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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

This is a very misleading metaphor.

Horses were not workers. The were tools workers used.

Farmers used horses to plow the fields. Transport workers used them to transport goods and people. As those workers got better tools to plow and transport, productivity increased, society got richer.

There are also millions of old telegraphs, slide rules, and rotary phones "unemployed" across the world. The fate of these no longer needed tools tells us nothing about the conditions for human workers.

Also, the fact that you can't find a human example to make this argument, but have to use a loyal, brave, and majestic animal instead, should be enough to hint that this is maybe a bit of emotional manipulation rather than a rational argument.

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Guess what, 90% of humans are also tools that a small percentage of other humans use to accomplish their goals.

Few people would argue that the job of “Amazon warehouse worker” is anything other than a tool for Jeff Bezos to become richer and more powerful. The person who has that job, from when they clock in to when they clock out, is functionally equivalent to a horse.

Amazon software engineers are the same, they just make more money today.

By that same logic Jeff Bezos is just a tool I use to get some obscure math textbook written in English shipped to my apartment in Eastern Europe overnight.

The point is that a horse can only do a dramatically narrow functions. It's basically a big walking engine. Conversely Jeff Bezos can tend a garden, build a house, create art, write documents, package goods, negotiate contracts, recruit employees, organise a company, care for children, drive a car, take out the trash, cook diner, etc, etc.

Comparing people and horses in terms of jobs they can do, and their ability to adapt to new tasks is so unbelievably dumb it's staggering it even needs to be pointed out. This is why these arguments for automation imminently putting vast swathes of people permanently out of work has never come true, in the hundreds of years it's been predicted.

Automation hasn’t put humanity out of work yet because humanity has been better at knowledge work. What happens when they’re not?

That's a good point, but talking about horses pulling carts muddies that to the point it's completely obscure.

As BurningFrog says, please find an actual human analogy. You can argue until your face is blue that this applies to humans, but if so you should be able to find an actual example.

Meanwhile developed world economies are close to full employment and have many more vacant positions than unemployed people. We have a skills problem, not an unemployment problem.

An example would be “due to X, essentially all humans are unemployable, except as sources of entertainment for the rich, or as meat”. As this is also the conclusion, it can’t be used as an in-advance example for why the argument is or isn’t reasonable. (Inverse begging the question, I think? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)

I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say.

I’m saying “if so you should be able to find an actual example.” is false.

CGP Grey argued (paraphrased) “if X happens in the future, Y will be like Z”, you are arguing that Y will never be like Z in the future because Y is not currently like Z.

But X has happened many times, and Y has never yet become like Z. Automation has replaced workers on massive, ginormous, gigantuan scales. Factories have replaced manual workers, then more efficient factories have replaced those factories, and then that's happened again several times over. Yet still we have near full employment and many, many more open positions than we have unemployed.

How long are we supposed to wait for this prediction to come true, and how many times does this have to be disproved across how many economies?

X is “AGI invented”. Not special purpose AI, not automation, AGI — the G stands for “general”. If this has ever happened, it wasn’t on Earth (unless you count evolution producing us, in which case the example is “Neanderthals are all dead”).

I don't see what that's got to do with horses then. It seems like that's just completely obscuring the point.

I see. I don’t know how to rephrase it to be better, but I’ll have a go:

Horses represent the importance of muscle power in the economy, which was made vanishing small by mechanisation; AGI would do the same for intellectual labour.

Difference being you can re-train Amazon SWEs as more things are automated / become more efficient.

But to do what? If the economic future this piece presents is right then AI will be able to do everything that humans do.

The difference between this and previous tech improvements is that this one replaces human thought, not manual labor. That’s fundamentally different than everything that’s come before.

People have choices. They can work for another company, they can start their own business, they can go live in the forest and live off the land. People can do whatever they want.

If they want to get money and work at a specific company, don't claim they are slaves. Amazon makes an offer: hey, if you work here you get X amount, and they accept.

You can claim an employee is a tool for the company, but you can also claim a company is a money generator for an employee. It's a work-money trade between 2 parties. Don't claim it's slavery.

Those choices will become illusions.

> Work for another company -> compete for decreasing number of jobs with increasing number of candidates.

> start their own business -> compete with everyone that is smarter than you and/or had a better starting position.

> go live in the forest and live off the land -> this is called poverty.

I agree with you.

But I think there might be a way out:

Spend as little as possible and use all your extra cash to buy stocks. Not meme stocks of course but either an index fund or if you really trust your skill go ahead and pick stocks. If there is a wealth transfer you will be at least partially on the receiving end.

Not to mention in the USA:

Leave your job -> Lose health insurance and anything you paid towards your deductible

More often than not its "take this abusive offer or starve to death". Not much of a choice there. The way I see it, what you're describing is an outdated ideology, which does not apply in practice in most parts of the world, except for a few privileged places.

Come on, this is a very narrow view of things. There are a lot of people that can't just quit their job and start their own business, because well, they don't have any savings or access to credit. The work-money trade could be very very unequal.

I don't see the distinction. Aren't workers also tools used to produce things? What's special about workers that makes them irreplaceable?

> Also, the fact that you can't find a human example to make this argument

What would you count as a single human example of human workers becoming obsolete? This has happened many times. About 96% of people used to work in agriculture. Today it's about 4%. Machines and technology have replaced the rest of the labor needed to grow our food.

> About 96% of people used to work in agriculture. Today it's about 4%.

Let's say the 96% number is from 1750, which I think is roughly right.

World population then was ~800 million. Today it is ~7700 million. Most have jobs.

The human workforce has expanded almost 10x in this period.

But the food needs (and other needs) have expanded 10x. It makes no sense to look at the absolute numbers instead of the percentage. If there had been no technological advancements at all, the workforce would have still expanded (in absolute numbers) to match the population.

Without machines and technology, we would need far, far more people today in agriculture. The need for all those jobs has been destroyed by technology.

When one job becomes obsolete, this frees up labour and people gradually move to other jobs. This increases production, since we're still producing agricultural products (using fewer people), and there's more people now producing other things. Agricultural jobs were destroyed, but there were always other jobs people could do, that weren't done before simply because agriculture sucked up so much labour.

This pattern will continue for a while. When human labour is no longer the best tool for one job, that labour will be reallocated to something else. There's still plenty of things we'd like more of.

But the video is talking about what happens when humans are no longer the best tool for any job. It's happened many times in history that some job has become obsolete. We haven't yet made a machine that's better than humans at every job.

One way to look at this is to compare the basic capabilities of humans and machines. The human list remains roughly constant, but the machine list increases over time.

Actually, what's happening in automation is not what people expected. We still don't have good robot manipulation in unstructured situations. Machine learning gave us automation of "higher" functions first.

The current result is a growth in really dumb jobs, like Amazon warehouse pickers. The computers do almost all the thinking. Humans just pick up things where told to do so and put them somewhere else. Such jobs have no promotion path.

This is the "machines should think, people should work" revolution.

“World population then was ~800 million. Today it is ~7700 million. Most have jobs.”

I doubt this.

In the USA, we have an unemployment number, “able bodied, but not working, or looking for work.” If the 50’s, it was basically housewives. Today it’s a lot of people. (This might not be the exact wording the government uses.)

My point is this number is huge, and never talked about much in the United States. I don’t think the government even has a way of tracking the number?

I don’t know how the rest of the world treats this number.

My guess would be most don’t have jobs, or if that number crossed 50% in any country, the jobs would not be of a livable wage living alone.

Labor force participation rate: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?location...

I don’t know how the rest of the world treats this number.

India deliberately chose not to automate agriculture. They still have about 50% agricultural workers. Recent attempts to change this have resulted in riots.[1]

[1] https://www.facebook.com/Reuters/videos/242972323968171/

We do track this, it’s called the prime working age participation rate.

This is moving the goalpost, though. The discussion was about whether or not the replacibility of generalized human labor is comparable to the replacibility of horse labor. No doubt there can be reasonable disagreement, but we can't compare the adaptation to specialized function replacement with generalized function replacement. The point of the analogy is that it (generlized labor) is novel in human populations, but not for horses.

> Aren't workers also tools used to produce things? What's special about workers that makes them irreplaceable?

Absolutely correct. And the entities employing those tools are called "Capital".

I think that the bigger flaw in the analogy is that horse reproduction is mostly controlled by humans in ways which (to say the least) would not be considered acceptable for humans to do to other humans. Yes, it might be true that most individual horses had more comfortable jobs during that time period, but they also got to reproduce a lot less (it’s also probably uncomfortable for horses to not reproduce, but I’m even ignoring that for now).

I think his logic holds.

The point is that we found new jobs for horses because there were areas where machines were inferior to them. Once machines could do everything that a horse could do (probably some mixture of load carrying and agility / endurance) we had no more work for them.

To bring the same logic to humans, in history machines freed up humans to do better work than before. Let's say what humans excel at is dexterity and thinking. Once machines are more dexterous and can think better than people, there's no more new jobs - because whatever jobs they would be, machines will be better qualified for.

The number of jobs that horses can do is a rounding error compared to the number of jobs that humans can do. If we're living in an imaginary future where machines can be trained to 90% of jobs, sure. But google a list of "most common jobs" and see how many a computer could do fully.

Even if you think a miracle ai revolution is on the horizon, humans and horses are not comparable in terms of diversity of labor

> Even if you think a miracle ai revolution is on the horizon, humans and horses are not comparable in terms of diversity of labor

As someone who does expect an AI revolution, I think you’re being overly literal with an analogy.

For arguments’ sake, a toy model of AGI: copy a human brain onto a substrate that costs less to run than a real human costs to feed [0]. For every intellectual task this human could have performed, it is now cheaper to have the AI do it. As this AI could be based on any human by the nature of the hypothetical, any human intellectual task is now done cheaper by the corresponding AGI.

Current robot bodies (for the hypothetical uploaded minds) are currently a bit meh, but (a) not so much as to make the idea ridiculous, and (b) we’ve already got BCIs demonstrated in animals, so an AGI puppeting a fast growing cheap animal is also entirely within the realm of the plausible if you don’t want robots and don’t care much about animal rights (though not much worse in that regard than current meat production, IMO).

As an aside: tasks is a better metric than jobs, as almost all jobs have many tasks some of which are easier to automate than others.

[0] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51746/when...

> The point is that we found new jobs for horses because...

My core point is that horses didn't have jobs!

People used horses to do jobs.

> Once machines are more dexterous and can think better than people, there's no more new jobs - because whatever jobs they would be, machines will be better qualified for.

I think this is another version of the same error. Machines have jobs in this scenario! People have to pay for what the machines produce, but there is no human on the other side of the transaction, so after a while humans run out of all money and die off.

Or something.. It's getting late and I'll stop here.

> People used horses to do jobs.

If I order food delivered, I and the restaurant are using a human to do a job. If that job can be done by a drone instead, that human has to find something else to do for income. For better or worse, the labor market is a process for turning other humans into tools.

The fact that the horse is paid in oats and not wages is irrelevant: a socially useful niche is transferred from a biological creature to a machine. It's an open question whether the future will contain enough socially useful niches for every working-age human (at least, ones that can pay a subsistence wage).

It is not misleading at all. You cannot find a human example because there is none yet, just as there was none for horses right until we found a way to replace almost all their production with machines. There is likely nothing magic protecting human function from exactly the same fate. We can argue about the time scale, but it seems clear we are headed that way.

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