If you want to understand our current moment, I would urge you to study that history.
Calculators didn't replace mathematicians, they replaced Computers (as an occupation). To the point that most people don't even know it used to be a job for people.
I say calculators but there is a blurry line between early electronic computers and calculators. Portable electronic calculators also replaced the slide rule, around the late 1970s, which had been the instrument of choice for engineers for around 350 years!
Imho you are underestimating the work of programmers if you compare them to “Computers”
In fact the first programmers were mainly women because they came from a Computer background.
the AI parallel is quite apt actually
I had the same thought you did back then. If I could build a company with 3 people pulling a couple million of revenue per year, what did that mean to society when the average before that was maybe a couple dozen folks?
Technology concentrates gains to those that can deploy it - either through knowledge, skill, or pure brute force deployment of capital.
If you replace lawyers with AI, poor people will be able to take big companies to court and defend themselves against frivolous lawsuits, instead of giving in and settling. If you replace doctors, the cost of medicine will go down dramatically, and so will waiting times. If you replace financial advisors, everybody will have their money managed in an optimal way, making them richer and less likely to make bad financial decisions. If you replace creative workers, everybody will have access to the exact kind of music, books, movies and video games they want, instead of having to settle for what is available. If you automate away delivery and drivers (particularly with drones), the price of prepared food will fall dramatically.
Personally, however, I would find it possibly even more depressing to spend my day doing a job that has economic value only because some regulation prevents it being done more efficiently. At that point I'd rather get the money anyway and spend the day at the beach.
Believe it or not most SWE's and white collar workers in general don't get these perks especially outside the US where most firms have made sure tech workers in general are paid "standard wages" even if they are "good".
That's true for many jobs. The only reason many people have a job is because of a variety of regulations preventing that job from being outsourced.
> At that point I'd rather get the money anyway and spend the day at the beach.
You won't get the money and spend the day at the beach; you'll starve to death.
In any case, there's also a difference between the idea that it can be me or another person doing the same job, and maybe that person can be paid less because of their lower cost of living, but in the end they will put in the same effort as I do; and the idea that a tool can do the job effortlessly and the only reason I have to suffer over it is to justify a salary that has no reason to exist. Then, again, just force the company to pay me while allowing them to use whatever tool they want to get the job done.
Your response doesn’t explain why so many people are hyped about it, just why CEOs are.
The reason to be excited economically for this is if it happens it will be massively deflationary. Pretending CEOs are just going to pocket the money is economically stupid.
Being able to use a super intelligence has been a long time dream too.
What is depressing is the amount of tech workers who have no interest in technological advancement.
And since when do business executives NOT pocket the money? Pretty much the only exception is when they reinvest the savings into the business, for more growth, but that reinvestment and growth usually is only something the rest of us care about if it involves hiring..
You're correct. But it doesn't matter. Remember the San Francisco protests against tech? People will kill a golden goose if it's shinier than their own.
It's self-defeating but predictable. (Hence why the protests were tolerated to backed by NIMBY interests.)
My point is the same nonsense can be applied to someone not earning a tech wage celebrating tech workers getting replaced by AI. It makes them poorer, ceteris paribus. But they may not understand that. And the few that do may not care (or may have a way to profit off it, directly or indirectly, such that it's acceptable).
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-multiplier-effect-of...
This doesn't even require any "conspiracy" among CEOs, just people with a vested interest in AI hype who act in that interest, shaping the type of content their organizations will produce. We saw something lessor with the "return to office" frenzy just because many CEOs realized a large chunk of their investment portfolio was in commercial real estate. That was only less hyped because I suspect there were larger numbers of CEOs with an interest in remaining remote.
Outside of the tech scene, AI is far less hyped and in places where CEOs tend to have little impact on the media it tends to be resisted rather than hyped.
For the same reason people are obsessed with replacing all blue-collar jobs. Every cent that a company doesn't have to spend on its employees is another cent that can enrich the company's owners.
I’m skeptical that this is a good use of resources or energy consumption.
Maybe it's my post-communist background though and not relevant for the rest of the world
Like you have a brilliant idea, but unfortunately don't have any hard skills. Now you don't have to pay enormous sums of money to geeks and have to suffer them to make it come true. Truly a dream!
That is what allowed our current lifestyles. It is good thing. Now it is just coming to next area.
Producing things cheaper sounds great, but just because its produced cheaper doesn't mean it is cheaper for people to buy.
And it doesn't matter if things are cheap if a massive number of people don't have incomes at all (or even a reasonable way to find an income - what exactly are white collar professionals supposed to do when their profession is automated away, if all the other professions are also being automated away?)
Sidenote btw, but I do think it's funny that the investor class doesn't think AI will come for their role..
To me the silver lining is that I don't think most of this comes to pass, because I don't think current approaches to AGI are good enough. But it sure shows some massive structural issues we will eventually face
investors don't perform work (labour); they take capital risk. An ai do not own capital, and thus cannot "take" that role.
If you're asking about the role of a manager of investment, that's not an investor - that's just a worker, which can and would be automated eventually. Robo-advisors are already quite common. The owner of capital can use AI to "think" for them in choosing what capital risk to take.
And as for massive number of people who don't have income - i dont think that will come to pass either (just as you dont think AGI will come to pass). Mostly because the speed of these automation will decline as it's not that trivial to do so - the low hanging fruits would've been picked asap, and the difficult ones left will take ages to automate.
If a bootstrapped startup has immediate access to the equivalent of 20 administrative employees via AI, then what purpose does the investor have?
And if a single bootstrapped "investor" can support such a company, that's an even better world than today isnt it? It means everyone has a chance at breaking out with a successful company/product.
We're all far closer to poor than we are to having enough capital to live off of efficiency increases. AI is the last thing the capitalist class requires to finally throw of the shackles of humanity, of keeping around the filthy masses for their labor.
With AI it is white collar work.
And I was explaining that I work in tech, so I live in the future to some degree, but that ultimately, even with HIPAA and other regulations, there's too much of a gain here for it not to be deployed eventually, And those people in their time are going to be used differently when that happens. I was speculating that it could be used for interviews as well, but I think I'm less confident there.
> They seem to be totally convinced that this will happen.
The two groups of people are not same. I for example belong to the 2nd but not the 1st. If you have used the current gen LLM coding tools you will realize they have gotten they are scary good.
I’m paid about 16x an electronics engineer. Salaries in IT are completely unrelated to the person’s effort compared to other white collar jobs. It would take an entire career to some manager to reach what I made after 5 years. I may be 140IQ but I’m also a dumbass in social terms!
Because the only thing that gets the executive class hornier than new iPhone-tier products is getting to layoff tons of staff. It sends the stock price through the roof.
It follows from there that an iPhone-tier product that also lets them layoff tons of staff would be like fucking catnip to them.
There's no such thing as taking people's jobs, nobody and nothing is going to take your job except for Jay Powell, and productivity improvements cause employment to increase not decrease.
It's difficult to have much empathy for the "learn to code" crowd who seemingly almost got a sense of joy out of watching those jobs and lifestyles get destroyed. Almost some form of childhood high school revenge fantasy style stuff - the nerd finally gets one up on the prom king. Otherwise I'm not sure where the vitriol came from. Way too many private conversations and overheard discussion in the office to make me think these were isolated opinions.
That said, it's not everyone in tech. Just a much larger percentage than I ever thought, which is depressing to think about.
It's certainly been interesting to watch some folks who a decade ago were all about "only skills matter, if you can be outcompeted by a robot you deserve to lose your job" make a 180 on the whole topic.
To me, this all sounds like an “end-of-the-world” nihilistic wet dream, and I don’t buy the hype.
Is it’s just me?