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It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increas

by air7 2y ago

It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable. The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing. [o] What's the proper social response to that, I don't know. [o] If and when AGI comes along, that will be all of us.

exitb 2y ago
Jobs are a byproduct of capital owners needing labor to sell things and services with a profit margin, so they can buy the good stuff. I’d argue that once the capital owners possess the technology that brings the cost of labor near zero, they will have no need for an economy at all, not to mention other people - unless it’s something more akin to a zoo.
- acestus5 2y ago
  This reminds me of the Chinese white monkey jobs.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > once the capital owners possess the technology that brings the cost of labor near zero Most Americans are capital owners. You’re describing a world in which most Americans live in a utopia.
  - dhosek 2y ago
    A quick google says that 53% of Americans own publicly traded stock, but that means that 47% do not. There will be some fraction of that 47% who have their own businesses, but I’m guessing that these would be people at the bottom end of the business scale. Would it really be fair to call the guys driving a truck through the alleys collecting crap metal capital owners who would live in a utopia? The same article that cites the 53% number also says that the top 10% of income earners own 70% of the stock market. That doesn’t really sound like a recipe for utopia.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > 53% of Americans own publicly traded stock, but that means that 47% do not Does that include 401(k)s and pensions?
      - dhosek 2y ago
        Yes. 401(k)s but not pensions. The latter are defined benefit programs where participants are not responsible for making investment decisions.
      - foolofat00k 2y ago
        Very probably, yes. I'd be shocked if more than 60% of Americans even have a 401k/pension, let alone one with any meaningful sum invested.
    - jkhanlar 2y ago
      https://youtu.be/FID0BLkZXuY?t=2058s https://youtu.be/FID0BLkZXuY?t=2058s > 34:24 "Markets are efficient because of active managers setting the prices of securities, firms like Citadel, firms like Fidel.....lity (Fidelity) [...] trying to drive the value of companies towards where we think they should be valued." - Kenneth Cordelle Griffin, Citadel Securities, November 2023 I thought Amazon was a public company, not private, and since supply and demand is dead and real price discovery is gone, that unless it becomes a private company it likely will not survive, unless there are enough retail investors to DRS directly register shares in their name so that DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) and Cede & Co do not hold all the assets for retail in street name to then bankrupt and collect all the assets leaving retail investors holding worthless securities, but I don't see that Amazon is private? Maybe I missed something that happened and it's a private company now?
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > thought Amazon was a public company, not private Parks, libraries and military bases are publicly owned. Amazon is a private company whose shares are publicly traded. > since supply and demand is dead This is wrong. > so that DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) and Cede & Co do not hold all the assets for retail in street name to then bankrupt and collect all the assets This is nonsense. (For starters, not how bankruptcy works.) > Maybe I missed something Mankiw’s Principles of Economics is a well-regarded introductory text [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Mankiw_book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Man...
- gnz11 2y ago
  > they will have no need for an economy at all Who is going to buy all of their crap then?
  - rcstank 2y ago
    They won’t be selling anything by that point.
  - jkhanlar 2y ago
    I noticed NVIDIA skyrocket from billions to trillions market cap, so wouldn't NVIDIA be able to help deploy some a.i. simulatedly autonomous homo borg genesis to engage in scripted automated consumer lives to replace traditional homosapiens/humans consumers and takeover what otherwise was economy and market for human people but now they are replaced by redefining human and people to be displaced by the automated scripted a.i. controlled ones? This is already happening, right? Or did I just give them idea to make this a reality? lol, wait, why am I getting raided by the FBI right now? What's going on? HALP!
quaintdev 2y ago
It's time we take on bigger and harder problems to solve. Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company is working on that. We need multiple such companies tackling bigger problems. Solving climate change, dealing with plastic are other bigger problems. I beleive there's no shortage of jobs. What if we start cleaning earth or reverse effects of human civilization on earth to make it more sustainable. The amount of people needed for that job are huge but we can't pay them at all because how our economies are structured. We need tectonic shift in how the world works today. Machines are taking human jobs, good. Now humans are free to do the work which machines can't do.
- wolverine876 2y ago
  > Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company is working on that. There's an organization called NASA working on it.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Does NASA have any planetary colonization program? They do plan the Artemis mission, but AFAIK that is about establishing a tiny scientific base on the Moon, probably with regular exchange of the crew. I don't think they proclaimed an ambition to settle massive amounts of people there. For me "living on another planet" is only really SpaceX's goal. Build a semi-independent nation on Mars, with a million or more people necessary. That is very different from a scientific base project.
    - zztop44 2y ago
      Proclaiming things is very easy.
      - inglor_cz 2y ago
        SpaceX aren't just proclaiming things. They are building a skyscraper-sized fully reusable rocket with completely new engines to get away from the Earth cheaply.
wolverine876 2y ago
> The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing. You might look up what economics has to say; this issue is well-addressed there. Some fundamentals: The comment above assumes a static marketplace - the same technology, needs, etc. - and one that addresses the entirety of economic demand, rather than a dynamic market where those things change and resources are scarce (thus when resources become available, they are applied to other unfilled needs). For example, which skills are in demand changes but there is still growing demand: If you look at the jobs performed 100 years ago, you'll see that most of them are no long needed. Yet not only are most people employed today, we have ~3-4x as many people - most of the jobs disappeared, yet, 3-4x people have jobs. And yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but that's good because that work comes with higher pay.
- ameister14 2y ago
  >yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but that's good because that work comes with higher pay. The problem, of course, is that wages stagnated from '99 to 2014 and the job participation rate has been decreasing since 2000 while cost of living and general production increased; so no, in a dynamic market work does not necessarily come with higher pay. It actually wouldn't really make sense for all new work to come with higher pay; if you have changes in supply (which is what we are really talking about) that come with associated lower labor costs, the people that used to provide higher cost labor for the initial supply level will have to accept significantly reduced salaries in their industry. That's what happened with the industrial revolution. Wages overall increased because people entered the workforce for the first time as skill requirements went down, but the average wage of previously employed people went way down as artisan and highly skilled labor was outcompeted by factory work.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    while cost of living and general production increased This is a major problem! Why ? Corporations chasing profits without enough competition ?
genedan 2y ago
Technology can also reduce the skills needed for jobs. For example, you no longer need to have an entire city's streets memorized to be a taxi driver.
- layer8 2y ago
  I don’t think there was ever a taxi driver shortage because city streets are too difficult to memorize.
  - genedan 2y ago
    Rideshare and delivery apps have enabled more people to do those jobs than before.
    - layer8 2y ago
      Because of less skills required? What are you basing this on?
      - bombcar 2y ago
        More like because of the non-necessity of supplying a livable wage.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Prior to the advent of GPS, taxi drivers in many cities were tested on their orientation skills and had to memorize a lot of streets. I would be surprised if no one ever failed this part of the exam.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Until you get replaced by a robot taxi.
karaterobot 2y ago
Wait a minute. Higher skill jobs? For at least a decade, the place jobs shifted to was Amazon. If you lost your job because Amazon put your company out of business, you could get a worse, more humiliating job working at an Amazon warehouse, or as an Amazon driver. It was not higher skill jobs the market shifted to, it was Nomadland jobs. Now that Amazon is switching to robots, where are those people Amazon is putting out of work supposed to go?
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  That's the point.
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    Not by my reading of the original comment. Seems like they're saying that layoffs result in higher skilled jobs. And here's my basis for that conclusion: > The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. And what I'm saying is that there may not be new jobs, and if they are they may be lower skill jobs if history is any indication.
    - ranger_danger 2y ago
      My understanding was that they're saying it's the act of replacing the worker with a robot that requires more skilled workers to maintain/design/manufacture/etc., not that it merely resulted in a layoff.
    - downrightmike 2y ago
      USA stem grads are too expensive, so companies are just opening body shops in asia/south america. So stem education was largely just a grift to get everyone they could into college.
      - throwaway4220 2y ago
        Your first statement doesn’t really match your second statement
logicchains 2y ago
>The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set No they don't. If AI reached the point where it was capable and willing to do all white collar work, there'd be no more need for humans to do that kind of intellectual work. What would still be needed is service jobs that rely on the "human touch", and trades that AI lacked the dexterity to do. We're already seeing that now, with AI posing a greater threat to programmers' jobs than to plumbers or electricians' jobs.
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  Oh good, now instead of creating things, everyone can have a fulfilling career at Starbucks.
tossandthrow 2y ago
the job displacement could be in the care sector. that is what usually happened. I don't think being a caregiver necessarily is a more complex job than the ones being displaced.
barfard 2y ago
[dead]
chucke1992 2y ago
Neither computers nor cars, nor office nor photoshop decreased the amount of available jobs...
- chillingeffect 2y ago
  But exactly as the person you replied to said, they increased the average intelligence needed to do the new jobs. That leaves so many marginal people unemployable. They could have maintained horses but working in cars is harder. I like this observation.
  - ameister14 2y ago
    They actually resulted in a decrease in overall skills required. It takes a lot of skill to use a loom and make a napkin, the same is not needed for factory work yet you can make 100 napkins at the same time. Similarly, we had the rise of the service industry in the US - manufacturing required a lot of skilled labor; retail and wait-staff do not require the same skill.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I'm not convinced that animal husbandry is less skilled than working in cars. Different skill, and as I've never done it I can't be certain, but horses are wet and messy biology with brains that are terrified of anything they've never seen before. Production line work I did do as a summer holiday job during my A-levels aged 17 or 18, it wasn't skilled work but also that was HVAC production line not cars.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      The specialization has certainly taken off - people are much more specialized in their jobs now whereas “farmer” was really a jack-of-all-trades with passing capabilities in many different skill sets.
      - zztop44 2y ago
        Yes and it’s not at all obvious to me that being a jack-of-all-trades farmer (builder, mechanic, etc) requires less intelligence than learning Python.
ben_w 2y ago
The chain of logic is falsified by the Whitney cotton gin: it was a labour saving device, which saved enough labour to make cotton much more profitable, which led to the growth of the cotton plantations in southern USA, which led to increased slavery, and those slavers actively prevented their slaves from learning to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_Unit... That said, I would also agree with the conclusion that "a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing", but for different reasons. I expect the abilities of AI to expand over time. IQ is a poor measure, but suitable as a shorthand especially for a comment like this. Imagine a general purpose AI that runs as fast as a human on 100 watt hardware; first one will be an idiot. Let's say IQ 50: only 0.1% of humans are dumber than this, nobody was employing them anyway. Version 2, say IQ 85: now about 16% are beaten by the AI, this absolutely matters, they're unemployable forever through no fault of their own, give them a basic income of some kind. Version 3, IQ 100, now half the world can't get work. Version 4, IQ 115, now it's 84% who can't get work, etc. Reality is a lot messier than that, so nobody needs to bother picking holes in the specific details such as "that's a lot of electricity" or "AI isn't a robot" or "comparative advantage": this is a comment, not a research paper.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  IQ is sort of useful to measure humans because we have roughly comparable skills. It’s not applicable to AI at all in terms of measuring job fitness. If I need someone to move some furniture it might only need an IQ of 85 but that doesn’t mean AI is doing it any time soon.
  - mdekkers 2y ago
    > If I need someone to move some furniture it might only need an IQ of 85 but that doesn’t mean AI is doing it any time soon. The article and discussion are literally about machines moving stuff.
    - alvah 2y ago
hanniabu 2y ago
> It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. That was true in the past, but as technology gets better that won't be the case. Yes new jobs will be created, but there'll be fewer and fewer. Technology will allow for more generalized approaches that can be quickly adapted to new solutions. So new jobs will also be replaced quicker and quicker.
- hackerlight 2y ago
  Comparative advantage will keep people employed for a while: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-... There's a recent NBER paper that predicts wages will increase in the beginning of the AI revolution, even as AI displaces some jobs. Eventually there will be mass unemployment, but only when AI dominates humans (cost & capability) at almost everything.
snowwrestler 2y ago
> It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable. It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time. In addition, the nations driving the most technological growth domestically have experienced the greatest job growth over that time. With the result that many of them, like the U.S. and UK, have had to develop robust immigration programs. Even within a single nation, like China, there is temporal correlation between technological development and job creation. As China has leaned into tech over the past few decades, job creation accelerated there. > So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing. Again, the evidence shows the opposite correlation: technological development results in more people working, not less.
- simonsarris 2y ago
  > It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time. 200 years ago the town [severely mentally disabled person] could chop wood and carry water. What's he doing today? There are ~9 million people on SSDI (disability) and ~5 million on SSI (considered completely unfit for work, the US version of basic income), and ~50 million retired. Retirement conceptually slowly became a thing around the late late 1800s. Many of these people are in one of these three categories because there is no job that would be a good fit for them, especially SSI, which most Americans don't even know about.
- rdedev 2y ago
  The key point being it's created more jobs so far but we cannot extrapolate the same thing if AGI comes up tomorrow. Like let's say open ai comes up with a new LLM that is capable of replacing a human in let's say software development. What new jobs would it create? All technological advancement so far has created new jobs because you need someone to actually work on it, like a chip factory or doing devops. As far as I can see an AI is general enough that you don't need much effort to specialize it and with how things are currently going, only a few players have the capability of building and deploying it.
bamboozled 2y ago
But how do you know what that future looks like? For example, What if we use AGI and make ourselves smarter and more capable as Kurzweil has argued ? You can’t imagine what that will look like so why worry about jobs ?
- starbugs 2y ago
  > You can’t imagine what that will look like so why worry about jobs? I'd rather worry about what that would look like given the current trends in tech and society.
- pixl97 2y ago
  >What if we use AGI and make ourselves smarter I mean a large portion of people on the 'information highway' seem to use it to make themselves dumber.
PKop 2y ago
Eugenics
- oblio 2y ago
  Sure, who's volunteering to be the first one? For sure I won't volunteer for it :-)
  - Nesco 2y ago
    If it comes through rna/dna editing it will be a good evolution
  - polski-g 2y ago
    The embryos I just had implanted in my surrogate are the result of eugenics. I hand picked the egg donor based on SAT. When the embryos were created, I got their 23andme reports and validated that the ones implanted had the appropriate SNPs for intelligence by cross referencing snpedia. Almost everyone does step 1, but very few people do step 2.
    - Nesco 2y ago
      Hey, I would be interested in doing the same. How hard is it?
      - polski-g 2y ago
        Find a fertility clinic that partners or will partner with https://www.lifeview.com/ https://www.lifeview.com/ Select eggs/sperm and make embryos at fertility clinic. Ship them all off to Genomic Prediction. After you get their simplified test results, call and ask for the full report that is compatible with 23andme. Search snpedia for keywords like intelligence, retardation, educational attainment and cross reference their existence/non-existence with the 23andme text file. Have fertility doctor implant the embryo of your choosing. If you have/are a female, the price is dramatically cheaper. Otherwise its about $200k (all post-tax). Embryo creation $45k, surrogacy agency fee $30k, surrogate $70k, baby delivery $25k, embryo testing $6k.
fragmede 2y ago
Just like the Turing test turned out to be the wrong problem, AGI is the wrong goal. As long as AI can stoichastic parrot its way to success, who cares if it's AGI? My washing machine broke and I want my robot to fix it. it doesn't need AGI to diagnose and fix the problem, it just needs to have seen that in the training data. The real shift comes when the robots are dexterous enough to fix each other. that's when no new jobs will be created to fix them because they can do it themselves.
- waynesonfire 2y ago
  > dexterous enough to fix each other. Dexterity isn't the issue, it's the lack of training content. Also, I would be happy with a real-time feed of a robot telling ME, a dexterous being, what I should do to repair something. I don't have access to such technology.
hackerlight 2y ago
When intelligence becomes truly abundant and cheap, then human intelligence won't be valued by the market. You only get paid well because your intelligence is scarce, but that won't be the case in a future with ASI. It's hard to predict what will be valued, maybe personality traits that lend themselves to jobs like social media influencer, politician or actor, because people may still value real humans in these jobs.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
crooked-v 2y ago
> What's the proper social response to that, I don't know. Universal basic income of some kind.
BenFranklin100 2y ago
I don’t agree with this take. A more accurate and precise way to describe the effects of automation is that it creates more human-centered jobs, some of which may require higher IQ but many that do not. Your average massage therapist does not have a higher IQ than your average Amazon line factory worker, for instance.
kelnos 2y ago
> The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. I don't think that's necessarily true. A taxi driver of 20 years ago had to memorize roads and routes, and become familiar with traffic patterns at different times of the day. (Many taxi drivers sucked for various reasons, but that's neither here nor there.) Today, anyone can be an adequate taxi driver, without really any knowledge of the areas they work in. Slap a smartphone on your dashboard and you're good to go. That's a lower skill job. > You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain Sure, and that's part of the problem. You lay off those 100 manual workers and hire 5 workers to maintain the machinery. It's not at all clear that those 100 manual workers are going to then find higher-skill jobs, especially if they need training to get them. > What's the proper social response to [hypothetical AGI displacing more and more jobs], I don't know. Easy: universal basic income, plus free higher education and vocational training programs for people who do want to work in a field that still needs humans in the loop. We need to drop this inhumane view that people who can't (or even simply don't want to) work somehow don't at least deserve a basic standard of living. And I think we'll find that if we remove financial, housing, and food insecurity, more people will actually want to find meaningful ways to participate in society. Some people won't, and maybe that's a shame, but for the sake of all of us, they should still be housed and fed, comfortably enough.

by air7 2y ago

exitb 2y ago

Jobs are a byproduct of capital owners needing labor to sell things and services with a profit margin, so they can buy the good stuff. I’d argue that once the capital owners possess the technology that brings the cost of labor near zero, they will have no need for an economy at all, not to mention other people - unless it’s something more akin to a zoo.

acestus5 2y ago
This reminds me of the Chinese white monkey jobs.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> once the capital owners possess the technology that brings the cost of labor near zero Most Americans are capital owners. You’re describing a world in which most Americans live in a utopia.
- dhosek 2y ago
  A quick google says that 53% of Americans own publicly traded stock, but that means that 47% do not. There will be some fraction of that 47% who have their own businesses, but I’m guessing that these would be people at the bottom end of the business scale. Would it really be fair to call the guys driving a truck through the alleys collecting crap metal capital owners who would live in a utopia? The same article that cites the 53% number also says that the top 10% of income earners own 70% of the stock market. That doesn’t really sound like a recipe for utopia.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > 53% of Americans own publicly traded stock, but that means that 47% do not Does that include 401(k)s and pensions?
    - dhosek 2y ago
      Yes. 401(k)s but not pensions. The latter are defined benefit programs where participants are not responsible for making investment decisions.
    - foolofat00k 2y ago
      Very probably, yes. I'd be shocked if more than 60% of Americans even have a 401k/pension, let alone one with any meaningful sum invested.
  - jkhanlar 2y ago
    https://youtu.be/FID0BLkZXuY?t=2058s https://youtu.be/FID0BLkZXuY?t=2058s > 34:24 "Markets are efficient because of active managers setting the prices of securities, firms like Citadel, firms like Fidel.....lity (Fidelity) [...] trying to drive the value of companies towards where we think they should be valued." - Kenneth Cordelle Griffin, Citadel Securities, November 2023 I thought Amazon was a public company, not private, and since supply and demand is dead and real price discovery is gone, that unless it becomes a private company it likely will not survive, unless there are enough retail investors to DRS directly register shares in their name so that DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) and Cede & Co do not hold all the assets for retail in street name to then bankrupt and collect all the assets leaving retail investors holding worthless securities, but I don't see that Amazon is private? Maybe I missed something that happened and it's a private company now?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > thought Amazon was a public company, not private Parks, libraries and military bases are publicly owned. Amazon is a private company whose shares are publicly traded. > since supply and demand is dead This is wrong. > so that DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) and Cede & Co do not hold all the assets for retail in street name to then bankrupt and collect all the assets This is nonsense. (For starters, not how bankruptcy works.) > Maybe I missed something Mankiw’s Principles of Economics is a well-regarded introductory text [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Mankiw_book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Man...
gnz11 2y ago
> they will have no need for an economy at all Who is going to buy all of their crap then?
- rcstank 2y ago
  They won’t be selling anything by that point.
- jkhanlar 2y ago
  I noticed NVIDIA skyrocket from billions to trillions market cap, so wouldn't NVIDIA be able to help deploy some a.i. simulatedly autonomous homo borg genesis to engage in scripted automated consumer lives to replace traditional homosapiens/humans consumers and takeover what otherwise was economy and market for human people but now they are replaced by redefining human and people to be displaced by the automated scripted a.i. controlled ones? This is already happening, right? Or did I just give them idea to make this a reality? lol, wait, why am I getting raided by the FBI right now? What's going on? HALP!

quaintdev 2y ago

It's time we take on bigger and harder problems to solve. Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company is working on that. We need multiple such companies tackling bigger problems. Solving climate change, dealing with plastic are other bigger problems. I beleive there's no shortage of jobs. What if we start cleaning earth or reverse effects of human civilization on earth to make it more sustainable. The amount of people needed for that job are huge but we can't pay them at all because how our economies are structured. We need tectonic shift in how the world works today. Machines are taking human jobs, good. Now humans are free to do the work which machines can't do.

wolverine876 2y ago
> Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company is working on that. There's an organization called NASA working on it.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Does NASA have any planetary colonization program? They do plan the Artemis mission, but AFAIK that is about establishing a tiny scientific base on the Moon, probably with regular exchange of the crew. I don't think they proclaimed an ambition to settle massive amounts of people there. For me "living on another planet" is only really SpaceX's goal. Build a semi-independent nation on Mars, with a million or more people necessary. That is very different from a scientific base project.
  - zztop44 2y ago
    Proclaiming things is very easy.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      SpaceX aren't just proclaiming things. They are building a skyscraper-sized fully reusable rocket with completely new engines to get away from the Earth cheaply.

wolverine876 2y ago

> The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing. You might look up what economics has to say; this issue is well-addressed there. Some fundamentals: The comment above assumes a static marketplace - the same technology, needs, etc. - and one that addresses the entirety of economic demand, rather than a dynamic market where those things change and resources are scarce (thus when resources become available, they are applied to other unfilled needs). For example, which skills are in demand changes but there is still growing demand: If you look at the jobs performed 100 years ago, you'll see that most of them are no long needed. Yet not only are most people employed today, we have ~3-4x as many people - most of the jobs disappeared, yet, 3-4x people have jobs. And yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but that's good because that work comes with higher pay.

ameister14 2y ago
>yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but that's good because that work comes with higher pay. The problem, of course, is that wages stagnated from '99 to 2014 and the job participation rate has been decreasing since 2000 while cost of living and general production increased; so no, in a dynamic market work does not necessarily come with higher pay. It actually wouldn't really make sense for all new work to come with higher pay; if you have changes in supply (which is what we are really talking about) that come with associated lower labor costs, the people that used to provide higher cost labor for the initial supply level will have to accept significantly reduced salaries in their industry. That's what happened with the industrial revolution. Wages overall increased because people entered the workforce for the first time as skill requirements went down, but the average wage of previously employed people went way down as artisan and highly skilled labor was outcompeted by factory work.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  while cost of living and general production increased This is a major problem! Why ? Corporations chasing profits without enough competition ?

genedan 2y ago

Technology can also reduce the skills needed for jobs. For example, you no longer need to have an entire city's streets memorized to be a taxi driver.

layer8 2y ago
I don’t think there was ever a taxi driver shortage because city streets are too difficult to memorize.
- genedan 2y ago
  Rideshare and delivery apps have enabled more people to do those jobs than before.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Because of less skills required? What are you basing this on?
    - bombcar 2y ago
      More like because of the non-necessity of supplying a livable wage.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Prior to the advent of GPS, taxi drivers in many cities were tested on their orientation skills and had to memorize a lot of streets. I would be surprised if no one ever failed this part of the exam.
pjmlp 2y ago
Until you get replaced by a robot taxi.

karaterobot 2y ago

Wait a minute. Higher skill jobs? For at least a decade, the place jobs shifted to was Amazon. If you lost your job because Amazon put your company out of business, you could get a worse, more humiliating job working at an Amazon warehouse, or as an Amazon driver. It was not higher skill jobs the market shifted to, it was Nomadland jobs. Now that Amazon is switching to robots, where are those people Amazon is putting out of work supposed to go?

ranger_danger 2y ago
That's the point.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  Not by my reading of the original comment. Seems like they're saying that layoffs result in higher skilled jobs. And here's my basis for that conclusion: > The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. And what I'm saying is that there may not be new jobs, and if they are they may be lower skill jobs if history is any indication.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    My understanding was that they're saying it's the act of replacing the worker with a robot that requires more skilled workers to maintain/design/manufacture/etc., not that it merely resulted in a layoff.
  - downrightmike 2y ago
    USA stem grads are too expensive, so companies are just opening body shops in asia/south america. So stem education was largely just a grift to get everyone they could into college.
    - throwaway4220 2y ago
      Your first statement doesn’t really match your second statement

logicchains 2y ago

>The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set No they don't. If AI reached the point where it was capable and willing to do all white collar work, there'd be no more need for humans to do that kind of intellectual work. What would still be needed is service jobs that rely on the "human touch", and trades that AI lacked the dexterity to do. We're already seeing that now, with AI posing a greater threat to programmers' jobs than to plumbers or electricians' jobs.

yoyohello13 2y ago
Oh good, now instead of creating things, everyone can have a fulfilling career at Starbucks.

tossandthrow 2y ago

the job displacement could be in the care sector. that is what usually happened. I don't think being a caregiver necessarily is a more complex job than the ones being displaced.

barfard 2y ago

[dead]

chucke1992 2y ago

Neither computers nor cars, nor office nor photoshop decreased the amount of available jobs...

chillingeffect 2y ago
But exactly as the person you replied to said, they increased the average intelligence needed to do the new jobs. That leaves so many marginal people unemployable. They could have maintained horses but working in cars is harder. I like this observation.
- ameister14 2y ago
  They actually resulted in a decrease in overall skills required. It takes a lot of skill to use a loom and make a napkin, the same is not needed for factory work yet you can make 100 napkins at the same time. Similarly, we had the rise of the service industry in the US - manufacturing required a lot of skilled labor; retail and wait-staff do not require the same skill.
- ben_w 2y ago
  I'm not convinced that animal husbandry is less skilled than working in cars. Different skill, and as I've never done it I can't be certain, but horses are wet and messy biology with brains that are terrified of anything they've never seen before. Production line work I did do as a summer holiday job during my A-levels aged 17 or 18, it wasn't skilled work but also that was HVAC production line not cars.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    The specialization has certainly taken off - people are much more specialized in their jobs now whereas “farmer” was really a jack-of-all-trades with passing capabilities in many different skill sets.
    - zztop44 2y ago
      Yes and it’s not at all obvious to me that being a jack-of-all-trades farmer (builder, mechanic, etc) requires less intelligence than learning Python.

ben_w 2y ago

The chain of logic is falsified by the Whitney cotton gin: it was a labour saving device, which saved enough labour to make cotton much more profitable, which led to the growth of the cotton plantations in southern USA, which led to increased slavery, and those slavers actively prevented their slaves from learning to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_Unit... That said, I would also agree with the conclusion that "a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing", but for different reasons. I expect the abilities of AI to expand over time. IQ is a poor measure, but suitable as a shorthand especially for a comment like this. Imagine a general purpose AI that runs as fast as a human on 100 watt hardware; first one will be an idiot. Let's say IQ 50: only 0.1% of humans are dumber than this, nobody was employing them anyway. Version 2, say IQ 85: now about 16% are beaten by the AI, this absolutely matters, they're unemployable forever through no fault of their own, give them a basic income of some kind. Version 3, IQ 100, now half the world can't get work. Version 4, IQ 115, now it's 84% who can't get work, etc. Reality is a lot messier than that, so nobody needs to bother picking holes in the specific details such as "that's a lot of electricity" or "AI isn't a robot" or "comparative advantage": this is a comment, not a research paper.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago
IQ is sort of useful to measure humans because we have roughly comparable skills. It’s not applicable to AI at all in terms of measuring job fitness. If I need someone to move some furniture it might only need an IQ of 85 but that doesn’t mean AI is doing it any time soon.
- mdekkers 2y ago
  > If I need someone to move some furniture it might only need an IQ of 85 but that doesn’t mean AI is doing it any time soon. The article and discussion are literally about machines moving stuff.
  - alvah 2y ago

hanniabu 2y ago

> It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. That was true in the past, but as technology gets better that won't be the case. Yes new jobs will be created, but there'll be fewer and fewer. Technology will allow for more generalized approaches that can be quickly adapted to new solutions. So new jobs will also be replaced quicker and quicker.

hackerlight 2y ago
Comparative advantage will keep people employed for a while: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-... There's a recent NBER paper that predicts wages will increase in the beginning of the AI revolution, even as AI displaces some jobs. Eventually there will be mass unemployment, but only when AI dominates humans (cost & capability) at almost everything.

snowwrestler 2y ago

> It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable. It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time. In addition, the nations driving the most technological growth domestically have experienced the greatest job growth over that time. With the result that many of them, like the U.S. and UK, have had to develop robust immigration programs. Even within a single nation, like China, there is temporal correlation between technological development and job creation. As China has leaned into tech over the past few decades, job creation accelerated there. > So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing. Again, the evidence shows the opposite correlation: technological development results in more people working, not less.

simonsarris 2y ago
> It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time. 200 years ago the town [severely mentally disabled person] could chop wood and carry water. What's he doing today? There are ~9 million people on SSDI (disability) and ~5 million on SSI (considered completely unfit for work, the US version of basic income), and ~50 million retired. Retirement conceptually slowly became a thing around the late late 1800s. Many of these people are in one of these three categories because there is no job that would be a good fit for them, especially SSI, which most Americans don't even know about.
rdedev 2y ago
The key point being it's created more jobs so far but we cannot extrapolate the same thing if AGI comes up tomorrow. Like let's say open ai comes up with a new LLM that is capable of replacing a human in let's say software development. What new jobs would it create? All technological advancement so far has created new jobs because you need someone to actually work on it, like a chip factory or doing devops. As far as I can see an AI is general enough that you don't need much effort to specialize it and with how things are currently going, only a few players have the capability of building and deploying it.

bamboozled 2y ago

But how do you know what that future looks like? For example, What if we use AGI and make ourselves smarter and more capable as Kurzweil has argued ? You can’t imagine what that will look like so why worry about jobs ?

starbugs 2y ago
> You can’t imagine what that will look like so why worry about jobs? I'd rather worry about what that would look like given the current trends in tech and society.
pixl97 2y ago
>What if we use AGI and make ourselves smarter I mean a large portion of people on the 'information highway' seem to use it to make themselves dumber.

PKop 2y ago

Eugenics

oblio 2y ago
Sure, who's volunteering to be the first one? For sure I won't volunteer for it :-)
- Nesco 2y ago
  If it comes through rna/dna editing it will be a good evolution
- polski-g 2y ago
  The embryos I just had implanted in my surrogate are the result of eugenics. I hand picked the egg donor based on SAT. When the embryos were created, I got their 23andme reports and validated that the ones implanted had the appropriate SNPs for intelligence by cross referencing snpedia. Almost everyone does step 1, but very few people do step 2.
  - Nesco 2y ago
    Hey, I would be interested in doing the same. How hard is it?
    - polski-g 2y ago
      Find a fertility clinic that partners or will partner with https://www.lifeview.com/ https://www.lifeview.com/ Select eggs/sperm and make embryos at fertility clinic. Ship them all off to Genomic Prediction. After you get their simplified test results, call and ask for the full report that is compatible with 23andme. Search snpedia for keywords like intelligence, retardation, educational attainment and cross reference their existence/non-existence with the 23andme text file. Have fertility doctor implant the embryo of your choosing. If you have/are a female, the price is dramatically cheaper. Otherwise its about $200k (all post-tax). Embryo creation $45k, surrogacy agency fee $30k, surrogate $70k, baby delivery $25k, embryo testing $6k.

fragmede 2y ago

Just like the Turing test turned out to be the wrong problem, AGI is the wrong goal. As long as AI can stoichastic parrot its way to success, who cares if it's AGI? My washing machine broke and I want my robot to fix it. it doesn't need AGI to diagnose and fix the problem, it just needs to have seen that in the training data. The real shift comes when the robots are dexterous enough to fix each other. that's when no new jobs will be created to fix them because they can do it themselves.

waynesonfire 2y ago
> dexterous enough to fix each other. Dexterity isn't the issue, it's the lack of training content. Also, I would be happy with a real-time feed of a robot telling ME, a dexterous being, what I should do to repair something. I don't have access to such technology.

hackerlight 2y ago

When intelligence becomes truly abundant and cheap, then human intelligence won't be valued by the market. You only get paid well because your intelligence is scarce, but that won't be the case in a future with ASI. It's hard to predict what will be valued, maybe personality traits that lend themselves to jobs like social media influencer, politician or actor, because people may still value real humans in these jobs.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

crooked-v 2y ago

> What's the proper social response to that, I don't know. Universal basic income of some kind.

BenFranklin100 2y ago

I don’t agree with this take. A more accurate and precise way to describe the effects of automation is that it creates more human-centered jobs, some of which may require higher IQ but many that do not. Your average massage therapist does not have a higher IQ than your average Amazon line factory worker, for instance.

kelnos 2y ago

> The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. I don't think that's necessarily true. A taxi driver of 20 years ago had to memorize roads and routes, and become familiar with traffic patterns at different times of the day. (Many taxi drivers sucked for various reasons, but that's neither here nor there.) Today, anyone can be an adequate taxi driver, without really any knowledge of the areas they work in. Slap a smartphone on your dashboard and you're good to go. That's a lower skill job. > You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain Sure, and that's part of the problem. You lay off those 100 manual workers and hire 5 workers to maintain the machinery. It's not at all clear that those 100 manual workers are going to then find higher-skill jobs, especially if they need training to get them. > What's the proper social response to [hypothetical AGI displacing more and more jobs], I don't know. Easy: universal basic income, plus free higher education and vocational training programs for people who do want to work in a field that still needs humans in the loop. We need to drop this inhumane view that people who can't (or even simply don't want to) work somehow don't at least deserve a basic standard of living. And I think we'll find that if we remove financial, housing, and food insecurity, more people will actually want to find meaningful ways to participate in society. Some people won't, and maybe that's a shame, but for the sake of all of us, they should still be housed and fed, comfortably enough.