> “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say.

No one is saying that. What people are saying is that technology has routinely made certain jobs irrelevant since the beginning of human civilization, and no one can do anything about it other than accept it and move on. Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place. Sharing and commenting on variations of the same article every single day is certainly not helping anyone's jobs.

> Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place

10 new jobs cannot be sufficient to replace 100 replaced jobs. What are other 90 going to do?

We find ourselves, in 2024, with unemployment levels (at least in the US) at near all-time lows. This is after centuries of mechanization and automation, decades of the computer and internet revolutions (which have barely any steam left, compared to the previuous ~70 years of rapid improvement), and with a global demographic shift that will actually require significant productivity improvements (as in "more output per worker") just to maintain existing quality of life with an increasingly aged population. China is probably losing 1M+ workers a year for the foreseeable future (their workforce actually peaked in 2015!). LLM-style AI is going to cause such a tidal wave of garbage that it's not even obvious to me that it will be a net increase to productivity at all, let alone make us all so productive that there will be a massive unemployment crisis. It's definitely going to affect some specific jobs, just the way other jobs have come and gone for centuries now, but I'm not convinced it will improve productivity as much as we actually need it to.

Yeah. A lot of people I know even have 2-3 jobs! Even combined, they don’t pay well enough to build retirement savings. It’s easy to find work when you’re being paid less than minimum wage as a contractor at 2-3 companies

There's always OnlyFans.

Wait, what's that you say? AI can make hyper-realistic porn now too?

We're doomed.

Who says it will be 10 new jobs? Why not a thousand? Or a million?

Did the world end when weavers lost their jobs because of automated looms or elevator operators lost their job because of buttons? Just like all the times before, we will figure it out. The only thing that will make the outcome worse is forced government action based on a few loud voices and populist demands.

The closer to human abilities AI gets, the less space there will be for new jobs to appear. Just because new jobs appeared before doesn't mean they always will. It does make sense to slow down this progress if we don't have answers to what happens if jobs start disappearing faster than we can replace them.

Who is going to "slow down this progress"? Some mythical world government? The Illuminati? You can't legislate human thought and human ingenuity. Progress is happening, whether you like it or not. You either embrace it or get left behind.

We can't stop it, but if the leading countries regulate it progress will be slower.

If one major economy regulates and slows down AI the rest of them will ramp up their investment and gain a competitive edge. The jobs will be gone regardless, just this time to an AI company in China or India rather than the USA. That's how the world works.

When the robots can fix themselves, then no new jobs need be created to fix the robots. Then that time it'll be different. We're at the cusp of that. I can ask openinterpreter to fix python on my computer for me. it's only a matter of time before robotics catches up.

We eventually will hit the point that technology replaces jobs and new jobs don’t popup. I hope by then we have our politics fixed enough to more equally distribute the automation bounty.

We also used to have a middle class consisting of horseshoers, elevator operators, and gas station attendants.

Many programmers do little more than glue together framework code, and make an excellent living doing it. Little sets them apart other than how fast they jump to the framework of the week. There's not a lot of separation from rent-seeking.

What would you do to change the direction of things? Make AI illegal, and hope there aren't companies that will just use it anyways?

And being able to interface with computers. It’s crazy how many people are unable to use a computer efficiently. Don’t take that skill for granted.

yeah except serious people in governance and AI science are raising alarm bells.. so "what about the horse carriage drivers" gets pretty thin, like instantly..

Whether we can or cannot do something about is a wholly different question from whether it’s an issue at all.

I see so many people basically say “there’s nothing we can do about it therefore there’s no problem at all”. I don’t think this is a coincidence. This is a very deliberate effort by those in the tech space who want to capture and privatize all the benefits for themselves to make it seem like there are no alternatives to the current trajectory of a handful of companies hoarding all the benefits of AI.

Once you accept that there are possible problems one can do stuff to address those problems, such as maybe democratizing AI so it benefits anybody and not just a handful of people who happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Heck, even if you accept that there isn’t a problem you can still recognizing that the current trajectory may not be a good one.

For most businesses, AI works basically the same as any other kind of automation:

1) increasing output for the same labor costs

2) reducing labor costs by replacing humans with machines

The interesting difference is that AI can automate a wide range of "creative" and "knowledge worker" jobs that formerly resisted automation, so many tech workers (and others) may suddenly become unemployed (and possibly unemployable), much as human network and system administrator jobs were mostly eliminated in cloud computing and replaced by software.

What's the alternative here? Make laws so that people aren't allowed to use AI to replace X job?

If AI replaces my job, I'll accept it. I don't want to do a job that could better be done by a machine.