The doorman was called a doorman because its essential task was the door. Everything else was additional and replaceable or unnecessary in the first place.
Same with AI. Once it has replaced the main task, the rest will adapt around it.
Maybe, you'd say there are more automatic doors than doormen. I'm confident that is true, but those automatic doors haven't supplanted doormen; they're automatic doors where there would have been manual doors before.
So everything hasn't adapted around automatic doors. We've just got a lot more automatic doors now. And a lot more doormen.
1) What proportion of doors had doormen before compared to now?
2) What proportion of the population was employed as doormen then and now?
3) What proportion of the population benefited from doormen then and now?
That said, to your actual points, as an intellectual exercise: while the population of New York has increased since 1930 (from around 7m to around 9m), the number of doormen has gone up much much faster (from "a few thousand" according to NPR to 25,000). So on the criteria you listed there, the number of doormen has increased as well.
The doorman example remains true.
Look at how beautiful old buildings were. However, now everything is a box, because it is more efficient.
The people setting the prices are not some omniscient backroom of guys smoking cigars. They are thousands and thousands of people much like you can me, competing with each other.
Deluded.
hahahah pls stop posting about economics. For people who have gone much deeper on this branches of knowledge and have a far greater understanding of how it fits in reality - your posts are insulting to read. Stop.
Modern buildings draw the line somewhere else. I too wish there would be more beautiful buildings, but not at the old price.
Honestly, rising house prices have fucked everything up.
There are many other little examples like this, where beneficial side-effects go lost from automation. I suppose LLMs serve as a prime example of how this can affect people quite negatively (e.g. skill atrophy), if not careful. I think adaptation only goes so far, and we are being arrogant in thinking that we can adapt to everything, because a large part of how we function as humans is not as adaptable as we think, e.g. our emotional and instinctual needs, or how we maintain skills that are essential in the long-term.
It also has been an incredibly short period with incredibly large changes, to be able to say that things will just adapt; perhaps they will, but at what cost, and who wins from it?
We stopped going to one favorite place because the wait for a table became interminable. You’d spend forever standing there watching people waiting 15-20 minutes to get a busser’s attention so they could ask a question about the food, and then another 5-10 minutes for someone who actually knows the answer to come out and talk to them. Or, after the meal was over, people would just camp out indefinitely.
Loss on every side, still happened.
Okay, but were you coming to the restaurant for social interaction with the waiters? Have you stopped going to those restaurants that serve you good food at a reasonable price and which are otherwise desirable places to eat because of the lack of social interaction with waiters?
People dislike places that charge too much for mediocre service, and those places disproportionately use the QR codes for ordering and don't pass on the savings from labor reduction to the consumer. Very few people actually miss their waiter interrupting their conversation to tell them the specials.
I agree with your last point though, and you can turn it into a more general statement: some people or companies use automation to do more, and others use it to do less. There's probably a reason for it, among others most likely deprivation. People and companies are getting pushed to 11, and take shortcuts.
Sometimes I feel like peter theil smokes a bunch of crack and posts antichrist takes on here under hundreds of alts. There is a lot more to life then instaspending money on Amazon, running on social media instead of talking to the kids, calling your dad for advice instead of chatgpt. These takes are exactly why most brands suck and why people will fight in the streets to defend Costco or valve.
Life will always have the intangibles and believe it or not it's still a good idea to hire someone who is only okay at a job but has an awesome personality and work ethic. Or lose a couple bucks on some hot dogs... 99% of purchases above survival are done for emotional needs and desires.
It's sad how the stupidest forms of short term cost saving and efficiency have driven ghouls to think they belong in business long term.
I don't see why it doesn't count. It shows we still value the service but it is out of reach for anyone who can't afford it. It lost in the same way much better food outings went out if business while McDonald's thrives. By making society arguably worse and punishing quality.
The wal-mart greeter is essentially a doorman for automatic doors.
the one with a doorman & porter vs the one with just an automatic door and elevator.
people really need to read alchemy by roy Sutherland.
Doorman and porter means more awkward social interactions with strangers, and “premium” just makes me feel like I don’t belong there. I prefer my hotels to be simple and automatic. Airbnbs with self-service check-ins are ideal.