Manual jobs that are relatively safe, close to home, steady, and easy to learn will probably have a lot of people vying for them, hence lower pay.
They've been automated for so long and so thoroughly that you didn't even think of them as 'having been automated away'.
Look at any commercial kitchen, any farm, inside any factory. Look at the grocery store, and its self-checkout machines. Look at parking attendants and toll booths. Look at the labour-saving devices employed at any construction site. Look at the demise of cottage industries - which used to be the economic driver of productive output, and are now limited to kitschy crafts on Etsy. Look at the cargo-container shipping yard, where a hundred dock-workers are now do the work that used to take tens of thousands. Look at the answering machine, and the utter insanity that is the modern automated customer support directory.
What hasn't been automated are jobs like janitors - where the work that they do is highly varied, and requires manipulation of different tools, in different spaces. We can automate a floor-mopping machine, or a vaccum cleaner, but we can't (yet) build a robot that will vaccum, and water the plants, and scrub a toilet, and clean up vomit, and refill the paper towel dispenser, all in one package.
Which aren’t automation or even new technology. The stores just cleverly moved the work that must be done to unpaid laborers. The self-checkout machines are an inferior tool with an escape hatch (customer service is on the way) to the real tool which must be operated by an employee.
I find self checkout very beneficial, as I frequently have few items to purchase, and there are more self checkout registers available more consistently than there would be staff.
Except if they have never used self checkout before. Or if they have 15 items in the store's cart but they haven't brought their shopping bags so they take 15 minutes to fill their arms and pockets and hats with their groceries.
Those people are eating time saved by self-checkout !
I tolerate the young ones who comes in pack of 6 individuals, especially if only one of them buy their unique can of coke. It makes the queue looks longer than it is and I am out sooner than the SUCKERS in the other queue.
HA ! (/s ? /s)
The contemporary habit of envisioning people as some sort of disposable artifice is dehumanising at its core and just serves to rid those in lucky positions of superfluence from responsibility.
Society needs to learn to recognize interpersonal differences in terms other than self-serving judgemental dismissal.
You would think that automating your job would make you free to work less. No, of course not, you end up either unemployed or working at least as much as you used to or more.
A lot of the comments here on this thread are already pessimistic in relation to the automation because people low key know that in the last decades almost all societal changes have come to the detriment of general population.
In capitalist west, capitalism was also about distribution of goods but literally being nice about it. Working together.
The language is meaningless gibberish. The tone and emotional spin, roleplay are what’s important.
In the US we’re enabling iron fisted oligarchs like the USSR once had. Those who refuse to share without extreme deference and idolatry, not because they’re that important to the well being of billions (they’re not) but because they’re important to the political actors that insulate them from taxation.
The USSR et al had many more problems than most people in the west, at least of my generation, properly appreciate — the Holomodor and the irony of the Berlin Wall's official name (≈ anti-fascist protection barrier) being the most pertinent in my mind.
Conversely, while the USA was a symbol of hope and freedom in my childhood, that childhood was oblivious to the official segregation of the USA even in the 60s, let alone the unofficial segregation whose continued existence was the basis for the term "woke" prior to it being appropriated by all the political talking heads to mean everything and nothing.
The oligarchy in the USA today is not one I favour, but it is kinder than the… I was going to reference the events of the Homestead strike, but it turns out I must remember my own words, for that too is less clear-cut than I had heard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
But yeah, reality is a complicated mess.
My opinion is that laissez-faire capitalism is BS, that the Roosevelt New Deal marked an end to that era for the same reason that the equivalent living conditions ended Soviet-style communism; that other forms of communism and capitalism exist; that both over-simplify human nature and that a superior alternative to both can be designed with careful effort; that such a thing probably won't be taken seriously until the current system is utterly broken because of those with power in the current system; and that by default AI and robotics is a lot closer to communism than anything else because "from each according to ability" requires much less personal consideration when everyone has a dozen droid servitors at their disposal.
Yeah, ask my grand grand father how great that worked. Oh sorry, you can’t, he was shot in the gulag in 1937 for anti revolution activities (and rehabilitated in 60s, saying it was a terrible mistake, that’s a relief, right?).
Its intrinsic economic woes were overplayed by western elites who were terrified of communist contagion.
Western ideology is about the primacy of property ownership. It's not economically efficient in the slightest but it's the only game in town these days.
The Fed and the financial class have been printing money relentlessly and have been squeezing all the juice of the economic benefits of automation by taxing it with inflation. The zero rates of the last 20 years have not reflected price stability, they reflected moving goalposts and strong technological deflation (which should've benefited the common people) coupled to high monetary inflation which was only allowed because of the technological deflation.
When you look at where did most of the money gained from technological innovation went - where all the newly found wealth was spent - the answer is obviously houses. The landlord / banking class have been printing money relentlessly inflating a bubble of the assets they hold, and they could only afford to do it because they absorbed the rising economic power of technology. You slave away while they get to print money.
We have effectively two tiered society. For the common people, a dollar is a dollar. For the financial class, a dollar is actually ten dollars, held with leverage and then bailed out by the Fed when it blows up.
Someone in a wheelchair 50 years ago could not do a lot of jobs vs now that's not even a factor in a software job.
In the U.S. I believe it's through Social Security.
So as more jobs are automated and the base level of ability required to get hired goes up so does the need to expand who qualifies for social programs.
Productivity will be increasing with automation so it's a matter of distributing resources more efficiently and fairly than it is about making sure there is labor for everyone to get a job.
If you don’t live in the U.S. it’s hard to grasp just how hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family ffs, but we can’t even fix that. There is zero political will to provide robust social programs here, despite any evidence that shows it might improve society.
Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close to zero chance of the solutions you’re describing.
Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly.
This presupposes one refrains from defeatist refusal to engage those problems of course.
> Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly.
We sure ought to, I agree with you there.
2. Capitalists requires consumers to actually buy shit.
Hopefully, we would reach a Star Trek-like utopia where people aren't required to work in order to live.
More realistically, the middle class just disappears, and we have nothing but the super-rich and the destitute left.
I think Jordan Peterson quoted the stats as people with IQ under 83 are completely unemployable i.e. even the army can't get a net positive out of them. I found that deeply concerning in several ways.
IMHO we need to work on reducing the cost of living so people can mostly opt-out without losing their home and dying. Instead it's always push harder, more growth, etc...
The "optimists" might not take notice because they've been in the layers that can keep playing musical chairs and adjust, and things might even seem good - especially when the pool of money available gets more concentrated.
What has been a slow gradual frog boiling process could very well accelerate with AI reaching this level though. I can't think of earlier developments being as widely applicable and moving as fast as this before.
I worry for my kids generation, and personally wish I was 10yrs closer to retirement.
This is because we decide it's better to pay people to do nothing than to clean streets and medians and countless other things that need done.
We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves.
The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people.
I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.
I don't have the time to work through the math concretely, but intuitively, imagine that the intelligence of parents is normally distributed, and the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Set the cutoff for "participating on HN" to to some threshold. Given the right set of parameters, most of the "weight" in the aggregate child distribution above the threshold will come from the long tails of the child distributions of parents in the fat part of the parent distribution.
Again, this is the core fallacy of eugenics.
How many current US PhD's are the children/grandchildren of immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs (or maybe even went through extended periods of unemployment)?
Why are you conflating immigrants from underdeveloped countries with low intelligence? The parents could be have been (likely were) highly intelligent, just lacking the opportunity or access to education.
The current US PhD's that are the children/grandchildren of immigrants aren't a random selection, they are the product of smart motivated parents working the system (immigration system, education system, admissions system) for and with their children.
The core fallacy of Eugenics is not that intelligence is heritable, it is that you can avoid terrible moral hazards when you try to meddle in this stuff.
I'm trying to say that regardless of who your parents are, your intelligence is primarily driven by your education (and your attitude towards education), with slight variance for genetic factors.
Therefore, we should not be anxious about "dumb people reproducing en masse" (as GP was).
We should be worried about educating everyone equally and fairly.
I don't think 50-80% heritability should be hand-waved away as "slight variance". I think what you're talking about is the manifestations of the intelligence (i.e. you can't be a rocket scientist if you never had the chance to learn about it), but not the intelligence itself.
Also please cite actual studies rather than Wikipedia. You’ll capture more nuance.
We conclude that there is now strong evidence that virtually all individual psychological differences, when reliably measured, are moderately to substantially heritable
For example, citation 6 implies nearly every personality trait is inherited, which seems aggressive to me.
Citation 7 is a book about how the genetic links get stronger with age, which seems also odd to take at face value.
Anyway, as great a source as Wikipedia can be, I wouldn't take its summaries at face value.
I hope not. I saw a pretty funny meme on Reddit today that went something like "50 years ago car manuals explained how to adjust the valves in your engine. Now they ask that you don't drink the battery fluid".
I think another big downside of so much technological progress is that people no longer need to understand, and get the benefit of learning, how things work. Yeah, it was a PITA that 35 years ago I had to muck with config.sys and autoexec.bat files, but it helped me have a better understanding of how things worked under the covers. There was some discussion on HN recently about how many Gen Z folks are woefully unprepared digitally for the workforce because they are so used to iPhones/iPads/apps, etc., that you don't know how thing actually work - like people not understanding what the file system is.
How do you smelt bronze? How do you grow crops? How do you build a lean-to?
Knowing how to do all those things does give you a very intrinsic understanding of a lot of things, but it's probably not wise to force everyone to learn those things.
EDIT: Apparently you don't smelt bronze, you smelt pure metals out of ores. lol.
What makes you say that's a fallacy? Everything I've read has shown intelligence to be highly hereditable. I'm not saying we should make policy changes based on that, but the science behind intelligence being (at least partially) hereditable seems pretty conclusive.
Then you read the paper and you see:
A total of 3511 CAGES (2115 females) participants had DNA extracted...Individuals were excluded from this study based on unresolved gender discrepancy, relatedness, call rate (≤ 0.95), and evidence of non-Caucasian descent...
Analyses of individual SNPs and genes did not result in any replicable genome-wide significant association. A gene-based test for association27 showed one genome-wide significant association (P = 9.2 × 10−7), with formin-binding protein 1-like (FNBP1L) on gf (Supplementary Figure 7). This single genome-wide association result for FNBP1L did not replicate in the independent NCNG sample (P = 0.211, gene-based test)...
Despite the fact that no specific genetic variants have been robustly associated with human intelligence, apart perhaps for APOE at older ages34,35, our results show for the first time that a substantial proportion (approximately 40 to 50%) of variation in human intelligence is associated with common SNPs (Minor allele frequency (MAF) > 0.01) that are in LD with causal variants...
Only 1% (approximately) of the variance was explained in the prediction analysis due to the individual SNP effects being very small and therefore estimated with much error, which detracts to a great extent from the accuracy (8-11%) of the prediction equation30. Our finding that 40-50% of phenotypic variation is explained by all SNPs is fully consistent with the low precision of a predictor based upon a discovery sample of ~3,500 individuals; estimation of the SNPs’ effects is different from prediction accuracy.
So basically, what they did, was take a bunch of British people born in the 1920's (a time/place famous for its rigid inter-generational class history), and found that members of certain family trees (that's more or less what it means to be British and have similar SNP distributions) scored similarly on tests, despite the fact that there's no real model to express why.
That and twin studies (which also have their obvious limits) are about the extent of current "evidence" for inherited intellect. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but 'conclusive' is hardly how I would characterize the state of true evidence-based research.
Seems to suggest that intelligence has a lot to do with genes. Why do you think that part supports your view that intelligence doesn't? Do you have any evidence that kids doesn't inherit any intelligence?
I'd be impressed if they saw the same thing across two populations where we know people aren't related, but I'd argue they just back-solved Britain's class structure.
One has to think critically in science.
>Do you have any evidence that kids doesn't inherit any intelligence
Well, if intelligence is inherited, then why are IQ tests going up over time (and therefore being recentered on 100 constantly)? Doesn't that imply learning is the driver?
Well no, if we still had the same gross economic output as 1000 years ago quality of living would be much lower.
The point of competition is that it drives up total economic output.
Of course it sucks for the people who get outcompeted. Certainly getting them productive again in another capacity is good for society. Letting them simply idle is not.
And on the time scales we're looking at here (millions of people losing jobs within a decade or so), population growth is not a relevant concern, and does not explain why people are worse off despite more automation. Not to mention that population growth is already negative in most societies most affected by automation.
Just wanted to note that I didn’t propose a particular solution—you seem to have responded as if I’ve just said “we should have no automation,” which is not what I was proposing at all—it was just an observation about where things have ended up.
We could imagine lots of ways to not throw people to the wolves when their jobs were automated away, the idea of just continuing to pay them is sort of a lower bound (in the sense that obviously the economy could bear it, because it had just been bearing it, right before the automation was implemented).
Remember, even the army during war time, which requires people fulfilling botho f these services won't hire people with such a low IQ.
First of all Peterson’s claim is 83, not 85.
Second, The military does not test IQ. It has a different test with a decent correlation. This test scores in percentiles however. And the bottom 10% are not allowed in. This is not the same thing as 10% of all people cannot get in, as those taking the military test are probably a lower IQ subset on average.
Probably not by much. I would guess the military is current cutting off the bottom 8-10% of the population.
I can’t find much in the way of hard stats but I still feel pretty strongly that a 10th percentile individual is more than well equipped to be a delivery driver of a warehouse worker or whatever.
A healthy society needs to have means to support people of all intelligence levels, we need the equivalent of jobs for ditch diggers, and those jobs need to be respected lines of work for people.
Work has more value than just money, and whether people like it or not, it gives value and meaning to peoples lives. The value we assign (and pay) for work shouldnt just be governed by the economic value it generates, it needs to be enough to meet basic needs, to engender respect.
The basic point I'll make here, using ditch digging is - have you dug a ditch? I have, its hard work, and mine was just a small one in my back yard.
Our default is "lots of babies"; women getting more education and economic liberty decrease that number. Poor places don't generally have significant educational budgets or opportunities for women, but as that specific set of things changes — education and freedom, not even always money — there is a corresponding change to number of births per woman.
It also means that rich couples in societies that lack women's lib still have more kids, even where you can infer high intellect without the convenient proxy of the women being allowed to go to university and giving you a test to score against.
That's not my point, my point is more that it's funny that people do things like going to college when this predictably causes them to have fewer children i.e. college actually hurts their evolutionary fitness.
That line of thinking is the beginning or the road to eugenics, and it goes no place good.
Also, everyone is thinking about evolutionary fitness. Some people just do it explicitly (and others do it by instinct/intuition)
What about Down syndrome adults, who are reliant on state benefits?
In case it's not clear, I don't support the killing of disabled people at any age, but I understand that different people approach these questions from a different set of assumptions.
My point is that adding scare quotes around "that's eugenics" doesn't stop it from being an accurate description, so your question is not the gotcha you might think it is.
But a woman aborting a Downs baby is not the state killing anyone, and most pro choice people would say the woman isn't killing anyone either, since the fetus isn't a person in their view.
Although I was completely unaware of this literature, I have spent the last few years essentially making the same point with regard to automation: you don't need a super-duper ASI to cause severe employment problems, all you need is something with an IQ of 85 that costs at most minimum wage to run (modulo robot body), and then 16% of the population are permanently and irreversibly no longer economically employable.
Assuming £10/hour and a cashier that can scan an average of 20 items per minute (which is probably 20 items in 20 seconds and then waiting 40 more for the customer to dig out their wallet), that's 20*60 items per hour = 1200 items per hour = 120 items/£1.
I assume it's mainly useful for other reasons?
Only if you don't take IQ tests seriously — I think I've heard them dismissed as "only good at measuring your score on an IQ test".
If you do take them seriously, then by definition an AI which genuinely scores 85 (and isn't, say, just programmed to be good at that specific set of puzzles), then it must be able to do what a human of that IQ can do.
In this case I mean the latter, what with it being a thought experiment to demonstrate why we get problems well before having to ask if the AI can take over.
Practical issues like "a native speaker with IQ 85 is almost certainly more fluent than an IQ 160 polyglot on their 53rd, but for an AI they're all equal", or "we can easily hard-code in an algorithm for winning chess and another for doing calculus" likewise don't really matter.
> childcare / elder care, social work, basically anything that requires garnering trust and a lot of social interaction, but not necessarily complex skills
One of the problems right now with ChatGPT is that people trust it waaaay too much, and it's not really even trying.
> that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.
worthless != longer economically employable
The arts have significant social value, and I suspect may be to humans what tails are to peacocks; but at the same time, painters and novelists and musicians and actors and playwrights are infamous in their collective struggles to earn enough to get by on those careers alone.
Has anyone ever said this about any test? Are there any tests that are so general that anyone who does better on it is better at every single task than someone who does worse? Is such a test even possible?
I lack the skills to determine that, so I am limited to trusting the people who tell me the tests are "pretty good but not perfect".
For that specific example, athletics, there does appear to be a correlation. It may be any or all of A->B, B->A, and C->(A, B), but "healthy body, healthy mind" is a meme that appears to have a similar age as the concept of writing.
Finally, as I have been specifying IQ 85 as the "huh interesting" threshold rather than "high" IQ, I'll ignore your goalpost shift and say that your citation is me right now saying: I reckon IQ improvements in at least this zone (say +/- 0.5σ) is causal for better outcomes with regard to [avoiding injury, pushing performance limits, maintaining training regimes, learning techniques], all of which improve overall performance.
My grandfather is about as smart as I am, but he never went to college (nor did well over 90% of his cohort). Now about half the population goes to college, and more than a third graduate.
That's a massive transformation in two generations, and its exacerbated by the degree to which it segregates. I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend college.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
It is completely wild to me how effectively society has self segregated to the point of just straight up never, not even once, interacting with the other group without even realizing it.
They both have college degrees though. I have a few friends who dropped out of college, but none that never attended.
You're not owed that your profession stay relevant, and so you always have to keep an eye on trends, and if needed, adjust course.
1. We've decimated the bottom end of the skills market in developed countries. Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.
2. People who spend years or decades on a skillset see it devalued and their income drops. It is often difficult to get a "second shot" at a new career in your 40s and can be deeply disruptive to you and your family's life. Growing up I watched this happen to the parents of several who friends who'd made careers in things like printing that were obsoleted by digital revolution. None of those people achieved the monetary success they might have in an un-disrupted industry.