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Comment by _448 | Hacker News Reader

This claim that AI won't cause unemployment baffles me. I understand the argument being made that new types of jobs will be created, but what the people making that argument miss is the massive level of up-skilling/re-skilling that is required of the population whose jobs are replaced. This has not worked out well. Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam locomotive(yes, for that many generations the effects of job losses are felt). These communities have not yet recovered.

The challenge with AI is that it is going to touch every spectrum of the jobs, and the people required for the available jobs will be far less and require very niche skills.

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It’s very surprising when people talk about AI but not talk about the Industrial Revolution. The power loom hugely changed the world. You don’t have to write a substack about your opinions — just read a history book.

Second, Marc quotes outsourcing but that’s not at all a relevant example. Outsourcing was not a technology. His other example is of robots but robots have not been revolutionary like the power loom or even the assembly line have been.

> Outsourcing was not a technology

He's likely referring to not just the general concept of outsourcing, which has been around forever, but the programming offshoring scare of the early 2000's (which - the scare - was very real, having worked through it). It was very much caused by technology - messaging, Webex (before Skype even), source control and issue tracking getting mainstream adoption (Bugzilla, CVS, Subversion), combined with an influx of people into tech companies and the subsequent market bust in 2000. It was the first time when regular office workers (programmers in this case) realized they could be made completely disposable by the millions, and that would not have been possible before the technology i listed became mainstream.

Still, technology didn’t make for a significant productivity gain. One human wasn’t getting more done — one human was simply being paid less for the same work (arguably worse work).

IMO it’s more of an example of globalization and specifically where globalization works and where it doesn’t.

Everyone should read about the Luddites. Turns out this debate has happened before, except with more smashing.

Smashing? You mean armed government forces fighting against their citizens.

Technologists making historical claims and arguments while not engaging with actual historians and also arguing that the humanities are a waste of time and money... name a better pair.

Like, Stanford has some world class History of Technology scholars just down the road from Marc's home. He could go speak to any of them.

What do you mean? Every article about this makes the comparison with the Industrial Revolution, including this one.

I think he means that the Industrial Revolution made a lot of human work obsolete, yet here we are almost without unemployment. Same for the invention of the wheel.

So how was that possible? Turns out people didn't want to work less, they wanted more stuff. (Bigger houses, more houses, better food, health care, ...)

The same will happen again with AI. Thanks to infinite human wants.

We're only "without unemployment" because most of the population is spectacularly underpaid. This makes it cheaper - so far - to use human labour than machine labour.

And we don't use human labour very efficiently. A lot of activities are pointless make-work or zero productivity wealth transfer.

Which is almost the point of AI. It's not just about partial mechanisation or automation, which is what happened during the first Industrial Revolution. It's about making all human activity obsolete. Including all forms of mental and physical labour. All forms of culture. And all forms of economic and political organisation.

There will be nothing humans can do which a machine won't do better.

We're like the dinosaurs. A few of us are looking up at the new light in the sky and thinking "Well, that's interesting" without much of an idea of what's actually incoming.

> because most of the population is spectacularly underpaid

Underpaid compared to what? I'll start assuming here, so please forgive me: it sounds like you mean "we have a right to not be underpaid" which would be nice but I don't think there's anyone that can bend economic realities to make this right meaningful.

It would be like "we have a right to eat meat" in prehistoric times which is simply a concept but it's not feasible simply because we call it a right. If we have a fixed amount of meat, someone will have to eat less if someone else eats more.

Yes, we can increase meat production but then someone else will again eat less than the others ("underpaid" in terms of meat).

> This makes it cheaper - so far - to use human labour than machine labour.

Yes, new technology is equivalent to putting a maximum salary on human work, eventually it's just not efficient anymore to use humans.

> It's about making all human activity obsolete

I think what you're describing is paradise and I don't see it happening anytime soon. And if it happens, well, no work all play sounds like Star Trek and there we still needed humans to work in politics, defense and research...

> All forms of culture

I think the artist that works in spite of his low income is a counter-example. There are people that like to be "productive", e.g. by making music, ...

> without much of an idea of what's actually incoming

I don't see it incoming anytime soon. But if it happens, I think must people will kill themselves by overdosing on endorphines (using drugs, social media, opioids, whatever else comes along)

"We're like the dinosaurs. A few of us are looking up at the new light in the sky and thinking "Well, that's interesting" without much of an idea of what's actually incoming"

That was the one of the most funniest and at the same time scariest thing I have ever read.

But the real question is: will we make good pets?

>So how was that possible? Turns out people didn't want to work less, they wanted more stuff. (Bigger houses, more houses, better food, health care, ...)

Make smaller houses and density legal by removing zoning laws and we will see people's true preferences.

Not up-skilling but down-skilling. AI is going to come for the mathematicians and radiologists first and work its way down to the pizza delivery boys. This is because robotics is a couple of decades behind. Anyone with a desk job as a knowledge worker is most at risk.

> AI is going to come for the mathematicians and radiologists first.

As a mathematician I can see that 1) chatgpt is not able to make basic computations correctly. 2) there are not many gigabytes of information about how a great mathematician use his brain to develop a new theory or concept. 3) Common language, like that used to train chatgpt, is far from the pure concepts and intuitions used in math

From all of the above, I fail to understand on what basis are you suggesting that AI is going to replace mathematicians.

Perhaps new systems with new capabilities might emerge but what we have now are very simple systems that use some clues to perform the most simple computations.

So you're saying the only thine ChatGPT needs is a reliable pocket calculator and fine tuning with arxiv papers?

You seem to imply that's hard, but to me it doesn't sound like a lot of work, especially compared with humanity collectively training thousands of Math PhDs every year. It's true that we're not quite there yet, but I know I wouldn't bet a 30 year career on this. Are you close to retirement in say 2 years?

Mathematicians are more than just number crunchers. Perhaps the most important part of a mathematicians job is formally defining problems. Even if the next generation of ChatGPT can solve any math problem you give it satisfactory, you still need a mathematician to ask the question.

Presumably this AI won’t be omnipotent either, and there will be some limit to its mathematical prowess. I suspect most human effort will be spent inventing new ways to push the AI further.

LLMs stand to be much better at research mathematics than humans. Breakthroughs in mathematics often come from taking a concept from one area of mathematics and applying it to another area. Humans find this difficult because it's hard to be a research-level mathematician in more than a few areas, a human life isn't long enough to learn that much. Humans learn depth-first.

LLMs learn breadth-first. You can go ask ChatGPT about literally any field of mathematics and it will give you an answer (probably a bad one). It's been trained on the entire Arxiv and (likely) library genesis. When they do become as good at humans at abstract reasoning, they will be as good at humans on all fields at once: an ultra-Tao.

LLMs aren't new and there has been no sign of them being able to automate maths research so far. If they do, I will acknowledge them as AGI as it has been my goalpost for over 30 years. I've never moved it once, and I won't.

Computers were invented in large part for this purpose. The hope was to have a machine that could spit out interesting theorems. It turned out that generating theorems was trivial (you can just enumerate them) but generating interesting theorems was a task of an entirely different nature. To this day, computers are frequently used as tools by maths researchers but cannot do their own independent maths research, i.e. invent and prove their own interesting theorems. This is surprising if you think of research maths as ultimately a game of symbol manipulation, but I think what it tells us is that that is not what research maths is.

The discovery that in trying to make a maths machine we made a computation machine instead, and it wasn't inherently any good at maths, made the difference between computation and maths very clear. What we have now is algorithms that are able to learn patterns in symbol use from large corpuses of text, and generate new text by recombining those patterns. Personally, I'm pretty sure this will be a demonstration that that isn't what research maths is either.

If LLMs do turn out to be capable of independently inventing and proving interesting new theorems (every word of that is important) I will have to throw away most of what I have come to think about what intelligence is, and I will do so without complaint because it will have been shown to have been wrong. Indeed, I'll do it with joy, because I've always believed AGI is possible and the biggest thing I've always wanted out of its invention is a better understanding of what mathematics is. This will have been provided.

However, I don't expect them to. Usually when I mention this people bring up various examples of attempts that have been made to make AIs "do maths" in some way but I'm aware of what has been done so far and none of it comes close to AI "independently inventing and proving interesting new theorems" or looks like its heading towards that any time soon.

It would be interesting to try these things out. I've been experimenting with making art with ChatGPT - instead of telling it how to do it or even what to do specifically I'm asking it for ideas, to then pick its favourite and expand on why etc. It's worked surprisingly well. I've moved on to asking it how you'd make an art show of multiple images, then just asking it to "follow step one in your instructions", "now follow step two".

Results were good enough feeding that into a SD model that we're commissioning the first one it made to get it in real life.

I'm not arguing chatgpt can research maths, but I do think the tools available are now fundamentally different than they were perhaps even last year. I don't think we're even at a point of knowing how best to use what we have, and the models should continue to get better.

I'd encourage you to experiment and see how far away you think things are. I'd do it, I probably will, but I lack the mathematical background to understand whether it's responding with garbage or not.

I can't evaluate the results but here's my first chat, may be interesting: https://gist.github.com/IanCal/4426fdf81797c2800e8202a3b4f6c...

Interesting meaning interesting to humans? If an AI is doing all of the work then maybe it doesn't matter what we consider interesting? You gave a prompt asking for 2023 nostalgia pop music in the care home, and the AI found novel theorems to generate it for you, but it didn't even notice or care! Maybe there will be some hobbyist human Mathematians and the AI can throw them a clue once in a while, like a good murder mystery host.

Interesting generally means having some sort of sufficiently broad applicability to be useful and sufficiently narrow applicability to have enough explanatory power. If you are too narrow you don’t get applied in many situations and if you are too broad you’re generally too watered down to prove anything significant about the situations in which you apply. Some exceptions which makes everything harder.

1+1=2 is a theorem but a very uninteresting one because it applies exactly once.

Every number n has a double successor S(S(n)) is also uninteresting because while it applies more broadly it’s too watered down.

There are no numbers n with n greater than two such that x^n + y^n = z^n is extremely interesting.

You are defining useful relative to human understanding. My point is this may not matter in an AI future.

The underlying concept I’m getting at is that there is more than just human understanding here. Our understanding of mathematics is highly subjective but it seems to me theorems do have some sort of true value with some of them being more useful for doing mathematics and others being things you prove once and never use again.

A robot could prove infinite theorems about every number having a double successor, triple successor and so on. If it does so it’s not just human subjectivity saying it hasn’t done any meaningful mathematics.

If "interesting" is the keyword here, I'd have hope that language models based around mathematics research would at least be able to narrow the scope of theorems being iterated through to those closest to what mathematicians are already talking about. We'll see

That's kind of what PowerPlay does:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5309

If it generates a bunch of theorems, won't some of those be interesting? Is there no easy way for a mathematician to sift through what it makes?

There are an astronomical number of true theorems, but almost all of them are uninteresting and not useful. We've had automatic theorem-generating software for decades, and there are so many useless true theorems that it can keep busy with all the CPU cycles you throw at it without necessarily generating anything useful at all. Even if you let it run with huge resources and generated loads of theorems, searching through them seems pretty hopeless.

Where machine learning systems like LLMs may be able to help is to spot analogies and ways to translate theorems to different areas to do something useful (but the tendency to hallucinate seems a formidable obstacle for things that must be proven). For real automated headway/assistance, I think we need something like Alpha Go's "intuition" at judging the value of a board state somehow applied to mathematical arguments. That's how mathematicians usually work; we have an intuition that we can use a particular approach to prove something, and then we fill in the precise particulars.

Yes, and that was basically the controversy around Doug Lenat’s automated mathematician:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Mathematician

I hope that intelligent mathematicians don't contribute too much to feed the AI. First develop a method by which all of us get better financial outcome in the long run, and then teach the AI some basic thinks just to please investors.

Why does society have mathematicians right now? It's some mix of "the people find mathematics intellectually worthwhile" (public universities) and "we sometimes need to ask them to solve hard problems". If AI makes it less intellectually interesting, the first reason goes away. If engineers can just ask the AI to solve a hard problem instead of the mathematician, they don't need the mathematician as a middle man. So AI also breaks this reason.

> I suspect most human effort will be spent inventing new ways to push the AI further.

Assuming the AI can't just do that itself too.

I am quite interested in this AI that can improve upon itself or come up with genuinely new and novel ideas. What are you referring to exactly? LLMs?

I'm replying to a comment about a hypothetical AI that can do math better than the mathematicians.

You know, this conversation had given me a short story idea. I wonder if anyone's written anything like this.

Humanity produces an intelligent mathematical AI. It starts by solving already solved problems, then leaps to relatively simple unsolved problems, then leaps directly to solving any problem that can be defined to it, including problems that humanity has battled for centuries. It even will give fully consistent proofs and the small group of researchers we're following are astounded. The resident proof experts say that the proofs it's giving are strange and sometimes inelegant but always logically sound. They go about proving many different problems until eventually someone disagrees with the request, saying obviously this one isn't true, it's logically impossible, it won't be able to prove it. But then the machine does, and gives a perfectly valid and consistent proof that to the highest of humanities knowledge, appears correct. Then the mathematician requests it to prove the inverse to explore his fault logic, and again the ai spits out a fully consistent and valid proof, for the opposite condition. No one can find any fault in either proof. They go through asking it to prove all the opposite conditions as they had requested earlier and it always outputs intelligent and fully self consistent proofs. No one can find a flaw in anything it outputs, even when it outputs conflicting information. It's as if it's playing on some higher plane, able to just toy with the absolute maximum of human knowledge to make the results look like anything it wants. Our once thought rigorous foundation is easily thrown away by the machine. Everyone claps and looks scared. The end

Exactly downskilling. So basically not at risk. There is always a shortage of the best. If the best lose their jobs they can take the next best job, or create a new job for themselves.

Yeah I could easily see it happening this way. Which breakthrough will happen first is frankly anyone's guess at this point.

Knowledge workers are at most risk because free access to quality knowledge is disappearing.

I myself, probably 'killed' more work hours (others could have been paid for) than I ever worked myself.

The idea that brilliant new tech is not going to destroy even more jobs is just stupid IMO.

People really refuse to see the reality of our future of unemployment and/or even more badly paid jobs in the gig economy.

If we assume an economy with a demurrage currency, then Say's Law applies and involuntary unemployment is impossible. Without a demurrage currency, Say's Law is not guaranteed at all and structural involuntary unemployment is possible even without increases in productivity unless you have a central bank that has to constantly increase the money supply and emulate the demurrage fee with inflation.

> Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam locomotive(yes, for that many generations the effects of job losses are felt)

In order to make money selling coal, someone has to buy that coal. They're selling something that nobody buys anymore. Try selling ice cubes in the North Pole.

The purpose of those coal jobs was jobs creation, not problem solving.

New generations need to be re skilled in understanding that jobs don't come from government policies but from problem solving. And government can only create new problems.

There were lots of buyers of coal at the time UK mines closed, but other sellers were able to supply at a lower price.

There continue to be buyers of coal now, and indeed the UK recently approved a new mine

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63892381

Yes, basic Economics, price is determined at the margins.

Europe is learning the hard way that fossil fuels are the best energy supply to heat your homes. There's no sun shining in the UK and for some reason you want to run on solar power to heat your homes? Tell me about madness

Government can also create solutions that solve problems. Hoover dam being one excellent on-topic example.

It's ok to give an example to show a contradiction, but it's a mistake to use an example to point a generalization.

Hoover dam is a bad example which can not be generalized into the "government is net positive problem solver" argument.

For one thing, everyone in the West who's fallen on hard times has been pretty grateful their government didn't let them starve to death.

This general, wide-impact instance of problem-solving is why the public will never allow libertarians anywhere near power.

The US is the single largest food and energy producing country in the world. The US economy barely depends on exports to work and it's most important trading partners are the two neighbors, Mexico and Canada. Mexico for labor and Canada for fertilizer.

There is no other country in the world with the relative and absolute advantages of the US. And that has nothing to do thanks to government, but instead despite government.

In particular, the USA energy supply kept running of fossil fuels, which is the government just doing nothing.

The USA is in a position to take a lot of bad choices and still have a great economy. The rest of the world only chance to have a good economy is to make good choices.

The next possible country that had a proven track record of very bad choices and still working out is Argentina. Net positive Food and energy producer. And yes, they tried hard to f*k it.

This still sounds like Reaganism "Government is the problem" rhetoric. Sum GDP is not a good measure of a country, particularly when it is concentrated in a very small group of people.

If citizens (as carried out by their democratic representative government) give corporations an inch, they will take a hundred miles.

If we take the industrial revolution as an example, yes, it is true that on average, at the minimum and as a whole indistrialized nations and societies are better off after it then before.

Also true, the period between before and after sucked, killed and ruined the health of generations, affected mostly those whose skills weren't as valuable as before anymore and the poor. Ignoring this change, and the social impact it has, is heartless capitalism at its worse. And during the industrial revolution, it was only addressed due to labor organisation and action, unions and public pressure so high that governmebts couldn't ignore it anymore. And it gave birth to communism.

Not sure if AI amounts to the same level of impact as industrialisation did, but f it does maybe it it would be sound policy to address the resulting social problems before they are to severe to ignore. And no, I am not talking about six figure salaries tech "workers", I talk about all those under paid and close to minimum wage blue collar real workers.

Honestly, in my opinion, the claim is clickbait misinformation, it fails to address several common issues, and basically relies on the claim that because it hasn't happened in the past it won't happen. There's also a decent number of Chat-GPT like mistakes in the article, so probably a test for clickbait.

Also, credibility is important. I looked up the guy, and he's a hedge-fund guy, who's got a lot of money.

Don't you think if you are in the business of investing, that you've heard and understand intimately the phrase; "past performance does not predict future results".

The reason technology doesn't net destroy jobs is that things that destroy jobs lower costs, which leaves people with more money in their pockets, which creates jobs.

What net destroys jobs is things that unproductively increase costs. Resources that are wasted can't be used for productive labor that improves quality of life.

The reason technology doesn't net destroy jobs is that things that destroy jobs lower costs, which leaves people with more money in their pockets, which creates jobs.

This is true so long as two other things are also true;

- There needs to be something else for people to do instead. In the case of the industrial revolution power looms in factories replaced home weavers, but the factories were huge and could employ all the weavers and more. The factories created more jobs than they destroyed. In the case of AI that isn't immediately true, nor is it obvious that it's going to be true in the short term. So far we can only envisage the destruction of jobs.

- Secondly, the lowering of costs only puts money in people's pockets if the very wealthy don't hoard it for themselves. There are trillions sitting around doing nothing for the economy according to leaks like the Panama Papers. AI could potentially just make those numbers a bit bigger while everyone else starves.

In the long term I'm reasonably optimistic. I think society will organize around AI to let computers do things and we'll settle on an alternative model to 'time worked = money', whether that's something like UBI or artistic patronage or whatever really. I think that's 50 years away. We'll only get to that because in the short term it's going to be painful though.

> There needs to be something else for people to do instead.

This is trivially the case. We still need people to build housing and fell trees for lumber and grow food. But let's suppose AI could do all that.

Then those things would be available at trivial cost because they require no labor. You could work for one day at minimum wage and cover your food and housing costs for a year.

> Secondly, the lowering of costs only puts money in people's pockets if the very wealthy don't hoard it for themselves.

Hoarding money isn't the root of the problem because money isn't resources, it's just paper or bits. If you print a trillion dollars and give it to Bill Gates to stuff in his nefarious mattress, not that much changes.

The true evil is artificial scarcity. But that's an entirely separate problem which is already happening independent of automation.

Suppose there is plenty of labor available to build new housing but you have a law against building new housing. Then people have neither jobs nor housing and get screwed. The thing screwing them is the law, not the AI.

Just because there are new jobs doesn't mean the people whose jobs were automated out of existence will be able to take them. This is the whole "teach truckers to write code" thing from back when people thought the next wave of automation would be self-driving, rather than art.

> Just because there are new jobs doesn't mean the people whose jobs were automated out of existence will be able to take them.

Yes it does, because those are the people whose labor will be available. They'll take whatever jobs they're qualified for, which may lower wages in those occupations until the lower price increases demand or reduces supply by driving anyone currently in those occupations who is qualified for another job into the other job.

The change isn't necessarily Pareto optimal. There can be people who are worse off because the amount their cost of living went down was less than the amount their wages went down. But for most people it will be the opposite, because the change is an increase in productivity. You get more production with less labor, so you on average need to do less labor to meet your cost of living.

Outside of undergraduate economics 101 textbooks Labour is not perfectly fungible.

- People have aptitudes, especially for creative work

- Changing trades requires training/education which in itself requires capital

- for most people their brains are less adaptable at older ages. Which worsens the other two effects.

> Outside of undergraduate economics 101 textbooks Labour is not perfectly fungible.

It wasn't claimed to be. That's why people whose skills are now in lower demand may make less money than other people. But that doesn't mean they can't find jobs.

> You get more production with less labor, so you on average need to do less labor to meet your cost of living.

Citation Needed.

This isn’t how it works out in practice though. If the predictions of the 1950s were to come true, we’d all be working 10 hours a week and bringing in the same wages.

They weren’t wrong though. Efficiency did go up. It’s just that these efficiencies were never passed on to workers. Instead you’re now 3x productive, but for less money. That’s a pay cut.

The same thing happens if/when AI automates us all. We won’t become unemployed, because people like pmarca are scared to death of people with the time and energy to be mad about the raw deal they’ve been given. So instead, we’ll all get paid less, while working longer in more bullshit jobs.

This is the most cynical take, but also sadly the most true to history and therefore probably the future. Sure, the future might have every one of us with the ability to boot up with a command a self-assembling automated factory that previously took a supply chain of thousands of workers to run, but due to the suddenly enormous cost of land and raw materials relative to our make-work wages, nobody can afford to build it.

I am somewhat serious, but also being a little factitious here. There's a breaking point of widespread democratized (runnable by like 1-5 people, or a small community) technology where these companies don't have the same ability to absorb all these gains. If/when the basics for living are largely automated and able to be bootstrapped for very cheap / very little labor by AI-assisted tools, then the only way people are going to settle for jobs that give less than what these provide is by top-down dictatorial artificial scarcity and rent-seeking, blatantly destroying this production ability. I think there's definitely a cynical reality where that happens - and definitely regions of the world where it will - but everywhere..? Eh...

My money for the cynical take is much more along the lines of "massive social upheaval kicks off a world war with terrifying consequences" or "AI eradicates humanity". Less than that and honestly - we're gonna be golden in the long run, and it's gonna be an awkward but neat short/medium run.

> There's a breaking point of widespread democratized (runnable by like 1-5 people, or a small community) technology where these companies don't have the same ability to absorb all these gains

That is actually a technological solution for a societal problem that I see as a way out:

A device that produces food, water, energy and does sanitation for a family of 4-5 people. This device would make it possible to give families higher leverage in any negotiation because they can not be forced to work for survival. We have the tech, only limiting factor is the size, but we will find a way.

- Solar Foods [1] (Protein production with CO2 and solar energy with a fermentation process)

- Omni Processor which recycles human waste [2]

- Tiger Toilet [3]

- Low cost waste water treatment [4]

- And potato production in a small vertical setup

[1]: https://solarfoods.com

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tdlqjGlN3A

[3]: http://www.easol.in/tiger-toilet-overivew

[4]: https://www.tbfenvironmental.in

Yep, exactly. I hope and expect to see automated vertical farm systems as cheap consumer products soon enough, for one. Though I also don't think we necessarily need to reinvent the wheel with this stuff - it doesn't have to be some independent micro system (which are typically much less convenient than mass-produced systems). We can still use standard farming/water/energy-production/sanitation - we just need to reduce the bottom-line cost of those services (which I am still strongly betting AI will impact hard) and make it so creating a competing system takes much less capital to boot up, in case existing services decide they want to try and charge the same consumer prices while eating up all the efficiency gains from AI.

We don't need to settle for lower quality, or convenience. We just need to ensure capitalism does what it's supposed to, and pass on the efficiency gains down to the consumer.

Though also, for my money - water, energy, sanitation? Those are already very cheap, and will get cheaper naturally. And food is cheap if you keep to basics. Automated housing construction and automated high-quality-meal kitchens (not just basics) seem like the areas to tackle for real cost savings. Ultimately the last bastion will be rent seeking on land though - which could be alleviated by creating housing alternatives off the conventional grid, or uplifting the quality of services in much of the developing world so there are much more options of safe areas to live (which again, is happening fast already and will happen much faster with a rapid improvement from AI tooling).

My argument is this is the natural way capitalism works - or is supposed to work - and we should treat that with hearty skepticism. But the only way this doesn't happen seems to be if there are monopolistic forces actively holding it back. Otherwise there really should be an abundance of cheap options for living coming to consumers in the near future, which would effectively be close to a UBI, and a "living off the land" alternative to wage labor.

(P.S. for housing, my bets are more on modular housing production in a factory setting becoming highly automated - the quality level of those builds is already quite high. But also just automation on the materials production all the way down the stack. There's hope for in-place construction savings (robots!) but I think that'll come much later. Logistics transportation was already due for some major improvements before AI reared its head - cheap electric engines just enable some very different structures that effectively have a net-0 cost of operation when combined with solar. Any innovation on that front would dramatically reduce the cost of everything else.

Dark kitchens are already a thing, and expect them to keep growing - especially as the tools improve. You could probably supply a whole city with the same wide variety of well-cooked dishes from a single facility with efficient transport. There's an element of dystopia there as cook jobs disappear and thus the personal touch, but the consumer reality (should be) basically-free meals at the same quality we expect from restaurants, on demand.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35027583

You're ascribing the evils of market concentration to automation. Automation isn't why housing and higher education are so much more expensive now than they were.

Yeah, I saw that post too, but didn’t want to pile on every one of your facile economic takes.

You’re right, automation isn’t why housing and education are more expensive now. The increase of those is direct result of government policy choices encouraged by the voters. For housing, were taking zoning laws, and public objection laws. Higher education tuition increases for public universities is directly tied to cuts in government support for said government institutions.

But let’s get back to the topic at hand, whether or not benefits of productivity increases are felt by workers, or if it’s primarily concentrated with the already wealthy.

The answer is clear. The benefits are concentrated with the few. Sure prices drop, but so do wages and overall wealth by the majority. This isn’t even a controversial take. Government statistics have been tracking this for 40 years.

You’re asking questions like they’re some great unknowable, but not only is this common knowledge, but just an google image search away.

Company size drops too though. Enough automation and every person has the abilities that took hundreds of people in their parents' day. Sure, the wealthiest will be able to leverage their gains the furthest - that's just how capital works - but it's also reducing people's dependency on these big firms and enabling them to personally capture the gains from the drastically-improved means of production. If and when communities are able to self-sufficiently produce most of what they need with just a few people and some AI tools, the game changes. Sure, at that point the rich would already be building death stars and wealth inequality would be even more laughable than it is today, but it'd at least still be a step-up in quality of life from the current regime.

> Higher education tuition increases for public universities is directly tied to cuts in government support for said government institutions.

Government spending on higher education has gone up dramatically.

Most of the increase there is probably attributable to student loan subsidies and the inability of borrowers to default. Make it possible for anyone to borrow an obscene amount of money to bid on status goods like elite degrees and the consequence isn't that hard to predict.

> But let’s get back to the topic at hand, whether or not benefits of productivity increases are felt by workers, or if it’s primarily concentrated with the already wealthy.

> The answer is clear. The benefits are concentrated with the few. Sure prices drop, but so do wages and overall wealth by the majority. This isn’t even a controversial take. Government statistics have been tracking this for 40 years.

What you've failed to establish is any link between the productivity improvements and the concentration of wealth. Why has capital captured the higher share? TFA provided the answer. Market concentration as a consequence of regulatory capture.

Consider the result if we had this degree of market concentration without the efficiency improvements from automation.

A significant part of productivity gains went to workers up until 1999. There is no universal law that says productivity gains are inherently captured by shareholders. Of course if this is a possible option capitalists will choose it. I think this is a consequence of government policy where monopsony power prevents labour from getting a fair price due to only a handful of monopolists having the things that improve productivity.

The predictions of the 1950s were wrong because people chose more stuff over less work. Partially because of the rising cost of land due to concentrated demand leading to needing “more home” in wage adjusted terms. Labour saw gains from increases in productivity and this didn’t really decouple until 1999 after which it mostly didn’t.

It seems to me all the money is just getting more and more concentrated. If Amazon succeeds in completely automating it's warehouses, who will see the bulk of that saved money, the customers or bezos?

> If Amazon succeeds in completely automating it's warehouses, who will see the bulk of that saved money, the customers or bezos?

The answer depends on whether Amazon is a monopoly. If everybody else who sells goods on the internet also automates their warehouses and customers choose the retailer with the lowest prices, they have to pass the savings on to the customer or the customer will buy from Walmart or some other competitor.

But "monopolies raise the cost of living" is a separate problem the solution to which is to get rid of monopolies, not to get rid of automation.

Wholeheartedly agreed there. If (still an if) the automation tools are widespread (preferably open source), the vector of possible businesses that could compete in those areas also greatly increases. What once took a firm of thousands of people might be doable by a few nerds with some AI tools they copied from the internet. Yes, that means a lot of jobs lost at those firms, but it also means massive competition to drive prices down to their minimums - which benefits the consumer and enables entirely new second-order effects.

Regardless of how this all plays out... there's gonna a whole lot of Abundance of Things, and Services. As producers/workers - it's gonna be an awkward time. As Consumers? Ho boy baby - shit's gonna get crazy cheap

Without a doubt the customers will see the bulk of the saved money. But Bezos capturing 5% of it will lead to an even more massive fortune. The minute any sizeable competitor follows suit it’s likely to be back to the typical roughly 2% retail margin with 98% of the savings going to customers.

Well the more you automate everything, the less consumers you're going to have so it does create a bit of a conundrum no ?

Probably what's going to happen is everyone will get more productive as open source AI models become more accessible and cheaper to run yourself, tooling, robots etc, then it will kind of end up leveling off again. Amazon will become less relevant because many other companies will have factories that are automated too.

It would be nice if we end up in a society where it's so cheap to produce everything that we're all wealthy.

I actually think there are so so so many variables at place that no one can predict where this is going... I get a feeling it's going to be a surprise.

If those communities were moving to London they would be doing fine. The unemployment rate in the UK is really low. It doesn't mean that a job will show up at your doorstep without having to do anything.

The communities are moving to London. Hundreds of thousands of (primarily young) people have been moving into London each year from other UK regions for decades. It's mainly balanced by migration out of London due to house prices and immigration from other countries.

I grew up in a coalfield area. I have friends and family who made that move and further afield. It's a big ask for people to uproot their families from their support network and stable council house for a very uncertain future in London. What transferable skills do you think a coal miner had?

How do these young people from the home counties afford London real estate?

How about you also check poverty rates, rents and housing availability, standard of living, not just counting those employed (which includes zero contract hours...)?

UK is not doing well and moving to the incredibly expensive London is not some easy fix you think it is.

Thats what many did and they're not doing fine though. One of the reasons London became so unlivable was so many people have to move there especially early in careers just to get a job. Which has a bonus effect of draining the original communities and speeding up the feedback loop.

You make it sound like there are no other factors. People like where they are. They like their communities. They may dislike cities, and they may not have the means to move to them even if they did like them. You dont seem to understand the absolutely rapid pace of change over the last 200 years.

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