6 ms·

Three things that get me about current AI discourse: - The public focus on AGI is almost a distraction. By the time we get to AGI highly-specialised models wil

Three things that get me about current AI discourse: - The public focus on AGI is almost a distraction. By the time we get to AGI highly-specialised models will have taken jobs from huge swaths of the population, SWE and CS are already in play. - That AI will need to carry out every task a role does to replace it. I see this a lot on HN. What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? That's still a gigantic economic impact. Even at the current state of the art this is plausible. - The notion that everyone laid off above will find new employment from the opportunities AI creates. Perhaps it's just a gap in my knowledge. What opportunities are so large they'll make up for the economies we're starting to see? I understand the inverting population pyramid in the Western world helps this some also (more retirees/less workers).

schnitzelstoat 2y ago
I agree on the first two points. On the third point, I think we've always seen this happen even in massive shocks like the Industrial Revolution (and the Second Industrial Revolution with assembly lines etc. and the Computer Age) It might be hard for people to retrain to whatever the new opportunities are though. Although perhaps somewhat easier nowadays with the internet etc.
- beepbooptheory 2y ago
  The industrial revolution didn't lay everyone off, it just made everyone's jobs worse in every possible sense.
  - visarga 2y ago
    I don't think many would switch current life with pre-industrial life. You are idealising the past and discounting the present
    - beepbooptheory 2y ago
      Not trying to value life in general at all, just the nature of the jobs. You might reply "distinction without a difference," and well, the fact that you'd think so would be one of my points about the labor ;). Personally, preindustrial life sounds pretty rough, but its all just apples and oranges! The future will continue to happen, to critique the present and how we got here is not to exhort the past (unless, you know, you are a particularly conservative person I guess).
- kranke155 2y ago
  The Industrial Revolution was a period of massive economic growth that was coupled with decline in the quality of life of the average worker. This Economist article talks about how looking at the historical data, historians now see that the height of the average Englishman actually went down due to malnutrition. https://web.archive.org/web/20210905065401/https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-living-standards-improve-during-the-industrial-revolution https://web.archive.org/web/20210905065401/https://www.econo... The myth that the Industrial Revolution was a wonderful time is just that, a myth. The actual reality of the AI revolution will likely be the same. Record number of billionaires and record number of people in deep poverty at the same time.
  - gazook89 2y ago
    Do people really think the Industrial Revolution was “a wonderful time”? Basically the first thought to comes to mind for me is massive migration to urban centers, along with huge amount of poverty and squalid living conditions and disassociation with your own labor. I feel like that was basically what was taught to me in High School too, not like some recently learned insight. And I agree with you. Further, the argument about economic prosperity isn’t equal for everyone. And increased worker efficiency isn’t directly (or sometimes at all) linked to worker satisfaction or even increased wages.
    - kranke155 2y ago
      I’ve heard some people say it. That economic disruption doesn’t matter because “all the pieces fall into place” eventually and the Industrial Revolution being an example.
  - j_maffe 2y ago
    Well, yeah but right now we're reaping many benefits from the industrial revolution. Malnutrition for sure. Not saying it's the same as the AI boom though.
- visarga 2y ago
  One thing AI is good at is explaining things, we can retrain faster and better with it.
wil421 2y ago
Just like robo-taxis are supposed to be driving us around or self driving cars. Not to mention the non-fiat currency everyone can easily use to buy goods nowadays.
- hiddencost 2y ago
  Waymo is doing 100k paid driverless trips a week with significantly better safety than humans in matched conditions.
  - asadotzler 2y ago
    The easiest 100 thousand trips per week (look at the three cities) out of the US's 7.7 billion trips per week? How is that meaningful?
  - andy_ppp 2y ago
    On a small subsection of US roads, British roads for example don’t make any sense. However, generally I think being a software developer might be not a career in 10 years which is terrible to think about. Designer too. And all of this is through stealing peoples work as their own.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      These models are not repositories or archives of others work that they simply stitch together to create output. It's more accurate to say that they view work and then create an algorithm that can output the essence of that work. For image models, people are often pretty surprised to learn that they are only a few gigabytes in size, despite training on petabytes of images.
- dijit 2y ago
  To be fair, I haven't touched real money in about 3 years. If it's called "bank-coin"; "swedish crowns" or "bitcoin" it doesn't matter because it's all digital anyway. On that count, the technological innovation is here, but it's centralised in a few "trusted" entities, just like everything.
visarga 2y ago
> What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? Zero sum game or fixed lump of work fallacy. Think second order effects - now that we spend less time repeating known methods, we will take on more ambitious work. Competition between companies using human + AI will raise the bar. Software has been cannibalizing itself for 60 years, with each new language and framework, and yet employment is strong.
- typewithrhythm 2y ago
  It's probably true, but just not for SWEs. Many roles will go the way of secretarys; the cost of making an administrative tool will decrease to the point where there is less need for a specialised role to handle it. The question is going to be about the pace of disruption, is there something special about these new tools?
- dizzydes 2y ago
  Fair, there are probably two threads to this. New product that push that bar and can command a decent margin (and good staff salaries) as long as there's a business case/demand and feature-sets that currently command a decent margin will be available for dirt cheap prices (managed by one or two person outfits). Your comment really got me thinking, it's time to upskill haha. Aside from biotech and robotics do you see any areas particularly ripe for this push?
  - visarga 2y ago
    For example, it the core field of innovation is biotech, there will be unexpected needs in downstream and upstream fields like medical tooling, biosensors, carbon capture and novel materials. Internet blossomed into a thousand businesses, I expect the same thing to happen again - we gain new capabilities, they open up demand for new products, so we get new markets and industries. Desires always fill up the existing capability space like a gas fills a room.
snowwrestler 2y ago
If an AI can do my job, why would my employer fire me? Why wouldn’t they be excited to get 200% productivity out of me for the marginal cost of an AI seat license? A lot of the predictions of job loss are predicated on an unspoken assumption that we’re sitting at “task maximum” so any increase in productivity must result in job loss. It’s only true if there is no more work to be done. But no one seems to be willing or able or even aware that they need to make that point substantively—to prove that there is no more work to be done. Historically, humans have been absolutely terrible at predicting the types and volumes of future work. But we’ve been absolutely incredible at inventing new things to do to keep busy.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  > If an AI can do my job, why would my employer fire me? Why wouldn’t they be excited to get 200% productivity out of me for the marginal cost of an AI seat license? They’d be excited at getting 100x of 100% output out an AI for 20 dollars a month and laying you off as redundant. If you aren’t scared of the potential of this technology you are lying to yourself.
  - snowwrestler 2y ago
    Again: I’m only made redundant if there is no more work that my employer needs me to do. Why should I be scared of technology that makes me more productive?
    - physicsguy 2y ago
      This assumes that the bottleneck to profitability is the limit of software engineers they can afford to hire. If they’re happy with current rate of progress (and in many companies that is the case), then a productivity increase of 100% means they need half the current number of engineers.
      - flimsypremise 2y ago
        what company have you ever worked for that was happy with the current rate of progress in software development?
no_op 2y ago
Non-general AI won't cause mass unemployment, for the same reason previous productivity-enhancing tech hasn't. So long as humans can create valuable output machines can't, the new, higher-output economy will figure out how to employ them. Some won't even have to switch jobs, because demand for what they provide will be higher as AI tools bring down production costs. This is plausible for SWEs. Other people will end up in jobs that come into existence as a result of new tech, or that presently seem too silly to pay many people for — this, too, is consistent with historical precedent. It can result in temporary dislocation if the transition is fast enough, but things sort themselves out. It's really only AGI, by eclipsing human capabilities across all useful work, that breaks this dynamic and creates the prospect of permanent structural unemployment.
- fulafel 2y ago
  We do have emplyoment problems arguably caused by tech, currently the bar of minimum viable productivity is higher than before in a lot of countries. In western welfare states there aren't jobs anymore for people who were doing groundskeeper ish things 50 years ago (apart from public sector subsidized employment programs). We need to come up with ways of providing meaningful roles for the large percentage of people whose peg shape doesn't fit the median job hole.
- consteval 2y ago
  > So long as humans can create valuable output machines can't Not all humans are going to be capable of this as time goes on. Those humans will be subjected to abject poverty. The reality is not everyone can possess a highly skilled knowledge job. Not everyone can go to college. What of them?
  - no_op 2y ago
    The irregularities of many real-world problems will keep even humans of low intelligence employable in non-AGI scenarios. Consider that even if you build a robot to perform 99% of the job of, say, a janitor, there's still that last 1%. The robot is going to encounter things that it can't figure out, but any human with an IQ north of 70 can. Now, initially this still looks like it's going to reduce demand for janitors by 99%. So it's still going to cause mass unemployment, right? Except, it's going to substantially reduce the cost of janitorial services, so more will be purchased. Not just janitorial services, of course. We'll deploy such robots to do many things at higher intensity than we do today, and as well as many things that we don't do at all right now because they're not cost effective. So in equilibrium (again, the transition may be messy), with 99% automation we end up with an economy 100x the size, and about the same number of humans employed. I know this sounds crazy, but it's the historical norm. Today's industrialized economies already have hundreds of times the output of pre-industrial economies, and yet humans mostly remain employed. At no point did we find that we didn't want any more stuff, actually, and decide to start cashing out productivity increases as lower employment rather than more output.
jonplackett 2y ago
When electricity got cheap - we use MORE electricity. Think how many places you see shitty software currently. My wife was just trying to use an app to book a test with the doctor - did not work at all. The staff said they know it doesn’t work. They still give out the app. We are surrounded by awful software. There’s a lot of work to do- if it could be done cheaper. Currently only rich companies can make great software.
- eitland 2y ago
  > We are surrounded by awful software. There’s a lot of work to do- if it could be done cheaper. Currently only rich companies can make great software. Lots of the awful software is made by awfully rich companies - and lots of good software is made by bootstraped devs. To mention some interesting examples, both Amazon and Google has gone from great to meh soon after they went from startups to entrenched market leaders.
  - jonplackett 2y ago
    Sorry I’m a bit slow picking this convo back up. I guess this is why I’m excited. AI will give smaller motivated teams a lot more firepower. One committed person can (or may soon be able to) take on the might of a big company. These companies are making crap software because their scale makes them hard to compete with. They know there’s no other good options. I think Sam Altman’s right that there’ll be a 1 person unicorn company at some point.
- rty32 2y ago
  Well, that probably happens to some extent, but I am quite confident that some smaller shops will just say "Hey make an app that works 50% of the time and that's good enough." then fire half of the staff. Oh, not just smaller shops, I have many issues with Android and other Google products -- from bugs to things that just don't work that have existed for decades, and there is no action on those over the years. Surely Google has the resources? Right? riiight? This is a human problem, not a technology problem.
deathanatos 2y ago
> What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? This is kinda ironic in a thread that's basically about the AI hype landscape, but you've just reduced the amount of SWE "power" your example organization has there by 25%.
tarsinge 2y ago
SWE became way more productive with Email and the Internet, did that lead to a significant part of them getting fired?
littlestymaar 2y ago
> SWE and CS are already in play. What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? You know what happened last time we got 50% more efficient? It was when github and npm arrived. LLM are saving time and making us more efficient, but that's peanuts compared to the ability to just “download a lib that does X” instead of coding this shit on your own. And you know what happened after that? SWE position skyrocketed.
charlie0 2y ago
Buy stocks and try to own the means of production. Things are going to begin to flatten out in terms of salary or even decrease as competition increases due to productivity gains.

schnitzelstoat 2y ago

I agree on the first two points. On the third point, I think we've always seen this happen even in massive shocks like the Industrial Revolution (and the Second Industrial Revolution with assembly lines etc. and the Computer Age) It might be hard for people to retrain to whatever the new opportunities are though. Although perhaps somewhat easier nowadays with the internet etc.

beepbooptheory 2y ago
The industrial revolution didn't lay everyone off, it just made everyone's jobs worse in every possible sense.
- visarga 2y ago
  I don't think many would switch current life with pre-industrial life. You are idealising the past and discounting the present
  - beepbooptheory 2y ago
    Not trying to value life in general at all, just the nature of the jobs. You might reply "distinction without a difference," and well, the fact that you'd think so would be one of my points about the labor ;). Personally, preindustrial life sounds pretty rough, but its all just apples and oranges! The future will continue to happen, to critique the present and how we got here is not to exhort the past (unless, you know, you are a particularly conservative person I guess).
kranke155 2y ago
The Industrial Revolution was a period of massive economic growth that was coupled with decline in the quality of life of the average worker. This Economist article talks about how looking at the historical data, historians now see that the height of the average Englishman actually went down due to malnutrition. https://web.archive.org/web/20210905065401/https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-living-standards-improve-during-the-industrial-revolution https://web.archive.org/web/20210905065401/https://www.econo... The myth that the Industrial Revolution was a wonderful time is just that, a myth. The actual reality of the AI revolution will likely be the same. Record number of billionaires and record number of people in deep poverty at the same time.
- gazook89 2y ago
  Do people really think the Industrial Revolution was “a wonderful time”? Basically the first thought to comes to mind for me is massive migration to urban centers, along with huge amount of poverty and squalid living conditions and disassociation with your own labor. I feel like that was basically what was taught to me in High School too, not like some recently learned insight. And I agree with you. Further, the argument about economic prosperity isn’t equal for everyone. And increased worker efficiency isn’t directly (or sometimes at all) linked to worker satisfaction or even increased wages.
  - kranke155 2y ago
    I’ve heard some people say it. That economic disruption doesn’t matter because “all the pieces fall into place” eventually and the Industrial Revolution being an example.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  Well, yeah but right now we're reaping many benefits from the industrial revolution. Malnutrition for sure. Not saying it's the same as the AI boom though.
visarga 2y ago
One thing AI is good at is explaining things, we can retrain faster and better with it.

wil421 2y ago

Just like robo-taxis are supposed to be driving us around or self driving cars. Not to mention the non-fiat currency everyone can easily use to buy goods nowadays.

hiddencost 2y ago
Waymo is doing 100k paid driverless trips a week with significantly better safety than humans in matched conditions.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  The easiest 100 thousand trips per week (look at the three cities) out of the US's 7.7 billion trips per week? How is that meaningful?
- andy_ppp 2y ago
  On a small subsection of US roads, British roads for example don’t make any sense. However, generally I think being a software developer might be not a career in 10 years which is terrible to think about. Designer too. And all of this is through stealing peoples work as their own.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    These models are not repositories or archives of others work that they simply stitch together to create output. It's more accurate to say that they view work and then create an algorithm that can output the essence of that work. For image models, people are often pretty surprised to learn that they are only a few gigabytes in size, despite training on petabytes of images.
dijit 2y ago
To be fair, I haven't touched real money in about 3 years. If it's called "bank-coin"; "swedish crowns" or "bitcoin" it doesn't matter because it's all digital anyway. On that count, the technological innovation is here, but it's centralised in a few "trusted" entities, just like everything.

visarga 2y ago

> What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? Zero sum game or fixed lump of work fallacy. Think second order effects - now that we spend less time repeating known methods, we will take on more ambitious work. Competition between companies using human + AI will raise the bar. Software has been cannibalizing itself for 60 years, with each new language and framework, and yet employment is strong.

typewithrhythm 2y ago
It's probably true, but just not for SWEs. Many roles will go the way of secretarys; the cost of making an administrative tool will decrease to the point where there is less need for a specialised role to handle it. The question is going to be about the pace of disruption, is there something special about these new tools?
dizzydes 2y ago
Fair, there are probably two threads to this. New product that push that bar and can command a decent margin (and good staff salaries) as long as there's a business case/demand and feature-sets that currently command a decent margin will be available for dirt cheap prices (managed by one or two person outfits). Your comment really got me thinking, it's time to upskill haha. Aside from biotech and robotics do you see any areas particularly ripe for this push?
- visarga 2y ago
  For example, it the core field of innovation is biotech, there will be unexpected needs in downstream and upstream fields like medical tooling, biosensors, carbon capture and novel materials. Internet blossomed into a thousand businesses, I expect the same thing to happen again - we gain new capabilities, they open up demand for new products, so we get new markets and industries. Desires always fill up the existing capability space like a gas fills a room.

snowwrestler 2y ago

If an AI can do my job, why would my employer fire me? Why wouldn’t they be excited to get 200% productivity out of me for the marginal cost of an AI seat license? A lot of the predictions of job loss are predicated on an unspoken assumption that we’re sitting at “task maximum” so any increase in productivity must result in job loss. It’s only true if there is no more work to be done. But no one seems to be willing or able or even aware that they need to make that point substantively—to prove that there is no more work to be done. Historically, humans have been absolutely terrible at predicting the types and volumes of future work. But we’ve been absolutely incredible at inventing new things to do to keep busy.

ninetyninenine 2y ago
> If an AI can do my job, why would my employer fire me? Why wouldn’t they be excited to get 200% productivity out of me for the marginal cost of an AI seat license? They’d be excited at getting 100x of 100% output out an AI for 20 dollars a month and laying you off as redundant. If you aren’t scared of the potential of this technology you are lying to yourself.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  Again: I’m only made redundant if there is no more work that my employer needs me to do. Why should I be scared of technology that makes me more productive?
  - physicsguy 2y ago
    This assumes that the bottleneck to profitability is the limit of software engineers they can afford to hire. If they’re happy with current rate of progress (and in many companies that is the case), then a productivity increase of 100% means they need half the current number of engineers.
    - flimsypremise 2y ago
      what company have you ever worked for that was happy with the current rate of progress in software development?

no_op 2y ago

Non-general AI won't cause mass unemployment, for the same reason previous productivity-enhancing tech hasn't. So long as humans can create valuable output machines can't, the new, higher-output economy will figure out how to employ them. Some won't even have to switch jobs, because demand for what they provide will be higher as AI tools bring down production costs. This is plausible for SWEs. Other people will end up in jobs that come into existence as a result of new tech, or that presently seem too silly to pay many people for — this, too, is consistent with historical precedent. It can result in temporary dislocation if the transition is fast enough, but things sort themselves out. It's really only AGI, by eclipsing human capabilities across all useful work, that breaks this dynamic and creates the prospect of permanent structural unemployment.

fulafel 2y ago
We do have emplyoment problems arguably caused by tech, currently the bar of minimum viable productivity is higher than before in a lot of countries. In western welfare states there aren't jobs anymore for people who were doing groundskeeper ish things 50 years ago (apart from public sector subsidized employment programs). We need to come up with ways of providing meaningful roles for the large percentage of people whose peg shape doesn't fit the median job hole.
consteval 2y ago
> So long as humans can create valuable output machines can't Not all humans are going to be capable of this as time goes on. Those humans will be subjected to abject poverty. The reality is not everyone can possess a highly skilled knowledge job. Not everyone can go to college. What of them?
- no_op 2y ago
  The irregularities of many real-world problems will keep even humans of low intelligence employable in non-AGI scenarios. Consider that even if you build a robot to perform 99% of the job of, say, a janitor, there's still that last 1%. The robot is going to encounter things that it can't figure out, but any human with an IQ north of 70 can. Now, initially this still looks like it's going to reduce demand for janitors by 99%. So it's still going to cause mass unemployment, right? Except, it's going to substantially reduce the cost of janitorial services, so more will be purchased. Not just janitorial services, of course. We'll deploy such robots to do many things at higher intensity than we do today, and as well as many things that we don't do at all right now because they're not cost effective. So in equilibrium (again, the transition may be messy), with 99% automation we end up with an economy 100x the size, and about the same number of humans employed. I know this sounds crazy, but it's the historical norm. Today's industrialized economies already have hundreds of times the output of pre-industrial economies, and yet humans mostly remain employed. At no point did we find that we didn't want any more stuff, actually, and decide to start cashing out productivity increases as lower employment rather than more output.

jonplackett 2y ago

When electricity got cheap - we use MORE electricity. Think how many places you see shitty software currently. My wife was just trying to use an app to book a test with the doctor - did not work at all. The staff said they know it doesn’t work. They still give out the app. We are surrounded by awful software. There’s a lot of work to do- if it could be done cheaper. Currently only rich companies can make great software.

eitland 2y ago
> We are surrounded by awful software. There’s a lot of work to do- if it could be done cheaper. Currently only rich companies can make great software. Lots of the awful software is made by awfully rich companies - and lots of good software is made by bootstraped devs. To mention some interesting examples, both Amazon and Google has gone from great to meh soon after they went from startups to entrenched market leaders.
- jonplackett 2y ago
  Sorry I’m a bit slow picking this convo back up. I guess this is why I’m excited. AI will give smaller motivated teams a lot more firepower. One committed person can (or may soon be able to) take on the might of a big company. These companies are making crap software because their scale makes them hard to compete with. They know there’s no other good options. I think Sam Altman’s right that there’ll be a 1 person unicorn company at some point.
rty32 2y ago
Well, that probably happens to some extent, but I am quite confident that some smaller shops will just say "Hey make an app that works 50% of the time and that's good enough." then fire half of the staff. Oh, not just smaller shops, I have many issues with Android and other Google products -- from bugs to things that just don't work that have existed for decades, and there is no action on those over the years. Surely Google has the resources? Right? riiight? This is a human problem, not a technology problem.

deathanatos 2y ago

> What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? This is kinda ironic in a thread that's basically about the AI hype landscape, but you've just reduced the amount of SWE "power" your example organization has there by 25%.

tarsinge 2y ago

SWE became way more productive with Email and the Internet, did that lead to a significant part of them getting fired?

littlestymaar 2y ago

> SWE and CS are already in play. What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? You know what happened last time we got 50% more efficient? It was when github and npm arrived. LLM are saving time and making us more efficient, but that's peanuts compared to the ability to just “download a lib that does X” instead of coding this shit on your own. And you know what happened after that? SWE position skyrocketed.

charlie0 2y ago

Buy stocks and try to own the means of production. Things are going to begin to flatten out in terms of salary or even decrease as competition increases due to productivity gains.