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Comment by teg4n_ | Hacker News Reader

AI taking over one of the only professions able to afford someone a proper middle class existence is pretty shitty. It will be great for capitalists though.

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This is the real point. If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind. In fact it would be great for society! But that's not what's going to happen. The AI (and robots) will be owned by the Shrinking Few, all the profits and benefits will go to the owners, and the people who used to do Job X will have to re-skill to gamble on some other career.

"Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"

https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

In the same vein:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Buckminster Fuller

> If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind.

Why on Earth would you expect something so unjust and unfair? Do you expect to pay a tax to former travel agents when you buy a plane ticket online? Do you pay to descendants of calculators (as in profession — the humans who did manual calculations) every time you use a modern computer?

We expect the workers displaced to suffer something worse. It’s not just or fair that people lose their source of income and ability to support their families through no fault of their own. Slippery slope arguments to one side.

We have a choice about how society is organized our current setup isn’t ‘natural’ and it’s largely one of accelerating inequality.

> It’s not just or fair that people lose their source of income and ability to support their families through no fault of their own.

There's nothing unfair about it. No person or company is entitled to other people or companies buying their services or goods. Your "source of income" is just other people making decisions with their money. Which they are free to make however they want (as long as they honour agreements that already exist, of course).

Your definition of "fair" assumes the supremacy of property rights over everything else that might potentially be valued by a society. Specifically, the right of the owner of a productive asset to collect as much of the profit from that asset as he wishes, up to 100%. You seem pretty certain of this, so I'm not going to try to talk you out of that definition, but try to imagine that there are other valid definitions of "fair" out there that don't place individual property rights as high on the totem pole.

What is just and what is fair? To quote George Costanza: "We're living in a society!"

Anything that people decide to do with their property is just and fair.

AI is trained off the intellectual output of the people who did Job X, so it seems 100% fair to me.

In 90% of cases, these people have consented to sell their intellectual output to their employers, and in remaining 9,9%, they have consented to release it under an open source license. In both cases, it's completely unfair for them to expect any additional monetary reward for any use of their code above what they have already consented to — salary in the first case and nothing in the second.

It’s also one of the few fields with good compensation that can be broken into with minimal expense — all one needs is an old laptop, an internet connection, and some grit. Just about anything else that nets a similar or better paycheck requires expensive training and equipment.

Losing that would be a real shame.

The "people" at the top in charge want nothing less than the population to be poor and dependant. There's a reason they've done everything they can to suppress wages and eliminate good jobs.

Despite that here on HN you have people cheering them on, excited for it. Tech is one of the last good paying fields and these people don't realize it's not a matter of changing career, because there won't be anything better to retrain in.

They are cheering on their own doom.

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