7 ms·

In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment

19 points by jazzdev 2y ago

jazzdev 2y ago
TLDR: "The future is bigger than we can imagine. Change is equally hard to comprehend. Two centuries ago, 80 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. If you told one of those farmers that in 2024 barely 1 percent of the population would work on farms, he'd have a difficult time imagining what the other 79 percent of the population would do with their time. If you then tried to explain what an average income could purchase in the way of a Netflix subscription, airplane transportation, and a car, he'd think you were insane. The same principle applies to imagining life 50 years from now."
- giantg2 2y ago
  Makes me sound old, but I'm sort of glad we don't live forever. Putting up with that kind of change sounds miserable.
  - chii 2y ago
    really? i would love to live forever, because these changes have been beneficial, and those who lived two centuries go would've loved to trade places.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Those two centuries ago probably yes. Three decades ago probably not. The world is in a much darker place than the 90s. And our extreme consumption is partly to blame, as is internet manipulation of the masses.
      - cyberlurker 2y ago
        Cancer treatment is way better now than even a few years ago. Miles ahead of the 90s. The bee population in America is supposedly growing very quickly thanks in part to tax breaks in Texas. Global poverty is way down. Large part of that is China. Gay rights have come a long way. Not perfect, but it’s nice that generally people can be more open about who they are. I absolutely love all the open source projects out there for almost anything I want. Yeah, we could be doing better. Much better. But it’s actually unlikely we will hit the worst case scenarios for climate change. The developing world is going to get rocked by the 2+C temperature increase, but it won’t be an extinction event, there is still more we can do, and there is much less denialism than the 90s or 00s. Am I touching too much grass?
        wkat4242 2y ago
        There's some positives yes but it feels like world in decline gearing up for war. Russia and China are again extremely adversarial and autocratic, the US is tearing itself apart in political polarisation. In my own country the extreme right fascists won 24% of votes. Gay rights are ok but Trans people are being demonised by the right now. As a whole it feels like the LGBTQ+ community is under attack. Big corporations are getting ever more powerful. The internet is decidedly less free and very enshittified and we get tracked and surveilled wherever we go, online or not. And no it won't be an extinction event but it will be heavy for the marginal people everywhere, leading to even more differences between rich and poor and even more pressure to equalise this by war. And in the 90s we had much better social welfare safety nets here. Three decades of neoliberal government hollowed out anything good here in Holland. The rage of the disadvantaged by this are what's fueling this swing to fascism, they take advantage of this anger and redirect it to worse.
    - giantg2 2y ago
      Having to work forever sounds miserable. I think there would be some psychological impacts as well around how we'd treat life, risk taking, etc. While many things would improve, it feels like seeing the natural wonders fade away for developments and stuff would be worse. Like we'd be trading human connection, general freedom, and privacy for more stuff. I am excited about some stuff in the future, but I'm more pessimistic about how ever increasingly complicated and expensive life will become. There are a few things that I enjoy where I can already see the writing on the wall for them to disappear or be banned.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Sure, somebody that works constantly in a field might not spend that much time imagining what the majority of the country would do if they weren't working all the time. But some other people that have much less demanding jobs did think that in the future people would barely work. This has become much more true for Europe than USA although as you'll see pointed out all the time, USA salaries are higher then Europe. I suspect Keynes was a socialist since he seems to have this idea that everybody would chip in only 15 hours a week in order to produce enough stuff for the whole of society. > "But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" [1] [1]: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
  - randomdata 2y ago
    > he seems to have this idea that everybody would chip in only 15 hours a week in order to produce enough stuff for the whole of society. [...] we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. And approximately a decade later, the United States did just that. The workweek was reduced to 40 hours to make what work there was to be done as widely as possible. He didn't get the number of hours quite right, but nailed the overall premise.
Cloudef 2y ago
The future will be AI generated spam content across all internet in hope of passive income
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Putting human spam-labor out of work, too.
BMc2020 2y ago
How to read an HN subject line: WRONG: In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment RIGHT: In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment (reason.com) TL:DR; (reason.com)
- bitwize 2y ago
  Indeed. Is there a browser extension or something that replaces every reason.com article on Hackernews with a corresponding jacobin.com article? For this one, there's an acceptable substitute on the front page right now: https://jacobin.com/2024/01/can-humanity-survive-ai https://jacobin.com/2024/01/can-humanity-survive-ai
yayr 2y ago
except for the very vague argument that tech disruptions in the past created more jobs there is not really any argument supporting that claim. Would have been nice to explain how people would be employed in an AI scenario and how they would benefit from the surpluses created by it.
callwhendone 2y ago
I don't think anything will stay stagnant enough for us to even comprehend what life will be like in the future.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
exitzer0 2y ago
[dead]
awwaiid 2y ago
Isn't zero-precent unemployment the exact opposite of the star trek utopia we were promised?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  Not really. In Star Trek, you have access to mental healthcare and the educational resources to go do something you want to do. Then that’s the work. I think it’s a little unbelievable that the right proportion of people want to, say, serve food at a restaurant. But that’s the idea.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    When you have the technology to replicate virtually any foodstuff to perfection instantly, restaurants become less common, and may take on different meaning (as more social hangouts rather than food-service places). Accordingly, the ST universe just might have enough bored, centuries-old El-Aurians looking for conversation and company to fill all the needed service roles there are -- and such roles are more relaxed and stimulating besides.
    - Schiendelman 2y ago
      I think you’re totally right. I am skeptical but hopeful. :)
  - kazinator 2y ago
    Though Star Trek, countless Americans also had vicarious access to mental health care. After a good episode, the world seems to make more sense, and one's outlook is more optimistic.
- randomdata 2y ago
  To be unemployed means that you want to do work for others, but cannot find anyone who wants you to work for them. In what way does Star Trek paint not being able to get what you want as utopia?
nextworddev 2y ago
This is a really poorly argued article, not sure even where to start dismantling the author's arguments. (Almost feels like ChatGPT wrote this article). But let's start with this "If H&R Block could replace 90 percent of its seasonal employees with AI, it would see its profits skyrocket, given that labor is its biggest expense. Those profits would be reallocated elsewhere, that would increase the potential for even more economic growth, and that would in turn create better opportunities for the accountants." => Lol, no. It doesn't work that way. H&R block, if any, will allocate more to share buy backs, and the size of the tax filing "pie" won't increase due to AI.
- pylua 2y ago
  I feel like the author has missed the concept of “Past performance is no guarantee of future results”.
  - jazzdev 2y ago
    Yes, it's not guarantee, but it is one good data source for predicting the future. See Rule 5 in https://hbr.org/2007/07/six-rules-for-effective-forecasting https://hbr.org/2007/07/six-rules-for-effective-forecasting
- skhunted 2y ago
  Exactly. Rich people tend to horde their wealth and seek more. When they have an opportunity to extract wealth from others they do so. The increase in economic growth from this extraction is minimal in comparison to the amount extracted.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    The only way to “extract wealth from others” is to put them to work.
    - drewmcarthur 2y ago
      exactly, the only reason to hire someone is because you’re making money off their work.
elicksaur 2y ago
Kind of a click-bait title, eh? A few paragraphs in, the statements felt generic and lacked supporting details to the point I got that uncanny valley sense of LLM writing. It doesn’t seem like this piece adds much that hasn’t already been said.
cozzyd 2y ago
Good evidence of this is how Gary, IN is thriving after automation reduced the steel plant labor requirements by 90%.
hatenberg 2y ago
Mindblowingly poor argumentation. a) No disentanglement of growth factors. Economic growth tied to expansion of consumer base is slowing for demographic reasons and more crucially, key markets in the knowledge economy are demand saturated - attention economy for example is not growing - it peaked in the pandemic and outside of policy intervention, there’s very limited growth potential. b) Failure to spell out the transformer as machine that prints machines. The transformer extracts the rules of creation from the corpus of human created labor results and automatically produces the replication function. The technology may be in its infancy, but it will only improve. c) Historically adjustment for new job creation has operated on a multi decade timescale, complimentary to the often massive infrastructure needs (wires, power plants, distribution infrastructure) but this technology does not have those requirements. The app stores, fiber lines, machines, API platforms all exist. Adopting products can happen in months. The loop from science to product is months (see vision transformer) d) Do I spot trickle down economics? Are we gonna invoke this boomer level of delusional narrative for the next 20 years again despite the iron clad metrics showing it’s wishful thinking to appeal to certain ideological positions rather than grounded in any kind of reality. The gains from operational efficiency will become stock buybacks, yachts, macadamia chewing cows and vanity dildos flying to space. Appealing to history is all fine and dandy, but one has to spell out the divergent core conditions to have a serious conversation - this article feels like faith, not well reasoned forecasting or even science fiction
- amayne 2y ago
  Original author here: A. Some parts of the economy will grow. Some will shrink. My claim is that if you believe that AI will create new efficiencies and continue to do so, then overall economic growth will increase at a faster rate than ever. B. Predicting what architecture could lead to this growth is beyond the scope of this article. The point was to say that if we keep getting increased efficiencies we'll get increased growth. C. Job creation accelerates. Before I was hired at OpenAI in 2020, nobody on the planet had ever been hired as a prompt engineer. Now it's a career (at least for the time being.) D. I'm assuming maximizing profit in the most near-sighted way possible. Same as it has ever been. Is there a specific claim or argument that you disagree with?
mediumsmart 2y ago
Let me guess, the populace will be 100% self employed publishing AI generated books on Amazon.
naveen99 2y ago
Will there be 0 unhappiness, 0 darkness, 0 pain, 0 death, 0 risk, 0 inflation also ?

19 points by jazzdev 2y ago

TLDR: "The future is bigger than we can imagine. Change is equally hard to comprehend. Two centuries ago, 80 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. If you told one of those farmers that in 2024 barely 1 percent of the population would work on farms, he'd have a difficult time imagining what the other 79 percent of the population would do with their time. If you then tried to explain what an average income could purchase in the way of a Netflix subscription, airplane transportation, and a car, he'd think you were insane. The same principle applies to imagining life 50 years from now."

giantg2 2y ago
Makes me sound old, but I'm sort of glad we don't live forever. Putting up with that kind of change sounds miserable.
- chii 2y ago
  really? i would love to live forever, because these changes have been beneficial, and those who lived two centuries go would've loved to trade places.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Those two centuries ago probably yes. Three decades ago probably not. The world is in a much darker place than the 90s. And our extreme consumption is partly to blame, as is internet manipulation of the masses.
    - cyberlurker 2y ago
      Cancer treatment is way better now than even a few years ago. Miles ahead of the 90s. The bee population in America is supposedly growing very quickly thanks in part to tax breaks in Texas. Global poverty is way down. Large part of that is China. Gay rights have come a long way. Not perfect, but it’s nice that generally people can be more open about who they are. I absolutely love all the open source projects out there for almost anything I want. Yeah, we could be doing better. Much better. But it’s actually unlikely we will hit the worst case scenarios for climate change. The developing world is going to get rocked by the 2+C temperature increase, but it won’t be an extinction event, there is still more we can do, and there is much less denialism than the 90s or 00s. Am I touching too much grass?
      - wkat4242 2y ago
        There's some positives yes but it feels like world in decline gearing up for war. Russia and China are again extremely adversarial and autocratic, the US is tearing itself apart in political polarisation. In my own country the extreme right fascists won 24% of votes. Gay rights are ok but Trans people are being demonised by the right now. As a whole it feels like the LGBTQ+ community is under attack. Big corporations are getting ever more powerful. The internet is decidedly less free and very enshittified and we get tracked and surveilled wherever we go, online or not. And no it won't be an extinction event but it will be heavy for the marginal people everywhere, leading to even more differences between rich and poor and even more pressure to equalise this by war. And in the 90s we had much better social welfare safety nets here. Three decades of neoliberal government hollowed out anything good here in Holland. The rage of the disadvantaged by this are what's fueling this swing to fascism, they take advantage of this anger and redirect it to worse.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    Having to work forever sounds miserable. I think there would be some psychological impacts as well around how we'd treat life, risk taking, etc. While many things would improve, it feels like seeing the natural wonders fade away for developments and stuff would be worse. Like we'd be trading human connection, general freedom, and privacy for more stuff. I am excited about some stuff in the future, but I'm more pessimistic about how ever increasingly complicated and expensive life will become. There are a few things that I enjoy where I can already see the writing on the wall for them to disappear or be banned.
lesuorac 2y ago
Sure, somebody that works constantly in a field might not spend that much time imagining what the majority of the country would do if they weren't working all the time. But some other people that have much less demanding jobs did think that in the future people would barely work. This has become much more true for Europe than USA although as you'll see pointed out all the time, USA salaries are higher then Europe. I suspect Keynes was a socialist since he seems to have this idea that everybody would chip in only 15 hours a week in order to produce enough stuff for the whole of society. > "But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" [1] [1]: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
- randomdata 2y ago
  > he seems to have this idea that everybody would chip in only 15 hours a week in order to produce enough stuff for the whole of society. [...] we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. And approximately a decade later, the United States did just that. The workweek was reduced to 40 hours to make what work there was to be done as widely as possible. He didn't get the number of hours quite right, but nailed the overall premise.

Cloudef 2y ago

The future will be AI generated spam content across all internet in hope of passive income

Terr_ 2y ago
Putting human spam-labor out of work, too.

BMc2020 2y ago

How to read an HN subject line: WRONG: In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment RIGHT: In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment (reason.com) TL:DR; (reason.com)

bitwize 2y ago
Indeed. Is there a browser extension or something that replaces every reason.com article on Hackernews with a corresponding jacobin.com article? For this one, there's an acceptable substitute on the front page right now: https://jacobin.com/2024/01/can-humanity-survive-ai https://jacobin.com/2024/01/can-humanity-survive-ai

yayr 2y ago

except for the very vague argument that tech disruptions in the past created more jobs there is not really any argument supporting that claim. Would have been nice to explain how people would be employed in an AI scenario and how they would benefit from the surpluses created by it.

callwhendone 2y ago

I don't think anything will stay stagnant enough for us to even comprehend what life will be like in the future.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

exitzer0 2y ago

[dead]

awwaiid 2y ago

Isn't zero-precent unemployment the exact opposite of the star trek utopia we were promised?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Schiendelman 2y ago
Not really. In Star Trek, you have access to mental healthcare and the educational resources to go do something you want to do. Then that’s the work. I think it’s a little unbelievable that the right proportion of people want to, say, serve food at a restaurant. But that’s the idea.
- bitwize 2y ago
  When you have the technology to replicate virtually any foodstuff to perfection instantly, restaurants become less common, and may take on different meaning (as more social hangouts rather than food-service places). Accordingly, the ST universe just might have enough bored, centuries-old El-Aurians looking for conversation and company to fill all the needed service roles there are -- and such roles are more relaxed and stimulating besides.
  - Schiendelman 2y ago
    I think you’re totally right. I am skeptical but hopeful. :)
- kazinator 2y ago
  Though Star Trek, countless Americans also had vicarious access to mental health care. After a good episode, the world seems to make more sense, and one's outlook is more optimistic.
randomdata 2y ago
To be unemployed means that you want to do work for others, but cannot find anyone who wants you to work for them. In what way does Star Trek paint not being able to get what you want as utopia?

nextworddev 2y ago

This is a really poorly argued article, not sure even where to start dismantling the author's arguments. (Almost feels like ChatGPT wrote this article). But let's start with this "If H&R Block could replace 90 percent of its seasonal employees with AI, it would see its profits skyrocket, given that labor is its biggest expense. Those profits would be reallocated elsewhere, that would increase the potential for even more economic growth, and that would in turn create better opportunities for the accountants." => Lol, no. It doesn't work that way. H&R block, if any, will allocate more to share buy backs, and the size of the tax filing "pie" won't increase due to AI.

pylua 2y ago
I feel like the author has missed the concept of “Past performance is no guarantee of future results”.
- jazzdev 2y ago
  Yes, it's not guarantee, but it is one good data source for predicting the future. See Rule 5 in https://hbr.org/2007/07/six-rules-for-effective-forecasting https://hbr.org/2007/07/six-rules-for-effective-forecasting
skhunted 2y ago
Exactly. Rich people tend to horde their wealth and seek more. When they have an opportunity to extract wealth from others they do so. The increase in economic growth from this extraction is minimal in comparison to the amount extracted.
- randomdata 2y ago
  The only way to “extract wealth from others” is to put them to work.
  - drewmcarthur 2y ago
    exactly, the only reason to hire someone is because you’re making money off their work.

elicksaur 2y ago

Kind of a click-bait title, eh? A few paragraphs in, the statements felt generic and lacked supporting details to the point I got that uncanny valley sense of LLM writing. It doesn’t seem like this piece adds much that hasn’t already been said.

cozzyd 2y ago

Good evidence of this is how Gary, IN is thriving after automation reduced the steel plant labor requirements by 90%.

hatenberg 2y ago

Mindblowingly poor argumentation. a) No disentanglement of growth factors. Economic growth tied to expansion of consumer base is slowing for demographic reasons and more crucially, key markets in the knowledge economy are demand saturated - attention economy for example is not growing - it peaked in the pandemic and outside of policy intervention, there’s very limited growth potential. b) Failure to spell out the transformer as machine that prints machines. The transformer extracts the rules of creation from the corpus of human created labor results and automatically produces the replication function. The technology may be in its infancy, but it will only improve. c) Historically adjustment for new job creation has operated on a multi decade timescale, complimentary to the often massive infrastructure needs (wires, power plants, distribution infrastructure) but this technology does not have those requirements. The app stores, fiber lines, machines, API platforms all exist. Adopting products can happen in months. The loop from science to product is months (see vision transformer) d) Do I spot trickle down economics? Are we gonna invoke this boomer level of delusional narrative for the next 20 years again despite the iron clad metrics showing it’s wishful thinking to appeal to certain ideological positions rather than grounded in any kind of reality. The gains from operational efficiency will become stock buybacks, yachts, macadamia chewing cows and vanity dildos flying to space. Appealing to history is all fine and dandy, but one has to spell out the divergent core conditions to have a serious conversation - this article feels like faith, not well reasoned forecasting or even science fiction

amayne 2y ago
Original author here: A. Some parts of the economy will grow. Some will shrink. My claim is that if you believe that AI will create new efficiencies and continue to do so, then overall economic growth will increase at a faster rate than ever. B. Predicting what architecture could lead to this growth is beyond the scope of this article. The point was to say that if we keep getting increased efficiencies we'll get increased growth. C. Job creation accelerates. Before I was hired at OpenAI in 2020, nobody on the planet had ever been hired as a prompt engineer. Now it's a career (at least for the time being.) D. I'm assuming maximizing profit in the most near-sighted way possible. Same as it has ever been. Is there a specific claim or argument that you disagree with?

mediumsmart 2y ago

Let me guess, the populace will be 100% self employed publishing AI generated books on Amazon.

naveen99 2y ago

Will there be 0 unhappiness, 0 darkness, 0 pain, 0 death, 0 risk, 0 inflation also ?