https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries

The article is intended for tech people to roll over and accept their fate.

I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.

No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.

[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

It's also not like I would do more work for less effort and be home by lunch. It will still be same 8 hours of doing something and be compensated to have the same general level of lifestyle with or without AI.

I'm certainly not excited to have a new office chair or a coffee machine.

Surely, on Hackernews, we know we can get excited about technology that maybe boring to most of the public. And in this case, I think the technology has wide-ranging productivity enhancing applications

Maybe your question is about why the tech billionaires are trying to get the public so excited about it? Totally different question.

>> It will still be same 8 hours of doing something

Yes but your 8 hours of work will serve more people. Will you see the fruits of that productivity gain? Very good question, but again, orthogonal to the usefulness of the technology.

I work in place that serves about the third of a population of a small country and I highly doubt the advances in technology future or past (hello COBOL and Azure) will change that much. I also really doubt the changes in the landscape are making the quality of experience better. It's sort of induced demand where increases in technical performance either mean less colleagues or just more work for the same of work.

I can imagine an alternate future where AI advances without all of the social, environmental and economic harm that it does, where there isn't a literal cult of neo-reactionaries using it to advance their authoritarian political agenda, where mass copyright theft isn't an issue, where the internet isn't consumed by slop and businesses aren't trying to put their workforce out on the streets as fast as possible. Where people don't literally believe it will evolve into some kind of techno-God whose judgement we should fear. Where we're not shoving it into every nook, cranny and orifice of our society, even when it doesn't work, because it's "inevitable" and we "just have to learn to live with it." A world where AI is just technology and not whatever this insanity is that it breeds in people.

I wish I lived in that world, because the hacker in me finds the technology fascinating, and I'd like to be able to use it without abandoning my morals or supporting the infrastructure of fascism.

Does this distinction matter practically? It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. Do I care if I'm the one falling from 10 meters high?

But then I suspect you don't care one way or another what the effects of LLM usage are, you just don't want the pace of LLM acceleration interfered with. It's the same basic rationale that Americans have with guns, and they make the same bad faith arguments when gun control comes up.

I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not only English into Spanish, but business requirements into code. Sure, not perfectly, but well enough that I feel like I'm living that joke about a mechanic who charges $1 for a new bolt and $999 for knowing which bolt. #LeopardsEatingPeoplesFacesParty2026, but seriously, LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.

I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. I hear rumblings of problems from copyeditors, translators, and mathematicians. It's affecting a lot of people at the same time, even if they can all point to ways it kinda still sucks or "lacks taste" or "has no common sense" or whatever. I can point to the models doing bad code, but I know from experience that "bad code" can win awards at the product level.

Robots have been milking the cows and sorting the post for decades now. But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land.

Ironic that I only hear praises of AI-driven cars from one place, which has been saying "just a few years" for the last 13. The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).

I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.

I've had LLMs write code which performs a genetic algorithm for balancing video game AI*. There's a very soft line in quickly moving metaphorical sand between what it can do and what it can't, and right now I'm not sure which side of that line you'd find a user saying they want a computer vision system to turn a robot arm into a barista given LLMs can search for, download, read, and seemingly do a decent job of implementing research papers e.g. sim2real.

Just to be explicit though: I'm not saying the state of AI-led research is sufficient to render unimportant researchers who find better ways to train AI, just me as a software engineer is no longer a blocker to productising that research.

* The same LLM had also written the game AI, but while I'm fine pointing to a genetic algorithm balancing it, I don't think that the game AI in itself counts because "game AI" is GOFAI.

Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.

Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid.

By their customers, for doing the same thing they'd been doing for much of their working lives up to this point.

> Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will?

You'd have the answer if you'd continued for just four more words (or five if you count the "they're" as two) past where you cut off the quotation:

  they're forced by economics

No, in reality, people do not want to pay for what he wants to sell. It's concrete people. Not something disembodied.

  Economics (/ˌɛkəˈnɒmɪks, ˌiːkə-/)[1][2] is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.[3][4]

  Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as the basic elements of economies, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of those interactions. Individual agents may include households, firms, buyers, and sellers.

That, too, is a job that's gone. I used to know some actress/model/waitress types in LA. They'd sometimes do catalog modeling: "OK, the next one is the blue sweater, and hurry it up, we have thirty more to do before lunch".

Yes, I'm still waiting for that. It's gonna lift productivity in what's a large sector in most economies. Of course, most companies will have to re-organise their processes to take full advantage, because eg truck drivers also perform all kinds of ad hoc labour around loading and unloading.

You don't seem to get it. If what you said is true then the only reason why your job is gone first is because software moves faster than hardware. The chain reaction to get rid of all jobs has started.

After all, you can now automate the development of physical hardware including robots and their control algorithms. Then all we need to do is give the AI a job shop and mechanical engineering is done next.

And so on. Until every single job is gone.

My surprise was the ordering.

We saw the same with the pandemic and the vaccines where the personal harm % of the vaccine was significantly smaller than the personal harm % of the illness and yet had (still has) a huge conspiracy theory about it.

The first agricultural revolution would have been one guy planting seeds with the expectation that edible crops would grow. That led to a huge population boom, but not to cities.

The industrial revolution didn't have the mechanics you're imagining. People left the country for cities because work was available in cities, not because it wasn't available at home. Peasants were always in a constant state of having more labor available than the land they worked required, but that push factor never meant the surplus labor could leave. You can't leave without somewhere to go to.

With the significant exception of post plague periods during which some big changes occurred wrt landholder / serf relations, expected pay rates, part ownership, etc.

eg: (unvetted source) Worker Power: How the black death revolutionised workers rights - https://historyguild.org/worker-power-how-the-black-death-re...

The period after the Black Death was characterized by serfs abandoning their family farms for more lucrative options elsewhere. If the family farms needed them, that wouldn't have happened.

It's your assertion that

* no peasants died during the Black Death,

* peasants owned "family farms"

* no peasant owned family farms suffered a labour shortage despite being "abandoned for more lucrative options elsewhere"

?

Okay. Sure.

"Normal"?

It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare.

But:

AI cannot do your job

Your boss bought AI to do your job

You're fired

This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not.

[1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook...

Being almost more boring than the thing that caused Malthus to become wrong is quite an accomplishment.

I think the optimistic excited people are thinking more 'What a time to be alive' than 'All praise be, for they have come'

Which is not to say there won't be people deifying AI, I just don't think there are many of those yet.

The cynical side of me thinks it will happen, but right now I feel like most of those who seem susceptible to that kind of thinking are tending towards the Butlearian.

Yes everybody sees it as useful tool, and everybody damn well understands in medium term their work is at huge risk. That rolls over any emotion around 'oh what a nice new toy to use'.

What do you think people are talking about when they refer to "the singularity"?

If you go by the original expression of the idea of the singularity, it is that the duration between significant advances has been decreasing throughout history at an accelerating pace. This suggests that the primary factor governing this property will reach a limit and a different property will become dominant. What happens then is unpredictable because up until now, that other property has not been discernable due to its relative scale. Like measuring the gravity of an asteroid while it is next to a star. Or seeing a star during daytime.

...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible.

That's because they're thinking that they're still going to get paid $200k/y for typing in "Duh, Claude, make me an app, here the specs from the client, doh!"

They aren't seeing that there is very little value to add when all they are, is an interface to a magic software-making machine.

replacement would not happen overnight but they would decrease the amount of jobs required

back then we need a team of 4 - 10 engineer for an project/app, now maybe we need 2-3 max

I think the outcomes are very hard to predict, it depends a lot on both economical factors, technological factors (how much will LLMs still improve beyond benchmaxxing), societal factors, etc.

It's like the early internet where there was the whole gamut of opinions between 'its a nothingburger' to 'it's the democratic town square of the world'. In the end, it was neither.

Whoever gets it right will be called a visionary, but realistically nobody had a clue.

Counterpoint: reducing most of these metastatic organizations to 2-pizza level teams with AI would be positive across the board.

Countercounterpoint: But since the overlords of these fiefdoms are not stupid, just malevolent, they'll use AI to tighten their grip and terrorize anyone who dare oppose them. Basically, organizational Ponzi.

You think I'm a non-hacker?

I don't think EMs are useless, I just think that you are naive if you think that LLMs can't do the EM work as well.

Either way, I empathize with your anxiety but posit that its primarily driven by techs original sin: the algorithmic feed and the resultant 24hour news cycle. I think the truth will be a lot more boring (mass upskilling and reskilling) but those narratives aren’t easily sold on the feeds.

AI is normal technology but it’s probably the largest upgrade to productivity and massively deflationary especially as it hits atoms and not just bits. That is actually extremely exciting.

If software genuinely becomes a solved problem, everyone is going to working in AI labs (or its verticals).

If AI is also going to maintain itself, then there is no need for AI labs either, at which point we've reached singularity and no one is safe.

If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much.

This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses.

A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.

"have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."

"If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."

I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.

That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.

I live in Eastern Europe now where they also have free health care, and it's so bad that almost everyone pays for private medical insurance - essentially we pay twice because the first system is mostly not fit for purpose.

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...

Is there the same motivation to help people live healthy lifestyles in the American healthcare system? Are there any lobby groups with the kind of influence and reach as a universal healthcare provider?

Most of my friends are in some form of tech or creative work, so perhaps that is my bias, but with the threat of destitution removed the vast majority of people I know would turn into maelstroms of creation: art, crafts, coding, building, organizing, civic participation, scientific experimentation, and raising strong families.

Instead they are trapped spending the majority of their time navigating corporate politics to deliver a fraction of their value to society. Seems… dangerously inefficient and corrosive to the human spirit, no?

Are there historical or contemporary examples of this? I googled but couldn’t find any specifics.

The reason I ask is that I in the US, employer-provided health insurance is a large expense for businesses. And anecdotally, I’ve never spoken to any US small business owner that feels that choosing employee insurance plans is a real competitive advantage. But perhaps the historical/contemporary alternatives are worse?

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a7750bd-1538-83ea-840c-57266e366f...

If you don't think the NHS has any problems then I don't know what to tell you on that you either don't follow any information about it or don't interact with it.

Today, many of those activities are either toxic, like fossil fuel subsidies, or useless, like casino stock markets which force everyone to play PR con games that are divorced from bedrock physical fundamentals - like clean water, a safe food supply, and a stable climate.

Guns won't help anyone when farming dies.

Not for long, anyway.

Money and trade as we know it today was invented by the Romans because soldiers were raiding their own villages for supplies. Paying soldiers with coins then demanding them back from villagers got them to start trading. That’s where incentives started.

Oh yes, the usual argument of how what most industrializes nations (and many poor nations as well) have achieved, is somehow seen as impossible just because the US can't manage to do it (because it doesn't profit the oligarchs).

If shit gets as bad as people are hoping it will get, workers aren't going to be in the "gets things" class anymore.

Now, not everyone can, because some people are very disabled. But the internet has brought new capabilities, and some disabled people are able to work remotely. And guess what, they do. They willingly give up the "free", say, 900 dollars a month on SSI to work for a salary.

You see "work" as a transactional unit.

I do work purely because of idealistic reasons. I'm not actually owed anything, I'm working because of us, humanity. Yeah, people are going to slack, and that's just life. It's just statistics, optimize society to such a configuration that people acts have a place and get the support they need. Most of the "slackers" who represent the people just living on the UBI type system you described, probably don't do it as a direct choice. Most likely they feel like they can't contribute to society, but that's something that's solvable. It's a matter of education and culture.

About your quote:

  "have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."

Of course, the good times also had their downsides, lots of complacency in politics and not feeling the need to fight for better, because things were already better than they've ever been!

Smaller EU countries cannot even today introduce a fair revenue tax on big tech so that they pay any tax without being threatened about retaliatory steps by US administration.

* politically, we have a unified economic policy that is working wonders. The Brussels Effect is a thing. But, we don't have a unified foreign and defence policies, which partially made Ukraine War possible, and is making a Russian invasion further in Europe a distinct possibility.

* however, economically, the market is not really completely unified yet, especially for digital services, but for many other branches of economy as well. I can drive through 5 countries in a day, and my Netflix and Play Store selection will be different in every one. That doesn't make any sense.

Americans would largely languish if big tech wins, big tech is already profiting of our misery now they want to profit in other domains too?

80% of this country is not going to benefit at all from any American corporations because American corporations have open disdain for workers.

Have you seen who we elect to run our countries?

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

Skimming this list, there seems to be one really marked failure, in Finland, but that’s disputed I read also.

Can you list more failures?

> Among all the people, only two key groups were found to be discouraged from working by the Mincome project – new mothers and teenaged boys, who, instead of entering the workforce at an early age, decided to study until grade 12, increasing the proportion of students who graduate high school.

Remind us what the U stands for?

If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working.

I would possibly exploit such a system. Take 4% from my portfolio + UBI on top. Maybe work 3 days a week if I find a job that I enjoy.

This is, IMO, why UBI has to be timed almost perfectly for when the AI is ready to be the one who does the work.

That is what earned income tax, payroll taxes, and Medicare and Social Security taxes are.

If you believe this, then surely you also believe pension plans are the devil? If we can't have UBI then we can start by tearing away pension plans for all of the old people my tax money is being wasted on.

But yes National pensions can have the same problem, as is currently the case in France. The elderly vote themselves higher and benefits, waiting to back breaking taxes on the diminishing number of middle-aged workers

By the way, I support some level of rich-to-poor redistribution, not sure what's the optimal level but to get a reasonable range of where the optimum could be, look at the top 20 countries.

It is NOT about enabling "a modest life" or stopping people from working! On any serious UBI proposal everyone is still incentivized to work.

Once AI is able to replace all human work, that's a new situation. But this is not happening in the next 20+ years.

I think we've largely been able to avoid large scale disruption in society for the past several decades because the groups losing their careers were small enough, but we can see negative effects in things like health data. I think Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case does a pretty good job at talking about this. However, AI now threatens a much more visible work segment, the upper middle class, so I do agree that now is a very interesting time to see what happens.

The miners, auto-workers, ship workers, BT (phone) workers and other swathes ended up leaving the workplace as a general rule.

To massage the figures, the government were able to expand the education sector and take the 'long term sick' off the books.

For the education sector there are mature person degrees, however, education mostly takes the young off the books, the people that did apprenticeships.

Long term sick can be an easy skive, if you have taken up the bottle, can claim to be depressed and have the doctor in the job centre believe you. The incentive is more money than dole and no need to check in with the job centre on a fortnightly basis.

IMHO AI is the fig leaf for what is going on, with further financialisation of Western economies (rent seeking) and absurd energy costs, due to the Anglo-American 'war for oil against humanity', making most Western economies doomed to never be competitive ever again. Soon the only jobs will be 'multi-drop delivery drivers' and 'care workers for seniors'. Immigrants and young people will fill these roles, not whomever is being laid off 'due to AI'.

The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"?

This is all, assuming of course, that the end is nigh and our profession really is close to extinction. I personally don't buy it, but if it is, so be it.

We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry.

Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day.

The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things.

Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone.

Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.

But there is still journalism.

* Propublica

* The Economist

* The Guardian

* 404 Media

Life is much harder for journalist now, and joining g the "darkside" of PR is the best/lucrative career path, but it exists

But to be fair the Guardian's sister paper, the Observer did score an impressive scoop last year with Chloe Hadjimatheou's investigation of the "Salt Path" scandal

Local journalism is dead, with unfortunate consequences for local politics that bleeds into national and international stuff.

National investigative journalism is hanging by a thread, with a TON of stuff (mostly corruption of various kinds) going uninvestigated which should be. Some of the slack has been picked up by academics of one kind or another making their work more accessible, but now they're in the firing line too.

I sense the inverse: a demand that we make ourselves irrelevant to satisfy interest rate inspired demand for cost savings.

Executives have developed a religion around AI and it is inspiring an orgy of value destruction in software orgs as they try to slash costs and increase efficiency. But theyve done it rather stupidly with this new religion rather than with more prosaic and altogether more boring improvements.

Quality has plummeted everywhere and there aren't even any meaningful cost savings to show for it, just empty promises and more hype.

If nobody actually needs your work's output and you are simply allowed to do it out of some kind of state benevolence because it's some quaint tradition, you're laughing stock. We should not put up with being that.

If a $20000/y a job is deemed unrelevant, chances is that one might easily find similar or better in a totally different area.

If a $200000/y job is deemed unrelevant and is lost, and one has mortgage payments they can't pay with a $50000 or $100000 job, they have a big problem because selling that house might become difficult when all other $200000/y workers will try to sell their house and move within the same period and the housing market crashes. So you can ruin the economy of a large area quite quickly.

So a bit of anticipation is useful.

https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...

There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor.

In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing.

Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s.

But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike.

Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.

You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).

You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good.

I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.

I wonder what they’ll do next with EVs becoming more popular? Outlaw home charging?

Mandate a monthly routing check by a certified specialist. You can sign up for a yearly commitment, 12 visits for just $899. A no brainer when a visit costs minimum $149.

Failure to comply can result in a fine up to $3,000 and up to 6 months in prison.

Can't make your own power, it's illegal to grow your own tobacco, what's next? Sewage bills?!

But you don't give out UBI and let people become potatoes. You give out UBI to allow them to meet their basic needs and then have them work a job they kfhr genuinely be OK at, and, ideally, enjoy. Ideally.

So yeah, even if no one ever really enjoying being a gas station attendant, getting up and going to a job to earn money and pay rent gives people a sense of purpose. And UBI definitely risks robbing people of that purpose. The alternatives to UBI soon though might be creating fake jobs or letting people starve.

Humans aren't like that. They don't deprive themselves of activity like a bored dog unless you (who?) give them a job. If you give people their time back, they will fill it out with whatever they actually want to do, and that's freedom.

Conversely, the erosion of free time over the past generation has arguably also eroded the social structures that keep people healthy.

There's an "epidemic" of people who have nothing to do and for whatever reason can't figure something out

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/05/ce-corner-isolation

Retiree data also shows finanical freedom and free time often doesn't lead to people figuring out something to do

A small parallel is that (for me) a weekend is not enough to do much more than recover from the workweek. But two weeks off is enough to recover and then do some more things. Even then, it would take more time to do things of major significance.

Chasing a ball, professionally, for millions of dollars a year, gives some very rich and famous humans a sense of purpose.

Laying on a beach and surfing may fulfill a sense of purpose for other humans.

Some humans need to solve hard problems.

Some humans need to create something original.

And then a lot of humans... most humans... drift through life without any sense of purpose. Does work, the need to work, give them some? I'm not a Calvinist, but I have to live in a world where most people are like that. So if they don't have some need to do something, idle hands are the devil's plaything, and no good can come from the idleness. Just drugs and dissolute degeneracy. Take it from a creative alcoholic who struggles with the question of purpose myself, and finds some light between music, painting, hard work I have to do and my better angels.

That's what you're having a hard time fathoming, because you think everyone is like you; imbued with meaning and purpose that they will find. They are not. Even those of us who are, or were, don't always remain so.

But need? Need wakes you up.

The crush. The urgency. The do or die. The death-defying situation. Sinking or swimming. Here is what brings out the initiative and the creativity and the purpose in people.

I used to believe exactly what you said when I was 17. If we didn't have to work we'd all use our free time to make amazing art and poetry and contribute to humanity.

Look around, man. I know a lot of people who don't have to work. Half of them are homeless and the other half are millionaires. You know what none of them are doing with their free time?? Anything resembling something with a purpose.

Whoever told you this or gave you that impression? It certainly does not reflect anyone in my life. It sounds like symptoms of major depression. But I strongly suspect it is actually just a lie.

What do you think people did before work was invented? Or rather, do you think evolution shaped humans in an environment that demanded 9-5 desk sitting, email sending, backcircling?

It's extremely revealing that people seem to not even be able to come up with things that might give you a sense of purpose in life. No wonder we're all depressed cynics.

Granted, society benefits most from the work of the exceptional, so it may still be worth it.

I also don't believe that we have eroded free time over the last generation. As one example, many now have a robot vacuum cleaner, which frees whatever time they previously spent vacuuming. They may be spending a lot of their time on things, but as long as those are things by choice, it's still free time.

That's a baffling proposition. I think society benefits overwhelmingly more from the sum of average contributions, not the rare exceptional contribution.

I do think we're missing out on a huge number of exceptional contributions due to the circumstances people face who would otherwise be free and able to make such contributions. Instead they are sending emails.

Not a joke.

All the folks talking about it, it sounds like some sort of fantasy cope to get people going along willingly into the void.

Now, times are becoming "interesting" again, unfortunately.

Well, it's also money, because it influences politics to maintain that apathy, but it feels like you guys could just not.

I don't hate billionaires. They basically never cross my mind. All credit to those guys for doing what they did. I'm not personally jealous and I find the anger and jealousy at them to be petty and kind of stupid in a way that reflects badly on the person expressing it. Most of the billionaires in the tech sector didn't inherit that kind of wealth, and I respect the ones who earned what they earned. I wouldn't trade my life for theirs and I don't feel left out because I don't have private jets or islands. Whining you don't have a jet or an island is childish... grow a garden and get a dog, don't be jealous. Comparing what you have to someone else's possessions is a basic fault that makes a lot of people miserable for no reason, unable to appreciate what they have. Appreciate what you have. Billionaires can have everything you ever dreamed of and still be much more miserable than you. Good for them if they're happy, I say.

I'm just also saying that if I were in their shoes I wouldn't think the current situation was tenable.

We’re going through a series of ever record breaking heat waves where the only thing you can be sure of is that it will be worse next year.

They’re still pushing fossil fuels and blocking attempts to replace them with cheaper alternatives.

They’re too focused on who got the biggest yacht to care.

Circular financing???

He was telling me stories about how the communist had an implementation similar to what you were describing. There was a strong enforcement of everyone capable of doing something did something. He said it was not uncommon to see something like two men, each with one arm, operating a broom and dust pan. One would sweep, and the other would hold the dust pan. Or something else like a person confined to a wheelchair would be stationed to call center since walking was not necessary.

He said the real toxic part of the policy was that since everyone was required to do some form of work, there was also an incentive to snitch on people that were not working. Snitches were rewarded, in fact. Thus, there were instances of false accusations, extortion, etc., so it seems like it was rife with corruption and bullshit like everything humanity touches.

On the east coast I could understand not wanting to get out of your car in the winter. And an attendant standing out in the snow is a tough job. Not sure it should be mandated. But in Oregon there's really no time of year it's that great a hardship to pump your own gas.

The attendants weren't fired, btw. At most stations they're still there and they'll offer to pump your gas. You're just allowed to do it yourself now.

So today it would be mainly just busywork, I’m doing those like twice a year, but need to put gas in my car once a week (roughly).

Since the Manchester Arena terror attack (awful, tragic, evil, and an isolated event), it has been mandatory for music and live theatre venues to have an absolute army of "security" staff checking people's bags.

A full 95 percent of whom would be entirely and totally useless in any actual emergency or danger situation.

It's one of the things contributing to the ever increasing price of show tickets, but basically it's a tax on people who can afford live shows to create jobs for an otherwise fairly unemployable sector of the population (young and not much education - way too little natural demand for that in central London to mop up all the supply).

And yep, I get it on the booze thing, but they'd have to confiscate a ton of handbag booze for the nylon jacket army to make economic sense.

Festivals is one thing, sure, but we're talking theatre shows and comedy nights as well.

I don't think it would be fair fo make living on a UBI as comfortable as the lowest minimum wage job people are actually working at. Not fair to the people who work at whatever they can find.

Of course, you also pay taxes out of whatever you make, so the person who makes $100,000 might be paying $30,000 in taxes and then they're effectively paying $18,000 rather than receiving $12,000. But that's fine and is actually want you want, because it produces a progressive rate curve even when everyone is paying the same marginal tax rate. Right now we put irrationally high marginal rates on lower and middle income people in the form of benefits phase outs. With a UBI they get the benefits as cash and experience the phase outs as paying taxes at the same (rather than a higher) marginal rate as higher income people.

You don't want people doing nothing. You want them to have the incentive to take productive employment when it's available. Taking away the money you give them because they take a job is exactly what you don't want, which is crazy.

I know it's considered "regressive" but if we're going to pay for that I think it shouldn't come out of income tax, it should be sales tax. Specifically zero tax on basic necessities and an escalating sales tax on anything optional or luxury. A gluttony consumption tax, if you will. Want to spend your $12k on Nikes? You're only gonna get $3k of shoes for it. Make $300k a year and live on rice and beans? Keep your money. Want to buy a boat? 20% of that goes to pay for the UBI.

[edit] on the other hand, what I just wrote is probably also a prescription for destroying the world's most successful and productive economies, and the companies that fuel them. But taking a UBI out of income tax is a great way to make more people not want to work. And if Nikes get way too expensive, who knows how that could distort the economy. Maybe it would be better if the government just made some basic rules about minimum wages and work hours and let people fight it out for a buck like they do now. idk.

I'm not using actual proposed values, just an example. Lets choose $100k as the pivot point.

So person earning that currently pays $30k tax, meaning they get take-home of $70k. The new system means they get $12k UBI and tax needs to leave them $48k so they stay at the same salary level. They now pay $52k tax.

That means 52% tax rate, across the board.

The guy who previously earned $20k and paid $2k tax had a take home of $18k. He gets $12k UBI. Now he pays 52% tax on the $20k, so $10.4k. His take home is now $21.6k.

The closer you get to the floor, the better security there is. You can live on the $12k but you are not rich, and nobody goes without.

The $1m high earner should have paid $400k in tax but actually paid $100k because he pays $20k to an accountant. He now gets $12k UBI and pays $520k in tax because income tax rate is flat and the accountant needs to find another way to earn a crust, though he gets UBI, so..

the new flat tax rate is 42% and the $20k guy takes home $23.6k

It'd be more practical to net the $12k in UBI against each person's tax liability. If one owes more than $12k in taxes, then he or she pays the difference. If one owes less than $12k, then the government pays out the difference.

The $12k is additive, but the factors that would reduce its value are multiplicative. If prices were to all double (an extreme case) it would still be equivalent to today's $6k. There's no scenario where everyone gets $12k but also the first $12k of everyone's money stops counting.

Sales tax on luxury items isn't a terrible idea, but the problem with relying only on sales tax is that very rich people (the ones who are getting most of the population's money) don't buy a lot, so the money just gets stuck in their accounts forever (or until they decide to buy all of the world's RAM). It can be one prong of a mixed strategy, though.

One part of inflation is driven by the difference between money entering circulation and money leaving it. UBI obviously brings a lot more money into circulation; it's generally assumed that taxes would have to be raised to remove the same amount.

Only if something is preventing the market from responding to higher demand by building more cars or housing units rather than raising the unit price. And if that's happening then you're screwed independent of this, because anything that causes ordinary people to have more money would do the same thing. If energy costs went down then people would have the money they didn't spend on electricity and that would cause housing costs to increase.

This is why restrictive zoning rules are very bad.

> I know it's considered "regressive" but if we're going to pay for that I think it shouldn't come out of income tax, it should be sales tax.

Sales tax is considered regressive for two reasons. One, it's a flat rate, but that's the thing we want in this case because we're using it as the de facto phase out for the UBI. Two, rich people don't spend as much of their income. But that one has always been a giant fraud because it's really income tax that allows the rich to defer taxes (via unrealized capital gains), and when they do that they don't even pay taxes on the money they spend, since they can borrow against the assets and spend on credit.

So using a consumption tax actually works perfectly well in this case and is even more progressive than the status quo where the rich can avoid taxes entirely.

They have to pay taxes on the income/realised gains they use to pay the loan back when it matures. It’s not completely tax free.

No they don't, they just take out another loan. If you have a billion dollars in assets that increases in value by an average of 10% a year and can borrow money at 6% interest, guess how long you can spend anything up to your entire wealth on credit before the recapitalized loan principal catches up to your assets.

"Estate tax" is basically a tax on people who die before they do "estate planning". It's a sham that generates less than 1% of federal revenue, and most of that not from billionaires but from upper middle class families who didn't realize they would be subject to it or otherwise died without making advance preparations for it.

One of the most common cases it actually gets collected is when someone dies relatively young, because those are the people most likely to have not shielded their assets from it yet, which is one of the reasons "death tax" is a pretty appropriate moniker for it.

It's also one of the reasons that UBI + consumption tax works really well: Put your assets into whatever box you want, transfer them to your kids however you want, you're still paying the consumption tax when you buy something.

Here's an idea I just kinda came up with: Maybe instead of what you buy, the first UBIx3 you spend in a year should be sales tax free. After that you pay sales tax which goes back into the UBI. But I guess that means tracking everything everyone buys... which would be a privacy disaster. Okay back to the drawing board.

I still think that in the case of individual buyers and sellers for houses and cars, a blanket injection of money just makes sellers able to raise their prices by the same amount.

And while it's true that if energy prices dropped, the same would sort of apply, that wouldn't be a tax out of the value people generate, it would be a boon to everyone... meaning in theory wages could go up and taxes go down and, as above, energy prices are much more of a strain on people with less money, so it would benefit them more, relatively speaking. Whereas a blanket $12k UBI to everyone would make it just as hard to compete to buy a house as before.

Elon is really the boring case because a) it requires the premise that unrealized gains are income (which brings in more sticky problems than you really want) and b) billionaires are over-hyped and the majority of total income is the likes of doctors and law partners, because there are so many more of them than there are of Elons.

But those people actually do spend a significant proportion of their income. Not all on necessities, but what kind of sane tax would tax only necessities?

> I still think that in the case of individual buyers and sellers for houses and cars, a blanket injection of money just makes sellers able to raise their prices by the same amount.

Suppose that everyone suddenly has an extra $12,000 to buy housing. Now, to begin with, this isn't actually what happens, because we're not printing the money. Whatever someone receives, someone else is paying in tax. For middle income people this is going to largely cancel out. For lower income people this is replacing SNAP and Medicaid and so on. It's a less dramatic change than it's made out to be.

But never mind that and suppose everybody actually had an extra $12,000/year. At existing prices, more people could now afford to buy a home, right? There is now additional demand for housing. And additional housing can be created by construction companies, who want that additional money. If it costs them $150,000 to build a housing unit and the price is $200,000 then they make $50,000 for each one they build. Unless somebody stops them, they're going to keep building more housing units as long as anybody is willing to pay $200,000 for them. Meanwhile $12,000 over 30 years is $360,000. So who is going to pay $560,000 for an existing unit when you can have a new one built for $200,000?

The problem only comes if you have zoning rules that inhibit new units from being built, because then everyone has to outbid each other on the existing stock. But even then it doesn't absorb all of the money, because some people would prefer to spend it on things other than housing.

> And while it's true that if energy prices dropped, the same would sort of apply, that wouldn't be a tax out of the value people generate, it would be a boon to everyone... meaning in theory wages could go up and taxes go down

Money doesn't care where you got it. A UBI and a tax credit are equivalent things. And if you don't think so then implement the UBI as a refundable tax credit and your concerns will be addressed, right?

> and, as above, energy prices are much more of a strain on people with less money, so it would benefit them more, relatively speaking.

Who do you suppose buys more electricity, a janitorial worker or OpenAI?

> Unless somebody stops them, they're going to keep building more housing units as long as anybody is willing to pay $200,000 for them.

sounds like you're describing a paperclip maximizer and drives home the importance of zoning (or rather land allocation and geographical coordination) as a general concept.

We would be better off if zoning density restrictions were entirely unconstitutional. Some state should try that.

Of course, one reason that they are very good is so that you can avoid living in hell. It's a balance.

Yes, this is why many people think Universal Basic Services (food, housing, health care, etc) is a vastly superior model to UBI

And to the extent that it doesn't, it's because they were going to buy those things anyway (since they're necessities) in which case it's equivalent to cash because they can now spend the money they otherwise would have used to buy those things. At which point all you're doing is wasting tax dollars on administrative overhead and reducing utility when you get the numbers wrong and what a given person actually needs is more money for food and less for housing or vice versa.

Then the gas station owner could hire another attendant. Or your parent could pick a different gas station or a different time of day, free markets and all...

The sad part is that it kind of does work from the other end.

Suppose you're a former press operator who can't expect to find any more work operating a printing press. Should you take a McJob? You have years of experience working with electric motors and hydraulics and pumps and industrial control systems. You might be better off to get a job in a trade. Study for the licensing exam and become a plumber or an electrician or the like. Except that you can't, because you're required to do a multi-year apprenticeship to get into any of those things no matter how much experience you have doing something similar. And you can't even get the apprenticeship to begin with because you're 45 years old and the union won't take you.

When a job is being eliminated by newer technology, the union has essentially no power because the employer doesn't care about workers going on strike when they're about to be laid off regardless. But when those laid off workers then want to get a job in another industry, the union there shows up to exclude them.

Which obviously sucks because then the union is screwing the laid off workers rather than some faceless corporation we might imagine or prefer them to be screwing.

This is not how unions work in the UK

In European unions you pay the membership and that is it.

On top of that many apply to complete industry sectors, they are not tied to specific jobs and don't care one second how you got your skills.

Moreover, getting your own full license takes around a decade, during which time you're expected to work as an underling regardless of whether you already have the capacity to do the job yourself. So to the extent that anyone can get an apprenticeship without blood relations or graft, they expect someone who is willing to be stuck in an entry level position for that long even if they already have significant relevant experience from a related field, and then you get in the queue behind a million high school seniors and never get a slot.

Getting permission for jobs is required in many cases without any union having anything to do with it, you have to get them regardless.

Finalising high-school without going through trade school, or into university, meant jobs that only unqualified people get.

Notice that this is equivalent to ensuring that they crash three times as hard for the people being excluded, because they all still need jobs but are now stuck competing for not just fewer but also lower skilled jobs, and on top of that then have to pay more for housing etc. because trade work is being artificially kept in undersupply.

Unions have saved my ass multiple times in the European countries I worked on.

https://vimeo.com/127605643

https://www.nytimes.com/1978/07/01/archives/150-hurt-as-truc...

Much of this time I wanted to switch into computer programming instead, which I've been doing on my own since I was 8 years old. Over the years I've built my own Linux distro from scratch, developed a heavily customized version of the Chromium web browser, and other interesting stuff. But oh noes, I don't have the right piece of paper to prove I'm worth anything, and I'm not planning to waste 4+ years of my life and $50k+ to get said paper, so nobody has any use for me.

Once I dared to become self-employed and stayed out of the job market a few years, then I was considered forever useless and unemployable on that basis alone. The job market doesn't want employees, or business owners, it wants slaves. Any extended period of "unemployment" (or underemployment) is the kiss of death.

Frankly, a lot of the programming jobs these days are shit anyhow (especially the type of crap posted to HN's Who's Hiring) so it's hard to get excited about any of it, and at 40+ I am now unemployable due to age anyway, so it's pointless to apply for anything.

I know plenty of people who went into contracting (aka self-employment) and later found full-time jobs (frequently with clients) across multiple white collar industries, including programming. They were all in their 30s and 40s. In many cases, going the self-employment route actually made them more valuable to future employers. I also know plenty of people without a degree who went into programming.

Over the years I've built my own Linux distro from scratch, developed a heavily customized version of the Chromium web browser, and other interesting stuff.

If this were true you'd be gainfully employed by now. Coming out of COVID, companies were hiring people just because they knew what an IDE was.

Based on your comments though, it's easy to understand why you haven't been able to find a job. I wouldn't want to work with someone as negative as you and I can't imagine anyone would want to work with someone so emotionally draining.

You don't need to be an extrovert to be employed. I'm not, and neither are most of my coworkers. But you do need to not be a hyper-aggressive sack of negativity that emotionally drains everyone around you. So deal with that, and you might be able to land a job before you pass.

The fact is, you, like most people in your society, will see exactly what it is you want to believe. The one thing you absolutely, positively don't want to believe, and will fight to the death to avoid knowing, is that your system is broken and corrupt, and it fucks people over constantly.

You're 40+, you have like potentially another 40+ years to live a life you want. If all it takes is a degree from a public university and some white knuckling for 4-6 years to then get the life you want to work in, is that such a burden to bare?

Wouldn't you want to at least try to achieve your dreams before giving up? You have the experience and smarts to know how to succeed if you want, so why give up 4 decades before the game is over?

Unless it's a criminal record holding you back, I really don't think this is the case. Since 2012, I know lots of people that changed careers.

The first step to solving the problem is acknowledging the problem, not throwing earnest observations of dysfunction into the, "I know a short guy who gets lots of sex, height doesn't matter," bin.

You say no plausible path to automating - I beg to differ.

It would get officers out of harms way.

Not imminent but not zero risk either.

https://berggruen.org/

Which is an AI booster:

https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries

You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.

The about page says this:

> In the cultural realm, Studio B is networking frontier technologists with Hollywood auteurs and science fiction authors who will shape the next narrative.

The organization was founded in 2010. Asking filmmakers about AI seems pretty on brand for their goal of talking about frontier technologies intersecting with Hollywood, does it not?

Is there some definition of “AI booster” that I’m not aware of? Or does it really just mean anyone who talks about AI in a positive light? I don’t see any smoking gun financial incentive connection here where they’re getting paid to “boost AI”

Means they are invested in AI companies

> shape the next narrative

With pro AI narratives because they have an interest in pro-AI

> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.

Does this article seem like an AI boosting article? Perhaps exactly the opposite?

I dislike this article intensely, and disagree with it, but its lot because somehow the Berggruen Institute is shadow pushing AI here

This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on, even if the connection is barely relevant. NPR will tell you about every ad buy that relates to their reporting.

This source could have and should have mentioned this connection in a disclosure, and it would not have detracted from the article. But the fact that it is effectively hidden is a detriment to the level of trust the reader can put into it.

Where is the financial tie between this organization and the AI companies?

The throwaway account's comment above implied some financial connection, but when I clicked the links all I saw was a couple videos where one of their other journalistic outlets had interviewed some filmmakers about AI.

I don't see anything to support this accusation that they failed to disclose reporting about some financial investment in AI companies.

He’s an advocate for universal basic capital, and this article is about how AI taking our jobs might free us from “workism.”

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

In other words, this article is directly tied to the opinions of its financial backer and isn’t being presented in an independent journalistic way.

To be clear I’m not even saying that this is a bad dude or that the organization has bad opinions.

"The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the US government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide," Jobs said the Apple Expo, CNN reported in September 1999. (edit: added link)

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-c...

Thank you for that, and look who one of their speakers is? Hardcore technocrat and transhumanist Mr. Harari! You can read his opinions about transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in "Homo Deus" and on the WEF website.

So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.

people could convene in secret, organize, and coordinate without leaving a digital trail

impossible task in the present. lot of gen z can't even read or concentrate for more than 5 minutes

so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j

He had classes set up for kids and grown-ups to learn printing and they had a ton of cool projects to show for it. We went through all his letter blocks and he told stories about a giant building in the U.S. Northeast that was just stacked with those blocks. He loved the idea of that place and saw threats to its existence as real problems, but not as existential. Faith never came up. It was just there and that's how I know it was real.

Support that AI is now threatening.

Recording is too much work. ;-)

Defiantly not something most countries have setup.

What they (and their constituents) fail to realize though is that we're quickly approaching a post-work society and people won't just disappear or stop needing to eat.

I keep hoping that the public would wisen up and see the writing on the wall but somehow incompetent people keep getting reelected.

I find this comparison to printers arbitrary, precious, and specious. Aren’t the armies of software engineers in tech more akin to the line-level autoworkers than artisans? The numbers would certainly suggest so. But it’s also silly to pretend such a new profession is anything akin to a generations-old trade. But maybe those tradesmen aren’t such victims either in this context? How privileged to be able to pass your profession down to the next generation! No one in my family has had that since farming, when only the oldest benefited.

I increasingly believe that if we really do want to keep moving forward faster and faster, we will be forced to take one of two paths:

(1) Some kind of socialism with a much bigger social safety net, probably basic income, retraining, and universal health coverage.

(2) Absolute totalitarian surveillance state with drones and cameras everywhere and an iron-fist police force to suppress the constant threat of violent revolt as millions upon millions of people constantly lose their careers. This looks like dark cyberpunk, basically, and it's even kind of miserable for those at the very top. You can be rich and powerful, sure, but if you get on the wrong side of it you will be crushed. Look at what happens to oligarchs in Russia.

The path to (2) is unfortunately an idea that was just, even noble in the past: the puritan work ethic and its corollaries. It's a great idea when you have a society that doesn't change much where a person can pick a vocation and make a living. It doesn't work in a society that reinvents itself completely every 10-20 years, rendering entire employment verticals totally obsolete.

I think we've been able to ignore it until now. The change was still slow enough to tolerate.

AI is the end of that. It's going to be the end of stable careers.

Edit: I can think of a third option:

(3) Tax anything that is labor-replacing for a period of time equal to the time it usually takes people to retrain. e.g. AI would be taxed for the next 10-20 years in this scenario with the tax rate decreasing each year.

I greatly prefer (1) since the third option is likely to just freeze progress.

University graduates are often considered min-bar for white-collar work hiring, so if it takes 4 years to train someone, how are people supposed to decide on a career path when it takes less time than that to completely alter the workplace?

My daughter is entering her first year of nursing, a career path that she is greatly looking towards. Who says in 3 years that robotics companies don't actually deliver on their promises and completely up-end the care industry? While I think that unlikely, it's not like people aren't trying to automate nurses away.

A bricklayer can be excellent at his job. He can work hard to become so (to paraphrase Inigo Mendoya). He should pride himself on this excellence, but it is unlikely he will think he was put on this earth to be a bricklayer. The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them.

In a culture where the highest goods are production so you can feed the appropriate level of hedonic consumption, and without any transcendent meaning its a rough go.

Isn't that exactly a concern for those who find meaning in other things than their job? If you find meaning in your job then getting paid enough to support your family is obviously important, but it is ultimately a secondary concern.

How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? Careers can evaporate just the same but what they leave behind is vastly different from 60 years ago.

The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.

And for that, I agree with you, it’s self-selected to take the suffering jounrey

"if you're someone who benefits from this arrangement, to be able to tell yourself that a brute numerical fact".

I think this is the root of your confusion. Humans have long demonstrated the pattern of gathering in groups to survive. These groups usually worked out a way to pool resources to increase the chances of living a comfortable life.

"(if you profit off others labour, there must be those whose labour is profited off of)"

Security markets are open to everyone. There are no restrictions on who can participate. Many companies compensate workers with stock, or other retirement plans that provide ways to buy securities.

What you're describing is slavery. Our current systems are trying to move from slavery to at will labor. I find your comment out of touch with our current circumstances.

Our current timeline is no different and the security markets is the idea we manifested to create co-operation. Now certainly our timeline is FUBARed. If I wasn't so numb I would weeping everyday at the news but the world is still co-operating. Hard to believe but it could always be worse.

"just so happens to by divine coincidence to go hand in hand with the profiteers just happening to have some nebulous quality that morally justifies the whole arrangement."

What nebulous quality? Agency is well defined and a term of art in psychology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_%28psychology%29

>>” to scale your wealth with other people's labor”

Or you can scale your labor with openly available AI?

I was raised in the art world by a multi-generational art family. None were wildly successful all managed to make enough for a good life. Farmers, bakers, masseuses, carpenters,... all work with their hands generally only artist can take rubbish and turn it into big money. The criticism of the art world you put forward is very one-dimensional.

I'm also an artist, primarily a printmaker. I've made my living otherwise, though my work sells at a modest pace.

I know many artists in galleries but only a few earn enough to pay their bills. Artists who do earn a living are good self-promoters of their work or build reputation through family connections to patrons. The shy ones remain unknown. Hardly a "criticism of the art world" just a summation of decades-long observation.

For every artist turning rubbish into big money there are many who only turn rubbish into garbage. Perhaps my comments are "one-dimensional", but so is implying that turning rubbish into big money is easy to achieve.

Making a living at art is a big sacrifice. Maybe I should have said earn a living rather than big money. The big money comment was focused on stock market returns which was really my point.

It’s hard to make big money using just one’s hands outside of the stock market.

My judgement may have been skewed by families like the Calder. Alexander Calder was a third generation artist.

My families success was much closer to middle class. The big advantage they had was time To focus on their curiosities.

It’s true that being embedded in any societal effort will increase the odds of success for the young raised in the environment.

I never mentioned the simplicity of earning only that it was possible. I have observed this being done. It was not fast or easy but is possible.

My uncle always had good reviews but his pieces were never purchased by the art world. His work was purchased or rented by the science museum world.

I’m glad you are able to sell some prints. The most important thing is creating.

The challenge of selling art is tough. Earning a living leveraging one’s artistic training is easier then the gallery path.

My uncle worked his whole life and never sold a piece to the art world. Society did find values in his objects. One has to take success even if the form is unexpected.

I went to art school and studied industrial design a career I wanted since puberty.

He died last year.

https://www.normantuck.com/

Thank you for the clarification. You're right artistic success usually requires enduring arduous effort. Art, well, visual art, is making something out of very little. Hard to explain why the value of art is quirky. The word "value" is ambiguous, has multiple meanings.

I think paintings, prints, etc., are approximate expressions of an artist's visual imagination. Material value of painted canvas is negligible, price can be assigned by dealers and other players. Real value is individual, created when a viewer strongly resonates with an artistic expression. OTOH market/art-world value is mutable. I've often remarked that it won't be decided which of the art created today is "good" until 50 years after we're all gone.

> The most important thing is creating.

It's true, motivation to make art is more than selling art. A very successful artist in his sixties told me he feels a need to create art whether it sells or not. I've donated prints to schools, hospitals, libraries, etc. It's gratifying to know my work will be around long after I've passed on. That's more important to me than money.

I visited your uncle's website. His kinetics are superb, entertaining but also expressing visually complex, 4 (or more) dimensional ideas. Translating to concrete form is an admirable accomplishment.

BTW I think industrial design is underappreciated. Shape, color, etc., of utilitarian objects has to be determined by at least one real person. Some of these objects are endowed with subtle beauty. Working with beautiful things makes the labor less burdensome.

If you're using "scale your labour" to mean "scale your output". Well, two cases: your selling your labour as an employee, or your output directly. Either way: the market won't value them above their cost of substitution, which is just the cost of substitution of your original, non AI labour, plus the cost of the AI (an ever cheaper commodity).

Could capital owners try to capture it all? I'm sure. But it's not a natural result of the technology, it's just whether we choose to allow it or not.

Unless the capability to create high productivity enabling AI is in the hands of every person, or the control of the centralized means of that AI production is with a representative government (as opposed to capital-controlled government), it is a natural result of current AI technology for capital to capture all the productivity gains.

> it's just whether we choose to allow it or not.

It will probably some combination of the above. Capital will still have disproportionate but not absolute control over the technology, but popular discontent and anger, hopefully channeled through electoral process and not violent revolution, will force sharing the productivity gains with broader population.

The capability is definitely there, the agency or education probably isn't. Those are both personal and infrastructure choices. None of those are tech issues.

Most people predict Citizens United will cause some kind of upheaval eventually. Maybe AI will be the thing that finally causes it, but if you ban that, it'll just be something else, proving my point its not a natural result of the technology but more a matter of all that is happened so far.

Then no, it's not possible for the average worker, largely because the advance of technology raised the bar on labor, requiring more (and increasingly expensive) education, all while that 60s worker and their generation, caught in a Reaganite zeal, pulled up the ladder behind them in housing and destroyed public goods.

Plus, the US government at the time was less than half the size of the private sector [1] so we'd expect he was contributing less to dead-weight government projects and corruption.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_104.10.a...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...

And I want to understand if there’s any chance to do it the same way with salaried work, not with clever investment over decades, or winning the lottery, or getting an inheritance. Which are all valid ways to have a lot of wealth but don’t tell me the value of salaried work in the US today.

If you want much more than he had, you're going to need to pay much more for it. Bit of an obvious one.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my computer, but as the GP indicated the rest of society expect very different things from you today – more equipment, more education, etc. Those things aren’t just increased living standards, they are increased job requirements.

So we've moved from a world where it was impossible to afford all that stuff and a 7 person family to a world where ... still can't be done. People have raised their standards to the point where they can't afford 5 children, savings and a lifestyle that they think is reasonable. Not much of a mystery there to interrogate. There has never been a generation that could afford the lifestyle they want and it appears there still isn't.

The current world has different technology and economics

In order to match the same lifestyle of the past you would have to be subject to the economic and technological structure of the past

Which you can emulate and it is objectively cheaper but you choose

This is literally the operational principle of the Amish and mennonite communities

My post, and the GP post I'm agreeing with, are saying that most of those aren't optional "lifestyle upgrades" that you choose instead of 5 children and 5 homes. Much of it, like education and technology, are requirements for getting and holding a normal job.

It's true that society has changed, but we are allowed to lament some of those changes without turning Amish. For example, I don't think that our technology and education is the main driver behind not being able to afford children and houses. Part of it is incompetent management of the housing market -- as someone once said, a house can be affordable or a good investment, but not both. Another part is that median income per person has not grown proportionally to GDP per capita since the 1960s, leading to a more extreme accumulation of wealth at the top, which is in turn entirely down to politics (e.g. an overcomplex tax code with plenty of loopholes).

If you're outside the US (like myself), the graphs arguably look a bit better, but there's still a lack of housing due to increased regulations on construction -- how energy efficient new houses should be, where you are allowed to build them, which old houses you are allowed to destroy to make room for new ones (for historical reasons), etc. In addition to the welfare states becoming less efficient over time, leading to less real income with less benefits from the state. (Which are not much better than inefficient monopolies in less socialist countries, to be fair.)

</end of political rant>

Whether or not you agree with that philosophy or not living by yourself in a tent in the forest is absolutely an option

“My post, and the GP post I'm agreeing with, are saying that most of those aren't optional "lifestyle upgrades"”

My disagreement is that they are optional, like everything else in life

You aren’t willing to take the tradeoff of not having indoor plumbing or whatever but the claim that using modern technologies and living according to capitalism isn’t an option is incorrect

Ultimately that’s a choice among infinite options

The challenge is that this is a hard argument to make to most people because they aren’t aware of the hedonic treadmill

I could easily afford the life my grandfather had in 1950, but I wouldn’t have a fuel injected motor, vaccines, a laptop or a job in computing.

My air would be full of lead and my drinking water would be cloudy and smell like sulphur.

That life is possible in San Angelo Tx today on ~15,000 a year, the equivalent of his salary in 1950

Just pretend like it’s 1950 and use the tools and build the community you need to do it like they did back then

No fair using nail guns

How do you get this "reliable, but not spectacular" income in one of these places? What are these places?

That kind of story was not uncommon at all in the past, today you would have to be a literal multi-millionaire to have that lifestyle.

The "he lived in Daly City" thing is a bit of a red herring. Daly City was not a 15 minute drive from the center of the hottest industry in the world in 1963. So substitute Fresno.

Anyway, if you can find a woman who wants to be a SAHM to your five children in a Fresno starter home, where she clips coupons and cooks meals from scratch with no appliances, you can achieve a 1963 standard of living pretty easily on a schoolteacher's salary.

Not every house at that time was a post war levitown style shack. AC wasn’t even terribly uncommon in 1960s construction.

Most of the "life is too expensive today" complaints are some flavor of: Grandpa was a 90th percentile income earner and I am a 50th percentile income earner, so even though my life is objectively much better than Grandpa's in many ways (childhood vaccination, clean air, seatbelts, etc) the loss of status is much more salient than the gains in material well-being.

Air conditioning was extremely uncommon in my neighborhood when I was growing up in the 80s. I didn't personally know a single family that had a/c until the 90s. The only places that were air conditioned in my neighborhood in the 80s were businesses. I'm sure it was more common in the South.

https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...

That song is about Daly City,[1] where some of the original houses still are pink, green, blue, and yellow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boxes

If you mean "where within commuting distance of the hottest industry in the world can I find a reasonably priced home" then yeah obviously you can't, but SF wasn't that in 1963.

This is a key point. I grew up in a nice middle class neighborhood 20 minutes from DC. Back then DC was the murder capital of the country, there were no tech jobs in northern VA, etc. Today it’s much more expensive, but it’s also full of tech engineers. The town has moved upmarket. It’s not a Honda Accord, it’s an Acura.

https://americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index/

This makes "thriving" a constantly moving target, because by definition 40 percent of people have housing that sucks too much. This does reflect realities of human psychology (our happiness is mostly about relative well-being, not absolute well-being), but it is not remotely useful for comparing material living standards over time.

I think that just in terms of food expenses, having to feed five children + one spouse might be pretty challenging. Let alone if we factor in things like healthcare plans, among other things.

Another thing: the GP's grandfather was a blue collar worker, you're talking about a white collar remote worker who by definition is a high earner and not somebody average.

This talking point that things are not harder today and everybody would be able to have the same affluence of 60's people if at least they were not so demanding sounds completely unrealistic.

Healthcare is cheap if you consume healthcare like a person in 1963. No need for MRIs, anti-depressants, chemotherapy, most childhood vaccines, braces for the kids' teeth, etc. The big exception is labor & delivery, where what used to be standard (a long hospital stay for recovery) is now so outrageously expensive that it's not even an option.

How is today better than the situation 20 years ago?

"TVs are better and cheaper" is not a useful counterpoint when discussing the economy of the 2020s.

You can't know the quality of new kia "for decades".

I still see 90s and earlier cars on the road all the time (nearly daily). I owned one until 2020, when someone totalled it while parked for me.

- Basic utilities, food, heating, energy, gas.. 50-100% increase in cost

- piano, railway carrage, something nobody uses - 0.34% increase

Thus inflation is only 5% - capiche?

No matter how many billions you have in the bank, you cant get a better netflix subscription, TV, or iPhone than the normal person. This is the 'march of progress' you speak of. The things people wanted and coveted most have been squashed to a market value most people can just afford, and then subsidised with credit plans to make them affordable by all.

This is the basics of modern economies. It is not separate to technology progressing. The technology progressing has become the foundation of all modern economies.

https://www.cseed.com/en/indoor-tv/unfolding-tv.html

Netflix is a terrible example, it’s cheap entertainment for the masses. Why would a billionaire watch Netflix when they could get front row and/or box seats to any sporting event or concert in the world and fly there via private jet.

The fact that you can buy a 72" tv for less than $1k now is nuts, and I assume there is no secret HBO with higher quality content only for billionaires, they still have to watch the same shit as us, and there is some good stuff out there, even on Netflix (maybe not a lot, not anymore). Even rich people sometimes want to sit at home and just watch TV, it takes a lot of energy to go out to something every night, even if you can. I used to go to concerts every week, sometimes several, now it's far less as I get older and it becomes more draining. Box seats are not very good seats and if you get good seats you are still surrounded by other people that will ruin your time.

I'm not rich, but there isn't much that I covet from rich people, because they really don't get that much better shit than we do anymore, they get more "luxury" and convenience and opportunity, but they still have the same technology as us, and it still sucks. 20 years ago, they had things we would want and could never afford, now the gap has shrunk considerably. They can pay 100-1000x for 1-5% quality gain on what a regular consumer can buy.

Like what?

Oh yeah, having a driver was very much a rich person thing in 2006. Now that's just called having an Uber account and it's nothing special. (Although if you have Zoox or Tesla Robotaxi access it still is.)

The access to information out there is stunning. The visuals for the Straight of Hormuz in 2006 would have been far more limited to rich people who actually needed that information. Today there's a dozen vibecoded play-by-play visualizations of the entire conflict.

I’m not even sure what my point is.

Being a billionaire was never really about having stuff. It was and is about having power.

Point is, information wants to be free, and that sounds stupid because the world's changed since, but, like it or not, ChatGPT (et al) is, and has already changed the world. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle, all we can do is adapt.

Funny you mention that, we're bringing measles back. Check out the graphs on https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html . Seems it started Jan 2025.

Anyway good luck

Yes, the people who like living in the Pleasuredome of cheap and fast thrills have it better these days. The rare few who want a stable, thoughtful life with a lifelong partner far away from the racket? Well...

Secondly, you can't invalidate a list of net positives like longer life expectancy by objecting to one of the things on that list.

It seems to me these changes are much more daunting if you live in a country where no job means no health insurance, and where the pay gap between skilled and unskilled work is huge. That makes an existential question about work into a very material one.

work should not be considered to have to have intrinsic meaning for it to be worthwhile - you merely need to make sure your pay is worthwhile.

Find intrinsic meaning outside of work. The best way, imho, is to find the highest paying job you can, work super hard and earn maximally, until you built up a nest egg from which you can draw a living off indefinitely. Then, use the remaining time you have left to pursue what you find to be intrinsically rewarding.

Being actively miserable 8 hours a day will just ruin the remaining 16.

if someone is paying for this, then it must mean it is useful to the one doing the paying. If you're not the one paying, you also cannot decide whether it's useful to the payer or not.

It is perfectly rational to choose lower income occupations for your own reasons. Income maximization at all costs is how you become a pawn in someone else's game even (especially?) if it makes you rich.

Don't plan to have fun later, because later may never come.

You didn't exist before you were born, so you had no idea about anything.

You "die" when you go to sleep.

So we could say most of it doesn't matter - of course if there isn't anything after our living here.

The point of the commenter was that if we wait to have fun til later, there may not be a later. Life is about striking a balance of having fun now and sacrificing now so that you (or your family or community etc) can have fun later.

"the remaining time"

Doing what is intrinsically valuable to you hinges on you still having access to the person you are. Don't take that for granted. A lifetime of settling can easily drive that out of someone, but planning to settle before it even started, as the only option, surely will. How could it not?

Old men [0] living it up because they never did while they lived is the worst. You can't regain a sense of justice, curiosity and innocence once you let it go and out of sight. You cannot have either without the other two, and none of them come back once you misplaced them as something you don't need "for now", but something very cringe and sad can takes their place, and it comes with this conspiracy of not mocking one another, of pretending to be fully featured people, as they stumble and babble into the sunset.

[0] And I say "men" because this is very much a male issue. You don't hear many women talking like that, at least I can't even remember one.

Too bad you have to work super hard until you drop dead, never managing to build that nest egg. Surely you just did not work hard enough. Soo sorry, but its all your fault anyway.

Or maybe you did manage to do that at a tender age of 60, perhaps even 50 or 40 if you were super lucky/smart. Too bad your best and most creative years are past you and you have no family (or spent almost no time with your kids, who are now alienated grown ups). Such is life, you know.

Meanwhile, the kids of the rich live by a different set of rules...

And what if the FIRE plan doesn’t work out? Work generally takes up too much lifetime to spend that time on doing something one doesn’t find meaningful. That’s not a way to live a fulfilling life.

They weren't too big to fail.

Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years?

You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is, the plight of the printers is totally incomparable.

Question: What happens when you drive a car at 90 mph into a concrete wall?

Answer: Well, actually just this morning pulling into my parking spot, I bumped into the barrier beneath my tires. It was fine!

Must not spend much time talking to people in other fields.

I was refuting your made up statistic.

You're referring to a NAICS code set that includes both printing and the entire publishing apparatus around it.

At printing's peak, there were 70,000 people employed in actual printing in the US. There were lots more engaged in the business around printed goods, but those jobs weren't threatened by desktop publishing. In fact there are more of those people today than there were at the peak of printing, drawing a clear empirical line between those jobs that were destroyed by printing tech improvements and those that were not.

At its peak in the late 90s, printing was 0.025% of US people or 0.05% of the workforce, which (being unbelievably wealthy) would obviously be the extreme high end of print employment globally.

0.01% was obviously a complete finger in the wind estimate, but turned out to be a pretty good guess!

https://whattheythink.com/articles/52978-desktop-publishings...

Here:

> You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is [emphasis in source], the plight of the printers is totally incomparable.

"It hasn't happened yet" is a non-sequitur at best, but obviously the goal of such a "contribution" is to chill discussion. The same "contribution" can be made to any conversation about any possible future events. So long as everyone already knows they're talking about the future, it is not helpful in any way.

The comparison is useful. Printers had decades to pivot and hence the anxiety didn't exist like it does today. Today's capital allocated wants this to happen within a decade.

-Sam Altman “whole classes of jobs going away”

-Mustafa Suleyman "So white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."

-Jim Farley “Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers.”

-Dario Amodei predicted that AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years

-Arindam Paul has said that 40-50 percent of white-collar jobs in India could cease to exist because of AI, and an Anthropic researcher had predicted that AI would be able to automate any white-collar job by 2028.

AI skeptics constantly lie and misrepresent what the leaders in this field have actually said, and then get themselves all spun up about something they fabricated in the first place!

It’s both humorous and a little sad.

OK, so I guess the claim is true as soon as one person loses their job?

And again, YOU are the one focused on "THE entire workforce", I already said fine, we can just talk about tech or whatever subset you'd like. The point is that it's pretty clear these quotes are not nearly as widely sweeping as AI detractors usually misrepresent them as.

While I haven't been "retrained" my understanding was the real issue that it's lip-service.

Like the Department of Labor doesn't actually show up to a closed down factory with staff to train people in some other vocation.

Now for the sake of argument multiply the 90% of the employees that were laid off, with the amount of companies that do the same, there aren't enough roles whatever those may be for everyone else now at the job center.

Sounds much more like a warning than a dismissal to me. If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.

I a lot less than that. Most people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely, which I think is a good proxy for the ceiling of who can be replaced by AI. Almost nobody on my block besides me is going to be replaced (beer brewer, several nurses, navy servicemen, cops, and teachers).

I was at the hospital a few days ago, and was pondering the numerous nurses who were wheeling around portable nursing stations with monitors and various types of equipment. They’d stop at a room, take a patient’s blood pressure (among various other things), type some notes, and move on. I can easily imagine most nursing tasks being subsumed by robotics.

The same goes for brewers, soldiers, cops, and teachers. Soldier, cop, and teacher robots are already being tested, or actually deployed…and it’s early yet. If a safe, highly dense source of power is developed, that will vastly accelerate the process. At best, there will be far fewer humans involved, monitoring the robots, much as software engineers are now monitoring the agentic AIs.

I’m not sure how human society will adapt. The optimistic view (championed by Elon Musk) is that we’re headed for a “Star Trek economy” of essentially endless abundance for everyone. I hope things play out somewhere along those lines…

I’ve personally been impacted very heavily by LLM technology. Two of my major skills, coding and writing, have been greatly devalued by it. I’m relying on one of the truly core human traits to compensate - adaptability. That’s an area where LLMs currently lag far behind.

We’ll see how things go from here… ;-)

I think you are greatly underestimating the difficulty of automating nursing tasks.

About teachers: some amount teaching profession can be automated, but the parts that cannot (in any reasonable way in the foreseeable future) are perhaps the most core aspects of teaching.

As to the rest of their function, I think probably the biggest obstacle will be the ability to safely manipulate the human body, as in turning or moving the patient. That requires delicacy, advanced tactile sensors, and physical power. For fine detail work, such as finding a vein with a needle, the technology already exists. Elon Musk also predicts that robotic surgery will rapidly outpace human surgeons, and I agree there.

On the subject of human teachers, my comment is similar to that about human nurses. A human connection helps with motivation. That said, I think video serves much the same function, and with video one teacher can reach an unlimited number of classrooms. That’s independent of how humanistic the teaching robots will become, and I expect that will also improve rapidly. We are nearing singularity like situations with engineering problems, in other words recursive improvement without much if any human intervention.

Seems like a decent reason not to believe it, frankly

What looks like exponential curves turn into S-shaped curves everywhere. In the last century, coal power plants have gotten less than twice as efficient. A professor at law school was giving a lecture on technological singularity back in 2011. And I pointed out that Moore’s law was already dead. And in fact in the decade since then improvements came far slower than they did from 1990-2000.

It’s better now by roughly a factor of two per passenger mile.

The nature of such large improvements is that it’s extremely hard to get such an improvement again!

Which is just not that big of a deal for 50+ years of technological development. It doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't do before.

It allows you to move freight really fast at half the cost. That's a lot of things that can move around the world 100X faster than they could on the next-fastest available mode: ships and trains.

That's leaving out fuel prices. The planes may use half the fuel, but aviation fuel has increased 7x in price since 1990. I couldn't find prices for 1969, but if you take the price of crude since then you're looking at a CPI-adjusted increase close to 100x.

Of course, inflation should be canceled out before evaluating the overall benefit. If you can self the goods for 7X then the fuel savings is back to 2X.

Made me think of this 90-year old demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVUVPen3xNQ

Yeah, but "we" (note the scare-quotes) can always just decide skimp on those "core aspects of teaching," which may even be a tempting option when "we" decide "we" have less need for educated workers.

That's just first order effects. What's going to happen to the beer brewer when sales are down because the knowledge workers have cut back, and what will happen to those nurses when a lot of those knowledge workers lose their health insurance?

I'm not sure what "Do you mean in absolute terms?" is asking, but I think it's generally wise to follow the Hacker News guidelines here:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith

Why do people always fight with a fabricated strawman of what the situation is like for poor people? Some hypothetical world where unemployment insurance, Medicaid, renter protections, etc., don't exist?

My family has owned brownstones in new york my entire life and their experiences are quite different than yours.

>Why would you accuse me of making it up?

Besides the fact that you're a well known troll here? It's a shockingly convenient argument devoid of any actual fact.

>This information is publicly available. E.g., https://www.evictpro.us/blog/how-long-does-eviction-take-in-.... This says that in Maryland, a typical timeline for a contested eviction is 90-150 days.

Your own link says half of that... 45-75 days "typical timeline - notice to physical eviction". So yeah, that's why I think you're a liar. Because I've read more than enough of your posts here and I'm also capable of using common sense to determine that shit stinks. Your article also makes it pretty clear that the difference between it moving quickly or not is mostly dependent upon the landlord. "Worst case is unusual. Most landlords will never see this case; firm portfolio managers will see it 1-2 times a year."

So again, total BS from you.

Will you substantively respond to this post? Let's see! I doubt it.

Alas.

So because you have an anecdote, I must be lying?

> Your own link says half of that... 45-75 days "typical timeline - notice to physical eviction".

My story was about landlord-tenant mediation. Do you think those involve straightforward, "best case" proceedings? The assertion above was that "many" people are "one missed paycheck away from homelessness." If someone's alternative is homelessness, then the eviction proceeding won't be a straightforward, uncontested proceeding. And the law gives tenants many opportunities to drag out proceedings.

> Your article also makes it pretty clear that the difference between it moving quickly or not is mostly dependent upon the landlord. "Worst case is unusual. Most landlords will never see this case; firm portfolio managers will see it 1-2 times a year."

What about that sentence shows that case length is "mostly dependent upon the landlord?" Walk me through it?

It's called common sense. You asked what my experience is. I know you're lying because you don't pass the sniff test and you're a well known troll here.

>My story was about landlord-tenant mediation. Do you think those involve straightforward, "best case" proceedings? The assertion above was that "many" people are "one missed paycheck away from homelessness." If someone's alternative is homelessness, then the eviction proceeding won't be a straightforward, uncontested proceeding. And the law gives tenants many opportunities to drag out proceedings.

Doesn't really matter, your own link provides the average. You citing to what your own link describes as scenarios that will not happen to any land lord just show how dishonest you are in your own framing.

>What about that sentence shows that case length is "mostly dependent upon the landlord?" Walk me through it?

Maybe read your link... the "What Speeds the Timeline Up" section up should help

Is it common sense, or your preconceptions?

> Doesn't really matter, your own link provides the average.

The “average” eviction doesn’t result in homelessness, so why are you focusing on that? You have to actually follow the conversation. We’re not talking about how long eviction proceedings take. We’re talking about the assertion that people are one missed paycheck away from “homelessness.” In that context, you need to look at how long eviction takes for people who are otherwise facing homelessness.

The French Revolution was not an isolated event

Suddenly everyone gets paid for doing nothing of added value?

We ban AI and similar ultra-high leverage technologies?

I'm not sure what would replace it. A welfare state doesn't work if the state doesn't have the money. State-run economies don't have the best track record either

Raw figures.

The actual “unemployment” figure you hear is not raw figures, since you must exclude the 75 million children and elderly.

But still, 33% in that case.

The official figure you see excludes far more people from the counting to make it seem like only a tiny fraction of people are unemployed. They’ll say 4% or something. But in fact, about half of all people are not employed in the US.

The technologies GP mentions didn't end commercial print -- they were all heavily in use _by_ commercial print.

The result was “seizing the means of production”

Judging by the reaction in discussions it is a very sore point of socialists to point out that Marx was obviously upper class, definitely part of the bourgeoisie and in his actions shows that he is entirely unwilling to give that up. The same goes for other famous socialists, from Engels to Lenin.

There are even voices that claim the point of socialism was never to end inequality but rather to take far more wealth for themselves. The "halfway to robin hood" jokes, they certainly take from the wealthy, and everybody else, but they never seem to get around to giving it to the poor ...

On one hand, you could see how it was rewriting shipping, then manufacturing, globalization, etc.

they touched on how the unions handled things, how real estate near waterways was changed (manufacturing and warehousing), and more

But on the other hand you could see how obvious it was the changes were going to happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

Btw, from the author page:

> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.

There probably is some strong bias and conflict of interest in this article. I didn’t see any line saying “btw, just so you know, my paycheque is strongly bound to me pushing AI adoption in the workplace for a living (hence exacerbating all the issues i write about)”.

In all seriousness, our jobs are almost certainly going the way of AI coding things, the same way we sorta took over a bunch of unskilled women who merely punched a bunch of cards and ran punched cards through a machine to do basic calculations before computing became something else too.

Before digital and electronic switching systems, you most likely didn't get work in a telephone central office unless you were more of a mechanic than a programmer.

I am more worried about the fact there is nothing "next" to "strive for" or do than about the status of someone that knew the ins and outs of wax sublimation printing (though it is a cool thing).