Because AI is nowhere close to replace a large swath of jobs? Besides content spam authors? Because even in case of artists, the 100% AI generated stuff is crap compared to the AI-supported stuff.

I think you underestimate the willingness of the average American to consume slop. It really doesn't take much for an LLM to produce something good enough that millions of people would lie on their couch and zombify to it (while consuming ads). If AI were as crappy as you say, it wouldn't have been mentioned in the terms to end the recent writer's strike in Hollywood.

Nothing matters except the outcome. Let's say, hypothetically, that we invent something much closer to so-called "AGI" – I can guarantee you that many pundits and HN users will find reasons to believe it's not real and that it's crap or whatever. Why should anyone care? Plenty of people thought the Web was crap in the beginning, and now look at where we are. I don't see any reason to believe AI won't have some impact on jobs and the economy for the next decade. If it was total crap, no one would be using it, but all I know is tons of developers are using Copilot, and I'm using GPT-4 every single day. Are we all just spinning tops or is it actually being of some use to us?

It doesn't even matter if it is slop and you don't want slop. A huge oversupply of slop creates a market for lemons scenario. It is so hard to find the good stuff most people stop even looking for it, assume it is all slop and adapt to that reality. And then non-slop isn't created at the same rate because they're can't get through the noise anymore.

> Because AI is nowhere close to replace a large swath of jobs?

It's nowhere close now. 10 years ago we were nowhere close to generative AI. How will the AI landscape look in the next 10-20 years? There's a non-zero chance that it will be ready by then to replace many jobs.

While I am not terribly worried about the jobs over the next 3-5 years, I am worried about what the landscape will look like in 10-20 years. If the white collar jobs are getting wiped out and we lose a bunch of blue collar jobs like warehouse work and trucking, it’s going to be a real rough time for the economy.

There's a "non-zero" chance all life on earth is eradicated in an extinction event like a gamma ray burst too. That phrase is just smarter sounding weasel words.

With regards to generative AI replacing jobs, it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in.

For example, I am not a lawyer or doctor therefore it seems trivial to me that AI will replace much of what lawyers and doctors do. Both boil down to reading a libraries worth of information and then making sense of it right? Bam, easy for AI.

However, I'm a professional engineer and I know how extremely complex and difficult computer science is to get right, especially at scale, therefore I'll eat my hat if in 10 years you can write "Create a facebook clone that can support 500 million simultaneous users" and the AI does anything but hallucinate nonsense that won't work. (There's also the reality that there is far more to large scale software than what can be typed into a computer or repeated by an AI, but hey, details).

I'll also point out that 10 years is not so long. 10 years ago Elon Musk told us AI was replacing driving and taxis. 2015 that feature was launched. 10 years later... not so much.

"it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in."

You attribute this to a 'bias of underestimating other people's jobs' I attribute this to a 'bias of overestimate our own jobs'.

Most programmer jobs do not involve facebook clones that support 500 million users. Most programmer jobs are boring crud apps for random companies in traditional industries. Just think of what the outsourcing mills in India produce, and how many people they employ, then think again about how many jobs generative AI replace.

Also, Hollywood rapidly organised to try to slow down AI. They could see, very evidently, how extremely rapidly AI was advancing, and how lethal the threat is to them.

The actors and writers guilds moved to protect their interests against studios abusing AI.

Far easier to AI fake Jim Carey speaking on camera, even doing acrobatics, than it is to AI fake the development of even a tiny piece of novel UI in an app. The reason is we have lots of footage of Jim Carey doing those things and so we can easily recreate him doing those kinds of things. We can probably even put entertaining words in his mouth via AI because we have the entire history of human writing in the model so we should be able to easily create something semi-novel and funny to have him say. What these models cannot do is thoughtfully interview users, evaluate designs on functionality and aesthetics (and perhaps brand) and build an app that looks and behaves well but very different/distinct from existing apps. The novelty is the hard part for these AIs. Even that AI Jim Carey script will reflect or outright steal from the training data. This is why actors came together to say no. It's just too easy, today, to steal their likenesses and do things they would themselves never agree to do. If you're building yet another clone app or site, you too are like these actors, only you're unprotected because too many of us over the last couple of decades were foolishly saying we had it good, the sodas were free, and there was nothing to complain about. If, on the other hand, you're doing something novel, creative, and interesting, you will be fine, better than fine, you will be able to command a premium over the AIs and all the loser might as well be AIs who thought they were too good for a union.

Who knows, because that'll take breakthroughs we don't have yet. Where we are now, however, probably cannot evolve much further, so this is kinda what you're gonna get from this period for AI probably for a while. Transformers plus all the web's content and a bit of chat UI and this is what you get from the 2010s breakthroughs. It's a pretty decent auto-complete service but not one that's likely to change the world in profound ways.

Recall that we've had many eras of AI, going back into the '70s with expert systems and back propagation that led to neural networks that got a lot of investment in the '80s along with early machine learning and advances in speech recognition and computer vision. The '90s work spent a lot on probabilistic and Bayesian methods, SVMs and Q-learning, then we got big data and deep learning, and don't forget Siri and Roomba to round out the 2000s era, the one that came before the current regime.

What the next breakthrough and investment era will bring, we cannot say. It may be a minor leap or a major one. We just don't know.

>Because AI is nowhere close to replace a large swath of jobs?

Is that a claim or a question?

In either case, doesn't matter, as long as it's close to replace a swath of jobs - even if it's not some particular "large swath" it can't replace yet (or ever).

Doesn't have to replace all jobs to have a negative job market impact. Just more than can be reclaimed with new ones.

The clear hypothesis in the question was "for jobs that AI can do just as well as a human".

It's closer than you realize for more jobs than you can imagine. Do you not realize just how many office jobs are simply repetitive tasks? Everywhere, for everything. Microsoft is working overtime to replace entire staffs with a new keyboard and a single prompt engineer.

People who really KNOW what they are doing will command a very high premium because they'll be needed to do things that can't be done via AI tools, but everyone else is kind of screwed. Being the best at what you do was always a good idea, but it's about to be a requirement.

I am not sure if raising minimal requirements is a bad thing. For example, it is harder to get into medicine now than it was 100 years ago, but is it bad? Maybe AI revolution will simply raise education requirements and those will lead to "smarter"/more specialised humanity?

I mean, yeah it is sort of bad. There’s a huge shortage of medical staff in the US (and many other developed countries). I’m not sure raising educational requirements (yet again), is really going to be all the helpful for the general population. Everyone shouldn’t need a masters degree just to make a basic living. Increasing educational requirements will increase people’s already inflated school debt and decrease the amount of time they can be in the workforce. This would give them even less time and opportunities in the workforce to make money (and repay their enormous school debt). And if the minimum requirements to participate in white collar work is now a masters degree, but AI has eaten a large portion of available work, then having more education really isn’t going to do much, since most everyone else will also have to increase their education to be competitive.

I mean, even some of the most basic jobs today require a university/college degree, when in the past a high school diploma would have been sufficient. It’s just moving the goal posts all over again.

Is your argument that medicine today is worse off than medicine 100 years ago because of increased barriers to entry? That's what it seems like you're saying but that's so bat shit silly that it can't possibly be the case.

No, that’s obviously not what I’m saying. In fact 100 years ago, doctors were actually receiving about the same amount of education as doctors today. Residency programs became a requirement in the mid 1920’s. But I get the point you’re trying to make.

It was the adoption of the Hopkins model and standardization of medical education— which focused on a mission of education, research and clinical practice— that led to a lot of medical advances that we have today.

My point, is that too much education (and its associated costs) can become a barrier to people joining industries/paying off their loans. Do you suggest doctors increase their education for longer than a decade? Maybe 2 decades of education would make better doctors, but is that really a net benefit to society? Not too mention, a good portion of a doctors education already is actually just learning on the job (while being paid a pittance).

Education (in the US), is not free (or even reasonably priced) and wages have stagnated for quite some time. All you’re doing is burdening people with more debt in order to still have to fight in a job market against their fellow humans as well as now AI.

If companies (or the government) took on training costs (like they often used to) and people were paid enough to make a comfortable living, then I wouldn’t even be discussing this. By all means, bring on the AI revolution.

But until we have some sort of safety nets in place to prevent all these people falling into poverty, requiring more educational investment and debt burden is not really a great solution for a large portion of the population. I mean, even a person’s healthcare is tied to being employed, and one of the political parties is still talking about repealing the ACA to this day, one of the only bills to actually try and tackle the absurd healthcare costs and coverage issues. More time in school would also just increase healthcare costs an individual would have to pay.

Judging from the present state of things, we’re nowhere near solving ANY of these issues that we are currently experiencing. Without proper guard rails, a rapid and wide adoption of AI is only likely to exacerbate these issues that our society is presently struggling with.

AI is 10x closer than it was six months ago. It's a quickly moving field. And without actual improvements in quality, you'll assemble pipelines to gradually refine quality before shipping, and every step of that pipeline could be staffed by inadequate AI. Why wouldn't Fordism and Taylorism work when we have intellectual machines?

The most hopeful answer is 'because the competition will use AI to augment instead of replace, and produce a superior product.'

I think most businesses will struggle to completely eliminate the need for humans. Surely AI will continue to drive efficiency for those who remain employed and others will find new jobs and/or start their own businesses.

That, or all the jobs go away and then no one has money resulting in a non-functioning economy :).

'completely' is the word here that simply doesn't matter.

Lets say you need ditches dug and you need 100 people to do it. Lets say there's only 50 people that want to dig ditches. This is a market favorable to labor. Pay will increase and so will growth of technology.

But the moment the opposite happens the equation dramatically changes. If you have 50 jobs and 51 workers looking for jobs you can now get labor to fight with itself to see who will work for the least money.

>and others will find new jobs and/or start their own businesses.

Right, because there's going to be some magical market where AI isn't doing the same thing (maybe direct contact prostitution for a while?). And yea, lots of little businesses will pop up, and be very quickly ate up and consolidated by large businesses exploiting the interconnectedness of technology everywhere. The future doesn't look like the past in great number of ways because of this.

> then no one has money resulting in a non-functioning economy

This is a very serious risk. Typically this is why authoritarian states fall apart. And in the 'free west' we risk exactly the same with larger corporate consolidation effectively forming a quasi-authoritarian state via lack of competition, rent seeking behaviors, and semi-direct control of the government via lobbying.

if all job go away, because they are replaced by AI, it means that

* there is no longer a need for a working class

* there is no longer a need for a consumer class

If there is neither a worker class, neither a consumer class, there is no longer a need for an economy

There are just rich people waging war using drones to control access to resources to fullfil their own need. Most people would become utterly irrelevant here.

You say "put yourself in the shoes of the profit maximizing firm", do you expect governments to not optimize for cost, or other organizations should not optimize for cost?

Yes, I expect companies and even more so, governments, to not optimize for cost.

I expect them to optimize for human wellbeing, a functional society, and a clean environment above cost, and then cost.

well said. thank you.

I don't see how taxing people indefinitely so that an indefinite amount can be spent to maximize employment through delivering something which can be delivered cheaper and better with more technology is optimizing human wellbeing.

If the government is spending money on delivering X, they should do it as cost-effectively as possible, and the rest of the money can then be spent on other things or can remain in taxpayers pockets so they can spend it elsewhere.

If the government is going to try to achieve full employment with everything it does, it will just be a disaster.

Another good one that shocks me that people ignore is the long-term effect of remote work on salaries. If you can do your job from home, there's someone who can do it who has a cheaper home than you.

I think it depends on how much salaries drop. Let’s say salaries drop 25%, but more people can live in places where homes cost 50% or less, it’s likely still a good deal for that remote employee. Remote work is making cities in the Midwest far more attractive.

This is no different than living in a city, going to work in person and renting cheapest, crappiest place of residence you can. You could say "There is always someone willing to tolerate shittier living conditions and undercut you" if your pay was based on your cost of living. But it's not. Your pay is based on the supply vs demand for the type of work you do. If it so happens the work you do is worth enough to support you living in a large city(and your sales skills good enough to take advantage of it) great. There is plenty of people who work in person and can't afford more than a room in a bedsit in a city. Imagine how much better their life can be if they can do their work remotely and they can rent a house "in the hicks" for the same money.

There will always be people willing to do your job for cheaper as well as these that take 3x what you take and do half. Such is life.

> There will always be people willing to do your job for cheaper as well as these that take 3x what you take and do half. Such is life.

Which of these do you think is the bigger threat to you?

If they can do your job roughly as well as you for half the cost, what's the employer's incentive to keep you around to do it?

That's why strong unions are needed.

>If you can do your job from home, there's someone who can do it who has a cheaper home than you.

Yes, but rent also falls in now highly coveted due to work availability areas, since people can increasingly live everywhere.

You might not have to worry about that. I'm seeing people being called back into the office at least part of the time.

Good for them. But they have no local social network.

Rather the opposite: those WHF can just live in a small city / community with 100x the "local social network", cohesion, friendliness, etc. than the ones living in some big city where they don't even know their immediate neighbors.

And of course if someone from e.g. India replaces you, I'm pretty sure they'll have a far greater "local social network" than whatever Silicon Valley can offer.

I don’t mean having friends, I mean having a useful professional network for getting jobs

All else being equal, their lower cost will get them jobs more easily than some expesive fella's "professional network".

Also, even when working remotely, people tend to remember who did a good job and who they collaborated well or has some good skills - and when they start another company, or move to work elsewhere, they can still opt to bring them in, even if they've never gossiped next to the same watercooler.

Respectfully I disagree unless the job is low skill and fungible. Network is far more valuable. Especially local ones.

> I mean having a useful professional network for getting jobs

Why does this need to be local? Even when I was working in the office a good chunk of my professional network wasn't for in the same city as me.

Local networks are just typically stronger. And networks in major cities are typically stronger. It will take a lot of time for this to change. I’m mostly remote but everyone is still attached to a major urban hub.

We even have ample evidence from history that this did not occur with other innovations. We don’t have a field of workers anymore, we have one guy in a tractor. We don’t have a factory of workers anymore, we have one guy watching the machines.

We won’t have a field of lawyers, radiologists, programmers anymore, we will have one guy watching the machines. You can tell yourself you’ll be that one guy, but statistically you won’t.

How does that one guy in a tractor or that one guy watching the machines get paid when no one has a job to buy food, widgets, health care, et cetera? A sudden disruption like AI is purported to potentially cause is a recipe for total societal collapse.

We’ve tried to kick the can down the road to a weird ponzi where we all do services for one another, but I don’t know how much longer that can go for. Now AI is going to disrupt that. We need to just stop sending all the money upwards and enjoy the benefits that mechanization and AI can bring. But I doubt that happens.

> In a short essay published in 1930, the world’s most important economist, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that within 100 years, most people would be working no more than 15 hours a week.

We did not get this future. We got a future where both husband and wife have to work 40+ hour weeks for the same lifestyle. He did not envision the siphoning off of wealth that would characterize the 20th and 21st century.

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

Easy. Make things for rich people only.

Its not a lie that people fall for.

Its a lie people want to believe.

Try telling people about the pace of AI advancement, scaling laws, how AI art managed to surpass 90% of human artists in 1 year. And it'll either result in visceral disgust, or complete indifference.

People do not care. Even if the flood has consumed the street, and is rising 1 meter per minute, they do not care. Unless the flood hits their front door, and wets their feet, they prefer to live their normal lives assuming everything tomorrow will be the same as today.

Hence all the AI messaging has become all about 'copilots', because that's the only message people want to listen to. There's plenty of extremely frank discussions by AI company CEOs, AI company staff, or even AI enthusiast forums, but people are utterly uninterested, and prefer to scroll tiktok and watch their TV.

Only when they actually encounter a bot a work that does 95% of their work, will they suddenly wake up, and organise, and demand a response. Hollywood managed to organize at an incredible speed to demand a slowdown to AI, but the water was at their necks already.

Now, its understandable why most people don't want to read about AI advancements. They have their lives, chores, children, weekend trips. They feel entitled to a life in statis, where revolutionary change doesn't happen unless they are the ones demanding it. Too bad reality doesn't work that way.

In the end, its individual choice, to go all in, to decisively steer your career path for a post-AI future, or pretend it doesn't exist, and enjoy their remaining years in their jobs in bliss. I will watch with fascination and horror what happens to the latter group.

> its individual choice, to go all in, to decisively steer your career path for a post-AI future, ..

I believe this number will be < 1% of all workers. Most of the remaining will adjust to new reality with little bit of persuasion/force and understanding.

Last month I traveled to my home country and found people seem very happy and well adjusted in extremely polluted city where I was staying and even claimed since they moved to little less congested area (equally polluted!) life has become so much better. I found most people do not care or understand and some were fatalist in sense "this world has become a nasty hellhole anyway and if it ends along with them it will be all the better".

Another thing I noticed that in a world far away from intellectually challenging work in machine learning / AI etc a lot of workers' lives are already controlled by lot of simple computer programs. Computers are arbiters of truth in large part of third world where trusting people is hard but computer has no reason to lie. If computer tell someone how long they worked, how much to be paid and so on it becomes amenable to most parties.

Depending on economic status of countries I see government are already preparing for jobless future of most workers and looking to provide free ration/lodging/medicine etc. There will be mismatch of expectation between what people think they deserve vs what governments can provide. And thats where I believe AI etc will be greatly used identify those who wouldn't take to easy path of agreeing to what's given. This could go until population collapse or reach to level where it is just enough to support then prevailing economic system.

>They feel entitled to a life in statis, where revolutionary change doesn't happen unless they are the ones demanding it.

Truer words have never been spoken.

My bottomwit approach: On an individual level, use AI as far as I can push it. Maximize individual productivity. Then dump the resulting profits into index funds, to hedge against when - not if - my own cognitive labor becomes near worthless by investing in the productivity of the entire Earth, broadly defined.

This is a good investment strategy because eventually your cognitive ability will decline to zero even if AI does not advance any further!