Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

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Ask truckers about this with the nearly decade long plus narrative that the second self driving is mastered they will be laid off, combined simultaneously with complaints about how no one is entering the lucrative trucking industry.

I’ve had non tech family and friends who are currently dealing with the result of American cutthroat capitalism and barely able to cover living expenses despite having two people working full time, ask me how I felt about the risk of AI to my job.

My answer has consistently been that I’m not afraid because one of these results happens. A: AI hits a peak soon and can’t replace any work I do, so it doesn’t matter. B: AI does get sophisticated enough to replace the work I do at which point we’ve basically reached almost star trek level tech where machines can do most of the work and we’ve allocated resources through society in a way that everyone benefits. And lastly the one I think is most likely C: AI automates all this knowledge work for the benefit of company owners and we end up either accepting it as a group and falling back to pre industrial serf like social structures or every rises up in a social revolution.

To be honest I’d expect that going back to serfdom style rules would be the most expected and stable but the current group of western oligarchs don’t seem to care to make sure that their burgeoning serf class have their basic needs met and instead want to antagonize them for not being rich. It’s a really odd juxtaposition of rabidly independent culture where people believe they accomplished everything by the sweat of their own brow crossing with the results of of a society that lets an individual run a company of 10s to 100s of thousands of employees at the same time

Having your serfs' basic needs met was very rarely a care of the ruling classes in any state form that deserves the name "serfdom". Serfs dying in a famine was just one of those things that happened. There was perhaps a brief reversal after the Black Death, when so many serfs had died there was almost a competition for the labor of the survivors.

My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something.

Serfs might decide to kill the local lord. And most local lords didn't have a huge standing army to prevent that.

So you don't sound too correct.

With the exception of Switzerland, this didn't tend to go too well in the middle ages - the early modern age was the first time this became viable "at scale", hence the French Revolution.

There were plenty of earlier cases of one family of minor nobility killing another family of minor nobility and taking over their farmland and serfs, but successful peasant revolts that led to a change in the hierarchy were really rare (outside of Switzerland). Even the 1381 "Great Revolt" in England, which called for the abolition of serfdom among other things, is evaluated by the World History Encyclopaedia [1] as "largely unsuccessful" despite having many factors in its favour: a rise in the bargaining power of surviving peasants after the Black Death, and peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows. And yet Wat Tyler's head ended up on a pike, and despite the poll tax being rolled back, serfdom as an institution remained.

[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/Peasants'_Revolt/

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuchinaggio

> peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows

The longbow's reputation as a hard-counter to heavy cavalry is, I think, a little context dependent. The famous set pieces like Poitiers, Agincourt, Crecy all featured favorable terrain - and in the case of Agincourt, favorable weather - ideal for massed fire into predictable funnels (where, strictly speaking, the longbow served first and foremost as a horse killer).

All this to say, it's IMO a mischaracterization to imply the peasants in the aforementioned peasants revolt held the military edge relative to the crown and its allies. After the initial shock of the uprising, they were a clear underdog matched against a well resourced and ruthless opponent.

I agree entirely. Even with the longbow (or crossbow), a peasant uprising could maybe kill a few local lords and knights, but most of the time they would then find themselves very much the underdog against the forces that would be mobilized in response. We have to wait until gunpowder (for example Jan Zizka's Hussites - and even that was more an exception that proves the rule) for peasants, on average, to have a decent chance.

>> And lastly the one I think is most likely C: AI automates all this knowledge work for the benefit of company owners and we end up either accepting it as a group and falling back to pre industrial serf like social structures or every rises up in a social revolution.

> My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something.

I think the real risk of C is that the economy changes to something radically different, where everything is capital and labor is (basically) no longer required. The whole B2C economy just withers and dies, and is replaced by an economy centered on elite fantasy fulfillment (e.g. Elon Musks monopolizing resources to build mega-projects for themselves, perhaps with a smallish community of human pets kept as an audience).

There wouldn't be any serfs, because serfs had economic value to the medieval elites. But there may be a population of marginal people scraping by squatting and subsistence farming at the margins, hoping a mega-project doesn't displace them.

I assume you are a programmer. In my view, if AI can do software engineering, then I don't think any white collar job is safe.

Software engineering at the CTO level, sure. Coding? It’s looking like the chess versus go of jobs.

My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure. My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.

> My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure.

Both of these jobs - particularly the latter but where I live also the former - rely on a heavy surplus of disposable income sloshing around the economy. Once the money stops flowing the home stills start and the ski trips stop.

> My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.

The broad point you're conveying is reasonably clear, but I'm not even sure whether you're implying your friend is a SWE by virtue of their child tinkering with a REPL, or if you're referring to the future job prospects of said 10 year old.

AI might not come for the ski instructors, but climate change will. Already being felt in Europe.

I don't think ski instructors are safe from AI over the next ten years. It already seems quite feasable on indoor skiing treadmills (which are getting pretty popular for lessons), and would be enabled on actual slopes with some heads-up display and body sensors/cameras.

So the idea is that a massive increase in productivity will reduce economic production?

Or is the idea that we will continue to organize our society around the ever more pointless concentration of wealth?

Are you asking me what I personally believe, or what the GP meant? I don't want to put words in their mouth, but stating that bartending is future-proof while white collar work isn't paints the picture of a future with more inequality and concentration of wealth rather than less.

Maybe I'm being overly broad in my interpretation, because they did specifically single out "coding" - but having personally worked both in and out of tech I don't really see non-dev "desk jobs" as having any particular moat against automation (and potentially even less than devs, which admittedly means I disagree with the likes of Jensen Huang).

So, when programmers go - they won't go alone. At that point it's reasonable to ask what kind of human labor will be marketable enough to command upward-mobility salary tiers, or if the 99.9% are perpetually relegated to pouring Bezos & co drinks while teaching them how to telemark [1]

[1] dystopia aside it would be entertaining to watch

I was making a snide remark about bizarre belief that the macroeconomic effect of increased automation will be poverty.

> broad point you're conveying is reasonably clear

Let me further clarify it: winemakers, lobbyists, charismatic artists and anyone else whose job is based on relationships will also be fine. (Or folks like plumbers and electricians.)

The roles being automated away look like the quiet, tinkering alone genius types. First at the commodity level. But increasingly at the highest ones. The preserved jobs will be both high and low, and exist in the context of a more-productive society.

> The preserved jobs will be both high and low, and exist in the context of a more-productive society.

A more productive society is not incompatible with extreme inequality. Unless the middle is preserved, it's hard to see how all these winemakers and charismatic artists will find a market for their labor.

> more productive society is not incompatible with extreme inequality

Sure. And I don’t see why in the trades and service industry solid middle-class jobs won’t survive. I’m just commenting that, ironically, coding is turning out to be the 21st century’s auto line worker.

Just because software engineering is being done by AI does not apply most other jobs can, too—it’s just the impersonal ones.

What’s different from the Middle Ages is that raw food is cheap. A prepper can get a couple years of food for like $10k. It’s not going to be lavish eating, but it’s better than starving. So if you’re smart and you lose your job and are in the pre-singularity, but have some savings, you can stock up a few years worth of food, and ride things out. If you blow it all on DoorDash, that’s on you.

Where to live, now that’s another problem. Buy an RV and head out to the desert? The food won’t fit into the RV though so, uh, I dunno.

Uh, anyway, point is, go watch Mad Max.

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