I already pay for a GPT subscription, and its reliability is one of the worst of any product I pay for. The novelty keeps me paying, but I can't imagine building a business on it.
Employers will save health, logistics, HR, etc.
Governments will have to pay for unemployment
Just the same as always - privatize the gains
Those people no longer have jobs. That sounds bad, but consider they can now do something else. (Ad infinitum this is obviously a problem. But the history of technological development provides cause for optimism in the long run.)
I think it actually provides cause for pessimism: in the past those people had other kinds of jobs to move to. But this AI revolution makes it much harder to move to another job other than a menial one because a lot of the lower level office jobs are affected all at once. This creates a lot of downward pressure on fields that were already paying peanuts and where employers have realized they can now squeeze even further, either by cutting wages directly or by having more desperate entrants in the race to the bottom.
Going from agricultural work into technology was an improvement, going from office work to unskilled labor is a regression. Upward mobility is limited because there is less room there anyway and there too there will be more competition for fewer jobs.
So for the moment I don't really see the upside on a societal scale, even if for some individuals there are upsides.
If we automate away administration, there is a bonanza to be had. Every person would in essence be a start-up team. That's enough surplus to figure out a transition. I'm not optimistic about every political system finding the solution. But some will, and then it slowly spreads.
HN is not an 'average' in this sense at all, more likely an extreme outlier. This is also why the 'gig economy' is such a huge step back.
The 9 to 5 job was invented alongside the Industrial Revolution. (And clocks.) Before that, many civilisations were collections of entrepreneurial households. (Plus slaves/serfs/servants.)
The point is civilisation adapts. But the long run, in making some people more productive, has historically been everyone getting richer.
Those were the exceptions, not the rules, the slaves, serfs and servants were the bulk and what is happening now is that we are re-creating the conditions where lots of people will have nothing to offer but their physical labor, in that sense it is the reverse of the industrial revolution. But couple AI with robotics and you might not need those people at all. What do you propose to do with them? What about the millions of translators, truck drivers, copywriters cab drivers, couriers and so on?
If you propose they become entrepreneurs in what domain should this happen? And what will safeguard those domains from being usurped in turn?
It's interesting how the fact that civilization has adapted to date gets taken as proof that it will always work but that's faulty logic: this time it may not work and even if it worked for society it most definitely didn't work for all of the individuals in it. And this time around it may not work for the majority of the individuals in it.
This was the exact argument made during the Industrial Revolution. Keep in mind that a minority of workers today are in white-collar jobs. We're over a century out from mechanising physical labor, and it's still strongly present.
> what about the millions of translators, truck drivers, copywriters cab drivers, couriers and so on?
Drafting spreadsheets by hand was a profession up to teh 1980s. Same for reams of printing and document-couriering services. People adapted.
> If you propose they become entrepreneurs in what domain should this happen?
Idk, launch a florist or ski instructing or tour guiding service. Travelling chef. There are so many talented people with zero knack for administration stuck in service jobs.
> this time it may not work and even if it worked for society it most definitely didn't work for all of the individuals in it. And this time around it may not work for the majority of the individuals in it.
Not using precedent as proof. Just saying there is precedence for technological revolutions and this very concern. The fact that it's gone pretty much one way elevates the burden of proof for those preaching doom and gloom.
Another observation: the socieities that best distributed the gains in a way that was win-win were those who approached it with optimism.
> it may not work for the majority of the individuals in it
Sure. I'm not saying the transition won't be hard. But it's not avoidable. And in the long run, precedence shows it should (or at the very least, can) work out. Having excess production and a labour surplus is a champagne problem. That doesn't mean one can't fuck it up.