I wonder why people reflexively quote a "fallacy" from the year 1891! It wasn't true even back then, as evidenced by the multiple economic crises that followed.

Nowadays we have a completely different economy to begin with, saturated with "bullshit jobs" (Graeber) already.

The amount of new inventions is finite. In the 1990s we had TGV, Concorde and Maglev trains. Perhaps physical inventions have been somewhat exhausted?

What invention is on the horizon that will provide new jobs for those laid off from "bullshit jobs"?

How did society support Einstein when he discovered relativity? It didn't: Despite the invention of the tractor in 1892, which, according to HN commentators, should have provided him with a carefree life, he had to take a job in the patent office. Which, according to "AI" fanatics, would now be automated by "AI".

The economy is not zero-sum. That’s just a fact. Go ahead, cite something to back up your claim.

If you want to discuss the "dismal science" in one-liners, you won't get anywhere.

I’ve provided a source. You haven’t.

The real answer is that administrative overhead will expand to fill any jobs displaced by AI. There's no danger of net job loss, just a higher percentage of bullshit jobs.

> he had to take a job in the patent office

Do you have any idea how much a patent clerk makes

> Perhaps physical inventions have been somewhat exhausted?

I vividly remember hearing this from a group of elderly adults when I was around maybe 8 years old.

I remember being very sad that I missed it: The good times of the economy, the period where all the cool things were invented, the “good times” that were being ruined by all of this new technology that the elderly people thought were against the natural way of how things should be.

And it’s always wild to me that I see the same fallacies repeated on HN, inevitably by people who are also convinced that the good times are about to end and all of this new-fangled technology stuff is evil because they just figured out how the world worked in their middle age years and now it’s all changing in ways they find scary.

But they're kind of right, we got all the low-hanging fruit out of the way a long time.

I mean, how much higher is quality of life now compared to 1970? Like... a teensy bit. That's not true from 1915 to 1970 though.

In some ways it's gotten worse. Yes we have these cool phones, but now you're chained to constant communication all the time. Life was a lot simpler and less distracting when your phone was on your wall.

Have we got all the low hanging fruit, or have we moved the floor up and new fruits are low hanging. How much better life is now depends on what you want to measure.

For example, even with vastly more cars on the road road, our air quality is better in most major urban areas. Some of that is political, but a lot of it is technology advances since the 70s.

The cars themselves are faster, safer and more efficient. Again some of that is political policy and a lot of that is technology.

You can now light your whole home for the same amount of energy that you would have used in the 1970s to light a single overhead fixture in a room. All on the back of technology that didn’t exist until the 90s.

For a mere $50 a month you can talk to anyone anywhere in the world in high quality audio and video for an infinite amount of time. In the 1970s just calling the next city over was a cost you had to worry about incurring, let alone calling someone half the world away.

Almost all of the vastness of human knowledge is available for free or nearly free online, expanding your reach beyond what your local library has in stock.

Yes there is a lot of junk out there. But there always has been a lot of junk. There have always been snake oil salesmen and scammers. There are more of them with new scams enabled by technology sure, but again that’s been true of all time. I don’t see evidence that we are uniquely overwhelmed with garbage relative to the benefits we’re accruing.

I remember attending a lecture on why electric cars could never be pragmatic, due to the incredible energy density of gasoline, compared to the pathetic energy density of even SOTA batteries. Even if batteries improved their energy density by orders of magnitude, they could never even come close to matching fossil fuels!

And there's a lot of recentish developments that were considered impossible or hadn't even been conceived of. In medicine we've made HIV prevention/treatment with a pretty much 100% success rate, Hepatitis C antivirals, MS treatments with hopeful prognoses, a huge swathe of cancer treatments that make cancer overall more survivable than not, and mRNA vaccines are incredibly promising. Just personally, Vyvanse is an indescribably more effective and pleasant experience than Ritalin. MRIs are also pretty much magic. They're more or less the holy grail of imaging. Only issue is that they're still expensive, but we're working hard on ~room temperature superconductors.

In clean power, heat pumps have become obscenely efficient, and solar panels are both very effective and very cheap, pairing well with batteries. Induction stoves are also getting quite good.

Drones have benefited immensely from more efficient computing and better imaging, which isn't necessarily all for the best but is something that could absolutely not have been done in 1970.

What else, what's cool but also improves day to day life? Well, modern elevators are dramatically faster. I, personally, enjoy having wheels on my suitcase, and the modern omni-directional ones are a hugely better experience than the first versions. Oh, E-bikes! Those are really really cool. I guess that's just batteries again?

I'm sure there's a ton of stuff that didn't even occur to me because I'm blind to it, and to be entirely honest, didn't experience the year 1970.

Job creation for robots, yes.

Robots need no compensation, no health insurance, they don't have any rights, can work 24/7, they cannot sue the company, they don't steal from the company, they can suffer an "fatal" accident with minimal liability to the company, they can erase their memory of any liability to the company, will always say yes to everything, training them is transferring a file.

If you make a robot 33% as productive as a human per unit of time, because it can work 24 hrs instead of 8 hrs, it has the same output.

Well, yes, manufacturing ideal slaves is really what's automation has always been: humans make rather lousy ones, but they are incredibly versatile instead. If you could just replace humans with rightless machines, which nevertheless are just as capable (except from revolting, of course) — why, the Golden Age would begin, for some.

Literally trickle-down economics.

This is true under an economic system that appropriately distributes the fruits of economic production to workers; perhaps one that existed in the post-ww2 to neoliberal era. But it is untrue under a rentier / technofeudal / oligarch economy, in which all excess profits are captured by a cabal of the owner class. Which of these states describes the modern economy is a political exercise.

I’m sorry, you think we have an entirely different economic system now? Laughably false.

I would encourage you to read books like Varoufakis' Technofeudalism and Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. The distribution of wealth and capture of profits has changed significantly and no longer resembles the economic environment of previous generations.

We're headed in that direction. Why do you think the tech billionaires have been aligning themselves with the Project 2025 architects and Trump?

> Laughably false.

Please edit out swipes like this from comments on HN.

> Laughably false.

Please edit out swipes like this from comments on HN.

Economics is a pseudo-science typically used to launder political ideology, but this "fallacy" is particularly ill suited to this discussion. Yes, it's true that automation doesn't necessarily cause a net unemployment across the board to go up. But it can still decimate employment in the automated sectors. From that link:

>While many workers fear that automation or artificial intelligence will take their jobs, history has shown that when jobs in some sectors disappear, jobs in new sectors are created. One example is the United States, where a century of increasing productivity and technological improvements changed the percentage of Americans employed in the production of food from 41% of the workforce in 1900 to 2% in 2000.

The problem with AI is that it tends to automate away skilled jobs, ones that sometimes required many years of study and educational debt to get.

So the net result, with respect to software engineering, which was the context of the discussion is here, is not "job creation." The net result is that people (especially the junior ones who just got out of school with a pile of debt) are now forced to compete for jobs they aren't necessary any more qualified for than people without those degrees.

This applies to other things where AI massively reduces the number of people needed. Journalism, art asset creation, etc. These are the kinds of cushy and often fulfilling jobs that are only possible because our grandparents and their parents, and so on, worked backbreaking or mind numbing jobs to build the kind of economy that would support these kind of careers. Thanks AI! My kid might never have to worry about the horrors of creative engineering or artistic careers, freeing up room for the real joy of being a gig economy slave or a factory shift worker!

>Economics is a pseudo-science typically used to launder political ideology

This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard on here. Perfect example of conspiratorial thinking.

Automation has always resulted in economic growth. This time will be no different.

Economics is inherently tied to politics, and economic theory is merely created to satisfy various political desires.

Our economic understanding is inherently limited to just capitalism. That's all we know, and our theories are constrained within that environment. However, throughout human history there have been a plethora of economies that operated under different rules.

> Automation has always resulted in economic growth

This, while true, does not mean that further automation will result in economic growth.

For example, under a capitalist economy, 100% automation results in the entire economy collapsing. Because the economy is predicated on consumerism, which requires employment. In order to produce things, you need people to buy them.

Seems simple, but it's a huge problem with capitalism that we repeatedly bandaid. Obviously, we can't let people who can't work just rot in the street, because that's unpleasant. So we develop systems like disability, Medicaid, Social Security, education, etc to bolt-on top of capitalism to fill in the gaps.

We are completely and utterly not prepared for extreme automation.

There's nothing conspiratorial about it. Maybe you were thinking of a different word?

But if economic growth is your only goal then there are plenty of reliable options, like another major war, that are even better for long term economic growth. Whatever it takes to make line go up.

The worst part is that AI is absolutely not going to achieve any real "intelligence" or automate anything truly difficult. It's just going to nibble away at a bunch of formerly desirable careers.

To be fair the firm's goal is, explicitly, to "replace most economically valuable labor".

I always get a little triggered when i hear the phrase job creation. it’s like a solution in search of a problem. here idk if you’re using it in the way i usually hear it because i generally agree -productivity gains boost the economy. for me, i wish the focus was on value creation. i think of the economy like a bike, the slower it goes the harder it is to balance. i come from a biology background and there there is ‘boom bust’ as a widespread and normal process. if humans are clever enough, even when we run out of resources and are about to bust, we can just suddenly invent fertilizer or countless other things. we took natural gas and added value to it. humans have lots of tricks to keep the bicycle chooching along. Regarding ai, it’s a systemic change. most people aren’t great at systems thinking because most people are specialists. so it’s not too likely you’ll hear a salient take on what ai will do despite some rather smart people commenting. The one trend i like to look at is sort of a scale reset or, how do you say forest from the trees? what i mean is, one of corporate’s great advantages are their size and swath of roles and the coordination that allows them to have an outsized advantage-essentially leveraging the collection of specialist to gain a dominate effect in working ‘the system’(navigating government, economy or scale, overwhelming capital, etc). Enter AI, subsuming these roles into one thing and sort of resetting the required scale to have some of the corporate power/advantages. Of course these are some rosy shades but i often approach new things with “what’s the best that could happen” and it has served me well.

Yea, I believed that for a while and still do...but we're going to go through a rough patch first. There's a bunch of people who don't understand how this works and are looking for a get rich quick scheme. Very lazy people. They're going to further devalue employees and expect unrealistic outcomes.

It's going to take some time here before people learn how AI fits into the every day and along the way there's going to be some wild stuff.

I also expect there to be a very very strong addiction or cult-like behavior. Mental health will suffer as well. Very dangerous times.

Productivity gains also boost wealth inequality. Too much wealth inequality has negative effects on democracy and society in general. AI has the possibility of making the tech billionaires far more wealthy and influential.

They boost the economy if there exist enough mechanisms that spread the generated gains to everyone. Those mechanisms used to be unions, political power of the working class and the demand for labor. The first two are close to nonexistant now, and the third one is being eroded at an increasing speed. The closer to human abilities automation gets, the less room there is for new human jobs to be created. At some point any new job invented can also be done by an AI, and at that point productivity gains have no mechanism with which to spread into the economy. At that point the owners of the machines will get everything they want from them and they'll have no need to pay other humans anything.

"The economy" (GDP) being boosted is very unevenly distributed.

Are the jobs created good jobs - that pay decently, and that people want to do?

uncontrolled productivity gains that don't feed the added value of that extra productivity back into the system is failed. you end up with the 0.1% having all the money.

hmmm... wonder what country has this balance.