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This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job dis

by enduser 9mo ago

This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to automate everything will be out-competed by companies/countries that use humans and robots together to maximum effect.

vlovich123 9mo ago
I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- baq 9mo ago
  Humans still play chess and horses are still around as a species. (Disclaimer: this is me trying to be optimistic in a very grim and depressing situation)
  - skissane 9mo ago
    B2C businesses need consumers. If AIs take all the jobs, then most of the population-minus the small minority who are independently wealthy and can live off their investments-go broke, and can’t afford to buy anything any more. Then all the B2C businesses go broke. Then all the B2B businesses lose all their B2C business customers and go broke. Then the stock market crashes and the independently wealthy lose all their investments and go broke. Then nobody can afford to pay the AI power bills any more, so the AIs get turned off. And that’s why across-the-board AI-induced job losses aren’t going to happen-nobody wants the economic house of cards to collapse. Corporate leaders aren’t stupid enough to blow everything up because they don’t want to be blown up in the process. And if they actually are stupid enough, politicians will intervene with human protectionism measures like regulations mandating humans in the loop of major business processes. The horse comparison ultimately doesn’t work because horses don’t vote.
    - baq 9mo ago
      This is the optimistic take, too. There are plenty of countries which don’t care about votes, indeed there are dictators that don’t care about their subjects, they only care about outcomes for themselves. The economic argument only works in capitalism and rule of law - and that’s assuming money is worth anything anymore.
      - skissane 9mo ago
        The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with social stability. Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process? Or will they enact human protectionism regulations? What Would Xi Jinping Do?
        ben_w 9mo ago
        > Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process? If AI can take all the jobs (IMO at least a decade away for the robotics, and that's a minimum not a best-guess), the economy hasn't been destroyed, it's just doing whatever mega-projects the owners (presumably in this case the Chinese government) want it to do. That can be all the social stability stuff they want. Which may be anything from "none at all" to whatever the Chinese equivalent is of the American traditional family in a big detached house with a white picket fence, everyone going to the local church every Sunday, people supporting whichever sports teams they prefer, etc. I don't know Chinese culture at all (well, not beyond OSP and their e.g. retelling of Journey to the West), so I don't know what their equivalents to any of those things would be.
        tstrimple 9mo ago
        Look at what China does to protect its citizens against social media. You see China enacting many of the social media protections that many HN enthusiasts demand, yet Sinophobia makes them reframe it as a negative. "Children shouldn't have access to social media, except when China does it then it's bad!"
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  - plufz 9mo ago
    I try to be optimistic as well. But obviously horses are almost exclusively a hobby today. The work horse is gone. I think the problem is political to a part, if we manage to spread the wealth AI can create we are fine. If we let it concentrate power even more it looks very grim.
  - ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
    I am somewhat confident that horses are going to replace cars and tractors pretty soon, possibly within my lifetime and quite likely with my son's. He's going to learn how to drive (and repair) a tractor but he's also going to learn how to ride a horse.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 9mo ago
  Perhaps you have missed the essential point. Who drives the cars? It's not the horses, is it? And a chess computer is just as unlikely to start a game of chess on its own as a horse is to put on its harness and pull a plow across a field. I'm not entirely sure what impact all this will have on the job market, but your comparisons are flawed.
  - Covenant0028 9mo ago
    In the case of horses and cars, you need the same number of people to drive both (exactly one per vehicle). In the case of AI and automation, the entire economic bet is that agents will be able to replace X humans with Y humans. Ideally for employers Y=0, but they'll settle for Y<<X. People seem to think this discussion is a binary where either agents replace everybody or they don't. It's not that simple. In aggregate, what's more likely to happen (if the promises of AI companies hold good) is large scale job losses and the remaining employees becoming the accountability sinks to bear the blame when the agent makes a mistake. AI doesn't have to replace everybody to cause widespread misery.
    - ahf8Aithaex7Nai 9mo ago
      Yes, I understand that it's about saving on labor costs. Depending on how successful this is, it could lead to major changes in the labor market in economies where skilled workers have been doing quite well up to now.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- 9rx 9mo ago
  > Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. Oh? I sat down for a game of chess against a computer and it never showed up. I was certain it didn't show up because computers are unable to without human oversight, but tell me why I'm wrong.
  - p-e-w 9mo ago
    Apparently human chess grandmasters also need “oversight” from airplanes, because without those, essentially none of them would show up at elite tournaments.
    - 9rx 9mo ago
      Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and perform while there, without airplanes. Computer chess systems, on the other hand, cannot do anything without human oversight.
      - fsflover 9mo ago
        Yes, a computer chess system replacing a thousand chess players requires a couple of developers for the oversight.
        9rx 9mo ago
        Computer chess systems don't need developer oversight. They do, however, require oversight from, let's call them, IT people.
      - ben_w 9mo ago
        > Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and perform while there, without airplanes. Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes for the point being made. I (not that I'm even as good as "mediocre" at chess) cannot legally get from my current location to the USA without some other human being involved. This is because I'm not an American and would need my entry to be OKed by the humans managing the border. I also doubt that I would be able to construct a vessel capable of crossing the Atlantic safely, possibly not even a small river. I don't even know enough to enumerate how hard that would be, would need help making a list. Even if knew all that I needed to, it would be much harder to do it from raw materials rather than buying pre-cut timber, steel, cloth (for a sail), etc. Even if I did it that way, I can't generate cloth fibres and wood from by body like plants do. Even if I did extrude and secrete raw materials, plants photosynthesise and I eat, living things don't spontaneously generate these products from their souls. For arguments like this, consider the AI like you consider treat Stephen Hawking: lack of motor skills aren't relevant to the rest of what they can do. When AI gets good enough to control the robots needed to automate everything from mining the raw materials all the way up to making more robots to mine the raw materials, then not only are all jobs obsolete, we're also half a human lifetime away from a Dyson swarm.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
  > Computers replaced humans as the best chess players Computers can't play chess.
- ForHackernews 9mo ago
  Unless the state of the art has advanced, it was the case that grandmasters playing with computer assistance ("centaur chess") played better than either computers or humans alone.
avereveard 9mo ago
Overseeing robot is a time limited activity. Even building robot has a finite horizon. Current tech can't yet replace everything but many jobs already see the horizon or are at sunset. Last few time this happened the new tech, whether textile mills or computers, drove job creation as well as replacement. This time around some component of progress are visibile, because end of the day people can use this tech to create wealth at unprecedented scale, but other arent as the tech is run with small teams at large scale and has virtually no related ondustries is depends on like idk cars would. It's energy and gpus. Maybe we will be all working on gpu related industries? But seems another small team high scale job. Maybe few tens of million can be employed there? Meanwhile I just dont see the designer + AI job role materializing, I see corpos using AI and cutting the middleman, while designers + AI get mostly ostracized, unable to raise, like a cran in a bucket of crabs.
- misnome 9mo ago
  > because end of the day people can use this tech to create wealth at unprecedented scale _Where?_ so far the only technology to have come out widespread for this is to shove a chatbot interface into every UI that never needed it. Nothing has been improved, no revelatory tech has come out (tools to let you chatbot faster don’t count).
  - avereveard 9mo ago
    In the backend, not directly customer facing. Coca cola is two years in running ai ads. Lovable is cash positive, and many of the builder there are too. A few creators are earning a living with suno songs. Not millions mind but they can live off their ai works. If you dont see it happening around you, you're just not looking.
    - misnome 9mo ago
      So, a company cutting costs, a tool to let you chatbot faster, and musical slop at scale. This doesn't sound like "creating wealth at unprecedented scale"
impossiblefork 9mo ago
I think the big problem here though, is that humans go from being mandatory to being optional, and this changes the competitive landscape between employers and workers. In the past a strike mattered. With robots, it may have to go on for years to matter.
- baq 9mo ago
  A strike going long enough and becoming big enough becomes a political matter. In the limit, if politicians don't find a solution, blood gets spilled. If military and police robots are in place by that time, you can ask yourself what's the point of those unproductive human leeching freeriders at all.
  - MLgulabio 9mo ago
    [dead]
- simgt 9mo ago
  In this scenario wages will have been driven down so much that there will be barely anyone left to buy the products made by these fully automated corps. A strike won't work, but a revolt may and is more likely to happen.
  - gunt_crusher 9mo ago
    [dead]
jimbokun 9mo ago
Why not just have the robots oversee the robots?

by enduser 9mo ago

vlovich123 9mo ago

I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
baq 9mo ago
Humans still play chess and horses are still around as a species. (Disclaimer: this is me trying to be optimistic in a very grim and depressing situation)
- skissane 9mo ago
  B2C businesses need consumers. If AIs take all the jobs, then most of the population-minus the small minority who are independently wealthy and can live off their investments-go broke, and can’t afford to buy anything any more. Then all the B2C businesses go broke. Then all the B2B businesses lose all their B2C business customers and go broke. Then the stock market crashes and the independently wealthy lose all their investments and go broke. Then nobody can afford to pay the AI power bills any more, so the AIs get turned off. And that’s why across-the-board AI-induced job losses aren’t going to happen-nobody wants the economic house of cards to collapse. Corporate leaders aren’t stupid enough to blow everything up because they don’t want to be blown up in the process. And if they actually are stupid enough, politicians will intervene with human protectionism measures like regulations mandating humans in the loop of major business processes. The horse comparison ultimately doesn’t work because horses don’t vote.
  - baq 9mo ago
    This is the optimistic take, too. There are plenty of countries which don’t care about votes, indeed there are dictators that don’t care about their subjects, they only care about outcomes for themselves. The economic argument only works in capitalism and rule of law - and that’s assuming money is worth anything anymore.
    - skissane 9mo ago
      The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with social stability. Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process? Or will they enact human protectionism regulations? What Would Xi Jinping Do?
      - ben_w 9mo ago
        > Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process? If AI can take all the jobs (IMO at least a decade away for the robotics, and that's a minimum not a best-guess), the economy hasn't been destroyed, it's just doing whatever mega-projects the owners (presumably in this case the Chinese government) want it to do. That can be all the social stability stuff they want. Which may be anything from "none at all" to whatever the Chinese equivalent is of the American traditional family in a big detached house with a white picket fence, everyone going to the local church every Sunday, people supporting whichever sports teams they prefer, etc. I don't know Chinese culture at all (well, not beyond OSP and their e.g. retelling of Journey to the West), so I don't know what their equivalents to any of those things would be.
      - tstrimple 9mo ago
        Look at what China does to protect its citizens against social media. You see China enacting many of the social media protections that many HN enthusiasts demand, yet Sinophobia makes them reframe it as a negative. "Children shouldn't have access to social media, except when China does it then it's bad!"
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- plufz 9mo ago
  I try to be optimistic as well. But obviously horses are almost exclusively a hobby today. The work horse is gone. I think the problem is political to a part, if we manage to spread the wealth AI can create we are fine. If we let it concentrate power even more it looks very grim.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
  I am somewhat confident that horses are going to replace cars and tractors pretty soon, possibly within my lifetime and quite likely with my son's. He's going to learn how to drive (and repair) a tractor but he's also going to learn how to ride a horse.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 9mo ago
Perhaps you have missed the essential point. Who drives the cars? It's not the horses, is it? And a chess computer is just as unlikely to start a game of chess on its own as a horse is to put on its harness and pull a plow across a field. I'm not entirely sure what impact all this will have on the job market, but your comparisons are flawed.
- Covenant0028 9mo ago
  In the case of horses and cars, you need the same number of people to drive both (exactly one per vehicle). In the case of AI and automation, the entire economic bet is that agents will be able to replace X humans with Y humans. Ideally for employers Y=0, but they'll settle for Y<<X. People seem to think this discussion is a binary where either agents replace everybody or they don't. It's not that simple. In aggregate, what's more likely to happen (if the promises of AI companies hold good) is large scale job losses and the remaining employees becoming the accountability sinks to bear the blame when the agent makes a mistake. AI doesn't have to replace everybody to cause widespread misery.
  - ahf8Aithaex7Nai 9mo ago
    Yes, I understand that it's about saving on labor costs. Depending on how successful this is, it could lead to major changes in the labor market in economies where skilled workers have been doing quite well up to now.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
9rx 9mo ago
> Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. Oh? I sat down for a game of chess against a computer and it never showed up. I was certain it didn't show up because computers are unable to without human oversight, but tell me why I'm wrong.
- p-e-w 9mo ago
  Apparently human chess grandmasters also need “oversight” from airplanes, because without those, essentially none of them would show up at elite tournaments.
  - 9rx 9mo ago
    Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and perform while there, without airplanes. Computer chess systems, on the other hand, cannot do anything without human oversight.
    - fsflover 9mo ago
      Yes, a computer chess system replacing a thousand chess players requires a couple of developers for the oversight.
      - 9rx 9mo ago
        Computer chess systems don't need developer oversight. They do, however, require oversight from, let's call them, IT people.
    - ben_w 9mo ago
      > Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and perform while there, without airplanes. Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes for the point being made. I (not that I'm even as good as "mediocre" at chess) cannot legally get from my current location to the USA without some other human being involved. This is because I'm not an American and would need my entry to be OKed by the humans managing the border. I also doubt that I would be able to construct a vessel capable of crossing the Atlantic safely, possibly not even a small river. I don't even know enough to enumerate how hard that would be, would need help making a list. Even if knew all that I needed to, it would be much harder to do it from raw materials rather than buying pre-cut timber, steel, cloth (for a sail), etc. Even if I did it that way, I can't generate cloth fibres and wood from by body like plants do. Even if I did extrude and secrete raw materials, plants photosynthesise and I eat, living things don't spontaneously generate these products from their souls. For arguments like this, consider the AI like you consider treat Stephen Hawking: lack of motor skills aren't relevant to the rest of what they can do. When AI gets good enough to control the robots needed to automate everything from mining the raw materials all the way up to making more robots to mine the raw materials, then not only are all jobs obsolete, we're also half a human lifetime away from a Dyson swarm.
ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
> Computers replaced humans as the best chess players Computers can't play chess.
ForHackernews 9mo ago
Unless the state of the art has advanced, it was the case that grandmasters playing with computer assistance ("centaur chess") played better than either computers or humans alone.

avereveard 9mo ago

Overseeing robot is a time limited activity. Even building robot has a finite horizon. Current tech can't yet replace everything but many jobs already see the horizon or are at sunset. Last few time this happened the new tech, whether textile mills or computers, drove job creation as well as replacement. This time around some component of progress are visibile, because end of the day people can use this tech to create wealth at unprecedented scale, but other arent as the tech is run with small teams at large scale and has virtually no related ondustries is depends on like idk cars would. It's energy and gpus. Maybe we will be all working on gpu related industries? But seems another small team high scale job. Maybe few tens of million can be employed there? Meanwhile I just dont see the designer + AI job role materializing, I see corpos using AI and cutting the middleman, while designers + AI get mostly ostracized, unable to raise, like a cran in a bucket of crabs.

misnome 9mo ago
> because end of the day people can use this tech to create wealth at unprecedented scale _Where?_ so far the only technology to have come out widespread for this is to shove a chatbot interface into every UI that never needed it. Nothing has been improved, no revelatory tech has come out (tools to let you chatbot faster don’t count).
- avereveard 9mo ago
  In the backend, not directly customer facing. Coca cola is two years in running ai ads. Lovable is cash positive, and many of the builder there are too. A few creators are earning a living with suno songs. Not millions mind but they can live off their ai works. If you dont see it happening around you, you're just not looking.
  - misnome 9mo ago
    So, a company cutting costs, a tool to let you chatbot faster, and musical slop at scale. This doesn't sound like "creating wealth at unprecedented scale"

impossiblefork 9mo ago

I think the big problem here though, is that humans go from being mandatory to being optional, and this changes the competitive landscape between employers and workers. In the past a strike mattered. With robots, it may have to go on for years to matter.

baq 9mo ago
A strike going long enough and becoming big enough becomes a political matter. In the limit, if politicians don't find a solution, blood gets spilled. If military and police robots are in place by that time, you can ask yourself what's the point of those unproductive human leeching freeriders at all.
- MLgulabio 9mo ago
  [dead]
simgt 9mo ago
In this scenario wages will have been driven down so much that there will be barely anyone left to buy the products made by these fully automated corps. A strike won't work, but a revolt may and is more likely to happen.
- gunt_crusher 9mo ago
  [dead]

jimbokun 9mo ago

Why not just have the robots oversee the robots?