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.
Yes, but then it was a shift from one kind of labor to another. Now it is a shift from some kind of labor into nothing.
> Drafting spreadsheets by hand was a profession up to teh 1980s. Same for reams of printing and document-couriering services. People adapted.
That's a nice mantra but it doesn't put food on any tables. People adapt to large scale war as well, mostly by dying and people adapt to famine, earthquakes and floods as well, mostly by dying. Whose to say that massive unemployment because there literally is no longer enough work to go around (which technically is already the case!) the income streams of which power all of our collective economies is something that we can 'survive' in any form? You are so sure because it worked in the past but that doesn't offer any guarantees for the future at all. That's the same kind of reasoning that would have someone endlessly pull the trigger during Russian Roulette: it worked so far! Until it doesn't...
> 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.
There is only so much demand for florists, ski instructors, traveling chefs or tour guides and those jobs are mostly taken.
The reason those people are in administrative jobs is because that's where the money is. If that source of income disappears they don't just evaporate, they are now 'unstuck' from their source of income, that doesn't change their needs one bit (and in many ways increases those needs, including psychological needs).
> 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.
See Russian Roulette analogy above. It's survivorship bias warmed over.
> Another observation: the socieities that best distributed the gains in a way that was win-win were those who approached it with optimism.
Yes, optimism all the way to the polluted and destabilized world that we live in today. We will be dealing with the consequences of that revolution for the next 20 decades or so and that's assuming that the next one isn't going to do us in. The industrial revolution worked out for some parts of the world. But others were left behind without a moment's thought (well, ok, an occasional tear was shed). The number of people that this revolution leaves behind could very well be orders of magnitude larger.
>> 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.
I'm not sure 'won't be hard' is strong enough and I'm not sure it isn't avoidable, regardless I'm pretty sure that as long as we aren't able to clean up our present day messes that we probably shouldn't be opening more Pandora's boxes unless we have a plan on how we're going to deal with the possible aftermath. Anything less would be - especially given our track record of these things to date - utterly irresponsible.
I know quite a few school age kids. If there is one scary and common thread that runs through what I keep hearing it is that they have universal apathy regarding their future, between 'AI', climate change and various wars why study, why prepare for a world that's changing too fast to keep up with? You may as well enjoy the ride down because the job you are aiming for when you're 14 will no longer exist by the time you hit the job market. And that's a very difficult thing to argue with, and we, the present day tech generation are the ones bringing that about.
I don't have any clear answers either. But I think unbounded optimism is likely to lead to some massive level of disappointment.
I'm arguing that this is far from a certainty. If anything, it seems to be a creature of the AI companies' leadership's marketing.
> reason those people are in administrative jobs is because that's where the money is
This doesn't preclude there being other things there's money in. Just consider how much cheaper education becomes without administrative bloat.
> See Russian Roulette analogy above. It's survivorship bias warmed over.
What's the basis for casting technological revolutions as a game of Russian roulette? Of course your model will predict doom if you hard code that in.
> industrial revolution worked out for some parts of the world
I mean, sure. If you think the world would be better off had we never industrialized or invented agriculture, I guess there's a lot to be depressed about.
> not sure it isn't avoidable
The tech has military applications. It's not avoidable.
> as long as we aren't able to clean up our present day messes that we probably shouldn't be opening more Pandora's boxes unless we have a plan on how we're going to deal with the possible aftermath
You don't know what's in the box until you open it. We wouldn't have wind farms and solar panels (as efficient as they are) without computers. If we'd listened to the people who said we should stop digitising to save jobs we would be worse off vis-à-vis climate change.
> they have universal apathy regarding their future, between 'AI', climate change and various wars why study, why prepare for a world that's changing too fast to keep up with?
Where are these kids geographically? The brighter ones I know are brimming with optimism.
> unbounded optimism is likely to lead to some massive level of disappointment
By definition, right?
I'm not saying we won't be disappointed. But optimism with respect to technological revolutions tends to lead to a better place than fear and pessimism. Even if that better place has its disappointments.
If you have any good advice that transcends 'become an entrepreneur' and 'deal with it' then I'm all ears. Because this is no longer a theoretical issue for me.
> Where are these kids geographically?
NL.
> The brighter ones I know are brimming with optimism.
They're anything but stupid, in fact that's part of the problem, they're clever enough to see which way the wind blows. If they were less smart it would be less of a problem.
However, if I ran a business where we needed to translate documents I still wouldn't trust that to an automatic tool. AI is seriously flawed, hopefully eventually more people will realize that before it buries the internet in layers of garbage.
To summarize, my children are mostly indifferent to the advent of AI because I always tell them it's complete trash.