Comment by dlisboa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlisboa | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> the jobs that were destroyable were also often not a whole lot of fun in the first place.

You're severely underestimating how much high education and creative jobs will be impacted. Those are the "fun" jobs, involving imagining, learning, thinking. Illustrators, architects, designers, writers (of different sorts), journalists, even programmers and musicians. In fact, manual and repetitive labour is the one kind of job not impacted by today's AIs.

It's not that you'll fully replace all of those jobs with AI. It's that if you needed 10 illustrators, or 10 designers or 10 writers, now you might only need 1 to make sure the output of the AI is ok.

There'll be new opportunities afforded by this increase in productivity, new jobs in new industries, but retraining will not happen fast enough to employ those 9 extra people. And the problem is it'll happen in many different areas of the economy and at roughly the same time, that we won't have enough new jobs to go around for everyone in a timeframe that saves them from unemployment.

I think it is fair to interpret this as admitting that we will accomplish the same societal value with a smaller proportion of the creative, well educated population. That portion of our creative population will be available to help solve these problems. Some of them will have the resolve and resources to do so. I expect we would gain from increasing the size of that population but we have seemed to struggle to do so.

In the long-term you're correct, society will rebalance itself and will make better use of the available brain power. In the short-term some jobs in the industries will just disappear and those people will not find another right away in the same industry.

It's specially hard on entry level jobs: a beginner designer would come up with a few designs and a more experienced designer would shoot some down and approve others, thus helping the beginner learn and improve. The company needed the beginner to do the leg work that would be too expensive to pay the experience designer to do. Now the experienced designer does not need the beginner at all, just the AI as they already know what is a good design, and for actually zero cost.

The beginner designer in this example will not be able to find another job in the industry, because they do not yet possess any skill that is valuable, and will never acquire the experience necessary for those skills. Maybe they'll transition to a different industry, but that will take some amount of time and for that time they may be unemployed.

And the bigger issue even is when these expert designers retire - where do we get more experts? Do we become the elohoi of "The Time Machine" where we don't know how to do anything? Is AI really going to completely replace these designers in their work lifespan?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com