I see where you’re coming from, but is this really the main source of the inequality?

Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. In the past, companies have shared shared profits more widely due to benevolence (it happens), government edict (e.g.; ww2 era), or social/political pressure (e.g., post-war boom).

Fwiw, I think that the mid-20th century build up of the middle class was an anomaly (sadly), and perhaps we are just reverting to the norm in terms of capital class and worker class extremes.

I see tons of super skilled folks still getting financially fucked by the capital class simply because there is no real option other than to try to attempt to become part of the capital class.

In the current world, where do you think a lot of the capital class is able to get their capital?

Technological progress, and especially the Internet, has made much bigger markets out of what were previously lots of little markets, and now th "winner take all/most" dynamics make it so that where you previously could have, for example, lots of "winners" in every city (e.g. local newspapers selling classified ads), where now Google, FB and Amazon gobble up most ad dollars - I think someone posted that Amazon's ad business alone is bigger than all US (maybe more than that?) newspaper ad businesses.

(Yes, they were printing bibles; radio and TV and the internet originally were going to be educational ...)

Yes, more of this money is going, instead of middle-class workers, straight to the capital class who own the "machines" that do the work people used to do. Except instead of it being a factory that makes industrial machines owned by some wealthy industrialist, the machines are things like Google and AWS and the owners are the small number of people with significant stock holdings.

It's really striking though that a person graduating high school in say, 1970, could easily pick from a number of career choices even without doing college or even learning an in-demand trade, like plumbing, welding, etc. Factory work still existed and had a natural career progression that wasn't basically minimum wage, and the same went for retail. Sure, McDonalds burger flippers didn't expect then to own the restaurant in 10 years, but you could take lots of retail or clerical jobs, advance through hard work and support a family on those wages. Those are the days that are super gone and I totally agree with you both that something has changed for the worse for everyone who's not already wealthy.

Only in certain places, and only mostly due to crazy policies that made housing ridiculously unaffordable. I'm in an area where my barber lives on 10 acres of land he didn't inherit and together with his wife raises two children. This type of relaxed life is possible to do in wide swathes of the country outside of the tier-one cities that have global competition trying to get in and live there, as long as you make prudent choices.

I think 20- to 30-something engineers who have spent their entire adult lives in major coastal cities have a huge blind spot to how middle America lives.

[0]: https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...

In general, I'd argue minimum wage jobs aren't anymore a stepping stone to some sustainable good job; they're basically viewed like consumables by companies. Even someone with a decade of experience, say, at several retail stores or restaurants, can't expect to be offered a position making $50,000 a year plus benefits just for having done his job well every day. By contrast, a dedicated factory worker with a decade of experience 50 years ago could expect to have advanced somewhat, and would expect continued advancement. Today everyone working in retail, restaurants, etc. all know that if they're going to do any better it's going to be by leaving that sector, via learning a trade, going to college, or perhaps founding their own small business. All things which were good options in the past too, but advancement was once a realistic expectation too.

The only situation I can imagine would be if the wife has a government job with extremely generous health insurance subsidies.

There’s always another appointment lined up before and after mine, so I guess he’s pulling 6 figures without much sweat.

I live in the principal city of the local Metropolitan Statistical Area; it's by no means a big city, but it's representative of many small cities around the country. My barber lives out in the county, outside of city limits, where it is much more rural and one can indeed buy 10 acres for not a whole lot of money.

I believe his wife is a schoolteacher; I don't believe public employee benefits are especially generous in this state.

Ask them what their deductible/oop max, and how they get that insurance, and I bet you will have your answer for how your friend can afford to raise a family of 4 as a barber and buy and live on 10 acres of land. I doubt a 2 barber couple could pull it off. The security/benefits of one half of a couple being a government employee is pretty valuable.

Bet you can get the same for less than $20 within 3 miles (and possibly far less).

I paid $10 for my last haircut ($6 two months ago - thank you, Joe Biden). Luckily there's another shop nearby that still charges $5.

I’m not just paying for a haircut, it’s an experience that’s worth every penny.

This isn't specific to cities.

In fact, people in rural areas are worse impacted, because the rise of Walmart, Dollar General, and others funnel money out of their towns that would have otherwise enable many local families to capture the profits from local spending. Today a lot of that spending goes mostly to those companies, and only a fraction of the money stays, in the form of a few low-wage jobs.

I'm not saying it's impossible to not live in poverty. I'm just saying it's much much harder, because "advancement" is obsolete in a lot of occupations where it used to be a thing.

Isn't this rather a strong argument for the claim that what high school as of today teaches is a strong mismatch with what the labour market demands? In other words: the pupils are taught skills for many years of their life that are rather worthless for the job market.

Why won't tradesman cut their prices?

But high school and college both got dumbed down, and now an education at a state university is comparable to high school in the first half of the twentieth century.

School teaches everybody to read, write and reason about things in general to a decent level. You can't teach high school kids the basics of all the careers out there beyond stuff that's generally applicable - you wouldn't have the time or the equipment. And schools do often have elective shop, cooking, electronics etc classes for those who want to do them.

Ha, those were cut from school before I was in high school decades ago.

I don't think UBI is the solution. Nor is squeezing people more than they are being squeezed. Efficiency and productivity are good things. What is wasteful are things like make-work programs like the DMV or other govt office. That crap needs to be automated away. Hospitals need more funding. Schools are unclear. I think schools would benefit from privatization. I don't think the same of hospitals. Not sure why.

Today, that's close to impossible unless you take student loans, go through the gauntlet of getting a higher paying job, and then have to grapple with home prices assuming you don't live in a place with reasonably affordable home ownership.

If you think the DMV and government offices are "make-work" then we need to start with cutting military spending because it's the biggest "make-work" government program we have that the vast majority of U.S. spending goes to.

[0] https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...

We can't change mandatory spending or we have millions of elderly people dying because social security vanishes into thin air.

Some people call it a Ponzi scheme, but it’s a pool, as designed.

The military is a big jobs program and all the industrial support generates a lot of economic activity. Better if they just dropped it in the ocean, though. Too much temptation to test it.

And outside of electronics a lot of physical-goods/land stuff is less attainable in many places in the country anyway.

The problem with non-redistributive approaches is that generational wealth rarely goes away. So if you don't have it, the number of people who don't have to try to out-spend you for whatever you want only goes up as time passes.

I'm pretty sure the latter 3 are more important to standard of living than the former.

Ergo, I believe your claim that standard of living is superior to 1970 is false. Having a shiny iPhone to distract you from the fact that you're homeless, sick and starving is not a step up.

[0] https://mpost.io/wp-content/uploads/975d2151-7def-45a4-8c52-...

Well, we (in the US), have slowly been privatizing them and it’s bad! If you look at test results though, it’s great! Because private charter schools can drop underperforming students before the end of the term and artificially inflate their numbers. There are many more reasons that education with a profit motive isn’t better than without. I suggest maybe reading up on this before casually suggesting how you think we should radically erode our institution.

Consider the elephant in the room:

https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per...

Where does that money come from?

The government spent it.

I submit that it is not hyperbole to say that probably 95% of all global human problems can have their root cause traced to poverty. That is not a scientific number, so don't ask for a citation (it ain't happening).

Anyone who only has the skills to affect the lives and/or environments of the people in their immediate surrounding are going to find themselves on the 'have nots' end of the spectrum in the coming decades.

But looking back further - ohhhhhh yeah dude. Oh yeah. Totally. For a brief period my mom worked at a BofA facility that _processed paper checks_. Like they had a whole big office for it. That's completely 100% gone now. The checks get scanned at the point of entry (cash registers, teller counters, etc) and then shredded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942

In short the Federal government broke the individual laborers and labor unions to make sure they could afford to win World War 2.

Yes this tech may not eliminate jobs, but the jobs remaining will be indefinite less skilled easier to replace, or outsource

As for human translators, the need for them far, far exceeds the number of them. Have you ever needed translation help? I sure have, but no human translator was available or was too expensive.

This is probably the real problem. Translators are payed shit nowadays for what is a really high-skill job. I have translators in the extended family who had to give up on that line of work because the pay wouldn’t sustain them anymore.

the issue is that many translation jobs will, and already are, being replaced with 'proofread machine translation output' jobs that simply don't pay enough. translation checking is careful, detailed work that often takes almost as much time as translating passages yourself, yet it pays a third or less of the rate because 'the machine is doing most of the work.'

An adequate AI translation is a lot better than no translation.

e.g. Italian citizenship can cost as much as a brand new car in Brazil and almost half of that cost could come from certified translation hurdles.

I somehow imagine it'll be the worst of both worlds but I'm a glass half empty kind of guy.

Everybody who doesn't have to do physical labour - including me - should be happy and grateful for that privilege - not try to rob even more from physical labourers, who in the end, create everything.

* Verbal translation, where accuracy is usually important enough to want to also have a human onboard since humans still have an easier time with certain social clues.

* High-culture translation, where there's a lot to personal choice and explaining it. GPT can give out many versions but can't yet sufficiently explain its reasoning, nor would its tastes necessarily match that of humans.

* Technical translations for manuals and such. This market will be under severe threat from GPTs, though for high-accuracy cases one would still want a human editor just in case.

All in all, GPT will contract the market, but many human translators will be fine. There's still areas where you'd still want a human, and deskilling isn't a bug threat - a human can decide to immerse and get experience directly, and many will still do so by necessity.

In some cases, the quality may not go down or even go up (we've probably all seen some pretty bad human translations).

"AI" is not the only automation that threatens translation jobs: translation memories (plain ol' databases that remember past translations) have killed a lot of business for human translators, namely re-translating new versions of products, where not a lot has changed. Nowadays, they only get paid for the sentences that were modified compared to the previous version ("the diff"). SDL Trados is an example of this simple approach that is extremely effective, and used heavily e.g. by the European Commission's translation service.

not only am I sure people will have no trouble eating, I'm willing to wager obesity goes up

i'm not teasing, I don't think your worry is warranted

97% of jobs used to be working on the farm. Now it's something like 2%.

Ted Faro is alive today. We just aren't sure which of the FRANK'S he's at.

Ted Faro was a horrible human being blinded by delusions of grandeur, but he wasn’t “evil” - he was even convinced he was saving humanity by ending the threat of both war and climate change.

I don’t see GPT itself as representing a new Faro Plague, but I do see a lot of wannabe Ted Faros making the decisions at the top.

If LLMs come even close to achieving their short-term potential, we’re unleashing a bigger destabilizing force on the world than the smartphone/social media combo - and the world of 202x seems blatantly incapable of absorbing that level of disruption.

That is no longer the case.

Think of it instead as cognitive habitat. Sure, there has been habitat loss in the past, but those losses have been offset by habitat gains elsewhere.

This time, I don't see anywhere for habitat gains to come, and I see a massive, enormous, looming (ha!) cognitive habitat loss.

Your job didn't exist then. Mine didn't, either.

This prediction has occurred with every technology revolution. It hasn't been borne out yet.

> the sort of undergrad maneuver

It's a variation of the broken window fallacy.

So what? You are performing 'induction from history', which is possibly the hand-waviest possible means of estimating what is next to occur.

Discontinuities occur. Fire gets tamed. Alphabets get invented. What went before is only a solid guide to the future absent any major disruption to the status quo. There is no a-priori reason to think that this time will be the same, either. Burden of proof is yours.

> It's a variation of the broken window fallacy.

I appreciate parsimony as much as the next academic but I'd appreciate you fleshing out your position here, so I can take it apart at the joints, in the custom and manner of my people >:)

The "this time it's gonna be completely unlike anything seen before!" is much more suspect.

> fleshing out your position here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

The parallels with your theory are unmistakable. Prosperity doesn't come from jobs that are little more than make-work.

I propose that you invest in a more convincing line of argument. The burden of proof lies heavy upon you.

Secondly -- for the life of me -- I don't see how we got from "prosperity doesn't come from jobs that are little more than make-work" (a claim, by the way, that Keynes would take exception to) to the view that automating most of the intellectual work on the planet will have nugatory impact, or that we'll all just vy to become celebrated Twitch streamers or influencers or whatever (assuming that synthetic influencers don't take off -- oh, wait, they did: https://www.synthesia.io/glossary/ai-influencer)

Even were you correct (and Keynes wrong), the instantaneous conversion of meaningful labour --- journalism, counselling, engineering -- into, as you say, "make-work" (the position I infer you are taking) would have tremendous cost.

Need I invoke Rawls here on widely-distributed self-respect/self-esteem? It's actually one of the prerequisites, he notes, for a stable civilization; https://academic.oup.com/book/32571/chapter-abstract/2703665...

At minimum, the psychological impact of such a transition would make the developed world's COVID hangover look like a day at the zoo.

Finally, the Parable of the Broken Window specifically refers to destructive work. Non-productive work is not covered. https://finshots.in/archive/dig-holes-and-get-paid-to-fill-t.... And that is to say nothing about how economic fruits are distributed -- a whole other matter, upon which, I again infer, you have no further comment.

Up until Louis Pasteur invented the germ theory of illness, it was broadly understood, across many different cultures, that disease had its origins in one or all of: witchcraft, possession, loose morals, blocked meridians, etc.

Were you to do historical induction on the spawning of illness theory, you might well conclude that no theory of illness would be scientifically verifiable. You might have argued that anyone claiming a radical change in medicine was deluded, alarmist, or simply excitable.

And you would have missed out on the multiple decades of extra health that you've had on account of antibiotics, sterile procedure, and disinfectant. Your induction from history would have caused you to miss the disanalogy.

Something to think about next time you're at the doctor.

As to distribution of economic fruits, as I mentioned before, replacing labor with machines made the US the most prosperous country in history, along with the richest poor people.

Your country, the USA, is very close to system collapse because of its inequal distribution of fruits. I daresay it makes good popcorn-time.

Sorry, but breaking a window and then fixing it is non-productive.

> Your country, the USA, is very close to system collapse because of its inequal distribution of fruits.

Hardly. If the US will collapse, it's because of the current leftist swing of the government engaging in ever-increasing wealth redistribution.

> I daresay it makes good popcorn-time.

It's the equal distribution of income countries that repeatedly collapse. France is in the news currently because they've discovered that the math of redistribution does not work, and the people who cannot accept the math are rioting.

Good night and good luck

And yea you can say that birds are dinosaurs but the transition was very messy.

I wonder how long it will take politics to appreciate the deep societal problems that may soon arise. Probably it will be too little, too late.

The luddites were trying to defend their livelihoods, communities etc. It's the same rational thing people are looking at now: How to survive

Fast forward to today. I received a solicitation for a charity in the mail the other day. They enclosed pictures of the poor kids. The kids were all wearing fashionable, spotless clothes in perfect condition.

That's what industrial textile machines gave us.

Any source for those starvation deaths? I would like to learn more about what prevented them from simply doing what the survivors did.

You can not easily buy a weaving machine (there are some second hand ones) or easily go to your local maker space and use the weaving machine to create the design you desire. Open source in the space of textile making is in its infancy even though there are some projects. I bet it is easier to get a low volume tape-out of some custom chips than it is to get a custom roll of textile. (you can get printing but that's not the same thing)

Textiles have become way cheaper and both higher quality (when demanded) and lower quality (cost saving fast fashion) and available in far higher quantities.

Some things were lost in this transition.

I've seen people use them to make rugs and things for sale in gift shops.

There's nothing stopping you from doing this.

My point was that access to the technological advancement has not trickled down and that this creates an imbalance of power.

Compare how easy it is to get a custom textile (not a custom print) made to how easy it is to get a custom PCB made (it is reasonably easy to etch a double sided board and multi-layer and flexible ones can easily be ordered online). The situation with regards to knitting is somewhat better.

Saying that a "a basic loom isn't hard to make" in a world of high speed air jet digital looms is equivalent to saying that perf-board still exists in a world of SMD components.

Tangent, I’m looking for some sci fi about this topic. Any suggestions?

But we can technically do much better waterproof concrete or whatever - however our incentives are also not aligned in the same ways.

Here's a tangential link to monks building a Gothic cathedral with modern machines: https://carmelitegothic.com/

Honestly as a human who grasps how the economy works, this doesn't sound like a good thing, but I don't see any path to trying the fundamental changes that would be required for really good general AI to not be an absolute Depression generator.

The only thing I'm wondering is, will the wealthiest ones, who actually have any power to influence these fundamental thing, figure this out before it's too late? I really doubt your Musks and Bezoses would enjoy living out their lives on ring-fenced compounds or remote islands while the rest of the world devolves into the Hunger Games.

This is complete nonsense. An LLM has no ability to innovate or 'try new things'.

Just what the shit do you think Google/Microsoft/Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into machine learning/AI for? The first one that creates a self improving-self learning machine wins the game (or destroys the earth with a paperclip maximizer).

You and your human intelligence are not magic. You're biological hardware and software that a lot of people are spending a lot of time and effort on reproducing in a digital format.

This is (materialistic) nihilism. Materialism is a philosophy and not a new one, but an exceedingly sterile one, in my view. If you want to take that philosophical position you can, but others are free to reject it (and most people do) because it is only a philosophical position, not a proved description of reality (how can it be?).

Which really makes you wonder if F/OSS was a good idea in the first place.

A few counter-notes

- Google translate and its ilk have already significantly cut down the number of translators required for multinational companies. Google translate in 2006 is also a bad example, it really only got excellent in the past few years.

- I would trust GPT to write the first draft, and then hire a translator to check it. That goes from many billable hours to one, or two. That is a material loss of work for said translator.

- High profile translations, as your example is, are a sharp minority of existing translator jobs.

There will always be a need for careful human translation work in such things as legal documents for government work but those positions will become even more competitive.

Recently I needed a couple payslips translated from German to English and then certified. Google Translate can translate, but cannot certify.

Professional licensed translator took significant amount of money and sent me a document for review with most numbers somehow mixed up. It took days of back and forth over the email for them to fix it.

I have been doing NLP since 1993. Before ca. 1996, there were mostly rule-based systems that were just toys. They lacked robustness. Then statistical systems came up and things like spell-checking (considering context when doing it), part of speech tagging and eventually even parsing started to work. Back then people could still only analyze sentences with fewer than 40 words - the rest was often cut off. Then came more and more advanced machine learning models (decision trees, HMMs, CRFs), first a whole zoo, and then support vector regressors (SVM/SVR) ate everything else for breakfast. Then in machine learning a revival of neural networks happened, because better training algorithms were discovered, more data became available and cheap GPUs were suddenly available because kids needed them for computer games. This led to what some call the ¨deep learning revolution¨. Tasks like speech recognition where people for decades tried to squeeze out another half percent drop in error rate suddenly made huge jumps, improving quality by 35% - so jaws dropped.

So it is understandable that people worry at several ends. To lose jobs, to render ¨NLP redundant¨. I think that is not merited. Deep neural models have their own set of problems, which need to be solved. In particular, lack of transparency and presence of different types of bias, but also the size and energy consumption. Another issue is that for many tasks, no much data is actually available. The big corps like Google/Meta etc. push the big ¨foundational¨ models because in the consumer space there is ample data available. But there are very important segments (notably in the professional space - applications for accountants, lawyers, journalists, pharmacologists - all of which I have conducted projects in/for), where training data can be constructed for a lot of money, but it will never reach the size of the set of today`s FB likes. There will always be a need for people who build bespoke systems or customize systems for particular use cases or languages, so my bet is things will stay fun and exciting.

Also not that ¨NLP¨ is a vast field that includes much more than just word based language models. The field of propositional (logical) semantics, which is currently disconnected from the so-called foundational models, is much more fascinating than, say, chatGPT if you ask me. The people there, linguist-logicians like Johan Bos identify laws that restrict what a sentence can mean, given its structure, and rules how to map from sentences like ¨The man gave the girl a rose¨ to their functor-argument structure - something like ¨give(man_0, rose_1)¨ - which models the ¨who did what to whom?¨. When such symbolic approaches are integrated with neural foundational models, there will be a much bigger breakthrough then what we are seeing today (mark my words!). Because these tools, for instance Lambda Discourse Representation Theory and friends permit you to represent how the meaning of ¨man bites dog¨ is different from ¨dog bites man¨.

So whereas today`s models SEEM a bit intelligent, but are actually only sophisticated statistical parrots, the future will bring something more principled. Then the ¨halluscination¨ of models will stop.

I am glad I am in the field of NLP - it has been getting more exciting every year since 1993, and the best time still lies ahead!

This is a really important point. GPT-x knows nothing about my database schema, let alone the data in that schema, it can’t it learn it, and it’s too big to fit in a prompt.

Until we have AI that can learn on the job it’s like some delusional consultant who thinks they have all the solutions on day 1 and understands nothing about the business.

These general models can be fine tuned with domain specific data with a very small number of samples, and have surprisingly good transfer performance (beating classical models). New research like LORA/PEFT are making things like continuous finetuning possible. Statistical models also do a much better job at translating sentences to formal structure than the old ways ever did – so I wouldn't necessarily view those fields are disconnected.

I agree with the general sentiment, there are still major issues with the newer generation of models and things aren't fully cracked yet.

If that’s a statistical parrot, well so are the rest of us.

But I think that is the issue...going forward wouldn't you hire a machine learning specialist rather than an NLP specialist for those problems? As far industry goes, is there any value in all the syntax/semantics/phonology theory NLP folks command?

Will linguistic knowledge not be needed at all? I don't want to speculate about the far-out future, but what I can safely say from industry experience that at any stage (1996 - now) there was always some extra gain to be had on top of the ((statistical | neural) - only) approach of the day by engineering hybrid solutions that at some level also exploit human-injected linguistic knowledge and human-injected business rules.

Next month at ECIR 2023 in Dublin, I will present a "shoot out" between a BERT model especially pre-trained (for months) and fine-tuned for document summarization of financial meetings (earnings calls) and a one-line POSIX shell script (two cascaded grep commands) written in 3 minutes by yours truly that also extrcts a summary - with surprising results...

You definitely see this in the weather space. Despite flashy headlines, AI has really failed to make much of a difference at core weather forecasting, because the specialized statistical systems that combine many numerical weather prediction models are so greatly refined to the generic forecasting problem that there is little room for improvement. And AI practitioners rarely even focus on the actual interesting problems in the field where we suspect there can be huge gains - like convective initiation (predicting where exactly storms will form and their potential phase trajectory, e.g. what is the probably it will go tornadic or produce large hail?). The reality is that meteorologists can refine the prediction task so precisely that you don't need innovative, brand new model architectures. And the crazy brand new pure DL/data-driven models like NVIDIA's FourCastNet or DeepMind's GraphCast have a long way to go to be a practical competitor to traditional NWP and basic post-processing/statistical bias correction.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. This right here is the crux of the issue. The only way people get to eat is if we change the economic systems.

Capitalism supercharged by AI will lead to misery for almost everyone, with a few Musks, Bezoses and Thiels being our neofeudal overlords.

The only hope is a complete break in economic systems, towards a techno-utopian socialism. AI could free us from having to do work to survive and usher in a Star Trek-like vision of the future where people are free to pursue their passions for their own sake.

We're at a fork in the road. We need to make sure we take the right path.

Things will get worse and worse until they boil over.

What can possibly be the benefit of requiring this constraint?

Remove the idea that this is necessary and watch how much relaxation comes to the deliberation on this topic.

"Current economic systems" will simply have to yield. Along with states. This has been obvious for decades now. Deep breaths, everybody. :-)

It's not "requiring this constraint". If you have some plausible pathway to get from our current system to some "Star Trek-like nirvana", I'm all ears. Hand-wavy-ness doesn't cut it.

> "Current economic systems" will simply have to yield.

Why? For most of human history there were a few overloads and everyone else was starving half the time. Even look at now. I'm guessing you probably live a decent existence in a decent country, but meanwhile billions of people around the world (who can't compete skills-wise with upper income countries) barely eke out an existence.

For the world that just lived through the pandemic, do you honestly see systems changing when worldwide cooperation and benevolence is a prerequisite?

My gut feeling is that AI is the 'social historic change' that will make UBI politically viable and a reality.

The problem is that we have created an economy where that is a bad thing.

The government of a wealthy country should ensure that its citizens are able to eat, and have a sheltered place to sleep, without them needing to work. Because the way things are going, there won't be enough work to go around. Even now, with the supposed "labour shortage" there are record numbers of homeless people, and people living paycheck-to-paycheck. Housing is more unaffordable than ever. Minimum wage is not keeping up with the economic realities.

Governments need to step in; they need to change policy so big corps are paying more taxes, and that tax goes to a basic income that can cover the cost of housing and the cost of food. Maybe not right away, maybe it starts at $100/month. But eventually the goal should be to get everyone on a basic income that can cover the necessities, then if they want to be able to enjoy luxuries (concerts, gourmet food, hobbies, streaming services, etc.) they can choose to work.

Computational irreducibility combined with human insatiability combined with ethics entails: a lot of work to be done. Everyone needs to get to work, we aren’t done yet. If robots could do all the work, god bless. This is about focus and intention. I can literally hire anyone right now and, with chatGPT, they can probably be valuable to me. Why aren’t we hiring more people?

Ever notice how you get taxed for hiring people a lot more than buying tech? That’s something to be fixed. It’s going to hurt. Also, 50% tax is about normal, get used to it.

I don't really think of filing paperwork, or writing code, or meetings in general. It's the stuff that requires arms and legs and fingers that's our bottleneck. ChatGPT can't help with that. Robots can, but RL is lagging.

All that takes knowledge work. Physical too, but most of the cost today is knowledge work.

Now, my average tech staff can actually solve challenging coding problems that before could only be done by the few talented ones.

It does not solve all shortcomings, but it definitely shifts the collective cognitive load in the company.

Many of these jobs are cheap and easy to understand and quick to train in. These aren’t the kind of jobs people probably wanted, but they’ll be there.

Yes, they will be all called 'ai data labellers'.

For a long time, "People don't just want jobs, they want good jobs" was the slogan of industries that automated the boring stuff. Now AI is suddenly good at all the jobs people actually want and the only thing it can't do is self-improve. In an AI future, mediocre anything will not exist anymore.

Either you are brilliant enough to be sampling from 'out of distribution', or you're in the other 99 percent normies that follow the standard : "learn -> imitate -> internalize -> practice" cycle. That other 99% is now and eternally inferior to an AI.

Right! Aren't we all mediocre before we're excellent? Isn't every entry level job some version of trying to get past being mediocre? i.e. Isn't a jr developer "mediocre" compared to a senior dev? If AI replaces the jr dev, how will anyone become a senior dev if they never got the chance to gain experience to become less mediocre?

I used to do a job that was eventually automated. We did the one and only thing the computer couldn’t do - again and again in a very mechanical fashion.

It was a shit job. You might get promoted to supervisor - but that was like being a supervisor at McDonalds.

Why not treat the job seriously? Why didn’t the company use it as a way to recruit talent? Why didn’t the workers unionize?

Because we all knew it would be automated anyway.

We were treated like robots, and we treated the org like it was run by robots.

There’s a huge shadow over the economy that treats most new jobs like shit jobs.

Maybe the very, very basic transcription/translation stuff might go away, but arguably this race to the bottom market was already being killed by google translate as bad as it is anyway.

In areas where quality is required (eg. localizing video games from japanese to english and vis versa) people would be (justifiably) fussy about poor localization quality even when the translation was being done by humans, so I have to imagine that people will continue to be fussy and there will still be significant demand for quality job done by people who aren't just straight translating text, but _localizing_ text for a different audience from another culture.

The way it works, someone would have to produce more original training data in the first place. It is AI that has to keep up, not the other way around.

And if you think that AI is going to stay at LLMs and not eventually evolve into self learning/self modifying systems you are shortsighted.

On the contrary, the confusion is all yours. This is literally the reason plenty of photographers were able to make money, as just one example; without it any major publication would just grab whatever photo they saw fit.

Or you could still have a human in the loop, for example a CTO reviewing their AI developer’s code. But now you can pay one person instead of 10.

That said, these tools still need some domain knowledge. It’s not at the point yet where anyone off the street can use it to accomplish an unfamiliar task.

There’s an old story about someone charging $1,000 to fix a machine. They did it in 10 seconds and the client complained. The consultant said “I get paid for knowing how to fix it”.

The same might be true for knowing how to prompt AI.

Yeah, exactly this. The funny thing about economic upheavals and industrial revolutions is that while people might get reallocated eventually (say, 30 years), that doesn't provide any comfort to the people who are getting upheaved now.

Somewhere toward that goal we became overly fixated with money/wealth and the pursuit of endless profits. Meanwhile, companies continue to post record profits while downsizing - gee, I wonder why.

The reality is, we need to start to figure out and move toward a new way to run the world. I always semi-land in a kind of Star Trek: TNG 'creation socialism', or whatever it is they have as a means of structuring a society, where you have a replicator that can create almost anything for you. They also have 'intellect machines' that are often used to build things from just describing what you want, or in other situation to dig into engineering problems, etc. Things that we are now starting to do with our new GPT tech.

Putting all this another way – how are all these corporations going to continue to exist when there are no customers to buy their products, because there are no jobs left. Basically, money as we know it is going to go away, we won't be a society of limited resources anymore.

And again as a reminder, this isn't something I'm saying is 2-5 or even 50 years away (maybe?). What I'm saying is that set the timeline however you want, it is going to happen, and we need to start to plan for it now. Based on what's happening already, we're likely at the start of a 20 – 50 year transition towards a new form of society entirely.

I doubt it. There will probably always be some scarcity. Even if we remove (or effectively remove) scarcity of physical resources or energy, there is still only a limited amount of time. You could base an entire economy on time and you'd still need some kind of a medium of exchange. Even in Star Trek TNG, every schmo on Earth doesn't have access to Federation supercomputing clusters or their own starship.

Most likely society will reorganize around it and new professions that don't exist today will be created.

And we haven't even considered the positive impact of AI.

It could for example accelerate the process of drug manufacturing and genetic therapies that will considerably increase human's lifespan, triggering another form of social reorganization.

So it is really impossible to tell with certainty how the world will look like in 50 or 100 years from now.

I am optimistic and would like to think it will be a much better place, not necessarily perfect and just in every aspect, inequality and armed conflicts will probably continue to exist, but overall it will be better than it is today.

There was a lot of fear during the industrial revolution, prompting many intellectuals to have a very grim outlook of the future, particularly when it comes to social issues (yes you, Marx).

But ultimately, if you look at the data compiled decades later, such as GDP and life expectancy around the world, it is undeniable that social and economic changes resulting from the industrial revolution made the world a much better place.

Not a perfect one, but certainly much better than it was (at least for humans).

When I show ChatGPT to a lay person they don't really care.

When I show it to a professional copywriter they say that if they submitted this content to a client they would lose the client.

I'm reminded of when my son was learning to talk and everything he said seemed brilliant and coherent to me.

To any stranger it sounded like gibberish.

I think GPT is like my son, and all tech people are like excited parents.

Maybe the kid will learn to speak like an adult, but it can't yet

But go back on HN a decade and be really honest.

Are we any better than average at forecasting?

I'm starting to think that being on the bleeding edge and seeing so many possible alternate futures actually makes us worse

Everyone is terrible at that.

I guarantee students are more excited about it than tech people because they are using it to successfully pass assignments.

I think the problem is that money saved from making those jobs redundant is not going back to the society but few heads on top. That's the fundamental problem, company moves money from payroll to tech that replaces the people and any savings are entirely company's profits.

And then they go ahead on tax avoiding spree so increased profits don't even flow back to the society

There are hundreds of thousands of people making their living on translating, and now most of them need to find something else to survive now.

The result of ChatGPT depends on the domain of the language. Technical reasoning based on many parts of input, is what the machine was designed for.. human language A to human language B depends on specific models built over the last ten years or so..

But if you subtract those two.. language structure and technical structure, you are left with giant holes in the way humans talk, interact and create.

Overall I would say that people who translate formal documents are in trouble yes.. people who translate to no-loyalty cost-sensitive markets like corporate ads for products or travel recreation things.. are in trouble. But there are many other kinds of communication, and therefore translation.

We are into a new reality and no need to lament the old one, because it is gone anyway

We keep committing seppuku by emerging technology to where hubris becomes a large scale financial or even a physical crash, and the smartest ones of us avoid the knee jerk reaction to quick over-adoption of new and unpredictable tech. The main problem is that there are so many forces pushing us towards adoption of whatever is packaged and marketed most heavily, and we need to incorporate better rollbacks and ways of gradually adopting new tech. Testing is also a quickly dying art, as seen with Twitter... This will be our downfall if not properly reigned in.

The people (self proclaimed tech leaders) who we exalt have already shown us that they are impulsive, and driven by greed, vanity, and ego. If we continue to let them act as "golden children", and continue to make them more and more wealthy, there will be no going back to fairness in our world. Tax them fairly, hold them accountable, stop letting them influence politics, stop electing rich people and people with conflicts of interest, and let everyone have a voice and equal opportunity to climb into responsibility based on their incremental successes... We're not doing any of that at all right now -- it greatly worries me.

This was true for Industrial Automation when machines automated physical work and humans could do knowledge work.

Now machines are on the verge of automating knowledge there would be no work left for humans.

Bad examples. Those are instances where you need human beings to provide interpretation of the context surrounding the translation/transcription, and where strict regulatory regimes are in place. Those are likely the last to be automated.