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:
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 ...
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!