Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Is this AI revolution ever going to happen? Siri and Alexa still hear the wrong thing half the time, even when I speak and enunciate very clearly. What jobs have been eliminated by this revolution that I’ve been hearing about for the past decade? The self driving cars are not picking me up and not delivering my packages.

I have a better solution than airdropping everyone welfare money so we can laze around all day - make it easier to start businesses. It’s extremely easy for me to create a tech company that scales to millions of users. It’s extremely difficult for me to give massages, cut hair, sell retail products in a physical location, and innumerable useful services that require licenses, bureaucracy, tax forms, inspectors, and on and on.

Even worse is that whatever the poor saves is immediately lost to inflation - education, healthcare, housing, and literal inflation to the fed printing money.

Rather than bandaid government-created problems with more government and a disincentive to create value for society, I wish we would let people other than CS majors become entrepreneurs organically.

An AI revolution is not required to eliminate jobs. Robots are already doing the work of millions. You can see it everywhere you look. Was your laptop hand milled out of aluminum? Nope, a CNC machine did it. Do you see 12 cashiers manning 12 checkout lanes at the grocery store? Nope, 1 cashier is manning 12 self-checkout lanes. Do you have a secretary that schedules your meetings? No, you just use Google Calendar. That is what automation is. The 1970s sci-fi robot is just a distraction.

Yes, technology enhancements (which are not “AI”) have increased productivity, allowing less people to create more value. Where is the widespread unemployment?

The fear is, like the agricultural and industrial revolutions, that change will suddenly spring forward at a rate that society can’t adapt fast enough.

And people are unemployed, or worse they are employed but at a rate they can’t afford to live, so are one of the tens of thousands of homeless in LA alone. They work 18 hours a day 7 days a week, so are dangerous as they drive to their third job at 3 in the morning which causes a crash which means massive traffic problems all day.

Even if you are a cold blooded Victorian thetr are benefits to keeping your customers alive and with enough free time to buy the crap you peddle.

There is a notion in economics of complements and replacements. The plow was a complement to horse labour, while the gas engine was a replacement. The former increased demand for horses while the latter basicly eliminated it. If we truly had human-level AI, labour models predict human wages would decline below subsistence. However, applying these labour models in a regime where we have AGI makes little sense, as all that will matter for human welfare is the objective functions of the AIs.

>An AI revolution is not required to eliminate jobs.

Yes it is. If you have tasks that cannot be automated, people's labour will have value. It would require AI that is as good as any human, and that is cheaper of course, to eliminate all jobs. And even then rich people may prefer human labour for nostalgic or signalling reasons. Eliminating all jobs is a tall order.

You don’t need to eliminate all jobs to create a problem. By simply automating trucking, and you’ve put about 15% of our workforce out of work. What jobs could we easily retrain that 15% for, that are not already being filled?

How do you start a business for a product for which there is no demand? Not as in “didn’t know I wanted it” but as in “can’t pay for it “.

That said, I’m not a fan of UBI. Yes, do tax the hell out of people who made fortunes from their inherited wealth and social connections / status, but use the money to hire people to do something useful and purposeful. E.g., roads, parks, schools, healthcare, basic research.

Maybe we try old fashioned Keynes style policy again, as Reagan / Laffer nonsense seems to have objectively failed for 90+ percent of the population, then maybe we discuss UBI if still needed.

Edit: P.S. I mostly like your comment, otherwise.

Also, by “hire people”, I mean directly, for a living wage, NOT outsourcing to billionaires who skim most of the money off the top and pay out minimum wage to a bunch of part time giggers.

> It’s extremely easy for me to create a tech company that scales to millions of users.

That's probably because the public does not have much at stake with a tech company. Especially with all those data leaks which happen regularly and nobody does anything because nobody cares.

If a tech business fails or misbehaves, it's probably only founders will be losing money and time. And then can even protect themselves from the users with a TOS which basically says "nope, your virtual losses are your virtual losses", and everybody is trained to just tick the check box.

While if a physical business fails then there are real people at loss who will have to look for a new massagist, a new hairdresser, a new shop, etc. And that's not even touching the subject or running business poorly: damaged joints, botched haircut and poisonous or otherwise unsafe products are way more tangible and likely to lead to action with more weight than shitposting about yet another serivce.

> people at loss who will have to look for a new massagist, a new hairdresser, a new shop, etc.

Oh, the humanity!

> And that's not even touching the subject or running business poorly: damaged joints, botched haircut and poisonous or otherwise unsafe products

Airbnb, Uber, etc. run into safety issues too. Other big tech companies can have privacy issues, and even data integrity issues. I'd much rather find a new barber than have Google or Facebook accidentally delete my account.

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