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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

> The jobs apocalypse is always right around the corner; just ask the Luddites.

The obvious yet unaddressed point here is that automation was bad for the Luddites. They lost their jobs to machines. The implied retort is that people can and should be reskilled, but as people like Andrew Yang have said many times, reskilling has mixed results.

It seems very weird that I, as a moderately knowledgeable layperson, should be able to have 3 or 4 steps of conversation into this topic that Marc simply does not acknowledge. I can only imagine how insulting it would be to an economist or social scientist who has seriously studied this stuff. This essay pretends we know nothing at all about automation.

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And reskilling makes much more sense when you’re replacing manual labour. Less sense when you’re replacing brains.

The presumption that there are alternative jobs or that a given worker can attain new skills imposes a tax on them they may not be able to pay. There are disabled and unemployed people who cannot handle "reskilling".

i think that youre right.

i also think that "information workers" were always a bit slushy in so far that an average "information worker" will likely have 3-4 "careers" during a lifetime anyway and AI will mostly affect information workers IMO -- or at least affect them first and the most.

The trouble is that if what you're mostly contributing is pushing and processing info because so far it was not automatable, you might find no adjacent fields to slip into.

Most the reskilling will ironically be in knowledge workers who will be forced into skilled physical labor. AI plumbers are a lot further out than most other forms of AI workers.

Morevec's paradox rearing it's ugly head again

Quite possibly. Though if you have that many cheap knowledge workers looking for work, that's quite a lot of brainpower to be dumped into the few remaining unsolved problems in robotics mass production (not that there are many - those robot dancing videos are terrifying, and Cobot arms are getting extremely versatile and affordable). i.e. digital work might be the first to go - but manual would follow quite quickly.

This is Mark Andreessen talking. Feels like Philip Morris telling you to stop worrying about smoking-induced cancer. He has also recently been particularly active in defending the massive inequalities generated by his favorite economic system, and by tech in particular. It’s as if he also indeed feels the pressure of a wider malcontent this time around. That said, I’m surprised he disses UBI as “communism” and inherently wrong. For billionaires like him UBI would be a strategically low price to pay to keep social unrest in check in a growingly automated and AI-based society. But hey, capitalists are gonna capitalize and he’s definitely good at that, so he might have his own view of where we’re headed. Or maybe, like all other capitalist billionaires, he just has a knee jerk reaction into code red defensive mode anytime something akin to redistribution of wealth looms large at the horizon.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

With AI-assisted production tooling, a lack of a UBI in the coming years should be basically treated as an act of war. The bar to achieve it is going to be ridiculously low - the only way it's not happening is if the powers-that-be are actively preventing it. At that point any mob could and should just spin up their own AI-powered factories for basic needs regardless of corrupted government/big business approval.

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