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Comment by code51 | Hacker News Reader

Here is the thing: The industry will sugar-coat the layoff effect by cutting down work days - not laying off a significant crowd.

Initially it will seem like a humane thing to do without cutting down salaries BUT we'll feel the real effect when the salaries are not increased to match the inflation.

You will work less, produce more (with AI), paid less (in terms of purchasing power).

Products that AI can touch will get cheap so purchasing power on digital products will stay the same to keep your entertained BUT land, housing, food... hard things will get harder.

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I don't buy it. The idea that automation reduces overall employment needs to die in a ditch. It's just not true. Look around you, we live in a world that's automated up to the eyeballs compared to any previous generation, yet employment is as high as it's ever been. In fact it's substituted for domestic labour and has allowed generations of women to go to work and build careers, and hundreds of millions of rural labourers have been drafted into industrial work forces in my lifetime. As automation has expanded, the demand for labour has grown voraciously.

These LLMs are incredibly smart compared to humans in some ways, but they're incredibly stupid in other ways. They're just another tool, and tools need users. Hopefully they will be another big force multiplier in knowledge based industries, but this will increase demand for knowledge workers, because they will become more valuable due to being more productive from having better tools.

If better knowledge tools reduced demand for the people using them, Moore's Law and the availability of ever more sophisticated software would have ravaged employment in the IT industry. But that's just not how that works.

It's based on the assumption that when a worker becomes more productive, that the only effect that has is reducing the amount of work there is for others to do, but that's an incredibly naive view. In fact it also dramatically reduces the cost of that work being done and increases the capacity of the organisation to do work. This increases demand for that work, it makes that labour more skilled, and increases profits thus stimulating investment. Yes there can be localised negative effects in some cases, sure. Ive seen some of those myself, but any economic realignment can have it's pains. Taking into account all the positives it increases the value of the economic activity overall.

Decision-making and reasoning was not automated in any era before. "Automation is just fine because it was fine until now" is an old world approach.

We are not only tool users at this point. We started to change through our tool use. We think we have guardrails against AI but our brains don't have any guardrails. It will get harder and harder to get motivated to learn any domain deeply. Our brains can't cope with these short-term job definitions in intellectually demanding contexts.

Prompt engineer today, automated next year. Take a look at the fate of indie AI startups (avatar generation is best example of this) and you'll see. Income opportunities are limited to shorter and shorter time windows. Only the big players dominate (with their marketing machine) and will probably pay peanuts after reaching dominance.

Of course decision making has been automated, that's literally what computers do. This will just streamline the process of pushing it into more problem domains. Everyone thinks their job is special and that automating any part of it will be the end of the world.

Eventually, with full human level AI yes, sure, at that point we'd not be augmenting human intelligence but genuinely substituting for it. We are a long, long, long way away from that though.

I edited my post above, so you may not have read the last paragraph.

I understand our perspectives differ because I think we are right at the edge of fast take-off and you outlined your view as slow take-off.

Computers were bicycles for our minds, applying our previously formulated solutions to scale. I agree I did not explicitly clarify that I was meaning high-level decision-making getting automated.

“It’s not the end of the world” begs for definition of what end of the world looks like. A meteor is not end of the world apparently but it killed the dinosaurs.

Well, I'll put my big mouth on the line and make a prediction. 12 years ago we all thought self-driving cars would be with us by now, and my wife genuinely wondered whether our kids would need to learn how to drive. My youngest passed her test a few months ago.

There's a significant low hanging fruit effect in AI domains. We rapidly reach a 90% solution, but that last 10% is absolutely critical, and virtually impossible to attain. I think these LLMs will follow the same trajectory. They will quickly become incredibly valuable or even indispensable tools, but the alignment problem and over-fitting will come to limit their reliable applicability in critical edge cases that make skilled human oversight essential. This will relegate them to the role of productivity enhancement rather than genuine labour substitution.

This assumes that humans in knowledge-based industries will maintain a significant cost-effective edge over AIs in some economically relevant skill domain. There's no reason to believe that will still be true in, say, 10 years.

This assumes that a human with a chisel will maintain a significant cost effective edge over a CNC machine...

It's the same thing. These things are still just tools that need to be used by humans. Fair enough, I can't really see 10 years into the future, but I don't think anyone can, and there's nothing about these tools we're developing today that makes me think they're immune to the economic effects of automation throughout the last 300 years.

If my memory serves, in past industrial revolutions, employment eventually caught up with automation. It did take one generation, though (~40 years in the 19th century).

That being said, I won't attempt to predict anything. Just checking what I can do to build a ChatGPT-proof resume :)

Maybe one day, some of us will see the end of the JIRA backlog ?

Imagine that, the entire world looking at the last user story being moved to "done" in silence, all having the same thought "now what"...

Employment is just as high for exactly the reason they’ve given. We create bullshit underpaid jobs in order to make sure everyone is employed.

No one is employing people for shits and giggles(maybe the government). Every employee exists because their employer believes they will add value to the company.

> You will work less, produce more (with AI)

The "work less" notion seems based on the idea that the only kind of work we can do is to keep the 20th century going. Once that infrastructure is automated, there's nothing left to do. That's just not true.

AI can help us explore space, mine asteroids, discover new worlds. It can eradicate diseases. It can create portable tests for transmissible diseases. It can help us rebuild cities into green spaces with fruit trees, gardens, flowers.

We have this incredible new technology that can let us reshape the world into an incredible future. Why would we settle for anything less than Star Trek?

The possibilities aren't ending with AI; they're just beginning.

That is a very nice point of view, thanks for sharing it. I'll try and keep it somewhere in my mind if the dark days come :)

Observing how AI (and, let's face it, pretty much every other tool at our disposal) has been used so far, I suspect that there will be quite a few steps before we get there. First, a mad rush to use AI for just about anything, just in case it sticks. In particular:

- attempting to build addictive technologies with AI (toys? casinos? conspiracy theories? definitely porn);

- attempting to speculate with AI;

- disrupting as many existing industries as possible with AI, whether it's sustainable or not;

- also, pretend AI (look at you, Parler/Hive);

- undoubtedly, AI for cyberwar;

- and of course, any number of confidence tricks based on AI.

My hope, at this stage, is that we'll hit a sufficient number of use cases in which AI is actually useful (AI for green urban planning?) before we hit either a new AI winter (which may be prompted by some catastrophe in which AI will have played some role).

Preach! Need more comments like this—about the cool new shit that will happen in the real world thanks to technological advancement. A very Musk-ian point of view.

Real talk though, we need another frontier to give (now globalized) human society something to look forward to. Colonization of space is pretty much the only place to go, and fortunately it doesn’t carry the moral baggage of displacing other life forms (at least as far as we know).

It can also help us spread propaganda, con people at massive scale, destroy public discourse spaces with spam, create deep fakes to slander people, start and prosecute wars, etc.

History shows that both good and bad things will be done with AI. We shouldn’t be doomers but we shouldn’t be naive either.

You will own nothing and be a King in your own metaverse.. It's a dystopian economic view, you will become a sort of neo slave.

IDK, if my job says "Hey, 4 day work week but you're not getting the yearly increase," I think I would be okay with that honestly. I think a lot of people would actually.

Perhaps you are making the case for public ownership of certain technologies. It's that, or live under the malignant rule of Amazoogle.

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