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Comment by maximinus_thrax | Hacker News Reader

> That's a lot of peoples salaries and livelihoods wiped out and they will fight tooth and nail to protect it.

Why? We're currently undergoing a major shift in labor wrt to automation, AI which will absolutely destroy entire sectors. Not a lot of people give a shit, it's considered good for the bottom line and for profitability. But when it comes to healthcare, the narrative is that we suddenly care about labor? People applauded the tech layoffs but the parasitic private insurance overhead is just too important? Disgusting

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> AI which will absolutely destroy entire sectors. Not a lot of people give a shit,

A lot of people __do__ give a shit and this is a very common conversation among blue collar workers. I've heard about it every Christmas for the past 5 years from people who don't know how to google. Mass shifting in jobs has always been a big conversation but there's just a big divide between the working class where people aren't talking together as much.

We have coal miners complaining about "big solar" taking their jobs. We have the whole "just teach to code" fiasco. We have a lot of discussions about Amazon. And I can keep going. If you think this is a "suddenly care" type of thing then you're likely in a bubble or not paying attention (a different bubble).

What is the "the whole "just teach to code" fiasco"? I'm familiar with the idea of widespread coding education, but the fiasco part is news to me. Is it something interesting, or just another face on the same story of struggling/failing public schools?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code

Basically a bunch of journalists told laid off coal miners that they should just learn to code, which some people saw as callous. Then in 2019 Buzzfeed and Huffpo and a few other places laid off a bunch of journalists. People started tweeting "learn to code" at them and they weren't happy about it.

It is a bit callous to be fair. Job retraining is costly and the way it was said more comes off as blaming the person for not knowing any better (people who've been working in that field for decades and started before the 90's). Predictions that people could not have reasonably made given the information they had at the time even if obvious in hindsight. There's also plenty of historical examples where rapid industry shifts result in a lot of people being out of jobs and entering poverty even if the total economy turns out better or smooths out in the long run. Temporally local events still matter and you can't just point to long historical trends to say the people suffering now aren't a problem.

Plus, we all know code bootcamps don't make great programmers. And if we're being extra honest, LLMs have a good chance of replacing low quality coders, so now in hindsight the advice comes off as even more pejorative and low quality. Hindsight is always 20/20.

AI will hit medicine pretty hard, it seems to me. Everything about medicine that isn't research is mostly identifying symptoms and applying the correct "standard of care" which an AI should be very very good at.

We haven’t gotten rid of pharmacies and that’s the easiest part of medicine to We haven’t gotten rid of pharmacies and that’s the easiest part of medicine to automate.

I don’t think AI diagnosis is going to change costs noticeably because tests and treatment is so much more expensive and you need people to provide that.

I interpreted that comment as an observation “about the weather”: not defending it, just pointing it out.

There’s a parallel to that observation: these parasites are a major part of the S&P (not as much as the article claims, per another comment) which means if they decline it will look like a secular decline in the market (=> peoples’ retirement savings) which will cause vocal anguish.

That latter phenomenon is why bills like the IRA splash out so much money on the fossil fuel companies.

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