Probably worth calling out the two of the biggest observable negative effects of automation that have occurred over time:
1. We've decimated the bottom end of the skills market in developed countries. Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.
2. People who spend years or decades on a skillset see it devalued and their income drops. It is often difficult to get a "second shot" at a new career in your 40s and can be deeply disruptive to you and your family's lives. Growing up I watched this happen to the parents of several friends who'd made careers in things like printing that were obsoleted by digital revolution. None of those people achieved the monetary success they might have in an un-disrupted industry.
Number 1 is my big concern. I have a son that is on the autism spectrum. He graduated from high school with a modified diploma when he was 20 and they decided to just send him along. He has managed to get a job doing baggage at the airport, which is pretty the limit of his abilities. What if all similar jobs were automated?
The scariest thing of all is how the average citizen is in a certain sense not reaping the benefits of automation.
You would think that automating your job would make you free to work less. No, of course not, you end up either unemployed or working at least as much as you used to or more.
A lot of the comments here on this thread are already pessimistic in relation to the automation because people low key know that in the last decades almost all societal changes have come to the detriment of general population.
Automation economic benefits should've manifested as deflation. That's what you'd expect to happen: the costs of doing things are coming down, so should the price. But the prevailing economic theory is that "deflation is bad".
The Fed and the financial class have been printing money relentlessly and have been squeezing all the juice of the economic benefits of automation by taxing it with inflation. The zero rates of the last 20 years have not reflected price stability, they reflected moving goalposts and strong technological deflation (which should've benefited the common people) coupled to high monetary inflation which was only allowed because of the technological deflation.
When you look at where did most of the money gained from technological innovation went - where all the newly found wealth was spent - the answer is obviously houses. The landlord / banking class have been printing money relentlessly inflating a bubble of the assets they hold, and they could only afford to do it because they absorbed the rising economic power of technology. You slave away while they get to print money.
We have effectively two tiered society. For the common people, a dollar is a dollar. For the financial class, a dollar is actually ten dollars, held with leverage and then bailed out by the Fed when it blows up.
Western ideology is mostly about taxing the salaries. While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods. But then again xUSSR "did't work" and capitalism "worked". How it even possible to reap anything from the automation if tax base is people's salaries and VAT?
Presumably the model for sufficiently wealthy countries would be to effectively tax the corporations either based in those countries or that wanted to sell to people in those countries. You then redistribute a subset of that as UBI or some other form of payment for either the subset affected by unemployability or to everyone.
In addition to UBI if we effectively taxed corporations we could have massive job programs for workers that either do get automated out of a job or work in a job that becomes obsolete. Just because you specialized in one thing and that thing becomes obsolete when you turn age 40 does not mean you do not have all kinds of other skills that will make it easier to start anew.
USSR style communism was really an authoritarian dictatorship.
In capitalist west, capitalism was also about distribution of goods but literally being nice about it. Working together.
The language is meaningless gibberish. The tone and emotional spin, roleplay are what’s important.
In the US we’re enabling iron fisted oligarchs like the USSR once had. Those who refuse to share without extreme deference and idolatry, not because they’re that important to the well being of billions (they’re not) but because they’re important to the political actors that insulate them from taxation.
Nothing's so clear-cut as history lessons might have you believe.
The USSR et al had many more problems than most people in the west, at least of my generation, properly appreciate — the Holomodor and the irony of the Berlin Wall's official name (≈ anti-fascist protection barrier) being the most pertinent in my mind.
Conversely, while the USA was a symbol of hope and freedom in my childhood, that childhood was oblivious to the official segregation of the USA even in the 60s, let alone the unofficial segregation whose continued existence was the basis for the term "woke" prior to it being appropriated by all the political talking heads to mean everything and nothing.
The oligarchy in the USA today is not one I favour, but it is kinder than the… I was going to reference the events of the Homestead strike, but it turns out I must remember my own words, for that too is less clear-cut than I had heard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
But yeah, reality is a complicated mess.
My opinion is that laissez-faire capitalism is BS, that the Roosevelt New Deal marked an end to that era for the same reason that the equivalent living conditions ended Soviet-style communism; that other forms of communism and capitalism exist; that both over-simplify human nature and that a superior alternative to both can be designed with careful effort; that such a thing probably won't be taken seriously until the current system is utterly broken because of those with power in the current system; and that by default AI and robotics is a lot closer to communism than anything else because "from each according to ability" requires much less personal consideration when everyone has a dozen droid servitors at their disposal.
> While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods
Yeah, ask my grand grand father how great that worked. Oh sorry, you can’t, he was shot in the gulag in 1937 for anti revolution activities (and rehabilitated in 60s, saying it was a terrible mistake, that’s a relief, right?).
The failures of the USSR does not mean the US is succeeding. It is possible for more than one thing to be bad. Power/wealth imbalances are bad wherever they appear. The USSR no longer exists, but the US does, and its imbalance is growing worse rapidly.
The USSR succumbed to the resource curse and an unstoppable arms race. In the 50s when they were still on somewhat friendly terms American newspapers were openly fretting that the Soviet economy was too efficient and growing too fast.
Its intrinsic economic woes were overplayed by western elites who were terrified of communist contagion.
Western ideology is about the primacy of property ownership. It's not economically efficient in the slightest but it's the only game in town these days.
Property tax and inheritance tax can both be thought of as wealth tax, and are quite common. More general wealth taxes. Many European countries currently have or used to have more general wealth taxes. Lots of Americans support a general wealth tax. See Bernie Sanders.
I fail to see how your example of basic requirements for normal life is wealth. Tax second and third homes, places with eleven bedrooms when the owners live elsewhere. People who own the robots that replace workers.
Are you just trolling? This seems like a bad faith comment of unimaginable ignorance.
Comment I was replying is about wealth, article and my original comment are about automation. Yet somehow you are now talking about 11 bedrooms somehow. Anyways...
"Manual" jobs, per the OpenAI whitepaper, seem to be the least susceptible to being automated. The robotics just isn't there yet. Blessings to your family.
Manual mid-range jobs were the first that were automated, due to the industrial revolution, and later during the robotics revolution.
They've been automated for so long and so thoroughly that you didn't even think of them as 'having been automated away'.
Look at any commercial kitchen, any farm, inside any factory. Look at the grocery store, and its self-checkout machines. Look at parking attendants and toll booths. Look at the labour-saving devices employed at any construction site. Look at the demise of cottage industries - which used to be the economic driver of productive output, and are now limited to kitschy crafts on Etsy. Look at the cargo-container shipping yard, where a hundred dock-workers are now do the work that used to take tens of thousands. Look at the answering machine, and the utter insanity that is the modern automated customer support directory.
What hasn't been automated are jobs like janitors - where the work that they do is highly varied, and requires manipulation of different tools, in different spaces. We can automate a floor-mopping machine, or a vaccum cleaner, but we can't (yet) build a robot that will vaccum, and water the plants, and scrub a toilet, and clean up vomit, and refill the paper towel dispenser, all in one package.
Which aren’t automation or even new technology. The stores just cleverly moved the work that must be done to unpaid laborers. The self-checkout machines are an inferior tool with an escape hatch (customer service is on the way) to the real tool which must be operated by an employee.
Surely the ability to easily type and search for items is new technology. Customers do not have to memorize the codes, they can look them up.
I find self checkout very beneficial, as I frequently have few items to purchase, and there are more self checkout registers available more consistently than there would be staff.
For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it takes me very little time to self checkout. For people with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of the many self checkouts.
> For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it takes me very little time to self checkout. For people with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of the many self checkouts.
Except if they have never used self checkout before. Or if they have 15 items in the store's cart but they haven't brought their shopping bags so they take 15 minutes to fill their arms and pockets and hats with their groceries.
Those people are eating time saved by self-checkout !
I tolerate the young ones who comes in pack of 6 individuals, especially if only one of them buy their unique can of coke. It makes the queue looks longer than it is and I am out sooner than the SUCKERS in the other queue.
The question seems to be, will those manual jobs be valued and economically rewarded, or will automation increasingly concentrate wealth into smaller and smaller groups while manual work will be low paying with low social mobility.
Depends on the supply of labor for those manual jobs. Jobs that require skill and/or have low quality of life at work such as requiring traveling/crawl spaces/outdoors/sewers/dangerous machinery/hazardous materials will probably pay well.
Manual jobs that are relatively safe, close to home, steady, and easy to learn will probably have a lot of people vying for them, hence lower pay.
As in "Manual jobs that weren't made obsolete in the previous automation revolution" I suppose ? Like construction machines and lavor-saving tools ? On the top of my head I am thinking hair dresser, nail care (I wouldn't risk going to hair dresser or barber robot shop).
Government can/does provide aid to those with disabilities that prevent them from being able to attain and keep regular employment.
In the U.S. I believe it's through Social Security.
So as more jobs are automated and the base level of ability required to get hired goes up so does the need to expand who qualifies for social programs.
Productivity will be increasing with automation so it's a matter of distributing resources more efficiently and fairly than it is about making sure there is labor for everyone to get a job.
Social Security in the U.S. is typically for retired people age ~65 or older. There are other social programs for low-income people, but they are abysmally insufficient for what we’re talking about. Usually disabled people are paid by “disability insurance” but you have to get a job first to even qualify for that. So that’s usually for injuries etc.
If you don’t live in the U.S. it’s hard to grasp just how hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family ffs, but we can’t even fix that. There is zero political will to provide robust social programs here, despite any evidence that shows it might improve society.
Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close to zero chance of the solutions you’re describing.
The minimum level of cognitive ability necessary for employment providing a reasonable degree of autonomy is bound to rise inexorably. So this concern will be shared by ever growing numbers.
The contemporary habit of envisioning people as some sort of disposable artifice is dehumanising at its core and just serves to rid those in lucky positions of superfluence from responsibility.
Society needs to learn to recognize interpersonal differences in terms other than self-serving judgemental dismissal.
Does that even matter when they still aren't being hired? Hiring statistics for those with disabilities are really horrible. We still hold biases about what makes one "productive" that stem from our very early hunter gatherer days, and these are still to this day negatively affecting the hiring potential of those with disabilities.
The scariest thing is that they will eventually allow euthanasia for your child and others like him. Economically unpleasant people are not needed in capitalism. The governments are already starting to prepare laws on it .
Yeah, I think something that gets missed by the decriers of pessimism is that over time we really do seem to be throwing a new strata currently at the bottom of the workforce onto the scrapheap.
The "optimists" might not take notice because they've been in the layers that can keep playing musical chairs and adjust, and things might even seem good - especially when the pool of money available gets more concentrated.
What has been a slow gradual frog boiling process could very well accelerate with AI reaching this level though. I can't think of earlier developments being as widely applicable and moving as fast as this before.
I worry for my kids generation, and personally wish I was 10yrs closer to retirement.
More generally the number of jobs hasn't seemed to drop drastically during any of these waves of automation, but the number of people employed in certain fields has including some jobs disappearing entirely. That means automation doesn't present a problem for the economy overall, but it does present a problem for individuals who need to exist in the transitioning economy. The US in particular has done an awful job easing those individuals during the transition. The economy becoming more efficient is good. We should use some of the surplus value of increased efficiency to care for the people harmed by that transition.
> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.
Although I was completely unaware of this literature, I have spent the last few years essentially making the same point with regard to automation: you don't need a super-duper ASI to cause severe employment problems, all you need is something with an IQ of 85 that costs at most minimum wage to run (modulo robotics keeping up and being part of that price), and then 16% of the population are permanently and irreversibly no longer economically employable.
There are many things a robot with "IQ" 85 cannot do that a human with "the same" IQ can: childcare / elder care, social work, basically anything that requires garnering trust and a lot of social interaction, but not necessarily complex skills. There will probably be more jobs like this in the future. Even now, people pay extra for handmade items when the technology to mass-produce the same thing for cheaper has been around for decades, so even if a robot can do your job, that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.
> There are many things a robot with "IQ" 85 cannot do that a human with "the same" IQ can:
Only if you don't take IQ tests seriously — I think I've heard them dismissed as "only good at measuring your score on an IQ test".
If you do take them seriously, then by definition an AI which genuinely scores 85 (and isn't, say, just programmed to be good at that specific set of puzzles), then it must be able to do what a human of that IQ can do.
In this case I mean the latter, what with it being a thought experiment to demonstrate why we get problems well before having to ask if the AI can take over.
Practical issues like "a native speaker with IQ 85 is almost certainly more fluent than an IQ 160 polyglot on their 53rd, but for an AI they're all equal", or "we can easily hard-code in an algorithm for winning chess and another for doing calculus" likewise don't really matter.
> childcare / elder care, social work, basically anything that requires garnering trust and a lot of social interaction, but not necessarily complex skills
One of the problems right now with ChatGPT is that people trust it waaaay too much, and it's not really even trying.
> that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.
worthless != longer economically employable
The arts have significant social value, and I suspect may be to humans what tails are to peacocks; but at the same time, painters and novelists and musicians and actors and playwrights are infamous in their collective struggles to earn enough to get by on those careers alone.
> then it must be able to do what a human of that IQ can do.
Has anyone ever said this about any test? Are there any tests that are so general that anyone who does better on it is better at every single task than someone who does worse? Is such a test even possible?
To pre-empt you expanding that to things like running speed, I considered it too obvious to bother mentioning that I'm taking about mental tasks.
For that specific example, athletics, there does appear to be a correlation. It may be any or all of A->B, B->A, and C->(A, B), but "healthy body, healthy mind" is a meme that appears to have a similar age as the concept of writing.
Finally, as I have been specifying IQ 85 as the "huh interesting" threshold rather than "high" IQ, I'll ignore your goalpost shift and say that your citation is me right now saying: I reckon IQ improvements in at least this zone (say +/- 0.5σ) is causal for better outcomes with regard to [avoiding injury, pushing performance limits, maintaining training regimes, learning techniques], all of which improve overall performance.
Automation in theory SHOULD, in the process of destroying jobs, make many things cheaper so people are able to afford things that were previously out of reach, creating new jobs in those sectors.
In addition to the other comment, the cashier is almost none of the price.
Assuming £10/hour and a cashier that can scan an average of 20 items per minute (which is probably 20 items in 20 seconds and then waiting 40 more for the customer to dig out their wallet), that's 20*60 items per hour = 1200 items per hour = 120 items/£1.
It’s safe to talk about EQ in addition to IQ regarding some jobs then. It’s more and more going to be about EQ jobs where AI feels lacking now, emphasis on the now.
Another problem is, that minimum required IQ number keeps rising too.
A healthy society needs to have means to support people of all intelligence levels, we need the equivalent of jobs for ditch diggers, and those jobs need to be respected lines of work for people.
Work has more value than just money, and whether people like it or not, it gives value and meaning to peoples lives. The value we assign (and pay) for work shouldnt just be governed by the economic value it generates, it needs to be enough to meet basic needs, to engender respect.
The basic point I'll make here, using ditch digging is - have you dug a ditch? I have, its hard work, and mine was just a small one in my back yard.
Our default is "lots of babies"; women getting more education and economic liberty decrease that number. Poor places don't generally have significant educational budgets or opportunities for women, but as that specific set of things changes — education and freedom, not even always money — there is a corresponding change to number of births per woman.
It also means that rich couples in societies that lack women's lib still have more kids, even where you can infer high intellect without the convenient proxy of the women being allowed to go to university and giving you a test to score against.
In the short run, people can act against their own evolutionary fitness, but in the long run, evolutionary pressures should push those people to the wayside.
Well yeah in fact regression to the mean predicts that below average people will on average have children smarter than themselves while above average people will have children less smart than themselves (but still smarter than average).
That's not my point, my point is more that it's funny that people do things like going to college when this predictably causes them to have fewer children i.e. college actually hurts their evolutionary fitness.
I think if you're thinking about evolutionary fitness when having children, or deciding how many children to have, you should fundamentally reevaluate your moral and ideological system.
That line of thinking is the beginning or the road to eugenics, and it goes no place good.
Eugenics is about imposing a system on society where only a chosen group of people get to have offspring, not about your individual choices or your kids. Otherwise choosing a mate you're attracted to becomes paramount to eugenics.
Also, everyone is thinking about evolutionary fitness. Some people just do it explicitly (and others do it by instinct/intuition)
Do you think that the state shouldn't be allowed to kill unwanted Down syndrome babies after they are born because "that's eugenics"?
What about Down syndrome adults, who are reliant on state benefits?
In case it's not clear, I don't support the killing of disabled people at any age, but I understand that different people approach these questions from a different set of assumptions.
My point is that adding scare quotes around "that's eugenics" doesn't stop it from being an accurate description, so your question is not the gotcha you might think it is.
I don't think the state should be in the business of killing anyone.
But a woman aborting a Downs baby is not the state killing anyone, and most pro choice people would say the woman isn't killing anyone either, since the fetus isn't a person in their view.
I understand that the market is mysterious and confusing, but it has always struck me as bizarre that our society is structured in such a way that automating a task away has ended up as a bad thing. The thing you were doing has been done, therefor society as a whole at least wouldn’t be harmed by just paying you (Your old salary - amortized yearly cost of the machine) to do nothing.
Maybe if you ignore the effects of competition. If you're paying someone you no longer need and your competitors (who have access to the same automation) aren't, they'll outcompete you.
This matters from the perspective of one specific competitor, but not from the perspective of society as a whole - the latter still has the same gross economic output and the same number of people to support it with. Therefore, the disconnect between the two is due to the way society is structured (i.e. who reaps the economic benefits and how), and not intrinsic.
> the latter still has the same gross economic output
Well no, if we still had the same gross economic output as 1000 years ago quality of living would be much lower.
The point of competition is that it drives up total economic output.
Of course it sucks for the people who get outcompeted. Certainly getting them productive again in another capacity is good for society. Letting them simply idle is not.
If we had the same gross economic output and the same population, quality of life would be the same, aside from environmental changes.
And on the time scales we're looking at here (millions of people losing jobs within a decade or so), population growth is not a relevant concern, and does not explain why people are worse off despite more automation. Not to mention that population growth is already negative in most societies most affected by automation.
I haven’t responded because int_19h seems to have perfectly understood what I was trying to say and made similar arguments to what I would have.
Just wanted to note that I didn’t propose a particular solution—you seem to have responded as if I’ve just said “we should have no automation,” which is not what I was proposing at all—it was just an observation about where things have ended up.
We could imagine lots of ways to not throw people to the wolves when their jobs were automated away, the idea of just continuing to pay them is sort of a lower bound (in the sense that obviously the economy could bear it, because it had just been bearing it, right before the automation was implemented).
I don't know to what degree automation was involved, but we also spent the last 60+ years socially devaluing jobs that don't require a college degree.
My grandfather is about as smart as I am, but he never went to college (nor did well over 90% of his cohort). Now about half the population goes to college, and more than a third graduate.
That's a massive transformation in two generations, and its exacerbated by the degree to which it segregates. I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend college.
It is completely wild to me how effectively society has self segregated to the point of just straight up never, not even once, interacting with the other group without even realizing it.
The college thing is a much bigger divide than politics for my friend group. My wife is about as blue-tribe as you can get. My best-man is pretty darn red tribe (and not Mitt Romney red-tribe, but "likely to vote for Trump in the next Republican primary" red-tribe).
They both have college degrees though. I have a few friends who dropped out of college, but none that never attended.
1. Is completely wrong. We have vastly grown the bottom end of the skills market by automating jobs to levels so simple that anyone can do it. They are bad jobs. But there are many of them. The problem is that we have people with normal IQs doing these jobs too, because there is not enough jobs above them.
People with these IQs under 85 are generally not employable in some of the lowest end jobs available: warehouseman, packer, or package delivery. I'm not sure what jobs you're imagining that are simpler than those, but I think I'm going to agree with the data on this point.
I think the framing here has to be very careful: I agree with the general psychometric data that ~15% of struggle to get or keep a job delivering packages or packing things. This is not the same as packing something or delivering a package. Jobs require a certain speed of execution, ability to adapt to changing conditions, low rate of mistake, and a maximum training time.
Remember, even the army during war time, which requires people fulfilling botho f these services won't hire people with such a low IQ.
Second, The military does not test IQ. It has a different test with a decent correlation. This test scores in percentiles however. And the bottom 10% are not allowed in. This is not the same thing as 10% of all people cannot get in, as those taking the military test are probably a lower IQ subset on average.
Probably not by much. I would guess the military is current cutting off the bottom 8-10% of the population.
I can’t find much in the way of hard stats but I still feel pretty strongly that a 10th percentile individual is more than well equipped to be a delivery driver of a warehouse worker or whatever.
> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.
This is because we decide it's better to pay people to do nothing than to clean streets and medians and countless other things that need done.
Both "smart people have smart children" and 90% of this forum being smarter than their parents could be true if "being on this forum" was selected on intelligence.
I don't have the time to work through the math concretely, but intuitively, imagine that the intelligence of parents is normally distributed, and the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Set the cutoff for "participating on HN" to to some threshold. Given the right set of parameters, most of the "weight" in the aggregate child distribution above the threshold will come from the long tails of the child distributions of parents in the fat part of the parent distribution.
>the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence.
Again, this is the core fallacy of eugenics.
How many current US PhD's are the children/grandchildren of immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs (or maybe even went through extended periods of unemployment)?
EDIT: To be clear, I know Western culture has pushed a narrative that intelligence is an intrinsic thing that anyone can have, but in practice, it's a reflection of learned skills like reasoning and abstraction. That's the entire point of education, if you don't practice those skills (with some exceptions), you are likely worse at them.
immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs
Why are you conflating immigrants from underdeveloped countries with low intelligence? The parents could be have been (likely were) highly intelligent, just lacking the opportunity or access to education.
The current US PhD's that are the children/grandchildren of immigrants aren't a random selection, they are the product of smart motivated parents working the system (immigration system, education system, admissions system) for and with their children.
The core fallacy of Eugenics is not that intelligence is heritable, it is that you can avoid terrible moral hazards when you try to meddle in this stuff.
There are enough teachers and doctors from other countries working as post delivery drivers in Germany because their education isn’t being accepted in Germany.
Sure, by no means am I trying to make some argument that immigrants or manual laborers are worse or inferior. In fact the opposite!
I'm trying to say that regardless of who your parents are, your intelligence is primarily driven by your education (and your attitude towards education), with slight variance for genetic factors.
Therefore, we should not be anxious about "dumb people reproducing en masse" (as GP was).
We should be worried about educating everyone equally and fairly.
"Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults."
I don't think 50-80% heritability should be hand-waved away as "slight variance". I think what you're talking about is the manifestations of the intelligence (i.e. you can't be a rocket scientist if you never had the chance to learn about it), but not the intelligence itself.
We disagree on the predictive power of twin studies.
Also please cite actual studies rather than Wikipedia. You’ll capture more nuance.
We conclude that there is now strong evidence that virtually all individual psychological differences, when reliably measured, are moderately to substantially heritable
For example, citation 6 implies nearly every personality trait is inherited, which seems aggressive to me.
Citation 7 is a book about how the genetic links get stronger with age, which seems also odd to take at face value.
Citation 4 is a study of 3k white (they excluded non-white people intentionally) British people born in the 1920's titled "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic," but their results could be restated as 'distant members of the same family clan (in a society famous for inter-generational class structure) score similarly on aptitude tests, but we can't explain it with our data.'
Anyway, as great a source as Wikipedia can be, I wouldn't take its summaries at face value, the three above examples lead me to believe (like in a lot of social sciences) there's still a lot of work to be done to actually get to answers.
But, again, circling back to the problem here - even if 'smart' people lead to 'smart' children, society as it stands is awful at actually identifying and rewarding smart people (i.e. jobs aren't doled out via IQ tests).
> I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.
I hope not. I saw a pretty funny meme on Reddit today that went something like "50 years ago car manuals explained how to adjust the valves in your engine. Now they ask that you don't drink the battery fluid".
I think another big downside of so much technological progress is that people no longer need to understand, and get the benefit of learning, how things work. Yeah, it was a PITA that 35 years ago I had to muck with config.sys and autoexec.bat files, but it helped me have a better understanding of how things worked under the covers. There was some discussion on HN recently about how many Gen Z folks are woefully unprepared digitally for the workforce because they are so used to iPhones/iPads/apps, etc., that you don't know how thing actually work - like people not understanding what the file system is.
Sure, but that's an argument against abstraction/specialization that is also somewhat hard to really buy into.
How do you smelt bronze? How do you grow crops? How do you build a lean-to?
Knowing how to do all those things does give you a very intrinsic understanding of a lot of things, but it's probably not wise to force everyone to learn those things.
EDIT: Apparently you don't smelt bronze, you smelt pure metals out of ores. lol.
I saw that meme too, except the version I saw had the top comment included in the crop, which was something to the effect of "warnings are put on products in response to customer behavior, not as a preventative measure. somebody's parents tried to drink battery acid."
> The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people.
What makes you say that's a fallacy? Everything I've read has shown intelligence to be highly hereditable. I'm not saying we should make policy changes based on that, but the science behind intelligence being (at least partially) hereditable seems pretty conclusive.
So you get studies with very confident titles like this: Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic
Then you read the paper and you see:
A total of 3511 CAGES (2115 females) participants had DNA extracted...Individuals were excluded from this study based on unresolved gender discrepancy, relatedness, call rate (≤ 0.95), and evidence of non-Caucasian descent...
Analyses of individual SNPs and genes did not result in any replicable genome-wide significant association. A gene-based test for association27 showed one genome-wide significant association (P = 9.2 × 10−7), with formin-binding protein 1-like (FNBP1L) on gf (Supplementary Figure 7). This single genome-wide association result for FNBP1L did not replicate in the independent NCNG sample (P = 0.211, gene-based test)...
Despite the fact that no specific genetic variants have been robustly associated with human intelligence, apart perhaps for APOE at older ages34,35, our results show for the first time that a substantial proportion (approximately 40 to 50%) of variation in human intelligence is associated with common SNPs (Minor allele frequency (MAF) > 0.01) that are in LD with causal variants...
Only 1% (approximately) of the variance was explained in the prediction analysis due to the individual SNP effects being very small and therefore estimated with much error, which detracts to a great extent from the accuracy (8-11%) of the prediction equation30. Our finding that 40-50% of phenotypic variation is explained by all SNPs is fully consistent with the low precision of a predictor based upon a discovery sample of ~3,500 individuals; estimation of the SNPs’ effects is different from prediction accuracy.
So basically, what they did, was take a bunch of British people born in the 1920's (a time/place famous for its rigid inter-generational class history), and found that members of certain family trees (that's more or less what it means to be British and have similar SNP distributions) scored similarly on tests, despite the fact that there's no real model to express why.
That and twin studies (which also have their obvious limits) are about the extent of current "evidence" for inherited intellect. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but 'conclusive' is hardly how I would characterize the state of true evidence-based research.
> our results show for the first time that a substantial proportion (approximately 40 to 50%) of variation in human intelligence is associated with common SNPs
Seems to suggest that intelligence has a lot to do with genes. Why do you think that part supports your view that intelligence doesn't? Do you have any evidence that kids doesn't inherit any intelligence?
I'm saying that the test was of 3,000 white British people born in the 1920's (they specifically excluded non-white people) and what they found was that distant relatives scored similarly on tests (that's what it means to share common SNPs, given the context).
I'd be impressed if they saw the same thing across two populations where we know people aren't related, but I'd argue they just back-solved Britain's class structure.
One has to think critically in science.
>Do you have any evidence that kids doesn't inherit any intelligence
Well, if intelligence is inherited, then why are IQ tests going up over time (and therefore being recentered on 100 constantly)? Doesn't that imply learning is the driver?
If you're interested in topic #1 here I highly recommend the book "Dignity" by Chris Arnade. It's not like this concept was literally new to me but the grace with which he talks about it and the specific stories he encounters made me see things in an entirely different light. x
No one talks about the lift attendants! «The person who operated the lifts (elevators) in old shopping houses or buildings was called an "elevator operator" or "lift attendant." Their primary responsibility was to manually control the elevator, ensuring that it stopped accurately at each floor and that passengers were transported safely. They would also assist passengers by opening and closing the elevator doors and providing information about the different floors or departments within the building.»
I think #1 is more attributable to the rising minimum wage. I read the other day that the one job that automation did successfully eliminate was the elevator operator, but I'm quite certain that - like the gas station attendant in states that don't mandate it - it fell victim to the rising minimum wage. It simply became illegal to pay people what these jobs are worth.
>> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common
I think Jordan Peterson quoted the stats as people with IQ under 83 are completely unemployable i.e. even the army can't get a net positive out of them. I found that deeply concerning in several ways.
IMHO we need to work on reducing the cost of living so people can mostly opt-out without losing their home and dying. Instead it's always push harder, more growth, etc...
It's interesting to see people who have been working as software engineers worrying that codegen LLMs will take their job. In the past week the amount of work that consisted of writing well-defined code was pretty much zero, and the actual core logic I have written lately has been almost mindlessly trivial. I spent much more time discussing requirements, arriving at consensus on where components should live, determining whether change requests should go forward, determining how changes affected latency or disk space, and debugging nuanced issues that required multiple engineers to slowly reveal the problem.
If your programming job consists of simply receiving a greenfield spec and banging out the code for it over and over, LLMs might be an issue. But most jobs are not like this. The bulk of the work, as always, is in dealing with the people at either end of the process. And knowing what the computer is doing and how it works will continue to be invaluable when an LLM writes logically perfect code that happens to run slowly or do the wrong thing once it makes contact with the real world.
This reminds me of a quote from Joel Spolsky in the early 2000's but he was talking about offshoring:
"There is always a global shortage of developers who know what they are doing"
At the time, I wasn't sure if this was the case but two things have helped me believe that this is true:
1. a few years ago there was a stat going around on HN that something like less than 5% of the US population could even write a Hello World application in ANY language
2. 15+ years of working in tech and 5+ years of being a hiring manager have shown me that even people with great looking resumes often fail the Fizz Buzz test
I suppose what people are afraid of is that the devs who can do Hello World + pass Fizz Buzz might use AI to orchestrate sophisticated systems which actually are effective in reducing a lot of menial work, which could eliminate a non-trivial number of jobs through sheer reduction of necessary labour/brain power.
I agree though, off-shoring could have been the cheap labour which displaced a lot of devs, but I actually found a lot of work cleaning up off-shored applications and made great money doing it. It's perfectly possible that some horrible amalgamations of software will be puked out by AIs for a few years and ultimately create as much work as it displaced.
At many of the FAANGs, it's not uncommon to spend 4 hours of testing for every one 1 of programming.
Considering how important it is to not have bugs - we're extremely unlikely to have an LLM writing code at an acceptable level of quality, and anyone being qualified to verify that quality beside an eng, before I'm retired.
But I'm confident many 22 year-old new grads will reply to tell me how wrong I am, and how I'll be starving to death under the burden of unemployment by next week.
Hot take, but if you're doing a lot of soft skills work with non-developers, you might be carrying the team too much. You're very much right that those jobs won't go away because that would mean people around the developer would then have to do more work and be more technical.
What would be great is for senior ICs to push into non-IC roles (ideally: ICs can use AI, so you need less ICs but this is unproven). Technical skills and knowledge applied to writing requirements cuts down on the number of conversations around those requirements. Then you get closer to a "greenfield spec -> bang out AI-generated code" situation because you're not slogging and negotiating through requirements written by non-technical people.
In one of GPT4's release demos, it is shown being fed a photograph of a hand-drawn web page. It then image analyses that, works out that it's a picture of a web page and turns it into a working web page (https://youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=shares&t=972).
So here's the thing; what in that list of non-codegen tasks is more complicated than that which GPT can already automate?
> The rise of horseless carriages, mass production and other new forms of automation in the first two decades of the 20th century created anxieties about the future of work and employment.
I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.
Recording and mechanical reproduction did cause the social(!) and economic value of small-time talent in the arts to plummet from "pretty high, actually" to "basically zero". That never recovered.
To no small degree, the US has coped with the effects of automation with huge public spending on the military (a massive blue-collar jobs program, effectively) and a painfully-inefficient healthcare system (a massive white-collar jobs program). Both are post-war (as in, WWII) developments. I have a feeling our optimism about the effects of further automation on unemployment would be rather bleaker without the action of those two very-expensive systems in mitigating the effects of past automation.
[EDIT] Oh, you can add the effects of pushing a whole lot more people into college to the list of expensive things we do that mitigate the effects of automation on employment. Keeping millions more people out of the workforce for an extra four years or more is a pretty big deal. Also a post-war development (the GI Bill was what kicked off that trend)
> I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.
Exactly. The buggy drivers became tax drivers, the horses became glue.
The automobile was a great invention for the participants on the right side of that bell-curve, and absolutely horrible for the participants on the left side of the bell-curve.
There's no guarantee, universal law, or dogmatic hit-the-brakes switch which will ensure that (without a major economic adjustment) further technological development won't put an ever-growing fraction of people to the left of the 'useful enough to be employable for a living wage' side of the bellcurve.
> I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.
Don't forget farmers. Most americans were farmers in the early 1900s. Today it's about 1%.
Sure, jobs were eventually created for the unemployed farmers but "robots taking all the jobs" was a cataclysmic event in the early 1900s. You could argue it was the driving force for much of the 20th century. WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out". The excess population was also a reason for the anti-immigration movement that dominated the first half of the 1900s.
"Robots taking our jobs" isn't the end of the world. But it can be very painful.
> WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out".
No. Some actual reasons for WW1: Franco-German animosity, the famous web of alliances, advances in weapon technology and accompanying arms races, nationalism, and cold geopolitical calculus (Germany thought their power relative to the other Great Powers would decline in the future).
A few years ago the NYT editorial board argued that inflation was going to be transitory because "it's not the 1970s." It was a smug, dismissive, and ultimately incorrect argument. Appealing to the past doesn't mean much because we don't live there.
This argument about automation is no different. We don't know what is going to happen because of AI. We don't even know where AI is going to go as a product/feature/whatever. It could totally make obsolete an entire class of lower-earning white collar workers whose main contribution is writing things. On the other hand, it could fizzle out and we could be comparing Bing Chat to Clippy a few years from now and laughing at all the investors who wasted their money on the next big thing after crypto.
Pointing to times in the past when people feared automation, and showing how those fears did not pan out, is not a good argument. Everything in history is contingent, everything could have gone a different way if a few people made different decisions at a few key times, and fear of automation may have motivated some of those people to make the decisions that prevented automation from destroying all the jobs.
To put it another way: If you play Russian Roulette with a six-shot revolver and you survive five rounds, should you be more or less likely to believe that you will survive the sixth round? People who look to the past and say "bad thing that was predicted did not happen then so it won't happen now" are guilty of thinking that if they survived five rounds then they will definitely survive the next one.
This logic is fundamentally faulty. Suppose, for example, that you're on "the front side" of a bell curve. As you go up the bell curve, until you near the peak, you can look behind you and think "Look at this, we've been going up for 100 years, and we're still going up!" But, if/when you do near the peak, it actually can turn quite drastically, and quickly.
The primary issue for me is the rate at which technological progress is moving is making it ever more difficult for humans to adjust. I mean, suppose that in 10 years we have fully capable self driving cars. I'm not necessarily saying that's going to happen (in fact I actually think it won't), but I do think it will happen at some point. Right now, truck driver is the most common job in that vast majority of US states. When self driving cars do eventually come, all of those jobs will disappear pretty quickly. Do you honestly think someone who has been driving a truck for 20 years will be able to "retrain" quickly?
And it's certainly not just truck drivers. Count me as one of the people who are astonished by ChatGPT's programming abilities. While I don't believe it's "there yet", I was pretty amazed that I was able to ask ChatGPT to program something for me, and it did quite well but the code had a subtle bug, and then when I pointed out the bug ChatGPT was able to fix it itself. And this wasn't even on the GPT-4 version. This stuff only gets better with time.
Progress on autonomous vehicles appears to have mostly stalled. And even if it can eventually be made to work on some roads, truck drivers do a lot more than just drive the truck.
There is no guarantee that the overall rate of technological progress will continue to increase. The opposite could well happen. Right now we are seeing the effects of multiple S-curves stacked on top of each other but progress is already slowing in many fields because the low-hanging fruit has been picked. For example, civil aviation has only eked out a few percentage points of improvement in efficiency and safety over the past couple decades; the latest airliners are actually slower than their predecessors. Or in medicine we seem to be running out of new small-molecule drugs to find and thus on average with all the failures it now takes more work than ever before to bring a new drug to market.
I expect there is lots of low hanging fruit to be picked from LLMs.
Imagine an LLM running locally on your car, refined to pick your lane based on the current traffic conditions and upcoming map data.
Many of the problems with self driving come for a lack of basic reasoning ability, an ability LLMs seem to emulate quite well. For example you can lay out driving scenarios to ChatGPT and get reasonable responses back.
It’s not as simple as running a Llama instance on your Tesla, but I expect language models will have had a big part to play when we finally get self driving to work.
Large language models are totally unsuitable to autonomous vehicles. No one is going to write code to describe a dynamic driving situation as static text which could be used as an LLM prompt.
Some of the underlying core technology could theoretically be used in that way by taking input from multiple videocameras and other sensors. But that approach is a dead end for consumer product development until someone solves the testing and explainability problem. Current limited AI systems are too unpredictable for safety critical applications. Just because AI software seems to work in testing doesn't mean you can have any confidence that it won't do something wildly dangerous in a novel real world situation. Vehicle manufacturers and their insurers will not take on the high potential liability even if autonomous systems are on average safer than human drivers.
Tesla uses a small language model for lane selection at intersections, they already shipped that to customers.
Natural language is useful for systems with discrete elements and complex rules, which seems like a good fit for parsing intersections, construction zones, things like that.
I also disagree that the explainability problem needs to be solved before self driving cars can be implemented. The effects of drugs are inherently non-deterministic, but the FDA still lets companies develop drugs and ship them to customers. You test self driving cars the same way we test drugs: by collecting data and calculating the probability of harm.
That’s not really what happens though. Truck drivers don’t disappear. They just become “truck driver attendants” who serve only to attend to occasional human requiring edge cases. They don’t require a commercial driver license and they pay minimum wage. And thus the lower class grows.
But do you really think we'll see the same number of truck driver attendants as truck drivers? Heck, one of the things that already exists is autonomous truck caravans, where one driver can "drive" a fleet, of say, 5-10 cars.
> one of the things that already exists is autonomous truck caravans, where one driver can "drive" a fleet, of say, 5-10 cars.
Trains long predate the truck, and allow a single driver to drive hundreds of cars. But the major advantage of trucks is last-mile logistics - going from the depot where large volumes of cargo pass through to the specific place the cargo is needed. The number of truck drivers, and of future truck attendants, is proportional to the number of stops, not the amount of material being delivered. If anything, removing the bottleneck of requiring a person with a CDL to make a pickup or delivery will cause the number of truck attendants to be much larger than the current number of truck drivers (as already seen for example with Amazon delivery services, UPS trucks, etc).
I think we will see more attendants than truck drivers now, because without truck drivers, trucks are cheaper, and we will want more trucks. Probably smaller trucks too.
I don’t have strong opinions on the ratio of attendants to trucks. You may be correct.
What worries me is not so much the fear of a certain job becoming obsolete, but the fear of the alternative new jobs becoming inaccessible to those left behind by automation. You can have a good and stable career and do everything "right" and still end up a complete beginner a few years later because your skills are worthless now. Especially after a certain age, employers won't choose you over fresh graduates who are knowledgeable in the new tech. The standard advice is to "always keep learning" but not every job will give you the opportunity to do so. Someone's gotta do what has to be done, we can't all just learn new things all the time. Also I wonder how much we'll realistically be able to keep up because the pace of new change has been steadily increasing. We've seen AI breakthroughs over the course of months.
100% and this has ruined millions of lives throughout history, most notably in the Rust Belt. A heck of a lot of auto workers had their job automated away and weren't able to make the jump to white collar work or another trade profession and so fell into unemployment or much less lucrative service employment. And the country ignored the pain and despair of these folks because they were a concentrated group of people, outside of the Coastal bubble.
The people on this forum who go on and on about "we have gone through this before and society kept going, people were fine in the end" are half right. Society as a whole did keep going and people outside of the Rust Belt weren't directly affected.
But what is different this time is that this is going to annihilate 70-90% of jobs in the "knowledge sector" and it is going to do so very, very quickly. This will knock out most of us comfortable engineers, but also middle management, consultants, journalists, writers, artists, paralegals, influencers, wall street traders, maybe even teachers, lawyers, and doctors to an extent.
I don't know what the US will do with the middle/top of the income brackets all across the country suddenly facing mass unemployment and then the subsequent race to fill service or trade jobs. How is a software engineer who got a 30 year mortgage that costs $3k a month going to survive going from a $180k a year salary to being an electrician apprentice at $50k a year? And that is in an environment where this hypothetical former engineer was the top candidate out of 100 other former engineers vying for a spot. GPT-4 will kill many people via unemployment unless it is paired with a UBI, or at least that is my pessimistic view.
I agree. Automation is getting to the point where it isn't just replacing manual jobs but now it is going to replace most creative jobs.
And it isn't going to be a high tech utopia, because a small group at the top is going to capture 95% of the wealth generated.
I would predict serious social unrest. The problem is people won't understand why they don't have jobs, so they will blame x country or z group for their problems which will lead to extremism.
I would argue many of the major historical events in the US, such as civil war, great depression, WW2, great recession were actually connected to automation requiring a reset of society.
Who is this super-layman that can sit down in front of ChatGPT5, ask it to produce a highly technical document and then immediately implement it's recommendations?
The man is going to ask it for explanations for days, throw something together that kinda works and hire an expert 'consultant' that should have been an employee, when it inevitably breaks or requirements change.
Who would bet the legal success of their company on the 'truthiness' of ChatGPT?
The skilled knowledge workers just got upgraded to a better set of tools and the layman is as equally clueless as ever. C++ didn't get easier to read, we just got a robot teacher.
Yeah but the point isn't that all engineers will go away, but there will be a much lower need for them at scale. Who is going to have use for a bunch of junior/mid level engineers when the job becomes purely specification writing and verification? 1 senior engineer who also plays double duty as project manager will be able to replace a team that had been like 8 people before. We aren't going to all of a sudden have 8x more projects to work on, we are going to have 8x fewer engineers. And companies will LOVE this because it will become a rat race down to the bottom salary wise as people get desperate for any job at all
The loss of low-hanging fruit is likely, I agree. Same as most mature technological markets. Making an iPhone app today is a saturated proposition, compared to a decade ago.
But the paradigm that websites, iphone apps and windows programs are the breadwinners, can very well change.
If we're really getting on the 'gpt engineering revolution' bandwagon, then it must logically bring quantum computing, metaverse, more cybersecurity vulnerabilities, more sophisticated internet backbone and better computing hardware with it. (And fusion power and flying pigs, ect idealism).
A revolution for one, will bring a revolution for everything and that involves an awful lot of developer-hours, once we have changed the target market from "http-websites and apps" to the next market.
UBI can also go different ways. It's one thing when everybody gets an equal share of some reasonable proportion of what society as a whole has produced. It's quite another when the elites (= the people who own the automation) maintain UBI on the level just enough to prevent social unrest while still maximizing profits otherwise. The latter can still be a very shitty place to live in; for a sci-fi example of something like this, consider The Expanse.
> there are a LOT less traders than there used to be
That is the core of the problem, which has been iterated several times in this thread.
Where do those traders that used to be there go? Historically, switching careers or positions has not been insanely difficult. But as there are fewer and fewer jobs, it becomes more and more difficult for people to retrain.
Is there an “ought” argument that deals with the “left behind” concept?
Obviously there are tons of practical considerations to deal with, but in a theoretical, general sense, is “left behind” a problem? Shouldn’t lifelong learning be a thing everyone is indeed capable of?
When you have a large pool of qualified mid-life new learners available for hire while fresh graduates are scarce, why wouldn't employers hire them?
This is only an issue if either there are genuinely not enough jobs in the field lots of people are trying to go into, in which case people should not be encouraged to go into it; or if older people demand higher compensation for the same skillset as younger people based purely on age, in which case that doesn't seem fair anyways.
And realistically, a mid-life learner is generally the better option to begin with - it's nearly impossible that someone after years of working has picked up no transferrable hard or soft skills and made no network connections of any value.
You may think so, companies are notorious for rejecting middle aged applicants in favor of 20-somethings because the latter are considered more malleable and eager to prove themselves.
That's just a polite way of saying "willing to work for less" which again means either somebody's asking for too much or someone's being exploited, which is the real issue.
Obviously its mere anecdote, but every company I have ever worked for has gladly hired middle aged entry level employees. If anything they have been preferred.
In short, the job hunt is going to become even more unbearable. I don't trust companies with the kind of leverage they're going to have with AI at their fingertips.
So software engineer salaries will experience a race to the bottom because you'd have to be grateful to be hired as one. That's just the way it is, I guess, but I can't fault people for feeling bitter that the skills they've built over many years or decades will be massively devalued. I often wonder which profession is safe from others working as hard as they can to make it less valuable. Probably you'd have to get on the side of those building the automations. Become an AI/ML engineer or starve, basically.
This is an example of a practical concern that I'm not sure meshes with what we might presume is our shared philosophical underpinnings.
Why is the burden placed on the employer to grow their employee and not the human being to grow themselves? In a generic sense, it could be outside of the purview of the employer to consider the employee's future in that specific way (in other ways it makes more sense, like health and happiness while employed).
It seems oddly paternalistic, to me, and once you remove that moral presumption doesn't the conversation become more complex?
Since companies do need workers and working is mandatory in our society, it seems weird to expect people to always be ready (and able) to mold themselves into whatever a company wants at the snap of a finger just so they're "allowed" to work in the first place.
Ah but isn't "working is mandatory in our society" an "is" argument, not an "ought" argument? Ought jobs be mandatory in our society? That seems like a better question.
Even if we did presume that jobs should be required in society, how would it even work for a job creator to preemptively know what skills were needed with enough time to ensure at your current job you were trained for future jobs? Why would that fall to your current employer?
In an ideal world but this one isn’t and even if it were the purpose of life is living not keeping up with a endless rat race of employability in a world that doesn’t know when to slow down.
Leaving people behind is problematic because not everyone can keep up or has the time and means to do so. Should a single mother be expected to put in hours every week learning some crap on top of working and raising kids or can that person just breathe and deal with their other problems? Full time house parent that loses a spouse and has to start working. Someone in a low income house that can’t afford professional courses/books or even has access to a computer.
You ever see those commercials about kids that can’t focus on school because they’re hungry? Yeah it’s not just them. When people are deprived of life essentials or dealing with personal problems studying is the last thing on their minds.
Here we have people in tech burning themselves out and we want to export that mentality to everywhere else instead of seeing it as a problem.
There are certainly plenty of people with learning disabilities, etc. Yes, most of us will have to adapt throughout our life, but not everyone is as fortunate (possibly not the right word).
Do you believe I agree that you addressed “this” in your comment? Or would it be more likely that I implicitly categorized your comment as a practical argument, without really addressing the moral underpinnings in what you’re describing?
For example you place the burden of “learning new things” at the feet of the employer, but you don’t really justify that. Why, in a general sense, can people not learn on the remaining hours of the day?
Your comment is riddled with moral presumption and I think it’s worth figuring out what those are.
And you seem to think it's every human's moral obligation to not only spend the majority of their waking hours at work, but also their free time on making themselves more valuable to corporations. And that's not a moral presumption? Where does that leave time for anything else in life?
If you have the secret on how to work 40+ hours, stay healthy, on top of chores and social obligations, have at least a little time for your hobbies, get your 8 hours of sleep, and learn a new profession on the side, please do share. Most people are already fully booked with a fraction of these things.
New profession? My understanding was that we were discussing evolving our existing professional skills to stay relevant in the workforce.
But yeah, I think there are many books on spaced repetition and deliberate practice such that it's hardly a secret.
Besides, does everyone have a right to every single one of those things you've listed all the time? I wouldn't argue so, considering we're talking about people who are providing less value over time to their fellow human being.
When time conflicts exist, you must prioritize, and I would imagine "remain able to contribute meaningfully to society" (with caveats around capability) ends up being more important than, "maintain multiple hobbies".
And no, I don't think people are, generally, perfectly optimizing their time.
So people should not be allowed to sleep properly (8 hours), eat well, exercise, have time for loved ones, keep their area clean (chores), feed themselves properly (prep, cook, cleanup), attend to any other needs simply so that we don't have to inconvenience companies with the task of training up employees in their weak spots? You are either a troll, a young person, or have no family.
Can you imagine a world where all of those things don't take up literally every second of your non-work time?
If you did indeed live in such a world, would your opinion change? If people did indeed have ~30 minutes a few times a week to keep up with their field's growth (and that's all it took), would that matter to you?
I'm really really skeptical about the professional growth you can achieve during mostly unguided ~2 hours a week. Might be enough to read some articles, but not enough to build any marketable skills. ETA: I know very few people who find it enjoyable or sustainable to account for every single minute in their day, humans also need rest and downtime to continue to function.
> You can have a good and stable career and do everything "right" and still end up a complete beginner a few years later because your skills are worthless now.
Nothing about that is new. It has been a common fear and very real issue since the industrial revolution took hold.
If it has been that bad or worse before, I wonder why we're not learning from it then. Humanity as a whole will be fine but tons of individuals are going to have their lives ruined.
The majority of comments I read/hear about openAI are horrible takes. It makes me believe most of the people haven’t taken the time to evaluate the output of these LLMs.
Programmers aren’t going anywhere. ChatGPT doesn’t “understand” things. It optimizes its output for some set of scoring metrics. It sees from it’s training data that tokens score better (on average) in a particular order or that some tokens are associated with some sentiment. It doesn’t see english words.
With code generation the biggest benefit is generating code scaffolding. That’s nice and all, but certainly NOT where the heavy lifting happens during system development. The scaffolding it shits out usually needs to be heavily modified by a human. The amount of capital, compute, memory, and energy it requires is insanely inefficient for generating boilerplate code. Don’t even get me started on the privacy implications…
OpenAI will make programmers more productive by reducing time spent on trivial/mundane tasks. That’s awesome! However, it’s not going to replace the SWE industry.
If it doesn't "see English words", how it can correctly perform tasks such as this:
"Tell me about the structure of the solar system. I want you to only use English words of Germanic origin; avoid using words derived from Latin or Greek. If there's no alternative, make up a new word by calquing the original into Germanic roots."
Just to give an idea of the output GPT-4 can produce from this, here's a snippet:
"... beyond the worldrocks, rockbits, and icebits, the sunstead also has spacegrit, small bits of rock and metal that fly through space. When spacegrit enters Earth's air and burns up, it makes a lightstreak that we can see in the night sky. If a bit of spacegrit reaches Earth's ground, it is called a starstone ... "
Rockbits are asteroids (and it does consistently use this term, like all others, throughout the composition). Can you explain how this invented word, or even its individual components, would be "associated with some sentiment" in the training data that leads to this output, if the model doesn't actually understand, on some level, what it's asked to do?
> OpenAI will make programmers more productive by reducing time spent on trivial/mundane tasks.
It doesn't have to be perfect to replace developers. If every developer in a company becomes 5x more productive but you can only sell 3x harder, something might still have to give.
Even if GPT-4 doesn't quite cut it, what about GPT-5? What about the crazy, off-the-wall concept that comes out of some university and completely revolutionizes the whole thing again by 2024? Stanford is already demonstrating an inclination for disruption. There is an incredible amount of energy, attention and capital being poured into this space right now. If all acceleration forces were removed, I think we are still going to wind up somewhere crazy.
We certainly aren't ever going to go backwards in capabilities. It will only improve - even if just marginally. I've got GPT3.5 suggesting very high quality methods for my codebases. You could take 20% of the capability away right now and I'd still consider it a revolution in productivity.
> It makes me believe most of the people haven’t taken the time to evaluate the output of these LLMs.
Falling from a high place only temporarily provides comfort of weightlessness.
People seemingly like to fall prey to this particluar incarnation of over-generalization. For obvious reasons, as they simply don't know what to do about the impending demise of the established economic order.
Robots did take all the jobs. We live in a world without lamplighters and knockeruppers and scribes and pinsetters and elevator operators and switchboard operators and a whole host of other professions that we now consider comically unnecessary. Other professions like farming and steelmaking remain, but require many orders of magnitude less labor for the same amount of productivity. Still other jobs like textile and shoe production have basically disappeared from the developed world and are only still done by humans because of the extreme exploitative situations available in some developing countries. There are very few people today in professions that existed a century ago, and even these have seen the tasks they do and skills involved change dramatically in that time. Pretty much the only people doing things today directly comparable to how they were done a century ago are those doing it for artisanal or ceremonial reasons.
People will continue to do things for so long as people prefer receiving money to doing nothing, but people won't be doing what we're doing now for long.
Title is sarcastic to the idea that robots take jobs, while we have already automated the shit out of our production processes and any grownup has seen people lose their entire livelihood more than once.
Scoffing might be a better word. It's been ignorable by privileged people like us for a long time because the jobs being lost (and the people doing those jobs) were "unimportant".
I will indeed laugh when the lawyer market collapses shockingly soon.
Has the prediction been wrong all those years? 99% of work that used to be done is arguably being done by robots, we just be doin different things now instead. IMO it is a bit worrisome that our abilities get further and further from their natural roots. Ever notice how when you look around yourself you couldn't make damn near anything that you are looking at, not even your bare essentials?
One issue here is the resulting fragility of the economy. If crucial nodes of competence were to be wiped out by disaster, domino effects could have system-level implications as recovery might take too long.
On a more personal level, people more and more lack the competence to understand non-local connections of the world they live in. Resulting in them not being able to judge consequences and making according mistakes.
This is the Faustian bargain of technology: We advance collectively but each of us becomes a tiny cell in some giant organism we can't even perceive. Living entirely apart from that will someday be as impossible as a skin cell in your arm trying to strike out on its own.
Quite striking that this piece doesn't mention that the very term robot was coined just over 100 years ago, with Karel Capek's Rossums Universal Robots
An automobile replacing horses frees the mind for different tasks. Using a centralized AI provider who tracks every thought and idea is utterly dystopian.
A whole generation thinks it's normal that every thought is logged, stored, censored, sold and supervised by a third party.
1. Money encourages people to help each other by facilitating reciprocation: I do something for you and you pay me, someone else does something for me and I pay them, etc.
2. Private ownership fosters accountability: People maintain their own houses because it's theirs. See also tragedy of the commons.
If these purposes are not being served for a majority of people, they will reject capitalism. But the right regulatory environment can ensure that they are. In a distant future with extreme levels of automation, people will still need help from one another and people will still want to own their own things. We just have to make sure it's possible. Progressive tax schemes and UBI, possibly in the form of equity, could accomplish that.
"It is much easier to imagine someone losing their job to a new technology, than it is to imagine many people gaining jobs that haven’t been invented yet."
When I was in school in the pre-Internet era, I had one very insightful teacher comment that many of the jobs we may end up working in hadn't even been invented yet. Turned out to be true in my case.
Yes indeed. Ai will create more jobs in the end. We need to stay positive and do not be discouraged by negative aspects. Ai will take away some jobs short term, but we will have plenty of jobs again after we have killed off billions of people in WW3 and WW4. Don't worry guys. It's going to be fine. /sarcasmOver();
Everything that can be automated is being automated and will be automated even more. There is no fear. It’s economics 101. Businesses are not welfare programs, they are profit oriented.
>Businesses are not welfare programs, they are profit oriented.
So, we change that by requiring corporations that want to continue indemnifying their owners from damanges become workfare programs and less profit oriented. The current regime sure aint working, and I think it is fair to expect businesses that benefit from public infrastructure have some skin in the societal game as well.
i hope robots do take all the jobs. jobs today are terrible. they don't pay enough and you have to take orders from a class of managers that fancy themselves as feudal lords and you their serfs. so yea. good riddance to the "jobs". everything is made up in this system anyway, everyone knows it. just do crypto ubi and let the robots do all the drudge work.
Previous tech has replaced drudgery and allowed humans to focus on or move onto doing something else. Typically something requiring more creativity or intelligence.
What new things will humans do in the face of automated intelligence and creativity?
Things requiring less intelligence and creativity - since Bill Gates' reassurance was "but we'll still need carers" maybe we'll just watch ourselves die out for a few generations
Though ignore the 'upload nirvana' scenario, which is perhaps even more scary, given what we now know about big tech, capitalism, government control, etc. Yep, we really could give criminals 2000-year sentences to purgatory, if we uploaded them.
Population growth correlates heavily with technological growth in the sense that the higher the tech the lower the population growth.
Correlation does not equal causation but you cannot deny the possibility of causal connections here.
Generally the lower tech the area than the more children you have the better off you are economically. Mainly because children can function as manual labor. With much of manual labor replaced with automation, nowadays having more children is more of a burden.
Robots have not only been about to take our jobs. They have been taking our jobs. It's just it's so subtle it's hard to see it.
Probably worth calling out the two of the biggest observable negative effects of automation that have occurred over time:
1. We've decimated the bottom end of the skills market in developed countries. Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.
2. People who spend years or decades on a skillset see it devalued and their income drops. It is often difficult to get a "second shot" at a new career in your 40s and can be deeply disruptive to you and your family's lives. Growing up I watched this happen to the parents of several friends who'd made careers in things like printing that were obsoleted by digital revolution. None of those people achieved the monetary success they might have in an un-disrupted industry.
Number 1 is my big concern. I have a son that is on the autism spectrum. He graduated from high school with a modified diploma when he was 20 and they decided to just send him along. He has managed to get a job doing baggage at the airport, which is pretty the limit of his abilities. What if all similar jobs were automated?
The scariest thing of all is how the average citizen is in a certain sense not reaping the benefits of automation.
You would think that automating your job would make you free to work less. No, of course not, you end up either unemployed or working at least as much as you used to or more.
A lot of the comments here on this thread are already pessimistic in relation to the automation because people low key know that in the last decades almost all societal changes have come to the detriment of general population.
Automation economic benefits should've manifested as deflation. That's what you'd expect to happen: the costs of doing things are coming down, so should the price. But the prevailing economic theory is that "deflation is bad".
The Fed and the financial class have been printing money relentlessly and have been squeezing all the juice of the economic benefits of automation by taxing it with inflation. The zero rates of the last 20 years have not reflected price stability, they reflected moving goalposts and strong technological deflation (which should've benefited the common people) coupled to high monetary inflation which was only allowed because of the technological deflation.
When you look at where did most of the money gained from technological innovation went - where all the newly found wealth was spent - the answer is obviously houses. The landlord / banking class have been printing money relentlessly inflating a bubble of the assets they hold, and they could only afford to do it because they absorbed the rising economic power of technology. You slave away while they get to print money.
We have effectively two tiered society. For the common people, a dollar is a dollar. For the financial class, a dollar is actually ten dollars, held with leverage and then bailed out by the Fed when it blows up.
Western ideology is mostly about taxing the salaries. While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods. But then again xUSSR "did't work" and capitalism "worked". How it even possible to reap anything from the automation if tax base is people's salaries and VAT?
Presumably the model for sufficiently wealthy countries would be to effectively tax the corporations either based in those countries or that wanted to sell to people in those countries. You then redistribute a subset of that as UBI or some other form of payment for either the subset affected by unemployability or to everyone.
In addition to UBI if we effectively taxed corporations we could have massive job programs for workers that either do get automated out of a job or work in a job that becomes obsolete. Just because you specialized in one thing and that thing becomes obsolete when you turn age 40 does not mean you do not have all kinds of other skills that will make it easier to start anew.
USSR style communism was really an authoritarian dictatorship.
In capitalist west, capitalism was also about distribution of goods but literally being nice about it. Working together.
The language is meaningless gibberish. The tone and emotional spin, roleplay are what’s important.
In the US we’re enabling iron fisted oligarchs like the USSR once had. Those who refuse to share without extreme deference and idolatry, not because they’re that important to the well being of billions (they’re not) but because they’re important to the political actors that insulate them from taxation.
Nothing's so clear-cut as history lessons might have you believe.
The USSR et al had many more problems than most people in the west, at least of my generation, properly appreciate — the Holomodor and the irony of the Berlin Wall's official name (≈ anti-fascist protection barrier) being the most pertinent in my mind.
Conversely, while the USA was a symbol of hope and freedom in my childhood, that childhood was oblivious to the official segregation of the USA even in the 60s, let alone the unofficial segregation whose continued existence was the basis for the term "woke" prior to it being appropriated by all the political talking heads to mean everything and nothing.
The oligarchy in the USA today is not one I favour, but it is kinder than the… I was going to reference the events of the Homestead strike, but it turns out I must remember my own words, for that too is less clear-cut than I had heard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
But yeah, reality is a complicated mess.
My opinion is that laissez-faire capitalism is BS, that the Roosevelt New Deal marked an end to that era for the same reason that the equivalent living conditions ended Soviet-style communism; that other forms of communism and capitalism exist; that both over-simplify human nature and that a superior alternative to both can be designed with careful effort; that such a thing probably won't be taken seriously until the current system is utterly broken because of those with power in the current system; and that by default AI and robotics is a lot closer to communism than anything else because "from each according to ability" requires much less personal consideration when everyone has a dozen droid servitors at their disposal.
> While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods
Yeah, ask my grand grand father how great that worked. Oh sorry, you can’t, he was shot in the gulag in 1937 for anti revolution activities (and rehabilitated in 60s, saying it was a terrible mistake, that’s a relief, right?).
The failures of the USSR does not mean the US is succeeding. It is possible for more than one thing to be bad. Power/wealth imbalances are bad wherever they appear. The USSR no longer exists, but the US does, and its imbalance is growing worse rapidly.
I haven’t said US is succeeding. In fact I don’t like US either.
The USSR succumbed to the resource curse and an unstoppable arms race. In the 50s when they were still on somewhat friendly terms American newspapers were openly fretting that the Soviet economy was too efficient and growing too fast.
Its intrinsic economic woes were overplayed by western elites who were terrified of communist contagion.
Western ideology is about the primacy of property ownership. It's not economically efficient in the slightest but it's the only game in town these days.
Property tax and inheritance tax can both be thought of as wealth tax, and are quite common. More general wealth taxes. Many European countries currently have or used to have more general wealth taxes. Lots of Americans support a general wealth tax. See Bernie Sanders.
I fail to see how wealth tax (my car and home is my wealth I suppose) going to 'reap' the automation advances. Please elaborate.
I fail to see how your example of basic requirements for normal life is wealth. Tax second and third homes, places with eleven bedrooms when the owners live elsewhere. People who own the robots that replace workers. Are you just trolling? This seems like a bad faith comment of unimaginable ignorance.
People have been brainwashed into thinking that normal requirements for living somewhere are investments
Comment I was replying is about wealth, article and my original comment are about automation. Yet somehow you are now talking about 11 bedrooms somehow. Anyways...
"Manual" jobs, per the OpenAI whitepaper, seem to be the least susceptible to being automated. The robotics just isn't there yet. Blessings to your family.
Manual mid-range jobs were the first that were automated, due to the industrial revolution, and later during the robotics revolution.
They've been automated for so long and so thoroughly that you didn't even think of them as 'having been automated away'.
Look at any commercial kitchen, any farm, inside any factory. Look at the grocery store, and its self-checkout machines. Look at parking attendants and toll booths. Look at the labour-saving devices employed at any construction site. Look at the demise of cottage industries - which used to be the economic driver of productive output, and are now limited to kitschy crafts on Etsy. Look at the cargo-container shipping yard, where a hundred dock-workers are now do the work that used to take tens of thousands. Look at the answering machine, and the utter insanity that is the modern automated customer support directory.
What hasn't been automated are jobs like janitors - where the work that they do is highly varied, and requires manipulation of different tools, in different spaces. We can automate a floor-mopping machine, or a vaccum cleaner, but we can't (yet) build a robot that will vaccum, and water the plants, and scrub a toilet, and clean up vomit, and refill the paper towel dispenser, all in one package.
> grocery store, and its self-checkout machines
Which aren’t automation or even new technology. The stores just cleverly moved the work that must be done to unpaid laborers. The self-checkout machines are an inferior tool with an escape hatch (customer service is on the way) to the real tool which must be operated by an employee.
Surely the ability to easily type and search for items is new technology. Customers do not have to memorize the codes, they can look them up.
I find self checkout very beneficial, as I frequently have few items to purchase, and there are more self checkout registers available more consistently than there would be staff.
For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it takes me very little time to self checkout. For people with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of the many self checkouts.
> For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it takes me very little time to self checkout. For people with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of the many self checkouts.
Except if they have never used self checkout before. Or if they have 15 items in the store's cart but they haven't brought their shopping bags so they take 15 minutes to fill their arms and pockets and hats with their groceries.
Those people are eating time saved by self-checkout !
I tolerate the young ones who comes in pack of 6 individuals, especially if only one of them buy their unique can of coke. It makes the queue looks longer than it is and I am out sooner than the SUCKERS in the other queue.
HA ! (/s ? /s)
Sure, but in my experience, there are so many self checkout stalls that I never have to wait long.
The question seems to be, will those manual jobs be valued and economically rewarded, or will automation increasingly concentrate wealth into smaller and smaller groups while manual work will be low paying with low social mobility.
Depends on the supply of labor for those manual jobs. Jobs that require skill and/or have low quality of life at work such as requiring traveling/crawl spaces/outdoors/sewers/dangerous machinery/hazardous materials will probably pay well.
Manual jobs that are relatively safe, close to home, steady, and easy to learn will probably have a lot of people vying for them, hence lower pay.
As in "Manual jobs that weren't made obsolete in the previous automation revolution" I suppose ? Like construction machines and lavor-saving tools ? On the top of my head I am thinking hair dresser, nail care (I wouldn't risk going to hair dresser or barber robot shop).
Government can/does provide aid to those with disabilities that prevent them from being able to attain and keep regular employment.
In the U.S. I believe it's through Social Security.
So as more jobs are automated and the base level of ability required to get hired goes up so does the need to expand who qualifies for social programs.
Productivity will be increasing with automation so it's a matter of distributing resources more efficiently and fairly than it is about making sure there is labor for everyone to get a job.
Social Security in the U.S. is typically for retired people age ~65 or older. There are other social programs for low-income people, but they are abysmally insufficient for what we’re talking about. Usually disabled people are paid by “disability insurance” but you have to get a job first to even qualify for that. So that’s usually for injuries etc.
If you don’t live in the U.S. it’s hard to grasp just how hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family ffs, but we can’t even fix that. There is zero political will to provide robust social programs here, despite any evidence that shows it might improve society.
Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close to zero chance of the solutions you’re describing.
You too over-generalize when extrapolating past behavior linearly into the future.
Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly.
This presupposes one refrains from defeatist refusal to engage those problems of course.
How long have you been following politics and economics in a serious capacity?
> Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly.
We sure ought to, I agree with you there.
The minimum level of cognitive ability necessary for employment providing a reasonable degree of autonomy is bound to rise inexorably. So this concern will be shared by ever growing numbers.
The contemporary habit of envisioning people as some sort of disposable artifice is dehumanising at its core and just serves to rid those in lucky positions of superfluence from responsibility.
Society needs to learn to recognize interpersonal differences in terms other than self-serving judgemental dismissal.
Contrary point - technology enables people with disabilities to match or even exceed their peers?
Someone in a wheelchair 50 years ago could not do a lot of jobs vs now that's not even a factor in a software job.
Does that even matter when they still aren't being hired? Hiring statistics for those with disabilities are really horrible. We still hold biases about what makes one "productive" that stem from our very early hunter gatherer days, and these are still to this day negatively affecting the hiring potential of those with disabilities.
> What if all similar jobs were automated?
Hopefully, we would reach a Star Trek-like utopia where people aren't required to work in order to live.
More realistically, the middle class just disappears, and we have nothing but the super-rich and the destitute left.
The scariest thing is that they will eventually allow euthanasia for your child and others like him. Economically unpleasant people are not needed in capitalism. The governments are already starting to prepare laws on it .
I think it's scarier that you believe this.
Canada's MAID is well ahead of the curve on this. You can qualify just for saying you're depressed in some cases.
1. Utter nonsense, please scrub whomever told you this from your list of reliable sources.
2. Capitalists require consumers to actually buy shit, owning capital doesn't get you anything if you don't have proles to sell to.
Yeah, I think something that gets missed by the decriers of pessimism is that over time we really do seem to be throwing a new strata currently at the bottom of the workforce onto the scrapheap.
The "optimists" might not take notice because they've been in the layers that can keep playing musical chairs and adjust, and things might even seem good - especially when the pool of money available gets more concentrated.
What has been a slow gradual frog boiling process could very well accelerate with AI reaching this level though. I can't think of earlier developments being as widely applicable and moving as fast as this before.
I worry for my kids generation, and personally wish I was 10yrs closer to retirement.
More generally the number of jobs hasn't seemed to drop drastically during any of these waves of automation, but the number of people employed in certain fields has including some jobs disappearing entirely. That means automation doesn't present a problem for the economy overall, but it does present a problem for individuals who need to exist in the transitioning economy. The US in particular has done an awful job easing those individuals during the transition. The economy becoming more efficient is good. We should use some of the surplus value of increased efficiency to care for the people harmed by that transition.
> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.
Although I was completely unaware of this literature, I have spent the last few years essentially making the same point with regard to automation: you don't need a super-duper ASI to cause severe employment problems, all you need is something with an IQ of 85 that costs at most minimum wage to run (modulo robotics keeping up and being part of that price), and then 16% of the population are permanently and irreversibly no longer economically employable.
There are many things a robot with "IQ" 85 cannot do that a human with "the same" IQ can: childcare / elder care, social work, basically anything that requires garnering trust and a lot of social interaction, but not necessarily complex skills. There will probably be more jobs like this in the future. Even now, people pay extra for handmade items when the technology to mass-produce the same thing for cheaper has been around for decades, so even if a robot can do your job, that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.
> There are many things a robot with "IQ" 85 cannot do that a human with "the same" IQ can:
Only if you don't take IQ tests seriously — I think I've heard them dismissed as "only good at measuring your score on an IQ test".
If you do take them seriously, then by definition an AI which genuinely scores 85 (and isn't, say, just programmed to be good at that specific set of puzzles), then it must be able to do what a human of that IQ can do.
In this case I mean the latter, what with it being a thought experiment to demonstrate why we get problems well before having to ask if the AI can take over.
Practical issues like "a native speaker with IQ 85 is almost certainly more fluent than an IQ 160 polyglot on their 53rd, but for an AI they're all equal", or "we can easily hard-code in an algorithm for winning chess and another for doing calculus" likewise don't really matter.
> childcare / elder care, social work, basically anything that requires garnering trust and a lot of social interaction, but not necessarily complex skills
One of the problems right now with ChatGPT is that people trust it waaaay too much, and it's not really even trying.
> that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.
worthless != longer economically employable
The arts have significant social value, and I suspect may be to humans what tails are to peacocks; but at the same time, painters and novelists and musicians and actors and playwrights are infamous in their collective struggles to earn enough to get by on those careers alone.
> then it must be able to do what a human of that IQ can do.
Has anyone ever said this about any test? Are there any tests that are so general that anyone who does better on it is better at every single task than someone who does worse? Is such a test even possible?
That's pretty much exactly the claims that the strongest proponents of IQ tests are making.
I lack the skills to determine that, so I am limited to trusting the people who tell me the tests are "pretty good but not perfect".
Source? Who is claiming the having a high IQ makes you better at for example athletics?
To pre-empt you expanding that to things like running speed, I considered it too obvious to bother mentioning that I'm taking about mental tasks.
For that specific example, athletics, there does appear to be a correlation. It may be any or all of A->B, B->A, and C->(A, B), but "healthy body, healthy mind" is a meme that appears to have a similar age as the concept of writing.
Finally, as I have been specifying IQ 85 as the "huh interesting" threshold rather than "high" IQ, I'll ignore your goalpost shift and say that your citation is me right now saying: I reckon IQ improvements in at least this zone (say +/- 0.5σ) is causal for better outcomes with regard to [avoiding injury, pushing performance limits, maintaining training regimes, learning techniques], all of which improve overall performance.
Automation in theory SHOULD, in the process of destroying jobs, make many things cheaper so people are able to afford things that were previously out of reach, creating new jobs in those sectors.
Last I checked, no grocery store got price drops thanks to self-checkout.
In addition to the other comment, the cashier is almost none of the price.
Assuming £10/hour and a cashier that can scan an average of 20 items per minute (which is probably 20 items in 20 seconds and then waiting 40 more for the customer to dig out their wallet), that's 20*60 items per hour = 1200 items per hour = 120 items/£1.
I assume it's mainly useful for other reasons?
Due to stickiness prices almost never drop, but they can grow slower than inflation, which in the limit has the same effect.
This is why I put emphasis on the word "should".
It’s safe to talk about EQ in addition to IQ regarding some jobs then. It’s more and more going to be about EQ jobs where AI feels lacking now, emphasis on the now.
Another problem is, that minimum required IQ number keeps rising too.
A healthy society needs to have means to support people of all intelligence levels, we need the equivalent of jobs for ditch diggers, and those jobs need to be respected lines of work for people.
Work has more value than just money, and whether people like it or not, it gives value and meaning to peoples lives. The value we assign (and pay) for work shouldnt just be governed by the economic value it generates, it needs to be enough to meet basic needs, to engender respect.
The basic point I'll make here, using ditch digging is - have you dug a ditch? I have, its hard work, and mine was just a small one in my back yard.
Meanwhile, it's the knuckle-dragging cro mags who are having all the babies. I wonder how this ends.
Correlation!= causation.
Our default is "lots of babies"; women getting more education and economic liberty decrease that number. Poor places don't generally have significant educational budgets or opportunities for women, but as that specific set of things changes — education and freedom, not even always money — there is a corresponding change to number of births per woman.
It also means that rich couples in societies that lack women's lib still have more kids, even where you can infer high intellect without the convenient proxy of the women being allowed to go to university and giving you a test to score against.
In the short run, people can act against their own evolutionary fitness, but in the long run, evolutionary pressures should push those people to the wayside.
I've also seen two parents of below average intelligence make children who are of above average intelligence, and thats not even uncommon.
Well yeah in fact regression to the mean predicts that below average people will on average have children smarter than themselves while above average people will have children less smart than themselves (but still smarter than average).
That's not my point, my point is more that it's funny that people do things like going to college when this predictably causes them to have fewer children i.e. college actually hurts their evolutionary fitness.
I think if you're thinking about evolutionary fitness when having children, or deciding how many children to have, you should fundamentally reevaluate your moral and ideological system.
That line of thinking is the beginning or the road to eugenics, and it goes no place good.
Eugenics is about imposing a system on society where only a chosen group of people get to have offspring, not about your individual choices or your kids. Otherwise choosing a mate you're attracted to becomes paramount to eugenics.
Also, everyone is thinking about evolutionary fitness. Some people just do it explicitly (and others do it by instinct/intuition)
Do you also think women shouldn't be allowed to abort Down syndrome babies because "that's eugenics"?
Do you think that the state shouldn't be allowed to kill unwanted Down syndrome babies after they are born because "that's eugenics"?
What about Down syndrome adults, who are reliant on state benefits?
In case it's not clear, I don't support the killing of disabled people at any age, but I understand that different people approach these questions from a different set of assumptions.
My point is that adding scare quotes around "that's eugenics" doesn't stop it from being an accurate description, so your question is not the gotcha you might think it is.
I don't think the state should be in the business of killing anyone.
But a woman aborting a Downs baby is not the state killing anyone, and most pro choice people would say the woman isn't killing anyone either, since the fetus isn't a person in their view.
I understand that the market is mysterious and confusing, but it has always struck me as bizarre that our society is structured in such a way that automating a task away has ended up as a bad thing. The thing you were doing has been done, therefor society as a whole at least wouldn’t be harmed by just paying you (Your old salary - amortized yearly cost of the machine) to do nothing.
Paying someone to idle is certainly harmful to society if you could pay them the same to do something productive.
But it is strictly better than the pre-automation situation.
Maybe if you ignore the effects of competition. If you're paying someone you no longer need and your competitors (who have access to the same automation) aren't, they'll outcompete you.
This matters from the perspective of one specific competitor, but not from the perspective of society as a whole - the latter still has the same gross economic output and the same number of people to support it with. Therefore, the disconnect between the two is due to the way society is structured (i.e. who reaps the economic benefits and how), and not intrinsic.
> the latter still has the same gross economic output
Well no, if we still had the same gross economic output as 1000 years ago quality of living would be much lower.
The point of competition is that it drives up total economic output.
Of course it sucks for the people who get outcompeted. Certainly getting them productive again in another capacity is good for society. Letting them simply idle is not.
If we had the same gross economic output and the same population, quality of life would be the same, aside from environmental changes.
And on the time scales we're looking at here (millions of people losing jobs within a decade or so), population growth is not a relevant concern, and does not explain why people are worse off despite more automation. Not to mention that population growth is already negative in most societies most affected by automation.
I haven’t responded because int_19h seems to have perfectly understood what I was trying to say and made similar arguments to what I would have.
Just wanted to note that I didn’t propose a particular solution—you seem to have responded as if I’ve just said “we should have no automation,” which is not what I was proposing at all—it was just an observation about where things have ended up.
We could imagine lots of ways to not throw people to the wolves when their jobs were automated away, the idea of just continuing to pay them is sort of a lower bound (in the sense that obviously the economy could bear it, because it had just been bearing it, right before the automation was implemented).
I don't know to what degree automation was involved, but we also spent the last 60+ years socially devaluing jobs that don't require a college degree.
My grandfather is about as smart as I am, but he never went to college (nor did well over 90% of his cohort). Now about half the population goes to college, and more than a third graduate.
That's a massive transformation in two generations, and its exacerbated by the degree to which it segregates. I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend college.
> I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend college
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
It is completely wild to me how effectively society has self segregated to the point of just straight up never, not even once, interacting with the other group without even realizing it.
The college thing is a much bigger divide than politics for my friend group. My wife is about as blue-tribe as you can get. My best-man is pretty darn red tribe (and not Mitt Romney red-tribe, but "likely to vote for Trump in the next Republican primary" red-tribe).
They both have college degrees though. I have a few friends who dropped out of college, but none that never attended.
1. Is completely wrong. We have vastly grown the bottom end of the skills market by automating jobs to levels so simple that anyone can do it. They are bad jobs. But there are many of them. The problem is that we have people with normal IQs doing these jobs too, because there is not enough jobs above them.
People with these IQs under 85 are generally not employable in some of the lowest end jobs available: warehouseman, packer, or package delivery. I'm not sure what jobs you're imagining that are simpler than those, but I think I'm going to agree with the data on this point.
You think 15% of the population is too dumb to deliver packages? More than 1 in 10 people is not smart enough to pack things?
I think the framing here has to be very careful: I agree with the general psychometric data that ~15% of struggle to get or keep a job delivering packages or packing things. This is not the same as packing something or delivering a package. Jobs require a certain speed of execution, ability to adapt to changing conditions, low rate of mistake, and a maximum training time.
Remember, even the army during war time, which requires people fulfilling botho f these services won't hire people with such a low IQ.
Alright this one annoyed me enough to look it up.
First of all Peterson’s claim is 83, not 85.
Second, The military does not test IQ. It has a different test with a decent correlation. This test scores in percentiles however. And the bottom 10% are not allowed in. This is not the same thing as 10% of all people cannot get in, as those taking the military test are probably a lower IQ subset on average.
Probably not by much. I would guess the military is current cutting off the bottom 8-10% of the population.
I can’t find much in the way of hard stats but I still feel pretty strongly that a 10th percentile individual is more than well equipped to be a delivery driver of a warehouse worker or whatever.
You’re arguing in March of 2023 that the issue is a lack of jobs?
The ratio of skilled : unskilled jobs. As well as the general decline in what constitutes a skilled job.
I'd summarize their comment as "the issue is a lack of skilled jobs."
> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.
This is because we decide it's better to pay people to do nothing than to clean streets and medians and countless other things that need done.
And ironically by paying them just for existing, they are ending up as the only group capable of reproducing at higher than replacement rate.
We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves.
>We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves.
The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people.
I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.
Both "smart people have smart children" and 90% of this forum being smarter than their parents could be true if "being on this forum" was selected on intelligence.
I don't have the time to work through the math concretely, but intuitively, imagine that the intelligence of parents is normally distributed, and the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Set the cutoff for "participating on HN" to to some threshold. Given the right set of parameters, most of the "weight" in the aggregate child distribution above the threshold will come from the long tails of the child distributions of parents in the fat part of the parent distribution.
>the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence.
Again, this is the core fallacy of eugenics.
How many current US PhD's are the children/grandchildren of immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs (or maybe even went through extended periods of unemployment)?
EDIT: To be clear, I know Western culture has pushed a narrative that intelligence is an intrinsic thing that anyone can have, but in practice, it's a reflection of learned skills like reasoning and abstraction. That's the entire point of education, if you don't practice those skills (with some exceptions), you are likely worse at them.
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/how-much-does-...
immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs
Why are you conflating immigrants from underdeveloped countries with low intelligence? The parents could be have been (likely were) highly intelligent, just lacking the opportunity or access to education.
The current US PhD's that are the children/grandchildren of immigrants aren't a random selection, they are the product of smart motivated parents working the system (immigration system, education system, admissions system) for and with their children.
The core fallacy of Eugenics is not that intelligence is heritable, it is that you can avoid terrible moral hazards when you try to meddle in this stuff.
There are enough teachers and doctors from other countries working as post delivery drivers in Germany because their education isn’t being accepted in Germany.
Sure, by no means am I trying to make some argument that immigrants or manual laborers are worse or inferior. In fact the opposite!
I'm trying to say that regardless of who your parents are, your intelligence is primarily driven by your education (and your attitude towards education), with slight variance for genetic factors.
Therefore, we should not be anxious about "dumb people reproducing en masse" (as GP was).
We should be worried about educating everyone equally and fairly.
"Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults."
I don't think 50-80% heritability should be hand-waved away as "slight variance". I think what you're talking about is the manifestations of the intelligence (i.e. you can't be a rocket scientist if you never had the chance to learn about it), but not the intelligence itself.
We disagree on the predictive power of twin studies.
Also please cite actual studies rather than Wikipedia. You’ll capture more nuance.
We conclude that there is now strong evidence that virtually all individual psychological differences, when reliably measured, are moderately to substantially heritable
For example, citation 6 implies nearly every personality trait is inherited, which seems aggressive to me.
Citation 7 is a book about how the genetic links get stronger with age, which seems also odd to take at face value.
Citation 4 is a study of 3k white (they excluded non-white people intentionally) British people born in the 1920's titled "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic," but their results could be restated as 'distant members of the same family clan (in a society famous for inter-generational class structure) score similarly on aptitude tests, but we can't explain it with our data.'
Anyway, as great a source as Wikipedia can be, I wouldn't take its summaries at face value, the three above examples lead me to believe (like in a lot of social sciences) there's still a lot of work to be done to actually get to answers.
But, again, circling back to the problem here - even if 'smart' people lead to 'smart' children, society as it stands is awful at actually identifying and rewarding smart people (i.e. jobs aren't doled out via IQ tests).
> I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.
I hope not. I saw a pretty funny meme on Reddit today that went something like "50 years ago car manuals explained how to adjust the valves in your engine. Now they ask that you don't drink the battery fluid".
I think another big downside of so much technological progress is that people no longer need to understand, and get the benefit of learning, how things work. Yeah, it was a PITA that 35 years ago I had to muck with config.sys and autoexec.bat files, but it helped me have a better understanding of how things worked under the covers. There was some discussion on HN recently about how many Gen Z folks are woefully unprepared digitally for the workforce because they are so used to iPhones/iPads/apps, etc., that you don't know how thing actually work - like people not understanding what the file system is.
Sure, but that's an argument against abstraction/specialization that is also somewhat hard to really buy into.
How do you smelt bronze? How do you grow crops? How do you build a lean-to?
Knowing how to do all those things does give you a very intrinsic understanding of a lot of things, but it's probably not wise to force everyone to learn those things.
EDIT: Apparently you don't smelt bronze, you smelt pure metals out of ores. lol.
I saw that meme too, except the version I saw had the top comment included in the crop, which was something to the effect of "warnings are put on products in response to customer behavior, not as a preventative measure. somebody's parents tried to drink battery acid."
> The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people.
What makes you say that's a fallacy? Everything I've read has shown intelligence to be highly hereditable. I'm not saying we should make policy changes based on that, but the science behind intelligence being (at least partially) hereditable seems pretty conclusive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
So you get studies with very confident titles like this: Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic
Then you read the paper and you see:
A total of 3511 CAGES (2115 females) participants had DNA extracted...Individuals were excluded from this study based on unresolved gender discrepancy, relatedness, call rate (≤ 0.95), and evidence of non-Caucasian descent...
Analyses of individual SNPs and genes did not result in any replicable genome-wide significant association. A gene-based test for association27 showed one genome-wide significant association (P = 9.2 × 10−7), with formin-binding protein 1-like (FNBP1L) on gf (Supplementary Figure 7). This single genome-wide association result for FNBP1L did not replicate in the independent NCNG sample (P = 0.211, gene-based test)...
Despite the fact that no specific genetic variants have been robustly associated with human intelligence, apart perhaps for APOE at older ages34,35, our results show for the first time that a substantial proportion (approximately 40 to 50%) of variation in human intelligence is associated with common SNPs (Minor allele frequency (MAF) > 0.01) that are in LD with causal variants...
Only 1% (approximately) of the variance was explained in the prediction analysis due to the individual SNP effects being very small and therefore estimated with much error, which detracts to a great extent from the accuracy (8-11%) of the prediction equation30. Our finding that 40-50% of phenotypic variation is explained by all SNPs is fully consistent with the low precision of a predictor based upon a discovery sample of ~3,500 individuals; estimation of the SNPs’ effects is different from prediction accuracy.
So basically, what they did, was take a bunch of British people born in the 1920's (a time/place famous for its rigid inter-generational class history), and found that members of certain family trees (that's more or less what it means to be British and have similar SNP distributions) scored similarly on tests, despite the fact that there's no real model to express why.
That and twin studies (which also have their obvious limits) are about the extent of current "evidence" for inherited intellect. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but 'conclusive' is hardly how I would characterize the state of true evidence-based research.
> our results show for the first time that a substantial proportion (approximately 40 to 50%) of variation in human intelligence is associated with common SNPs
Seems to suggest that intelligence has a lot to do with genes. Why do you think that part supports your view that intelligence doesn't? Do you have any evidence that kids doesn't inherit any intelligence?
I'm saying that the test was of 3,000 white British people born in the 1920's (they specifically excluded non-white people) and what they found was that distant relatives scored similarly on tests (that's what it means to share common SNPs, given the context).
I'd be impressed if they saw the same thing across two populations where we know people aren't related, but I'd argue they just back-solved Britain's class structure.
One has to think critically in science.
>Do you have any evidence that kids doesn't inherit any intelligence
Well, if intelligence is inherited, then why are IQ tests going up over time (and therefore being recentered on 100 constantly)? Doesn't that imply learning is the driver?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-12794-032
Also the rate at which people with lower IQs reproduce isn't really alarmist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#:....
If you're interested in topic #1 here I highly recommend the book "Dignity" by Chris Arnade. It's not like this concept was literally new to me but the grace with which he talks about it and the specific stories he encounters made me see things in an entirely different light. x
No one talks about the lift attendants! «The person who operated the lifts (elevators) in old shopping houses or buildings was called an "elevator operator" or "lift attendant." Their primary responsibility was to manually control the elevator, ensuring that it stopped accurately at each floor and that passengers were transported safely. They would also assist passengers by opening and closing the elevator doors and providing information about the different floors or departments within the building.»
I think #1 is more attributable to the rising minimum wage. I read the other day that the one job that automation did successfully eliminate was the elevator operator, but I'm quite certain that - like the gas station attendant in states that don't mandate it - it fell victim to the rising minimum wage. It simply became illegal to pay people what these jobs are worth.
On the second point, it's a good warning to never rest on your laurels.
You're not owed that your profession stay relevant, and so you always have to keep an eye on trends, and if needed, adjust course.
>> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common
I think Jordan Peterson quoted the stats as people with IQ under 83 are completely unemployable i.e. even the army can't get a net positive out of them. I found that deeply concerning in several ways.
IMHO we need to work on reducing the cost of living so people can mostly opt-out without losing their home and dying. Instead it's always push harder, more growth, etc...
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It's interesting to see people who have been working as software engineers worrying that codegen LLMs will take their job. In the past week the amount of work that consisted of writing well-defined code was pretty much zero, and the actual core logic I have written lately has been almost mindlessly trivial. I spent much more time discussing requirements, arriving at consensus on where components should live, determining whether change requests should go forward, determining how changes affected latency or disk space, and debugging nuanced issues that required multiple engineers to slowly reveal the problem.
If your programming job consists of simply receiving a greenfield spec and banging out the code for it over and over, LLMs might be an issue. But most jobs are not like this. The bulk of the work, as always, is in dealing with the people at either end of the process. And knowing what the computer is doing and how it works will continue to be invaluable when an LLM writes logically perfect code that happens to run slowly or do the wrong thing once it makes contact with the real world.
This reminds me of a quote from Joel Spolsky in the early 2000's but he was talking about offshoring:
"There is always a global shortage of developers who know what they are doing"
At the time, I wasn't sure if this was the case but two things have helped me believe that this is true:
1. a few years ago there was a stat going around on HN that something like less than 5% of the US population could even write a Hello World application in ANY language
2. 15+ years of working in tech and 5+ years of being a hiring manager have shown me that even people with great looking resumes often fail the Fizz Buzz test
I suppose what people are afraid of is that the devs who can do Hello World + pass Fizz Buzz might use AI to orchestrate sophisticated systems which actually are effective in reducing a lot of menial work, which could eliminate a non-trivial number of jobs through sheer reduction of necessary labour/brain power.
I agree though, off-shoring could have been the cheap labour which displaced a lot of devs, but I actually found a lot of work cleaning up off-shored applications and made great money doing it. It's perfectly possible that some horrible amalgamations of software will be puked out by AIs for a few years and ultimately create as much work as it displaced.
At many of the FAANGs, it's not uncommon to spend 4 hours of testing for every one 1 of programming.
Considering how important it is to not have bugs - we're extremely unlikely to have an LLM writing code at an acceptable level of quality, and anyone being qualified to verify that quality beside an eng, before I'm retired.
But I'm confident many 22 year-old new grads will reply to tell me how wrong I am, and how I'll be starving to death under the burden of unemployment by next week.
How good are the LLMs at creating tests?
Hot take, but if you're doing a lot of soft skills work with non-developers, you might be carrying the team too much. You're very much right that those jobs won't go away because that would mean people around the developer would then have to do more work and be more technical.
What would be great is for senior ICs to push into non-IC roles (ideally: ICs can use AI, so you need less ICs but this is unproven). Technical skills and knowledge applied to writing requirements cuts down on the number of conversations around those requirements. Then you get closer to a "greenfield spec -> bang out AI-generated code" situation because you're not slogging and negotiating through requirements written by non-technical people.
> If your programming job consists of simply receiving a greenfield spec and banging out the code for it over and over, LLMs might be an issue.
I think LLMs are going to be very powerful for brownfield coding too.
In one of GPT4's release demos, it is shown being fed a photograph of a hand-drawn web page. It then image analyses that, works out that it's a picture of a web page and turns it into a working web page (https://youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=shares&t=972).
So here's the thing; what in that list of non-codegen tasks is more complicated than that which GPT can already automate?
> The rise of horseless carriages, mass production and other new forms of automation in the first two decades of the 20th century created anxieties about the future of work and employment.
I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.
Recording and mechanical reproduction did cause the social(!) and economic value of small-time talent in the arts to plummet from "pretty high, actually" to "basically zero". That never recovered.
To no small degree, the US has coped with the effects of automation with huge public spending on the military (a massive blue-collar jobs program, effectively) and a painfully-inefficient healthcare system (a massive white-collar jobs program). Both are post-war (as in, WWII) developments. I have a feeling our optimism about the effects of further automation on unemployment would be rather bleaker without the action of those two very-expensive systems in mitigating the effects of past automation.
[EDIT] Oh, you can add the effects of pushing a whole lot more people into college to the list of expensive things we do that mitigate the effects of automation on employment. Keeping millions more people out of the workforce for an extra four years or more is a pretty big deal. Also a post-war development (the GI Bill was what kicked off that trend)
> I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.
Exactly. The buggy drivers became tax drivers, the horses became glue.
The automobile was a great invention for the participants on the right side of that bell-curve, and absolutely horrible for the participants on the left side of the bell-curve.
There's no guarantee, universal law, or dogmatic hit-the-brakes switch which will ensure that (without a major economic adjustment) further technological development won't put an ever-growing fraction of people to the left of the 'useful enough to be employable for a living wage' side of the bellcurve.
> I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.
Don't forget farmers. Most americans were farmers in the early 1900s. Today it's about 1%.
Sure, jobs were eventually created for the unemployed farmers but "robots taking all the jobs" was a cataclysmic event in the early 1900s. You could argue it was the driving force for much of the 20th century. WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out". The excess population was also a reason for the anti-immigration movement that dominated the first half of the 1900s.
"Robots taking our jobs" isn't the end of the world. But it can be very painful.
> WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out".
No. Some actual reasons for WW1: Franco-German animosity, the famous web of alliances, advances in weapon technology and accompanying arms races, nationalism, and cold geopolitical calculus (Germany thought their power relative to the other Great Powers would decline in the future).
> WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out".
Source?
I actually wonder if the farmer metric is true ?
Get outta here robut!
A few years ago the NYT editorial board argued that inflation was going to be transitory because "it's not the 1970s." It was a smug, dismissive, and ultimately incorrect argument. Appealing to the past doesn't mean much because we don't live there.
This argument about automation is no different. We don't know what is going to happen because of AI. We don't even know where AI is going to go as a product/feature/whatever. It could totally make obsolete an entire class of lower-earning white collar workers whose main contribution is writing things. On the other hand, it could fizzle out and we could be comparing Bing Chat to Clippy a few years from now and laughing at all the investors who wasted their money on the next big thing after crypto.
Pointing to times in the past when people feared automation, and showing how those fears did not pan out, is not a good argument. Everything in history is contingent, everything could have gone a different way if a few people made different decisions at a few key times, and fear of automation may have motivated some of those people to make the decisions that prevented automation from destroying all the jobs.
To put it another way: If you play Russian Roulette with a six-shot revolver and you survive five rounds, should you be more or less likely to believe that you will survive the sixth round? People who look to the past and say "bad thing that was predicted did not happen then so it won't happen now" are guilty of thinking that if they survived five rounds then they will definitely survive the next one.
This logic is fundamentally faulty. Suppose, for example, that you're on "the front side" of a bell curve. As you go up the bell curve, until you near the peak, you can look behind you and think "Look at this, we've been going up for 100 years, and we're still going up!" But, if/when you do near the peak, it actually can turn quite drastically, and quickly.
The primary issue for me is the rate at which technological progress is moving is making it ever more difficult for humans to adjust. I mean, suppose that in 10 years we have fully capable self driving cars. I'm not necessarily saying that's going to happen (in fact I actually think it won't), but I do think it will happen at some point. Right now, truck driver is the most common job in that vast majority of US states. When self driving cars do eventually come, all of those jobs will disappear pretty quickly. Do you honestly think someone who has been driving a truck for 20 years will be able to "retrain" quickly?
And it's certainly not just truck drivers. Count me as one of the people who are astonished by ChatGPT's programming abilities. While I don't believe it's "there yet", I was pretty amazed that I was able to ask ChatGPT to program something for me, and it did quite well but the code had a subtle bug, and then when I pointed out the bug ChatGPT was able to fix it itself. And this wasn't even on the GPT-4 version. This stuff only gets better with time.
Progress on autonomous vehicles appears to have mostly stalled. And even if it can eventually be made to work on some roads, truck drivers do a lot more than just drive the truck.
There is no guarantee that the overall rate of technological progress will continue to increase. The opposite could well happen. Right now we are seeing the effects of multiple S-curves stacked on top of each other but progress is already slowing in many fields because the low-hanging fruit has been picked. For example, civil aviation has only eked out a few percentage points of improvement in efficiency and safety over the past couple decades; the latest airliners are actually slower than their predecessors. Or in medicine we seem to be running out of new small-molecule drugs to find and thus on average with all the failures it now takes more work than ever before to bring a new drug to market.
I expect there is lots of low hanging fruit to be picked from LLMs.
Imagine an LLM running locally on your car, refined to pick your lane based on the current traffic conditions and upcoming map data.
Many of the problems with self driving come for a lack of basic reasoning ability, an ability LLMs seem to emulate quite well. For example you can lay out driving scenarios to ChatGPT and get reasonable responses back.
It’s not as simple as running a Llama instance on your Tesla, but I expect language models will have had a big part to play when we finally get self driving to work.
Large language models are totally unsuitable to autonomous vehicles. No one is going to write code to describe a dynamic driving situation as static text which could be used as an LLM prompt.
Some of the underlying core technology could theoretically be used in that way by taking input from multiple videocameras and other sensors. But that approach is a dead end for consumer product development until someone solves the testing and explainability problem. Current limited AI systems are too unpredictable for safety critical applications. Just because AI software seems to work in testing doesn't mean you can have any confidence that it won't do something wildly dangerous in a novel real world situation. Vehicle manufacturers and their insurers will not take on the high potential liability even if autonomous systems are on average safer than human drivers.
Tesla uses a small language model for lane selection at intersections, they already shipped that to customers.
Natural language is useful for systems with discrete elements and complex rules, which seems like a good fit for parsing intersections, construction zones, things like that.
I also disagree that the explainability problem needs to be solved before self driving cars can be implemented. The effects of drugs are inherently non-deterministic, but the FDA still lets companies develop drugs and ship them to customers. You test self driving cars the same way we test drugs: by collecting data and calculating the probability of harm.
That’s not really what happens though. Truck drivers don’t disappear. They just become “truck driver attendants” who serve only to attend to occasional human requiring edge cases. They don’t require a commercial driver license and they pay minimum wage. And thus the lower class grows.
But do you really think we'll see the same number of truck driver attendants as truck drivers? Heck, one of the things that already exists is autonomous truck caravans, where one driver can "drive" a fleet, of say, 5-10 cars.
> one of the things that already exists is autonomous truck caravans, where one driver can "drive" a fleet, of say, 5-10 cars.
Trains long predate the truck, and allow a single driver to drive hundreds of cars. But the major advantage of trucks is last-mile logistics - going from the depot where large volumes of cargo pass through to the specific place the cargo is needed. The number of truck drivers, and of future truck attendants, is proportional to the number of stops, not the amount of material being delivered. If anything, removing the bottleneck of requiring a person with a CDL to make a pickup or delivery will cause the number of truck attendants to be much larger than the current number of truck drivers (as already seen for example with Amazon delivery services, UPS trucks, etc).
I think we will see more attendants than truck drivers now, because without truck drivers, trucks are cheaper, and we will want more trucks. Probably smaller trucks too.
I don’t have strong opinions on the ratio of attendants to trucks. You may be correct.
What worries me is not so much the fear of a certain job becoming obsolete, but the fear of the alternative new jobs becoming inaccessible to those left behind by automation. You can have a good and stable career and do everything "right" and still end up a complete beginner a few years later because your skills are worthless now. Especially after a certain age, employers won't choose you over fresh graduates who are knowledgeable in the new tech. The standard advice is to "always keep learning" but not every job will give you the opportunity to do so. Someone's gotta do what has to be done, we can't all just learn new things all the time. Also I wonder how much we'll realistically be able to keep up because the pace of new change has been steadily increasing. We've seen AI breakthroughs over the course of months.
100% and this has ruined millions of lives throughout history, most notably in the Rust Belt. A heck of a lot of auto workers had their job automated away and weren't able to make the jump to white collar work or another trade profession and so fell into unemployment or much less lucrative service employment. And the country ignored the pain and despair of these folks because they were a concentrated group of people, outside of the Coastal bubble.
The people on this forum who go on and on about "we have gone through this before and society kept going, people were fine in the end" are half right. Society as a whole did keep going and people outside of the Rust Belt weren't directly affected.
But what is different this time is that this is going to annihilate 70-90% of jobs in the "knowledge sector" and it is going to do so very, very quickly. This will knock out most of us comfortable engineers, but also middle management, consultants, journalists, writers, artists, paralegals, influencers, wall street traders, maybe even teachers, lawyers, and doctors to an extent.
I don't know what the US will do with the middle/top of the income brackets all across the country suddenly facing mass unemployment and then the subsequent race to fill service or trade jobs. How is a software engineer who got a 30 year mortgage that costs $3k a month going to survive going from a $180k a year salary to being an electrician apprentice at $50k a year? And that is in an environment where this hypothetical former engineer was the top candidate out of 100 other former engineers vying for a spot. GPT-4 will kill many people via unemployment unless it is paired with a UBI, or at least that is my pessimistic view.
I agree. Automation is getting to the point where it isn't just replacing manual jobs but now it is going to replace most creative jobs.
And it isn't going to be a high tech utopia, because a small group at the top is going to capture 95% of the wealth generated.
I would predict serious social unrest. The problem is people won't understand why they don't have jobs, so they will blame x country or z group for their problems which will lead to extremism.
I would argue many of the major historical events in the US, such as civil war, great depression, WW2, great recession were actually connected to automation requiring a reset of society.
>> A heck of a lot of auto workers had their job automated away
And a lot of the remaining jobs went to Mexico.
I believe that most of the rust belt jobs were sent to countries with lower wages/more lax environmental laws.
Who is this super-layman that can sit down in front of ChatGPT5, ask it to produce a highly technical document and then immediately implement it's recommendations?
The man is going to ask it for explanations for days, throw something together that kinda works and hire an expert 'consultant' that should have been an employee, when it inevitably breaks or requirements change.
Who would bet the legal success of their company on the 'truthiness' of ChatGPT?
The skilled knowledge workers just got upgraded to a better set of tools and the layman is as equally clueless as ever. C++ didn't get easier to read, we just got a robot teacher.
Yeah but the point isn't that all engineers will go away, but there will be a much lower need for them at scale. Who is going to have use for a bunch of junior/mid level engineers when the job becomes purely specification writing and verification? 1 senior engineer who also plays double duty as project manager will be able to replace a team that had been like 8 people before. We aren't going to all of a sudden have 8x more projects to work on, we are going to have 8x fewer engineers. And companies will LOVE this because it will become a rat race down to the bottom salary wise as people get desperate for any job at all
The loss of low-hanging fruit is likely, I agree. Same as most mature technological markets. Making an iPhone app today is a saturated proposition, compared to a decade ago.
But the paradigm that websites, iphone apps and windows programs are the breadwinners, can very well change.
If we're really getting on the 'gpt engineering revolution' bandwagon, then it must logically bring quantum computing, metaverse, more cybersecurity vulnerabilities, more sophisticated internet backbone and better computing hardware with it. (And fusion power and flying pigs, ect idealism).
A revolution for one, will bring a revolution for everything and that involves an awful lot of developer-hours, once we have changed the target market from "http-websites and apps" to the next market.
UBI can also go different ways. It's one thing when everybody gets an equal share of some reasonable proportion of what society as a whole has produced. It's quite another when the elites (= the people who own the automation) maintain UBI on the level just enough to prevent social unrest while still maximizing profits otherwise. The latter can still be a very shitty place to live in; for a sci-fi example of something like this, consider The Expanse.
> wall street traders
When I started working in FinTech at a big bank, our Managing Director mentioned that he was told:
"In 2 years, there will no longer be the job of 'trader'"
This quote was from 2005 and he was sharing it with us in 2007.
While, yes, there are a LOT less traders than there used to be, it is certainly not zero.
> there are a LOT less traders than there used to be
That is the core of the problem, which has been iterated several times in this thread.
Where do those traders that used to be there go? Historically, switching careers or positions has not been insanely difficult. But as there are fewer and fewer jobs, it becomes more and more difficult for people to retrain.
Is there an “ought” argument that deals with the “left behind” concept?
Obviously there are tons of practical considerations to deal with, but in a theoretical, general sense, is “left behind” a problem? Shouldn’t lifelong learning be a thing everyone is indeed capable of?
The challenge is not people's inability to learn new skills but employers unwillingness to accept the risk of hiring mid-life new-learners.
When you have a large pool of qualified mid-life new learners available for hire while fresh graduates are scarce, why wouldn't employers hire them?
This is only an issue if either there are genuinely not enough jobs in the field lots of people are trying to go into, in which case people should not be encouraged to go into it; or if older people demand higher compensation for the same skillset as younger people based purely on age, in which case that doesn't seem fair anyways.
And realistically, a mid-life learner is generally the better option to begin with - it's nearly impossible that someone after years of working has picked up no transferrable hard or soft skills and made no network connections of any value.
You may think so, companies are notorious for rejecting middle aged applicants in favor of 20-somethings because the latter are considered more malleable and eager to prove themselves.
> more malleable and eager to prove themselves.
That's just a polite way of saying "willing to work for less" which again means either somebody's asking for too much or someone's being exploited, which is the real issue.
Obviously its mere anecdote, but every company I have ever worked for has gladly hired middle aged entry level employees. If anything they have been preferred.
In short, the job hunt is going to become even more unbearable. I don't trust companies with the kind of leverage they're going to have with AI at their fingertips.
So software engineer salaries will experience a race to the bottom because you'd have to be grateful to be hired as one. That's just the way it is, I guess, but I can't fault people for feeling bitter that the skills they've built over many years or decades will be massively devalued. I often wonder which profession is safe from others working as hard as they can to make it less valuable. Probably you'd have to get on the side of those building the automations. Become an AI/ML engineer or starve, basically.
This is an example of a practical concern that I'm not sure meshes with what we might presume is our shared philosophical underpinnings.
Why is the burden placed on the employer to grow their employee and not the human being to grow themselves? In a generic sense, it could be outside of the purview of the employer to consider the employee's future in that specific way (in other ways it makes more sense, like health and happiness while employed).
It seems oddly paternalistic, to me, and once you remove that moral presumption doesn't the conversation become more complex?
Since companies do need workers and working is mandatory in our society, it seems weird to expect people to always be ready (and able) to mold themselves into whatever a company wants at the snap of a finger just so they're "allowed" to work in the first place.
Ah but isn't "working is mandatory in our society" an "is" argument, not an "ought" argument? Ought jobs be mandatory in our society? That seems like a better question.
Even if we did presume that jobs should be required in society, how would it even work for a job creator to preemptively know what skills were needed with enough time to ensure at your current job you were trained for future jobs? Why would that fall to your current employer?
How is the individual going to know what to learn in advance? If anyone knows the requirements of companies, it's the companies themselves, no?
Well what are companies, if not collections of individuals? Nobody has a crystal ball, nobody can know what'll be needed next.
In an ideal world but this one isn’t and even if it were the purpose of life is living not keeping up with a endless rat race of employability in a world that doesn’t know when to slow down.
Leaving people behind is problematic because not everyone can keep up or has the time and means to do so. Should a single mother be expected to put in hours every week learning some crap on top of working and raising kids or can that person just breathe and deal with their other problems? Full time house parent that loses a spouse and has to start working. Someone in a low income house that can’t afford professional courses/books or even has access to a computer.
You ever see those commercials about kids that can’t focus on school because they’re hungry? Yeah it’s not just them. When people are deprived of life essentials or dealing with personal problems studying is the last thing on their minds.
Here we have people in tech burning themselves out and we want to export that mentality to everywhere else instead of seeing it as a problem.
I saw an interview with Ray Kurzweil recently who is a huge driver and influencer of a lot of these changes towards AI everything.
Ray is a trans humanist who believes we’re on the cusp of eternal life via the singularity.
One of the things he is relying on is that people will keep up with technology through computer brain interfaces like Neural Link but faster.
We should be seeing this come to market sometime around now.
It’s not here so I guess that’s not good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykY69lSpDdo
Worth a watch…
> Ray is a trans humanist who believes we’re on the cusp of eternal life via the singularity.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968#comi...
Yes, we "ought" not let people starve, go without heating, or become homeless because their skills were obsoleted by automation.
We "ought" to share the rewards and efficiencies of automation with the people that it displaces, rather than solely with the owners of capital.
There are certainly plenty of people with learning disabilities, etc. Yes, most of us will have to adapt throughout our life, but not everyone is as fortunate (possibly not the right word).
> The standard advice is to "always keep learning" but not every job will give you the opportunity to do so.
Uncertain. How old are you to be so knowledgable about the challenges of learning when 40, 50, 60, 70 or beyond?
I literally addressed this in my comment.
Do you believe I agree that you addressed “this” in your comment? Or would it be more likely that I implicitly categorized your comment as a practical argument, without really addressing the moral underpinnings in what you’re describing?
For example you place the burden of “learning new things” at the feet of the employer, but you don’t really justify that. Why, in a general sense, can people not learn on the remaining hours of the day?
Your comment is riddled with moral presumption and I think it’s worth figuring out what those are.
And you seem to think it's every human's moral obligation to not only spend the majority of their waking hours at work, but also their free time on making themselves more valuable to corporations. And that's not a moral presumption? Where does that leave time for anything else in life?
Why would learning something new take up all of one's free time?
If you have the secret on how to work 40+ hours, stay healthy, on top of chores and social obligations, have at least a little time for your hobbies, get your 8 hours of sleep, and learn a new profession on the side, please do share. Most people are already fully booked with a fraction of these things.
New profession? My understanding was that we were discussing evolving our existing professional skills to stay relevant in the workforce.
But yeah, I think there are many books on spaced repetition and deliberate practice such that it's hardly a secret.
Besides, does everyone have a right to every single one of those things you've listed all the time? I wouldn't argue so, considering we're talking about people who are providing less value over time to their fellow human being.
When time conflicts exist, you must prioritize, and I would imagine "remain able to contribute meaningfully to society" (with caveats around capability) ends up being more important than, "maintain multiple hobbies".
And no, I don't think people are, generally, perfectly optimizing their time.
So people should not be allowed to sleep properly (8 hours), eat well, exercise, have time for loved ones, keep their area clean (chores), feed themselves properly (prep, cook, cleanup), attend to any other needs simply so that we don't have to inconvenience companies with the task of training up employees in their weak spots? You are either a troll, a young person, or have no family.
Can you imagine a world where all of those things don't take up literally every second of your non-work time?
If you did indeed live in such a world, would your opinion change? If people did indeed have ~30 minutes a few times a week to keep up with their field's growth (and that's all it took), would that matter to you?
Trying to find the theoretical line for you.
I'm really really skeptical about the professional growth you can achieve during mostly unguided ~2 hours a week. Might be enough to read some articles, but not enough to build any marketable skills. ETA: I know very few people who find it enjoyable or sustainable to account for every single minute in their day, humans also need rest and downtime to continue to function.
Why unguided? And why does learning require losing rest and downtime or having to "account for every single minute" of your day?
I'm not sure where you're getting those things, these aren't "either/or" suggestions, but "both/and".
> You can have a good and stable career and do everything "right" and still end up a complete beginner a few years later because your skills are worthless now.
Nothing about that is new. It has been a common fear and very real issue since the industrial revolution took hold.
Just that it's happening faster and more ruthlessly than ever before.
Is it? I’d say a lot of stuff around a century or two ago was far worse than what we’re going through.
It's more ruthless than the industrial revolution? Are you surfing HN from a workhouse?
If it has been that bad or worse before, I wonder why we're not learning from it then. Humanity as a whole will be fine but tons of individuals are going to have their lives ruined.
The majority of comments I read/hear about openAI are horrible takes. It makes me believe most of the people haven’t taken the time to evaluate the output of these LLMs.
Programmers aren’t going anywhere. ChatGPT doesn’t “understand” things. It optimizes its output for some set of scoring metrics. It sees from it’s training data that tokens score better (on average) in a particular order or that some tokens are associated with some sentiment. It doesn’t see english words.
With code generation the biggest benefit is generating code scaffolding. That’s nice and all, but certainly NOT where the heavy lifting happens during system development. The scaffolding it shits out usually needs to be heavily modified by a human. The amount of capital, compute, memory, and energy it requires is insanely inefficient for generating boilerplate code. Don’t even get me started on the privacy implications…
OpenAI will make programmers more productive by reducing time spent on trivial/mundane tasks. That’s awesome! However, it’s not going to replace the SWE industry.
If it doesn't "see English words", how it can correctly perform tasks such as this:
"Tell me about the structure of the solar system. I want you to only use English words of Germanic origin; avoid using words derived from Latin or Greek. If there's no alternative, make up a new word by calquing the original into Germanic roots."
Just to give an idea of the output GPT-4 can produce from this, here's a snippet:
"... beyond the worldrocks, rockbits, and icebits, the sunstead also has spacegrit, small bits of rock and metal that fly through space. When spacegrit enters Earth's air and burns up, it makes a lightstreak that we can see in the night sky. If a bit of spacegrit reaches Earth's ground, it is called a starstone ... "
Rockbits are asteroids (and it does consistently use this term, like all others, throughout the composition). Can you explain how this invented word, or even its individual components, would be "associated with some sentiment" in the training data that leads to this output, if the model doesn't actually understand, on some level, what it's asked to do?
> OpenAI will make programmers more productive by reducing time spent on trivial/mundane tasks.
It doesn't have to be perfect to replace developers. If every developer in a company becomes 5x more productive but you can only sell 3x harder, something might still have to give.
Even if GPT-4 doesn't quite cut it, what about GPT-5? What about the crazy, off-the-wall concept that comes out of some university and completely revolutionizes the whole thing again by 2024? Stanford is already demonstrating an inclination for disruption. There is an incredible amount of energy, attention and capital being poured into this space right now. If all acceleration forces were removed, I think we are still going to wind up somewhere crazy.
We certainly aren't ever going to go backwards in capabilities. It will only improve - even if just marginally. I've got GPT3.5 suggesting very high quality methods for my codebases. You could take 20% of the capability away right now and I'd still consider it a revolution in productivity.
> It makes me believe most of the people haven’t taken the time to evaluate the output of these LLMs.
How much experience have you had with GPT3.5/4?
Falling from a high place only temporarily provides comfort of weightlessness.
People seemingly like to fall prey to this particluar incarnation of over-generalization. For obvious reasons, as they simply don't know what to do about the impending demise of the established economic order.
Where are the essays proposing solutions?
Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore John Kazycnski
Robots did take all the jobs. We live in a world without lamplighters and knockeruppers and scribes and pinsetters and elevator operators and switchboard operators and a whole host of other professions that we now consider comically unnecessary. Other professions like farming and steelmaking remain, but require many orders of magnitude less labor for the same amount of productivity. Still other jobs like textile and shoe production have basically disappeared from the developed world and are only still done by humans because of the extreme exploitative situations available in some developing countries. There are very few people today in professions that existed a century ago, and even these have seen the tasks they do and skills involved change dramatically in that time. Pretty much the only people doing things today directly comparable to how they were done a century ago are those doing it for artisanal or ceremonial reasons.
People will continue to do things for so long as people prefer receiving money to doing nothing, but people won't be doing what we're doing now for long.
Title is sarcastic to the idea that robots take jobs, while we have already automated the shit out of our production processes and any grownup has seen people lose their entire livelihood more than once.
See who's still laughing in a couple more years.
Was anyone ever laughing though? This isn't comeuppance. This is the other half of the Titanic sinking.
Scoffing might be a better word. It's been ignorable by privileged people like us for a long time because the jobs being lost (and the people doing those jobs) were "unimportant".
I will indeed laugh when the lawyer market collapses shockingly soon.
Has the prediction been wrong all those years? 99% of work that used to be done is arguably being done by robots, we just be doin different things now instead. IMO it is a bit worrisome that our abilities get further and further from their natural roots. Ever notice how when you look around yourself you couldn't make damn near anything that you are looking at, not even your bare essentials?
This is indeed a vastly underappreciated point.
One issue here is the resulting fragility of the economy. If crucial nodes of competence were to be wiped out by disaster, domino effects could have system-level implications as recovery might take too long.
On a more personal level, people more and more lack the competence to understand non-local connections of the world they live in. Resulting in them not being able to judge consequences and making according mistakes.
Related video illustrating your last point using the example of a pencil: https://youtu.be/IYO3tOqDISE
This is the Faustian bargain of technology: We advance collectively but each of us becomes a tiny cell in some giant organism we can't even perceive. Living entirely apart from that will someday be as impossible as a skin cell in your arm trying to strike out on its own.
Quite striking that this piece doesn't mention that the very term robot was coined just over 100 years ago, with Karel Capek's Rossums Universal Robots
An automobile replacing horses frees the mind for different tasks. Using a centralized AI provider who tracks every thought and idea is utterly dystopian.
A whole generation thinks it's normal that every thought is logged, stored, censored, sold and supervised by a third party.
Get out pencil and paper!
1930:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...
Functional capitalism serves 2 main purposes:
1. Money encourages people to help each other by facilitating reciprocation: I do something for you and you pay me, someone else does something for me and I pay them, etc.
2. Private ownership fosters accountability: People maintain their own houses because it's theirs. See also tragedy of the commons.
If these purposes are not being served for a majority of people, they will reject capitalism. But the right regulatory environment can ensure that they are. In a distant future with extreme levels of automation, people will still need help from one another and people will still want to own their own things. We just have to make sure it's possible. Progressive tax schemes and UBI, possibly in the form of equity, could accomplish that.
It's just like any project that's "just about to finish". It'll probably happen, just on a much longer timeline than anticipated.
The end of the article rings true for me:
"It is much easier to imagine someone losing their job to a new technology, than it is to imagine many people gaining jobs that haven’t been invented yet."
When I was in school in the pre-Internet era, I had one very insightful teacher comment that many of the jobs we may end up working in hadn't even been invented yet. Turned out to be true in my case.
Yes indeed. Ai will create more jobs in the end. We need to stay positive and do not be discouraged by negative aspects. Ai will take away some jobs short term, but we will have plenty of jobs again after we have killed off billions of people in WW3 and WW4. Don't worry guys. It's going to be fine. /sarcasmOver();
Everything that can be automated is being automated and will be automated even more. There is no fear. It’s economics 101. Businesses are not welfare programs, they are profit oriented.
>Businesses are not welfare programs, they are profit oriented.
So, we change that by requiring corporations that want to continue indemnifying their owners from damanges become workfare programs and less profit oriented. The current regime sure aint working, and I think it is fair to expect businesses that benefit from public infrastructure have some skin in the societal game as well.
I don't have much to add except for the depiction of robots in these articles being EXTREMELY on point.
I love the huge robot in the shadows that just says AUTOMATION across its chest.
I would imagine there would still be more painful job losses from plain ordinary financial mismanagement than there would be due to robots.
They haven taken our jobs. But they have made the buying power of workers lesser by time. Try buying a house today with an avarage sallary.
i hope robots do take all the jobs. jobs today are terrible. they don't pay enough and you have to take orders from a class of managers that fancy themselves as feudal lords and you their serfs. so yea. good riddance to the "jobs". everything is made up in this system anyway, everyone knows it. just do crypto ubi and let the robots do all the drudge work.
Doing the same tasks as humans is one thing, reverse engineering an understanding of human bureaucracy is something else entirely.
Previous tech has replaced drudgery and allowed humans to focus on or move onto doing something else. Typically something requiring more creativity or intelligence.
What new things will humans do in the face of automated intelligence and creativity?
Things requiring less intelligence and creativity - since Bill Gates' reassurance was "but we'll still need carers" maybe we'll just watch ourselves die out for a few generations
The burger-G scenario, then: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
Though ignore the 'upload nirvana' scenario, which is perhaps even more scary, given what we now know about big tech, capitalism, government control, etc. Yep, we really could give criminals 2000-year sentences to purgatory, if we uploaded them.
With that attitude, we'll never get rids of humans!
Thats why I don't believe in AIpocalypse.
This time it's different!
Because the population is so large and the planet so far into ecological overshoot that there won't be any jobs to take... in 100 years? :)
Population growth correlates heavily with technological growth in the sense that the higher the tech the lower the population growth.
Correlation does not equal causation but you cannot deny the possibility of causal connections here.
Generally the lower tech the area than the more children you have the better off you are economically. Mainly because children can function as manual labor. With much of manual labor replaced with automation, nowadays having more children is more of a burden.
Robots have not only been about to take our jobs. They have been taking our jobs. It's just it's so subtle it's hard to see it.
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