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Comment by exolymph | Hacker News Reader

> I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead.

I'm not sure how to say this in a non-dickish way, but most of us have to do stuff we don't particularly enjoy in order to make a living. I get that it sucks from your vantage point, but like... I'm sure there were stablehands who loved horses and had no interest in becoming mechanics. Shit happens.

I'm a writer and equally in danger of automated replacement, but so it goes. Maybe I'll end up curating and editing GPT7 output instead of drafting everything myself — I can live with that. It's not like my paid work was written for fun in the first place.

The art I make for my own satisfaction, I expect to continue crafting word by word, and I think people will continue to appreciate that painstaking expression of the human spirit. Just not in a commercial context.

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The problem with your example is that it assumes there is a place for him to go to. Stable hands becoming mechanics. That is the key concern with automation replacing jobs is that it is a zero sum game.

Lump of labor fallacy. Automation is not a zero sum game because it creates new jobs.

These are some bold claims. Id like to see some evidence.

There are more bank tellers today in USA than at any other point, despite the growing number of ATM machines.

https://www.aei.org/economics/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-ro...

This doesn't always happen mind you. But it shows that your (and my) economic instincts are piss poor. We can't just assume what the future holds.

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Another few examples:

3D animation has killed a lot of tweening artists (the people who smoothed out animations for Disney Films like 101 Dalmations or Sleeping Beauty). But 3d animation created the need of modelers, texture artists, riggers, and more.

Automatic Drum machines didn't kill drummers either, but allowed for more music to be made in general.

The only thing that automation "killed" recently was Lawyers, as online webpages that auto-generated common forms removed a ton of jobs that Lawyers used to do. IIRC, Lawyers are in somewhat of a decline because of this.

So it just goes to show that no one really can predict these things.

> 3D animation has killed a lot of tweening artists (the people who smoothed out animations for Disney Films like 101 Dalmations or Sleeping Beauty). But 3d animation created the need of modelers, texture artists, riggers, and more.

together with the previous comment on mechanics and stablehands, i wonder how many people in history grew up training and wanting to be a mechanic, only to be told, sorry we just don't have that many automobiles in the world, we need more stablehands. i wonder how many people went to do fine art in school only to be told 'look you have good skills and all but we just need more tweening artists'.

the pace of technological progress is fast - but not so fast that people being trained in art must move within a year!

I think retraining to an adjacent field is definitely possible - the only thing i see disagreements in is the cost, and who bears that cost.

The evidence is that despite constant growth of productivity since industrial revolution, unemployment is still low and not 99.99%

Evidence

I hear this a lot, that “automation creates jobs” chestnut.

Whenever people try to support this argument, they either fall into the “not thinking quantitatively” fallacy by pointing out that “sure, 25 writers got laid off, but the company used to have no programmers, and now they have 2!” Or they fall into the “not explaining the mechanism” fallacy by giving examples from the past where “stablehands retrained as mechanics” without examining why that happened, and what aspects make 20th century mechanization and 21st century automation completely different in kind.

How many people work on farms as a percentage of the population now as they did 100 years ago? We still eat, but now almost no one farms. Most everyone is still employed. We’ll figure something out.

Ok but that's exactly the problem, the situation we've "figured out" is kinda trash. A bunch of rich people own all the farms and we gave everyone bullshit admin jobs because we can't admit to ourselves that almost nobody farms and we still all eat and maybe that means a good portion of the population could just chill out.

I would much, much, rather work an Admin job than work on a farm

are you aware of how taxing that work is on the body ? How isolating it is ?

What? I'm not comparing the two. The point is that we don't need to do the admin jobs, and we need fewer people to farm the same amount of food, so we can just split the extra free time and maybe some people don't even need to have a job.

> that means a good portion of the population could just chill out.

so you're asking those people who farm (using huge machines and automation to do so extremely efficiently) to give you free food? Why would they want to do that?

The people producing the food get paid. A third party might pay for the feeding of those who cannot pay. Or money accumulated might get redistributed to enable everyone to afford it.

> without examining why that happened, and what aspects make 20th century mechanization and 21st century automation completely different in kind.

So, what aspects are completely different in your opinion? I don't see any fundamental differences. People's wants are unlimited, so the workers no longer necessary due to automation can move to fields where automation can't be applied. There will always be plenty of those because, again, unlimited wants. I mean, in Japan, people are already paying for artificial friends, who will go out for dinner with them. I think we'll have much more work in human contact and companionship in the future. Hopefully, much more doctors per patients and much more teachers per student than today. Etc.

Part of the reason I think 21st century automation is different from 20th century mechanization is that when you mechanize jobs, that requires physical machines, and the number of factory workers and mechanics needed to build/maintain those machines scales linear-ish-ly with the number of machines needed. And so mechanized farming got rid of a lot of farming jobs, but also allowed more farms to be built, which required more and more machines, and thus created manufacturing/mechanic jobs.

Software jobs don’t scale like manufacturing jobs. If you automate a particular profession’s work, they’ll lose their jobs, but meanwhile maybe now 10x more customers can afford the service they provide. But now, scaling the automating software to serve 10x the customers won’t require 10x as many programmers, maybe just a couple good devops people to tend the flock.

You might then argue that customers will still find things to want from the newly freed up labor, but I also think we’re going to start being hard-pressed for categories of work where “the human touch” makes a difference, and also where there is room to employ large sectors of the workforce. Add in that customers “new demands” won’t necessarily correlate with the need for human workers, and it becomes easier to see a world where people keep coming up with new wants, and automation keeps swooping in and immediately satisfying the demand.

The danger is less with automation and more with the speed of automation.

It's hard to retrain. When the change happens between generations there's a natural progression with parent: stable hand, child: mechanic.

When it happens 1-2-5 times in a person's career, then those are some really painful resets.

Sure, some will swim. But the social contract with democracy isn't that "some" swim, it's that "almost everyone swims" (which we generally call "everybody", but that's a separate discussion).

Long term and across society automation is absolutely positive sum. But short-to-long term for those on the short end of the stick it's clearly not.

This discussion usually ends up in "well, let's do UBI"-land, as if that's possible if Republicans get anywhere near control of congress.

> That is the key concern with automation replacing jobs is that it is a zero sum game.

it's not zero sum, because the resources that used to be spent paying you now could be spent on something else. This increase in efficiency means more goods/services could be produced!

Of course, that newly saved money would be spent on someone else, instead of the person being made redundant by automation. It is thus a societal responsibility to retrain/reskill that person, and the training perhaps also partially be paid for by the entity benefiting directly from the automation.

> I'm a writer and equally in danger of automated replacement

Don’t forget about musicians and junior software engineer work…very soon.

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