage manufacturing in
| America? That's just going to make things less
| affordable.
|
| But, rural America consistently votes for politicians and
| people who are trying to get rid of services they need
| the most. They are getting exactly what they are voting
| for and cheering right now.
|
| They are actively opposed to programs that would make
| education more affordable and cheering cutting the
| department of education, the post office, internet for
| rural America etc.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Let's start with just agreeing that the wage gap and
| wealth inequality is a bad thing.
|
| Which is all I wanted to say in the root post. I'm not
| gonna get gish galloped off topic any further.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It's a "bad thing" that over half of America wants (and a
| majority of poorer Americans) as they cheer on two
| billionaires that are gutting the safety net they need
| the most.
|
| So they must be okay with it.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I swear I have said this like ten times on this website
| since the election, but once again, since apparently
| people still don't get this:
|
| Trump won the electoral and popular votes with 312 (58%)
| of the former and 77,303,568 (49.81%) of the latter,
| which supports saying "over half" compared to Harris' 226
| (42%) of the former and 75,019,230 (48.34%) of the
| latter. However the population of the United States is
| 340.1 million of which 244.6 million are voting eligible.
| Some quick back-of-napkin math then will tell you that
| while Trump took both the popular and electoral votes
| enough to win, that victory represents at best the will
| of approximately 31% of the eligible voters. And, that's
| strictly the popular vote, which doesn't actually win the
| election. Democrats struggle in _every_ election because
| of decades of meddling on the part of Republicans with
| regard to how electoral votes are awarded and calculated,
| gerrymandering in every state, anti-voter, anti-minority
| policies that disenfranchise people on an industrial
| scale from the right to vote they 're entitled, etc. etc.
| etc.
|
| And you can say "well the Democrats should be working
| harder to undo it!" and I totally agree, but between the
| raw numbers on the ground, the well-documented Southern
| Strategy that has turned formerly pro-labor and
| progressive swathes of America into hard right
| strongholds via churches, and the various culture wars
| that have utterly melted American's brains to a great
| degree spearheaded by rest-in-piss Rush Limbaugh and the
| rest of the reactionary media sphere he helped weld into
| being, it is not remotely a fair statement to say that
| "over half of America voted for this knowing what would
| happen." Some did, for sure. Not half, not even fucking
| close.
| tkjef wrote:
| gerrymandering is so messed up. but speaking strictly
| from an outside perspective it is a gangster move.
|
| dare i say, gangster moves back are REQUIRED.
|
| to whoever downvoted this, you want to take the high
| road? when our citizens' voting rights have been
| marginalized?
|
| or are you just turned off by the word gangster?
|
| anyway, i propose making the gerrymandering an anti--
| american thing. which it is.
|
| make it the center of everything. there should be zero
| other issues until the ability to vote on the issues for
| all our people has been corrected.
|
| i would call out every single politician that was
| responsible for this gerrymandering. repeatedly, over and
| over again until they were harassed into a retirement
| recluse. that is my gangster counter move proposal.
|
| focus on the individual politicians reponsible for this
| and launch an all out aggressive offensive to eradicate
| their whole memory from America.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Sure sure.
|
| But that doesn't change the argument or the truth about
| what is, or isn't bad for people. I recognize the
| political disadvantage I'm at here, but lets just stick
| with the truth of the matter before we get into the
| politics.
|
| As I said before, I'm happy if you could just agree with
| me that wealth gap is a problem worth tackling.
|
| -----
|
| I'm not one to tackle entire problems all at once. Lets
| focus on things one step at a time. Lets first agree what
| the problems are in America. And then once we all agree
| on that, then we can work on them.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > What exactly does society even with a strong safety net
| (which I support) owe anyone? Universal healthcare? Yes.
| A method to enable people to have safe shelter? Yes. Even
| public transportation to get to jobs - Yes. I'm even in
| favor of affordable public college education.
|
| Cosigned all above.
|
| > But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
|
| I think insofar as property is treated as an investment
| vehicle, everyone should be able to own _something._
| Like, the difference between a mortgage and a rental
| contract in terms of personal economics couldn 't be
| further from one another. One creates wealth, one
| transfers wealth and concentrates it.
|
| "Can you afford to buy a home" as an economic metric
| doesn't mean necessarily that you should buy a home and
| you are a poor if you haven't or simply choose not to.
| That's fine. However, owning a home is a significant
| economic data point because it's a large investment to
| make that requires access to okay credit, and that once
| done, benefits the homeowner financially decades into the
| future. When I got a mortgage, an insured one with no
| money down even, my credit immediately went down to
| account for having a loan, but then right afterwards
| jumped almost 20% in a 3 month period, even though I did
| _nothing_ differently apart from paying into a mortgage
| instead of paying rent.
|
| Alternatively, reform the housing market so it functions
| as... well, a market. A house shouldn't necessarily
| appreciate in value over time, and the fact that it's
| expected to is... strange. One could argue that if
| nothing has appreciably changed in your neighborhood
| since you bought your house, it should sell for ballpark
| about the same price as what you paid for it, unless you
| did some substantial renovations or something. And even
| then... if you're just making it more suited to your
| tastes, probably not?
|
| In other words make houses... well, houses. Not
| investment vehicles.
|
| > People today are living all across the country and not
| be homeless and the people who live in the poorest states
| repeatedly vote for politicians that want to cut
| government services and cut the safety nets. Right now
| they are cheering DOGE. Why should I feel sorry for rural
| America? They are getting exactly what they voted for.
|
| Well, a lot of them are poorly educated for starters, and
| insanely propagandized. They've been the singular target
| for Republican messaging for decades now, and as you
| state, they've voted for those people too who have in
| turn damaged their schools and pillaged their industries.
| And that's not even going into things like offshoring and
| cheap international goods that have obliterated small
| town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have
| done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's
| markets out of existence.
|
| And yes it's tremendously frustrating to talk to these
| people since they're seemingly ready to blame anything
| and everyone who isn't them, their ideology, and their
| own choices for the fact that their home is dying, but
| it's _still their home,_ and it 's _still dying._ And
| like, even if their children all do what you 're telling
| them to do, that means millions upon millions of people
| about to immigrate to cities from these rural areas. So
| like, you gotta deal with them one way or another.
| They're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| > _However, owning a home is a significant economic data
| point because it 's a large investment to make that
| requires access to okay credit_
|
| You would be surprised at how low the credit rating you
| have to have to get an FHA mortgage. It only needs to be
| 580 to qualify for 3.5% down.
|
| > _However, owning a home is a significant economic data
| point because it 's a large investment_
|
| And then later you said
|
| > _A house shouldn 't necessarily appreciate in value
| over time, and the fact that it's expected to is...
| strange._
|
| So exactly how do you keep a property from appreciating
| in an area that people want to be in? My parent bought
| their home in 1978 in South GA for $50K. According to
| Zillow it's now worth $180K. Inflation adjusted it should
| be worth $245K (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/).
|
| > _And that 's not even going into things like offshoring
| and cheap international goods that have obliterated small
| town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have
| done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's
| markets out of existence._
|
| So you support Trump's inflationary policies about
| tariffs that will make goods more expensive in an effort
| to bring jobs back to the US (which won't happen).
|
| The world where every other country was demolished by
| wars and allowing the US not to have to compete with
| other developed nations is gone. Manufacturing jobs
| aren't coming back to the US. Would you be in favor of
| taxing those in the 90th percentile in wealthy (which you
| only have to make around $160K to be in) enough to
| support all of the other people so they can buy houses?
|
| I think a lot of people here have absolutely no idea how
| "rich" they are compared to the average American and
| aren't willing to give up enough of their income for
| "equality".
|
| > _So like, you gotta deal with them one way or another.
| They 're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence._
|
| Let them suffer. They would rather vote for politicians
| who hate the same people they hate - non Christians
| (except for Jews for some reason), minorities,
| immigrants, non-straight people, college educated, etc.
| They aren't voting against their own interest because
| they are "uneducated".
|
| They see the country eventually becoming more diverse and
| minority/majority and are doing everything they can to
| fight the inevitable.
|
| They themselves would rather not have universal
| healthcare because it might help the "illegals".
|
| Of course other cohorts are the middle class evangelicals
| who think they are going to burn in hell if gay people
| have equal rights and Jesus won't have any place to come
| back to if Israel isn't protected. I'm not exaggerating
| at all to make a point.
|
| Then you have people with money who like the status quo
| and don't care about inequality.
| dragontamer wrote:
| That's a weird non-sequitur you did.
|
| > But that doesn't mean that the other 60% are homeless
| and starving.
|
| No one said starving. I'm saying that the average person
| is in worse straights than the average person from the
| 1980s.
|
| If your message is 'Maybe not everyone needs a house'
| then it kinda sounds like you agree with me?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The home ownership rate in 1980 was also in the mid
| 60s...
|
| https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1991/demo/sb9
| 1-0...
|
| In fact home ownership rate has consistently been in the
| mid 60s since 1960
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/home-
| ownership-ra...
|
| In which way is the average person worse? Worse health?
| Worse life expectancy? More homeless people?
| dragontamer wrote:
| People who owned a home in 1980 only had to pay $47k, or
| roughly 4x average salary. (12513:
| https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/AWI.html).
|
| People who own a home in 2025 have to pay $350,000ish on
| a wage of only $66k.
|
| Home prices have gone up dramatically more than wages.
|
| > In which way is the average person worse?
|
| The amount of debt needed to own a home. Which is related
| to income vs cost-of-home. This ignores the fact that to
| reach $66k+/year salaries to begin with, you needed tens-
| of-thousands in student loan debt as well (which the
| average person in 1980 didn't need).
|
| ----------
|
| 1. Costs of education have gone up. It costs more money
| to be able to get a comfortable salary to begin with in
| today's world.
|
| 2. Younger folk are entering a very high-priced housing
| market, despite being already saddled with student loan
| debt (and thus starting off with no savings).
|
| 3. The bulk of "starting a new life" costs are car,
| house, and education. While yes computers and food have
| gotten cheaper, I would argue that car/house/education
| costs are the primary gatekeeper into income and/or class
| mobility.
|
| -----------
|
| For the 40%ish who cannot afford a house, it gets even
| worse. Rental prices in 1980 were $243/month. Do you want
| me to run the numbers on how screwed they've gotten? Or
| do you have the gist yet?
|
| Also remember: 1980 was a recession year with high
| unemployment and incredible inflation. We're comparing
| ourselves to the WORST time of stagflation and some of
| the worst geopolitical crisis of that era.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The average student loan debt is around $40K in the US.
|
| Even still, somehow, some way, the homeownership rate is
| the same, people aren't going homeless and people's needs
| are being met. How is that? If people are worse off
| meeting their Maslow hierarchy of needs?
| dragontamer wrote:
| So you ignore the literal prices of these things we're
| discussing.
|
| Gotcha. I'm glad that I've forced you to ignore my
| argument rather than addressing the elephant in the room.
|
| The average student loan debt in 1980 was zero because
| the vast majority of people could get by on free and
| public high school education btw. Especially if we assume
| that we're talking about the median income household.
|
| To achieve this equivalent to 1980s lifestyle, we're
| talking what? $200k extra debt burdens on every average /
| median person? $40k in student debt and $150k++ in extra
| housing debt? Plus 4 years lost in education (as 1980s
| folk could work those 4 years instead). How is this a
| better or even equivalent life?
| tkjef wrote:
| student loan debt is out of control. college is a money
| pit that will hopefully be dissolved within our lifetime.
| the social aspect is not worth the money.
|
| all knowledge is on the internet. we do not need college
| at all. that will come to be more evident. but colleges
| got lots o' money from donors to prolong their
| livelihoods.
| tmnvix wrote:
| From your source:
|
| > Home Ownership Rate refers to the percentage of homes
| that are occupied by the owner
|
| So this rate is not that of people that own a home, but
| homes that are owned by someone that resides there.
|
| Consider people in shared housing, young adults staying
| with parents, etc.
| authorfly wrote:
| Well inability to own a house was a major prelude to the
| 1930s economic and later conflict issues, particularly in
| western Europe (where it was more expensive in places
| like Britain to buy a house than even today, about 10-14x
| salary vs 8x today). House prices have been how they are
| now before: in the 1920s... (America is a bit of an
| exception because of all the expansion into California
| etc in the early 1900s).
|
| Male crime rates correlate with economic opportunity too,
| so even if you don't care about the 1930s and the
| economic reset of WW2 and its rebuilding (and WW1, but to
| a lesser extent), you should care about the possibility
| of crimes rates continuing to regress. Serious crimes
| don't get solved at a much higher rate than in the past,
| even if they have decreased since the 90s.
|
| Home ownership is a lagging indicator and doesn't show
| the whole picture: If people used to buy a home at 25 and
| move into it, but today they wait and live in their
| parents house until 30 before moving into a home, the
| stats might appear the same. The quality of life won't
| be. Home ownership rate needs context too, in some
| countries rent is low and house prices are high(er than
| the US), where many people rent through retirement, and
| where the implication of rising house prices is not as
| bad unless rent also raises.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And what exactly is wrong with living with their parents
| longer like most other countries do and is still
| prevalent among first and second generation Americans?
|
| As I asked before, what do you propose? Rent control?
| Affordable higher education? I agree with that. But half
| of America as seen by the support of DOGE and the lack of
| support for student loan forgiveness of any kind don't.
| America is getting exactly what they voted for -
| especially in the poorest, least educated states that
| vote Republican.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| > mobility and the ability to move to where the jobs are.
|
| This is a sign of low class status and lack of success.
| Rich people change the world to fit their needs. Poor
| people change themselves to fit the world. Leaving your
| entire family and social network behind for work is
| extremely middle class behaviour
| JustExAWS wrote:
| Yes, that's why Musk still lives in South Africa..
| asdf6969 wrote:
| Immigration is different. No individual can make a shitty
| country good
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _Both of those were easily afforded in the 80s._
|
| That's due to the post-war boom. The book Capital in the
| 21st Century goes over this, that the period between 1950
| - 2000 was an anomaly for the US that cannot be
| replicated, yet people bring up this stat as if it were
| normal.
| milesrout wrote:
| The average person didn't have a college education in the
| 1980s. Rates of educational attainment have skyrocketed.
| So obviously a lot more people spend a lot more money to
| be university-educated than did in the 1980s. Maybe
| people put more value on education today?
|
| Students expect a lot more services from universities
| today. They expect regular formative assessments. They
| expect various support services. They expect warm, air
| conditioned buildings without draughts. They expect
| healthcare, mental health support, disability services,
| and expensive facilities for everything: projectors and
| screens and computers and everything.
|
| Could that also be part of the drive of cost? The
| services definitely are, theyre a big driver of the
| increase in admin staff at universities.
|
| The cost of education is pretty irrelevant anyway because
| nobody actually pays it. You get a loan. That is paid by
| someone else: you, later. But young men and women heading
| off to university don't have a moment where they have to
| give up the opportunity to go because they don't have the
| money.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > The wealth gap was growing since 1980. Is the median
| person better today when the median person cannot afford
| a college education or a house?
|
| The house is due to population increasing far faster than
| new houses being built. That's a function of policy, not
| of rich people existing.
| aiajsbdbdjxjx wrote:
| Nobody's arguing things aren't better in some ways than the
| past. But your argument amounts to what is essentially
| trickle down economics. The median American is getting a
| marginal improvement - the top .1% American has gotten an
| astronomical improvement.
|
| The wealth gap increasing is a moral failure of our
| billionaires. They should take pride in building a better
| tomorrow for their fellow countrymen. And what we have now
| is the exact opposite of that.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's not just a moral failure of the billionaires. Many
| of us live in democracies, so we are _choosing_ (through
| our elected officials) that creating a few billionaires
| is more important than building a better tomorrow. The
| sorry state of things could be undone in a single
| election if people didn 't explicitly want and vote for
| the sorry state of things.
| graemep wrote:
| We have a limited choice of who to vote for. Here in the
| UK that is the big parties think, and most of the smaller
| ones too. The same is true in many democracies.
|
| Douglas Adams described it well:
|
| "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more
| rational and coherent than he had been, having finally
| had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple.
| Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world,
| the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The
| people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
| "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a
| democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said
| Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse,
| "why don't people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly
| doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the
| vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government
| they've voted in more or less approximates to the
| government they want." "You mean they actually vote for
| the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of
| course." "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again,
| "why?" "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said
| Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah the thing is there were better jobs that ex-farmers
| (or at least their children) could go to. I'm unconvinced
| that's the case this time round. Especially for unskilled
| people.
| anon7000 wrote:
| Is that really true 120 years ago? We have a lot of
| hindsight bias, but things really weren't amazing for the
| average person in the US even one hundred years ago.
|
| Today, the average person has affordable access to a lot
| of things that may have been luxuries, or simply didn't
| exist, 100-200 years ago. Running water, electricity,
| internet, mobile phones, modern sanitation &
| infrastructure, and any number of tiny cheap devices that
| improve QoL.
|
| And yes, we also have huge problems with wealth disparity
| and late stage capitalism.
|
| The problem is, we should not throw out the baby with the
| bathwater. Like, we do not have widespread food scarcity
| problems today. Extremely advanced medical technology is
| available, if too expensive.
|
| Our tech bubble is only one small part of actual
| technology. There is still very cool research going on in
| other fields. Big tech is all about personal computing &
| social media, and yeah, AI in this area is dubious and
| hard to get excited about.
|
| At the same time, there are SO MANY other areas of
| technology which can have huge impacts on humanity. For
| example, the tech behind modern AI models has already
| produced breakthrough research in the field of protein
| folding. (https://youtu.be/P_fHJIYENdI) This will have a
| big impact on our ability to solve biological problems.
|
| All that to say... let's stop being so closed-minded
| about tech. Yes, the big tech social media, app, and SaaS
| companies are not going to give us a utopian future. But
| technology is way more than that. It includes robotics
| advances for cheap manufacturing, cheap energy from small
| scale hydro or even nuclear installations, advances in
| our ability to fight diseases and viruses (the COVID
| vaccine would not have been possible as quickly without
| modern technology), more clever & efficient construction
| techniques, and the list goes on and on. Tech is
| absolutely solving tons of real problems that we face. We
| can be excited for that and also not care about the next
| knock-off AI wrapper SaaS company.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Is that really true 120 years ago? We have a lot of
| hindsight bias, but things really weren't amazing for the
| average person in the US even one hundred years ago.
|
| I didn't say they were. I said they had _better jobs to
| go to than working in the fields_. I 'm not saying their
| lives were better than ours are now. Obviously not.
| pphysch wrote:
| 96 years ago we there was a massive financial crisis and
| depression that killed a lot of people and is directly
| related to the (lack of) national policies of the time.
|
| USA recovered remarkably well, but only because there was a
| big pivot away from crony capitalism and towards
| "socialism" under FDR. Big investments in The People,
| unions, education, infrastructure.
|
| We are going in the former direction right now.
| hollerith wrote:
| Causal relationships can be hard to discern. Some say
| that FDR's policies extended the downturn to 10 years
| whereas recovery from previous downturns was much
| quicker.
|
| (Also, it is not clear to me how any of this is relevant
| to "The wealth gap growing, and the median person being
| better off aren't mutually exclusive".)
| teucris wrote:
| Can you provide references? This is the first I've ever
| heard of this.
| hollerith wrote:
| For example, Murray Rothbard argued in _America's Great
| Depression_ (1963) that both Herbert Hoover and FDR
| worsened the economic downturn through interventionist
| policies. He believed FDR's price and wage controls,
| massive public spending, and business regulations stifled
| economic recovery.
|
| My point is not that the person I was replying to is
| definitely wrong about FDR's policies, but rather that
| the effects of FDR's policies are _uncertain enough_ that
| the fact that FDR imposed them in the 1930s cannot
| credibly used to lend strong support to any argument for
| any economic policy to be imposed today. The post-WWII
| economic boom for example happened after most of FDR 's
| policies had been repealed.
| teucris wrote:
| Thanks for the reference. I generally agree that, from a
| very high-altitude, it's difficult to know whether New
| Deal policies shortened the depression given that WWII
| shook up the US so much. However, there are many things
| introduced during that time that have had a visceral
| effect on the average American's quality of life, saved
| lives, and would be terrible to abandon: the FDIC, the
| construction of a massive amount of infrastructure,
| social security, etc.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| These are probably the same people who say that
| environmental regulation is not necessary because
| companies would clean up pollution anyways.
| whatshisface wrote:
| "If the health benefits of pollution were so bad,
| insurers would pay plants to install scrubbers."
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| I don't think your comment adds clarity to the line of
| questioning and reasoning.
|
| I think it's damaging to clear thinking by muddying the
| waters.
|
| I give you an example of returning the favor to you:
|
| "Causual relationships can be hard to discern. Some say
| when people spout a spurious claim without evidence nor
| citations that falls in line with the entrenched
| structural power interests it simply shuts down critical
| thinking and causes people to not advocate for themselves
| and their own self interests which lets deep systemic
| issues fester and rot and leading to mass violence."
|
| https://a.co/d/9rTmcYe https://a.co/d/5aIpwPC
| https://a.co/d/0ujVgWg https://a.co/d/0g5HHDh
| pphysch wrote:
| Of course libertarian ideologues will argue FDR was the
| Big Bad. They are arguing from ideology, not science.
|
| FDR committed the grave sin of making a lot of rich
| people slightly less rich, in the short term.
| Deregulation is the answer to everything, including the
| problems caused directly by lack of regulation and
| governance. Hilarious.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I can think of one technology that could easily solve this
| problem: an ability to "freeze" people into some kind of
| hibernation indefinitely until they are needed. Potentially,
| this could even mean going to sleep on Earth and then waking
| up on some distant planet colony where they need people.
| Jarring, but somehow people can find a good life this way I
| bet.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| I bet anything that any robots capable of performing any kind
| of service will be subscription based. It will also purposely
| be out of reach for anyone not wealthy.
|
| Society has to change before humanity has any further
| technological progress that will benefit everyone. We're
| simply in the "how to min max wealth growth" stage.
| overfeed wrote:
| > I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have
| enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere
| with the help of some robots.
|
| If John Deere can help it, those Deerebots will be sealed
| shut, TPM'd & DRM'd to hell. You'd pay a subscription and
| have to take them into a service center to get them serviced
| and have the firmware updated. They basic subscription tier
| will only work with genuine Monsanto(TM) seedPods(R)
| mindslight wrote:
| From what I've seen, the small low-HP tractors without
| particulate filters have a minimum of electronics. It's the
| computerized emissions controls where they start creeping
| in. And I assume the big farmers put up with digital
| restrictions because they want to have their shiny new gear
| serviced by professionals anyway, whereas homesteads there
| is going to be a lot more DIY.
|
| The real problem is that farming is fucking hard. I bought
| a vertical tiller somewhat as a hedge against societal
| collapse from the political movement to destroy America,
| but I'm under no illusions of that being a straightforward
| food supply. The main aim is to be able to do food plots
| for neighbors in trade.
|
| Honestly I've got to wonder if we're going this far, why do
| you even need to live off the _land_? As in, why turn soil
| just to get free sun and water? Why not just indoor
| hydroponics? Or even still using soil, but inside in a much
| more controlled fashion.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Technical progress would be fantastic if the benefits
| didn't go mainly to the top
|
| They don't. You live better than Henry VIII in almost all
| ways (other than you can't establish a new state religion).
| You have access to painkillers, dentistry, sight correction,
| and information on a daily basis, along with more chicken
| than he did. The fact that that's true for hundreds of
| millions of people is incredible.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| > unlikely to manifest
|
| Over what time period? 5 years? 100 years?
| techpineapple wrote:
| I think a lot of cool shit will happen in the next hundred
| years, but the "end of scarcity unlimited money/tech points
| hack" is unlikely to happen in the next 100 years.
|
| And this is the core of my argument, let's talk more about
| the cool shit.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I can see it happening in the next 30 years.
| ajb wrote:
| Yeah
|
| The historic benefits of technology come from eliminating the
| waste of human effort:
|
| - Motors and engines removed the waste of using our muscles as
| an energy source
|
| - Computers removed the waste of people's time doing
| calculations and admin manually
|
| - Electronic Communications removed the waste of carrying
| information in physical form
|
| What's the most prevalent form of waste today? I think it's
| dishonesty and corruption. And AI seems set to make more of it.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| Does AI not also automate away repetitive tasks? This seems
| to be a disingenuous comparison.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| AI is strictly worse at automating repetitive tasks than
| traditional software, because AI output is non-
| deterministic
|
| If a task is repetitive then the output is predictable so
| it should be automated deterministically, not with fuzzy AI
| bullshit
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| LLMs are often worse, yes, but there are decision tree
| based machine learning models that can learn to be
| deterministic for classification if your training data
| accurately reflects the actual problem data.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| This sounds so stupidly over engineered for a majority of
| problems spaces
|
| Like teaching an AI model to learn arithmetic instead of
| just building a calculator
| beau_g wrote:
| I personally think it's polarized, and either the Pentti
| Linkola/Ted K way of thinking that the industrial revolution
| (or maybe even the agricultural revolution) were a detriment to
| humanity is correct and there is no turning it around within
| that framework, or all tech progress will reach an ultimately
| good equilibrium, though will be unstable and have mistakes
| along the way. I definitely lean towards the latter. What I do
| not think at all is we should purposely delay tech progress
| through the use of violence (which is what laws/regulations
| effectively are) while doing some type of wait and think about
| it exercise. I definitely don't think anything (good or bad)
| that does not break the laws of physics is unlikely to
| manifest, quite the opposite, most things we imagine now will
| come to fruition in our lifetimes and many others we haven't
| even imagined yet both good and bad.
| yarekt wrote:
| Regulation is violence? sorry for putting my socialist hat
| on, but free market is efficient, so efficient that without
| regulation it'll optimise away human happiness and find a way
| to turn tears into profits. Regulation is basically saying
| that you can make money in ways that benefits the humanity
| also, at least in theory. Lobbying and corrupt regulators
| muddy the waters
| beau_g wrote:
| Of course, laws/regulations are enforced by the party in a
| country that has a monopoly on violence, and use the threat
| of violence to enforce (either imprisonment or a monetary
| fine, monetary fines are a derivative of kidnapping as
| money takes time to accumulate). Of course I'm not arguing
| against these functions in general, they should be used in
| ways that prevent an even worse act of violence (ex. a
| corporation wasting the time and money of millions of
| people by selling them a dangerous product). The
| application layer is where I believe laws and regulations
| are appropriate though, not preventing the development of
| the technology (ex. trying to limit who, how, and when
| someone/some company can do a large training run for an AI
| video model, because AI video models will be leveraged by
| scammers down the line).
| toogan wrote:
| Threat of violence is not violence.
|
| A policeman standing on a public square threatening to
| incarcerate anybody who is violent results in no violence
| actually happening at that square. Take away that
| regulation (in form of the policeman) and watch the
| actual violence start.
| yarekt wrote:
| That's a very narrow view of humanity and morality. Only
| psychopaths (in a clinical sense, not derogatory) model
| their actions strictly by what's legal.
|
| Many things are moral, but have no legal coverage, some
| things are moral but illegal, and some immoral but legal.
| yarekt wrote:
| Hmm, I see where you're coming from. Monetary fines
| impact corporations "where it hurts", i.e. the bottom
| line.
|
| But yea, that's the only language that a corporate entity
| understands, unfortunately.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Another way to view it is that valid regulations (which in
| this context includes statute) are about handling
| externalities, structuring things so that the market must
| react to them.
|
| One of the most fundamental limits on the market is the
| criminalization of killing other people, giving it a
| prohibitive extra "cost". This kind of restriction on the
| choices of participants is so incredibly well-accepted that
| we simply take it for granted, and seldom think about it as
| a "regulation" even though it is.
|
| That regulation prevents CEOs from "rationally" deciding it
| costs less to assassinate rivals' employees than it costs
| to improve their product.
| diordiderot wrote:
| Feels like early industrial revolution vibes. Some of the hype
| turned real, just not how and a lot later than anyone expected.
| Same thing happened in the post-atomic age. But the gaps
| between revolutions are getting shorter.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I am as optimistic as a factory worker about to replaced by
| robots.
|
| Hence why I can't stand such techno-optmism, apparently most
| folks live in an ideal world free of economics.
| toogan wrote:
| Has the last 70 years of productivity increases led to a
| reduction in weekly work hours? No.
|
| Some jobs will be automated away. Good thing. Braindead stuff
| that a machine can do should be done by a machine. Doesn't
| mean we'll all soon be just picking our noses. There will be
| other work to be done, and if unregulated capitalism has its
| say then it can easily lead to even more worker exploitation.
| oblio wrote:
| Industrial work was really bad for workers at least during
| the early period. Arguably worse than equivalent
| agricultural work.
| tordanik wrote:
| > Has the last 70 years of productivity increases led to a
| reduction in weekly work hours?
|
| Yes, it has led to a significant reduction in hours worked:
| https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
|
| Of course, the effects aren't equally distributed across
| all countries. For example, annual work hours per worker
| have almost halved in Germany since 1950, but only seen a
| more modest decrease in the US. So political factors still
| play a role in how the benefits of increased productivity
| are used by society.
|
| But it's a strong effect. And those numbers don't even
| consider other factors such as how increased life
| expectancy combined with mostly unchanged retirement age,
| and being older when we first start working, give people an
| extra decade or two of not being part of the workforce at
| all.
| toogan wrote:
| The 40-hour workweek was introduced in Germany in the
| mid-1960s. 60 years later, it's still standard. A few
| 39-, 38- or 37.5-hour weeks here and there, but even
| those are by and large 40-hour weeks.
|
| The number of vacation week and public holidays has
| increased, which explains the majority of the difference
| in "annual work hours".
|
| The 10x in productivity is in no way reflected by the
| number of work hours.
| pjmlp wrote:
| No, it lead to less jobs being available.
|
| Good thing when people actually have another job available
| for them.
|
| Not everyone lives in regions where there is another job
| across the street.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Has the last 70 years of productivity increases led to a
| reduction in weekly work hours? No
|
| No, but it hasn't led to a massive increase in incomes
| either (after adjusting for inflation)
|
| But meanwhile everything gets more expensive so while yes
| people still have jobs and work as many hours as before, we
| have much less to show for it
| rchaud wrote:
| Techno-optimism is the domain of people who're confident that
| they'll be part of the managerial class that gets alerted
| when other workers are going over their bathroom break
| allotments.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| My last two roles have involved automating detection of cancers
| and other disease in biopsies (eliminating pathologists' jobs
| in hospitals), and now automating invoice payment and statement
| settlement in the global freight sector (eliminating
| accountants'/operators' jobs in these companies).
|
| I'm honestly very excited about this type of work. The benefits
| to society - better healthcare for less money, humans with
| their beautiful, creative brains not spending 40 hours a week
| looking at documents unnecessarily - are incredibly obvious.
| The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have to
| overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in place.
| We're able to do this work in spite of that wasteful,
| inefficient system, not because of it.
|
| I think the only thing that will actually push people to
| overthrow it is exactly the type of work I'm doing. Much like
| the first industrial revolution begat our first efforts at
| creating a more socialist, just, and democratic society (eg,
| like Fiorello La Guardia for instance). The benefits to this
| the first time were extremely tangible.
| 857593936464 wrote:
| > humans with their beautiful, creative brains not spending
| 40 hours a week looking at documents unnecessarily
|
| What should they be doing once all the meaningful jobs are
| automated away?
|
| > The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have
| to overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in
| place.
|
| > I think the only thing that will actually push people to
| overthrow it is exactly the type of work I'm doing.
|
| Stripping people of their livelihoods is one way to encourage
| them to overthrow the system, yes. Make no mistake though:
| the revolution will not be kind to you.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| We should also be displacing hierarchies. Why does it only
| benefit the very few? Because they get to somehow keep their
| moats. So how can we displace those moats?
| geysersam wrote:
| > So how can we displace those moats?
|
| Abolish private property I guess?
| ohgr wrote:
| The depressing bit is it's a corporate dystopia where you are a
| constant cash cow driven on hype and hope that never
| materialises.
|
| Like fuck me someone was trying to sell my company an AI todo
| list the other day. What problem does it even solve?!?!?
|
| Go out, buy a new iPhone. AI will come tomorrow and tell you
| when your mother gets to the airport and add it to your
| calendar and hire you a robotaxi to shovel your obsolete meat
| corpse into the worker ant distribution hub to escort her back
| to your techno-panopticon.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| I've recently been stuck on the idea that speculation is akin
| to computation... the moment we depart from the reality before
| us.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| Well: though we are not particularly likely to I do think that
| replacing people with machines would be fantastic if we
| actually just let people relax and work less, and so rather
| than lament the state of things I tend to focus on the need to
| promote the value of social systems which support human
| thriving. On the second point, I guess I would say that most of
| the marketing talk we see is unlikely to manifest but the
| future will in fact bring fantastic and fanciful advances in
| technology - it just won't be what the marketers are trying to
| tell us.
| wolfcola wrote:
| right, and we all got to work 20 hour weeks bc of the
| industrial revolution.
| lukevp wrote:
| Huh? 40 hr work weeks are a recent thing, many people in
| history worked 12 hr days 6 days a week. Technology and
| social progress definitely leads to fewer work hours.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| I'm not so sure. Unions (social progress) brought us the
| 40 hour work week more so than technology. Factory
| workers could potentially work more hours than farmers
| who had very busy periods mixed with slower times. I
| suppose they exist, maybe you have seen them, but I've
| not seen a real study of the hours worked by subsistence
| farmers in history. Though technology brings many other
| benefits, it's not clear to me how it plays in to work
| hours.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| It was factories that brought people together enough
| working as a single unit that allowed unions to flourish.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| Before the machines there were guilds of cloth-makers and
| weavers that would work less than five days a week and at
| less strict hours, but they lost their jobs to
| automation.
|
| I can really recommend the book Blood in the machine if
| anyone is interested in how automation early on affected
| workers.
| charlie90 wrote:
| >Technology and social progress definitely leads to fewer
| work hours.
|
| Do they? Seems more like developed countries just
| outsourced the sweatshop factory work to other countries.
| "Out of sight, out of mind" as they say, I guess.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| I'm not saying technology makes our lives easier. I'm
| saying technology makes it more possible than ever to build
| a world where everyone thrives. But it takes human social
| systems to make that happen. Understanding just how much
| good we could do with modern technology underscores the
| value in fighting for the right human social systems.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| We've had a long history of technological improvements being
| widespread distributed to the people. There's not a
| particularly bleak reason to believe the latest AI automation
| won't be too. Look around your desk or your house and just
| count all the effort-saving devices that have made their way
| down to you. Look at the price of TVs cratering. Tech that can
| be recreated easily spreads far and wide. AI can too. It's
| dropped 1000x in costs the last 2 years. This stuff will be
| running on old tech everywhere - and speedier and cheaper new
| chips, bots and other hardware are on their way.
|
| Unless there's a new world war or draconian regulation, we're
| good. It's pretty much locked in.
| oblio wrote:
| Progress is not guaranteed.
|
| Humanity has been around in basically the same form for 2
| million years (and the same form for probably 200 000 years)
| yet life for the average person on the planet really started
| improving circa 1950.
| aksbfjdjsbabs wrote:
| 2 million years is a long time. It's quite a stretch to say
| life only started improving in the last 50. An asteroid
| could hit today and nearly all evidence of our existence
| would be gone in 10k years.
| oblio wrote:
| Life expectancy skyrocketed once we discovered and
| applied hygiene, plus improved sanitation, and also
| antibiotics. More or less, modern medicine.
|
| The industrial era did a lot of things but it also made
| cities, famous for being horrible places to live in, even
| worse. It took the realization of that fact and action
| against pollution to improve that.
|
| Worker's rights movement also had to spring up for 40
| hour work weeks, 2 day weekends, sick leave, unemployment
| benefits, pensions, disability benefits.
|
| Slavery was barely abolished 150 years ago, and it's
| still present in some places. Ditto for serfdom.
|
| Hunter gatherers had healthier diets that settled
| populations thousands of years after the invention of
| agriculture.
|
| MANY things were better for society and neutral or worst
| for the average person.
| rchaud wrote:
| I'm struggling to think of any technological advancement in
| the past 20 years that's saved me time. The only real change
| has been a shift to WFH, but that happened independently of
| technological change in that era. Even things like screen
| sharing and remote desktop were possible before that time.
|
| 25 years ago, sure: online shopping/banking, email and chat
| -- these are all things my Blackberry or Nokia could handle.
| The touchscreen smartphone hasn't really moved the needle
| much in that regard.
| techpineapple wrote:
| This is the core of my original beef, techno-optimism seems
| divorced from the exact things I think it's ideologically
| trying to promote, and instead is just "AI will fix
| everything".
|
| And I basically agree about sort of time saving, we got
| smart phones, which I think was of questionable benefit
| compared to the invention of computers, the internet, and
| cell phones in the first place.
| ctoth wrote:
| Tell me you never called for a taxi and waited two hours
| for it only not to show up without telling me.
|
| Uber has saved me a remarkable amount of time.
|
| More-generally:
|
| https://gwern.net/improvement
| ryandrake wrote:
| I have waited hours while Lyft driver after Lyft driver
| canceled and the algorithm kept picking new drivers.
| techpineapple wrote:
| Yeah I actually had an Uber driver show up after like an
| hour and been like "I'm not taking you there!"
| rchaud wrote:
| No, I haven't. I live in a city, a cab took 15 mins to
| arrive after calling the dispatch service. Uber can take
| just as long, because the request bounces around
| different drivers in the area, the time to arrive is
| dependent on which driver accepts the offered rate and
| how far away they are. I've had to request rides more
| than once because the Uber-set price was rejected by all
| nearby drivers.
|
| When I lived rurally (in college) cabs had to be booked
| in advance, that's just common sense.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > We've had a long history of technological improvements
| being widespread distributed to the people. There's not a
| particularly bleak reason to believe the latest AI automation
| won't be too.
|
| the difference this time is that humans just moved to other
| activities where they were useful, and with super-AI(if it
| will happen) this is not the case anymore.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm kind of optimistic, especially fixing mortality seems
| interesting.
|
| I'm not sure which particular hype won't manifest but a lot of
| the AI progress is kind of inevitable.
| ozim wrote:
| In Europe we have less and less people. Automation is a must
| have because we will need those people in areas that cannot be
| automated.
|
| Transformation will be painful as it is hard to re-train people
| or get people to do stuff that is not really their forte.
| fock wrote:
| yes, automation is necessary and from what I see most non-IT
| companies are far behind what's possible. Something which is
| not necessary and imho pretty stupid is replacing idiotic
| workflow components designed to wash-out responsibility with
| LLMs and now let the bots run amok (which probably is totally
| ok with the bureaucrats who designed these workflows in the
| first place). Most of the AI automation crowd supposedly
| thinks this is a high value activity - while looking down on
| the bureaucrats. Which is pretty funny to me...
| abyssin wrote:
| In Europe we already have the technology for everyone to live
| and retire comfortably. What we don't have is the governments
| whose goal is for everyone to do so. I don't see how more
| technology would solve a political issue.
| ozim wrote:
| I did not write about need for more technology.
|
| What I see is companies failing behind implementing
| existing well known technologies.
|
| It is people who want to keep doing whatever they were
| doing for years that later will be angry, because whatever
| they were doing stopped making sense but they don't
| understand it. They will not want to understand things that
| put them out of job...
| reportgunner wrote:
| > _In Europe we have less and less people._
|
| Sorry, what Europe are you talking about ? I don't think
| that's true.
| qudat wrote:
| Humans will always value human labor, creative destruction is
| foundational to economic growth and it has been happening since
| the discovery of fire.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| They don't, though, they consistently want the cheaper
| machine made products rather than the artisinal human made
| versions. Sure it might align with their "values" but when
| they see the value difference at the cash register their
| minds will quickly change. It's already happening with AI
| designed products.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Completely agree. I look at all these predictions, good and
| bad, but then I look at the global temperature and it feels
| watching someone in complete denial after a terminal cancer
| diagnoses talking about their plans for the future, a switch in
| careers, investments etc.
|
| In terms of AI particularly I can only focus on the here and
| now, and the real world effects that I'm seeing are split
| between enabling creepy men to produce deepfakes of women
| they're stalking and enabling bad faith actors with the ability
| to erode faith in our democratic systems. Om both counts I
| repeatedly see the "techbros" who develop the tech waving their
| hands or actively supporting it.
|
| All of the benefits right now like being able to code
| marginally faster or bounce ideas off of aan LLM feel like
| playing with firecrackers while watching dangerous men develop
| guns after we got a hold of gunpowder.
| danans wrote:
| > It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society
|
| Your definition of "society" implies that it means "everyone".
|
| If you circumscribe the definition more narrowly to the owners
| of wealth/capital, the benefits to them (and the thin
| managerial class just below them) are pretty clear.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think one of the sad things is that when software went
| mainstream the culture went mainstream too so now that everyone
| wants to be "oh woe is me the world sucks" software people have
| to do the same too instead of being optimists.
|
| The degrowther culture of the mainstream comes to push out all
| nerds eventually.
| paulddraper wrote:
| This is what the Amish/Luddites would say.
| techpineapple wrote:
| I don't think Amish/Luddites would make quite the nuanced
| point I'm trying to make, but also, I don't have any
| particular beef with the Amish or the Luddites, in fact the
| older I get maybe the more I side with them, but again,
| that's aside from the particular point I'm making now.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is exactly correct technically and perfectly on the existing
| "paved path" of technology determinism.
|
| My company is actively in the process of demonstrating the
| "Learning machine" which is a Weiner style cybernetic system of
| systems
|
| It's unquestionable at this point that machines will displace all
| human labor where labor efficiency is the key factor for
| investment/use. Start with transfer learning from existing human
| machine interfaces and then expand to onpolicy with human
| feedback to SARSA.
|
| The only remaining question is the persistent one "who benefits"
|
| Almost nobody is working on what to do after
| zurfer wrote:
| I think plenty of people are working on that, some unaware :P
|
| Games for status will continue.
|
| Consuming experiences will continue (experiences that require
| humans will be premium).
|
| And in a good case, we will still have plenty of work to do to
| decide what to do (going to space, making earth sustainable,
| merging with machines, ...).
| gom_jabbar wrote:
| > Almost nobody is working on what to do after
|
| One interesting possibility is that this is not something
| humans need to work on at all - because, as Nick Land famously
| put it, "Tomorrow can take care of itself." [0]
|
| [0] https://retrochronic.com/#meltdown
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Why's he write like if I tried to mimick anti-oedipus
| getnormality wrote:
| This article lost all credibility with me here:
|
| > ...this means that only 20% of labor productivity growth in the
| US since 1988 has been driven by R&D spending! Capital deepening
| accounts for around half of labor productivity growth in this
| period...
|
| This is like saying that Jeff Dean's net worth is attributable
| not to his programming skills, but to the capital deepening of
| his bank account. The authors are working with concepts at a
| level of abstraction where they've lost contact with what they're
| saying.
| __loam wrote:
| Bizarre way to describe capital deepening. Jeff's programming
| skills probably got a lot more relevant because of things like
| the proliferation of internet access and utility computing.
| Seems like a pretty simple statement to me but maybe that's too
| abstract for you.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| You know how office workers are more productive because of
| computers? This didn't just happen because various companies
| did R&D investments in building (better) computers, but also
| because companies actually spent money buying computers for
| their office workers and because those office workers spent
| time learning how to use computers.
| getnormality wrote:
| If A caused B caused C, how does one determine the relative
| contributions of A and B to C? It makes no sense.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| That's because binary logic is the wrong model.
|
| B requires A. C requires both A and B. But also, A has a
| cost and B has a cost, and spending more on A or B can
| maybe get you more C.
|
| Maybe spending more on developing better computers won't
| actually help anything (because they've already got 640k
| memory, which is enough for anyone). But only half of the
| people who can benefit from them have actually bought one
| so far, so collectively spending twice as much on buying
| computers can make them collectively twice as beneficial.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| It has become fashionable to write think pieces without
| thinking too much.
| mooreds wrote:
| If you haven't read this classic about technology deployment from
| 2015, it's worth a read.
|
| https://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html
|
| Feels like we're still in the exploration phase of GenAI, but ML
| seems like it is in the deployment phase.
| klooney wrote:
| A lot of the people writing are in the US, which mostly does R&D
| and services- broad automation of production is likely to be
| invisible here.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| So they are arguing which one will get more benefits first - r&d
| or general automation? What is the point in arguing around it?
|
| Disconnect between progress being done (ie. alphafold) and trying
| to infer answer from some historic stats on r&d investment,
| ratios, their past estimated impact etc. is... just weird.
|
| It's also funny that the whole ai itself together with constant
| breakthroughs is r&d.
| godelski wrote:
| I hate these people that try to argue we don't need R&D. It's
| extremely short sighted and equivalent to pretending that the
| ground you stand on is worthless. Without the ground, you
| literally have nothing to stand on... Talk about pulling
| yourself up by your bootstraps...
| godelski wrote:
| This is a bit silly. It is equivalent to saying "most food will
| come from tractors, not land." There is some truth to this, but
| you really can't have one without the other. The whole system is
| interconnected.
|
| The problem with all these jabs at R&D and science is not
| recognizing that R&D and science produce the very foundations
| that lead to the ability to do production in the first place. I'm
| certainly not saying we should dump all our money into R&D, but I
| do find it weird that others talk as if the ground you stand on
| doesn't matter. You literally cannot stand without it. The truth
| is that you need both. I suspect why we shy away from R&D is for
| 2 big reasons.
|
| First, it has a lot of failure. The hardest thing about doing
| research is being able to stick with it when 90% of what you do
| doesn't work. It's fucking hard. But of course it is. If it was
| easy it would have already been done. So returns on the work can
| take a lot of time and the visibility of the failure is
| emotionally draining to those without enough resilience.
|
| Second, we do not accurately capture nor ascribe the value nor of
| research. People who create ground breaking scientific
| revolutions that create the capacity for trillion dollar markets
| never end up with 1% of the result of their work. You don't see
| Tim Berners-Lee being a billionaire, nor Linus Torvald. You
| didn't see it in Einstein and cases like Turing are quite common
| through history. Certainly this is an alignment issue as we as a
| society should be encouraging such pursuits as their benefits
| vastly outweigh anything that has been done by Apple or Google.
| Not to diminish their achievements, they have both done fantastic
| and incredible things, but do they not sit on the foundations
| created by Turing, Burners-Lee, Hopper, and others. Or look even
| today, the work done by LeCun, Sutskever, Karpathy, Fei-Fei Li,
| Hinton, and yes, even Schmidhuber has created more than a few
| dozen multi-billion dollar enterprises. Yet as far as I am aware,
| not a single one of them is a billionaire. I do not believe (I
| could be TOTALLY wrong) their combined net worth is a billion.
| Even if it was, that would be a far cry from what many of the
| mogul we see today. Do we really think Zuckerberg has created
| more _value_ than these people? Certainly this is entirely
| dependent upon your definition of _value_ and I think most of use
| could agree that it would be incredibly naive to believe this
| exclusively means the money in their pockets. If you really do
| believe that, I will say that you 're part of a problem. Money is
| a proxy, sometimes we need to stop and think "a proxy for what?"
| akomtu wrote:
| If we discovered a civilization of moderately smart pandas living
| on a remote planet and dropped the AI technology onto them, what
| would happen to their civilization? And what's our motivation?
| guy234 wrote:
| how could anyone possibly know that?
| callamdelaney wrote:
| Obviously?
|
| The US pays $12,000,000,000,000~ in salaries per year the TAM of
| automation is, assuming that 10% of work can be automated, $1.2
| trillion dollars.
| reportgunner wrote:
| Well yeah 10% of a big number is always going to be a big
| number, that's how math works.
|
| You can take all the salaries of the world and assume you can
| automate a percentage of that and you will consistently arrive
| to a big number.
| bashfulpup wrote:
| Very typical SV argument that R&D is "complex" and everything
| else is "simple".
|
| Would it blow your mind if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI
| that can do math/code better than 99% of humans but ordering a
| hotdog on doordash would be cutting edge and barely doable?
|
| I don't disagree that "common" tasks are more valuable. I only
| argue that the argument these are easily automatable is a
| viewpoint based on ignorance. RPA has been around for over a
| decade and is not used in many tasks. AI is largely the same,
| until we get massive unrestriced access to the data for it we
| will not automate it.
| User23 wrote:
| The code that AI is good at currently is exactly common tasks.
|
| Good luck getting it to write a competitive video card driver
| for Nvidia hardware or anything else that requires actual
| creative problem solving that isn't github boilerplate.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| It's only common among trained experts. For most people, even
| simple code is astonishingly difficult.
|
| I personally get more value from AI when coding more complex
| and novel things. Not fully automated, but English has become
| the most valuable language for me when coding.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I think this is the blind spot that a lot of tech workers
| have.
|
| To them, AI is years (decades?) away from being able to
| produce an Excel clone.
|
| To average people, excel is just a tool to add up columns
| of numbers. Something AI is readily capable of today.
| sumedh wrote:
| > Good luck getting it to write a competitive video card
| driver for Nvidia hardware
|
| Jensen says they use AI to build their chips.
| rocmcd wrote:
| > $CEO says they use $HYPED_TECH to build their $PRODUCT.
|
| Color me surprised.
| sumedh wrote:
| What about you, do you use AI currently?
| gnulinux wrote:
| > if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI that can do
| math/code better than 99% of humans
|
| This not even remotely close to true. Like not even a little
| bit. I use Cursor and Gemini for work daily and I'd be hard
| pressed to think AI is a "better" programmer than any
| professional software engineer. Sure it makes writing code
| faster and more efficient, because you just click tab and three
| lines are written for you. It absolutely isn't better than me
| at coding though.
|
| The claim about math is even more unbelievable than the claim
| about coding. We still don't have a single theorem proved and
| published by a LLM without human aid. LLMs barely follow a
| discussion in basic topology. It's incredibly ridiculous to
| state they're better than 99% of people. More like 0% of
| mathematicians and maybe 50% of college freshman.
| istjohn wrote:
| The top 50% of college freshman math and physics majors is
| approximately equal to the top 1% of all people.
| sealeck wrote:
| https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
| techpineapple wrote:
| I realized today while coding with cursor that AI seems to
| operate exactly the way I intuit it does, which is it acts
| like a junior engineer who works by copying existing code but
| doesn't understand why. For a lot of tasks that works great,
| I do this a lot as a senior engineer, but I know when not to.
| you can't let it run wild, because it doesn't know when not
| too.
| graemep wrote:
| > a junior engineer who works by copying existing code but
| doesn't understand why
|
| Given the amount of time I have spent fixing code written
| like this over the years it is not encouraging.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > We still don't have a single theorem proved and published
| by a LLM without human aid.
|
| I'm pretty sure that by "do math" the parent was referring to
| applying math, as one would do in the course of other tasks,
| and not mathematical research, just as by "code" they likely
| referred to writing code to solve a problem and not to
| algorithmic research.
|
| And from my experience teaching & tutoring both math and
| programming at various levels, I would absolutely agree with
| the claim that AIs like Claude 3.7 Sonnet surpass over 99% of
| humans at typical short tasks.
|
| It'll probably take some more time until context, memory and
| tool-use are improved sufficiently to allow AIs to tackle
| longer-term tasks effectively, but I'm sure it'll get there.
| And just as an example of progress, there was recently a post
| about the first "fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review
| without human edits or interventions" [0].
|
| [0] https://www.rdworldonline.com/sakana-ai-claims-first-
| fully-a...
| tokai wrote:
| >10yrs ago [...] ordering a hotdog on doordash would be cutting
| edge and barely doable?
|
| Online food ordering is a lot older than 15 years.
| rchaud wrote:
| Doordash is not the same as traditional online ordering. DD
| and all delivery apps are 3rd party middlemen that set their
| own menu prices and operate separately from the restaurant.
|
| Through this kind of obfuscation, they incentivize the growth
| of things like ghost kitchens, which are basically faceless
| factories. Nobody would order from them if they drove by one.
| but on the apps, they are displayed as standalone
| restaurants.
| falcor84 wrote:
| While I know there have been some issues with working
| conditions at ghost kitchens, I've also heard tons of
| horrible stories from regular kitchens, so it's not clearly
| to me that there's a significant difference on that front.
|
| As for referring to them as "faceless factories", I can't
| even start to imagine what sentiment that should evoke in
| me. I don't have an issue buying food products made at
| actual factories, and have visited quite a few. As such I
| don't have any issue ordering from a ghost kitchen located
| in an industrial area that may look like a factory on the
| outside.
| Brysonbw wrote:
| This is an interesting take and I think it could possibly be true
| (at this moment in time). Likewise, only time will tell...
| stego-tech wrote:
| It's the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions all over again.
| Broad automation of labor will not result in _societal_ uplift,
| but _Capital_ uplift, absent worker action to enforce equal
| distribution of gains (like how Unions brought us the 40hr work
| week and the end of Child Labor w / the Industrial Revolution).
| Worse yet, the irrationality of these techbro arguments shows
| their complete lack of long-term thinking or systems analysis.
|
| They cite "societal disruption" through the wholesale (or
| significant) replacement of labor via AI, but then shrug off the
| problem as one for government to solve - governments _they own,
| control, and /or influence_. Yet if we take them at their word
| and they get rid of labor - who the heck do they expect to buy
| their stuff, and with what income? Capital's plan is very much
| (Eliminate Labor) + (Continued Sales of Products) = (We Keep All
| The Money), and I'd like to believe the HN community at the very
| least can see how that math does not work.
|
| Capital would have to concede to a _complete rework of
| civilization_ away from consumption and towards a higher goal,
| but that would entail tearing down the power and wealth
| structures they benefit from _now_ with no guarantee of a
| brighter future _tomorrow_. Plowing ahead with AI while
| _prohibiting_ any attempts at systemic revolution isn 't just
| irresponsible, it's _insane_ , and I'm tired of having pretend
| it's not for the sake of a stock price somewhere.
|
| Present systems are incompatible with an AI-dominated future,
| full stop.
| kkaatii wrote:
| One danger is that, from a macroeconomics view, GDP growth can
| be attained without any regard for natural unemployment rates.
| When technology, controlled by capital, drives up markup on
| wages by displacing human labor and killing competition, then
| natural unemployment will rise, but the economy can still
| "thrive," from a statistical perspective. But it is individual
| persons being ignored by statistics. Indeed a grim future.
| stego-tech wrote:
| > GDP
|
| Your entire argument is why I reject GDP as a reliable
| measure of economic health (that is to say, I agree with you
| 100%). It can be a _component_ of it, sure, but as the
| standalone metric it 's relied upon as-is, it's _awful_.
| Doesn 't capture inflation, doesn't capture real productivity
| growth, doesn't capture employment rates or labor
| compensation or income distribution. Heck, GDP is _literally_
| an ideal expression of Goodhart 's Law: we have built entire
| systems designed to game a single number that was proposed as
| a metric of economic health, which no longer makes it a good
| metric of economic health!
|
| If someone's sole defense is "GDP Up = Good", I do not take
| their argument seriously - because it isn't.
| mitjam wrote:
| It's a matter of the relative value of types of production
| factors. Will AI increase or decrease the relative value of human
| labor compared to machinery, raw materials, and land? Beyond Adam
| Smith: What about Social, cultural, and Symbolic capital (Pierre
| Bourdieu). My gut feeling: median relative value of labor down,
| especially for knowlege worker, Other factors up, including
| social, symbolic, cultural capital. Being in an in-group
| protects, eg. in regulated professions. I expect regulations and
| group-thinking to go up as a protective measure.
| coldtea wrote:
| Most AI automation would automate useless bureucratic (public and
| private) bullshit jobs, not real productivity.
| falcor84 wrote:
| If you're able to define a clear metric to objectively
| differentiate between "bullshit jobs" and "real productivity",
| you'll probably nab a Nobel in Economics.
| reportgunner wrote:
| That's the easy part. The hard part is getting people to
| admit that the metric has been discovered already. Most
| problems with automation are organizational problems not
| technical ones.
| colesantiago wrote:
| The techo-optimistic people really need to answer the question on
| the middle classes and on the poor's minds.
|
| How can anyone be techno-optimistic about the future where AI is
| mass replacing their jobs to the point they cannot pay their
| rent?
|
| How would anyone pay their rent or taxes when they get mass laid
| off by AI in this age and where job postings get less and less,
| where businesses push for efficiency. Here, I see businesses and
| startups will try to copy Elon's style of layoffs and try to get
| away with it.
|
| I don't think UBI works here either especially with rent
| increases, rent, childcare, taxes, etc and it sounds too
| unfeasible and utopian.
|
| Also there is a narrative of "There will be new jobs created in
| the AI era" but I just don't see this happening since AI will
| replace jobs faster than they are created. Case in point with
| prompt engineering.
|
| Seems like those who are techno optimistic are the rich, investor
| class invested in the very things that push their narrative and
| where money isn't a problem at all.
|
| This class of people haven't thought about this nor that they
| care when AI job replacement happens since they are already
| invested in it.
| teleforce wrote:
| I'm really surprised out of current nearly 300 comments and
| counting, nobody really is mentioning constraint programming or
| CP, a seemingly forgotten deterministic sibling of the stochastic
| data-driven AI [1],[2],[3].
|
| "Out of these 14 tasks, we guessed that only 6 require abstract
| reasoning alone to perform. Strikingly, we classified only one of
| the top five most important tasks for medical scientists as
| relying solely on abstract reasoning. Overall, the most critical
| aspects of the job appear to require hands-on technical skills,
| sophisticated coordination with others, specialized equipment
| use, long-context abilities, and complex multimodal
| understanding."
|
| Almost all of 14 R&D tasks listed in the table including that are
| not suited for data-driven AI with abstract reasoning can be
| solved by CP. Provided that we are allocating enough compute
| resources with at least similar to that we're currently providing
| data-driven AI with the crazy amount cloud networks of massively
| parallel compute CPU/GPU/TPU/etc.
|
| Fun facts, the modern founder of Logic, Optimization, and
| Constraint Programming is George Boole, the grandfather of
| Geoffrey Everest Hinton, the "Godfather of AI" and "Godfather of
| Deep Learning".
|
| [1] Constraint programming:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming
|
| [2] Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming: A Fruitful
| Collaboration - John Hooker - CMU (2023) [video]:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/TknN8fCQvRk
|
| [3] "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - MIT
| (2011) [video]:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI
| hyperturtle wrote:
| I've always wondered if it would work out well for an LLM to
| evaluate a constraint program/script when it encountered a
| problem involving constraints / logic. like or-tools with
| python or evaluating a minizinc program.
| teleforce wrote:
| Yes, that's very plausible and I've thought similarly but not
| exactly the same approach for the diagramming limitations of
| LLM [1].
|
| Fun facts, the presenter John Hooker was asked about how to
| determine the suitability of a particular heuristic solver
| for specific problems in his presentation. He casually
| answered that if he knows the solutions to that he will
| probably win a Nobel Prize. But perhaps AI/LLM can help in a
| way to recommend the solver based on the type of applications
| or problems.
|
| If I'm not mistaken there's also Donald Knuth (TAOCP) asking
| questions after the JH's presentation, how often you see
| that?
|
| [1] Diagrams AI can, and cannot, generate:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43424916
| babyent wrote:
| I'm using constraint programming in my platform.
|
| Any experts want to help me?
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| Absolutely agree with this article, also there is an astronomical
| amount of low hanging fruit out there. Areas where the
| cost/reward calculation have not made sense in the past.
|
| One only has to think of the ubiquity of excel VBA still, and
| that'd probably still be regarded as fancy for most.
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