Hacker News Reader

Comment by a_wild_dandan | Hacker News Reader

1. You've fallen for the lump of labor fallacy. A 100x productivity boost ≠ 100x fewer jobs, anymore than a 100x boost = static jobs with 100x more projects. Reality is far more complicated, and viewing labor as some static lump, zero-sum game will lead you astray.

2. Your outlook on the societal impact of technology is contradicted by reality. The historical result of better tech always meant increased jobs and well-being. Today is the best time in human history to be alive by virtually every metric.

3. AI has been such a massive boon to humanity and your everyday existence for years that questioning its public utility is frankly bewildering.

View on HN

1. This gets trotted out constantly but this is not some known constant about how capitalist economies work. Just because we have more jobs now than we did pre-digital revolution does not mean all technologies have that effect on the jobs market (or even that the digital revolution had that effect). A tool that is aimed to entirely replace humans across many/most/all industries is quite different than previous technological advancements.

2. This is outdated, life is NOT better now than at any other time. Life expectancy is going down in the US, there is vastly more economic inequality now than there was in the 60s, people broadly report much worse job satisfaction than they did in previous generations. The only metric you can really point to about now being better than the 90s is absolute poverty going down. Which is great, but those advancements are actually quite shallow on a per-person basis and are matched by declines in relative wealth for the middle 80% of people.

3. ??? What kind of AI are you talking about? LLMs have only been interesting to the public for about a year now

> there is vastly more economic inequality now than there was in the 60s

Increased inequality doesn't imply the absolute level of welfare of anyone has decreased, I don't think you should include it in your list. If my life is 2x better than in the 60s, the fact that there are people out there with 100x better lives doesn't mean my life is worse.

> A tool that is aimed to entirely replace humans across many/most/all industries

This is a vastly overinflated claim about AI.

Is that not the goal? Since it turned out that creative disciplines were the first to get hit by AI (previously having been thought of to be more resilient to it than office drudgery) where are humans going to be safe from replacement? As editors of AI output? Manual labor jobs that are physically difficult to automate? It's a shrinking pie from every angle I have seen

Reply on news.ycombinator.com