On the Candlemaker's Petition
pmarca.substack.com
pmarca.substack.com
The total economy will be drastically better off with AI and robots to do more work for us, but a small overall fraction will see the greatest losses in employment and employability.
It's the illegal immigration debate all over again. Economically, they are a boon to the US economy over the long term. If you are low skilled or in other industries where you are competing with those migrants, it sucks for you. For everyone else, it is great. (Speaking purely from the standpoint of bringing in workers in their prime working years, ignoring cultural or other issues that arise with concentrations of out groups)
I watch TV with obviously auto-generated subtitles. Where a human cares enough to backspace and correct typos, the broadcaster is perfectly content paying cheap rate for 80% okay subtitles, which can’t even type “oh goodness that’s TMI” without mangling it.
My walmart shopping is self-checkout, and you’re in for a treat if the fruit you grabbed is missing a barcode so you stand around waiting on an attendant. But others would just “steal” it out of impatience, causing some corpo MBA to complain about “high shrinkage”.
Disney has setup a fake screen behind the actors to display the background for shooting, how long until an AI generates fake cityscapes for movies, and people stop getting a sense for what the real world looks like? But hey, paying workers for foreign set locations and B roll is pricey!
‘Look up item’.
You don’t need an attendant for that.
Sorry to interrupt your rant, ranting is important.
Hacker news is not the place for hot take-downs and ignorant dismissals. There are other places for that.
No shade meant, and clearly no benefit of the doubt given to someone trying to just pass along a helpful hint either.
A growing illicit workforce is in no-one’s long term interest.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
A venture capitalist, of course, is highly aware of this and being disingenuous to not mention it.
You will see this in government programmes that assert the goal is that people have jobs, any assistance on offer is temporary, until they get jobs, and the programmes are very, very reluctant to accept that some people aren't able to work, let alone that many people don't want to work.
The PWE suits many of the wealthy and powerful, who would prefer that the poor must do what they say or starve - and so it isn't questioned. But as the actual value of more human labour falls to zero, this whole idea doesn't work. Countries should have been preparing for this for decades, but like climate change it'll start to have horrible effects before they actually take serious steps to tackle it, and like climate change it'll hurt the poorest first and most of all.
There's a lot of money to be made, shovelling back the tide.
Some few occupations will become obsolete, just as has happened occasionally since the dawn of civilization. Countries should provide unemployment insurance and job training for the impacted workers.
I am happy to pay taxes and contribute donations to support people who are unable to work or pursuing education. As for people who are able to work but don't want to work, fuck 'em. I have zero interest in subsidizing them and will vote accordingly.
It's worth pointing out that the (ideal) inexpensive AI tech would remove basically every remaining advantage that human beings have over machines, at least if we continue to live in a society where human beings must work to survive and find meaning. AI is fundamentally different from the steam engine or cars or machine tools, in the sense that those inventions still left room for human operators. To the extent that AI leaves room for humans, it may only be due to the fact that "ideal" AI isn't achievable and what we build is (perhaps temporarily) some approximation of the more powerful thing people are worried about.
Though historically the John Henry story has been bull (machines didn't replace but augmented human work), how great if it became true in this case.
There are other sources of dignity beyond compensated work. And as the marginal cost of production approaches zero, why not just pay people — money may lose its “store of value” property but retain its signaling (prioritization) function.
How much better to go spend time hanging out with your aging parent than be changing their nappies. How much better to be writing shitty poetry for your enjoyment and that of your friends.
Universal human good appears on no financial report nor ballot sheet or any other objective of the mass of human work on the face of the earth (except perhaps a byline in a shrinking church or fraternal order).
If new suns are in store, how exactly are we to organize its distribution and protect its fertility? What commons has not been spoiled? What resource has not been extracted and hoarded?
The black gold of AI will be pumped from ground to mingle with the water of art and truth and community and education and as sure as such extraction has polluted the land it will sully our minds and squeeze our wallets.
The parallel does not align. Ludditism and import restriction come from differing motivations, even when they call for the same actions.
If AI is cheaper than human labor, AI will be preferred by industry. When human labor is cheaper than AI (such as free help from a friend or neighbor), then human labor will be preferred. But sunlight is almost always preferred to candlelight or lamp light.
In his other recent newsletter post, Marc Andreessen actually claims that AI will not cause unemployment [0].
[0]: https://pmarca.substack.com/p/why-ai-wont-cause-unemployment
Not really. You can take an Econ 101 class to see that high profits will lead to more competition which leads to lowering of prices... which kills the excess profits and results in higher consumer surplus.
There are scenarios of market failures, where you might have a monopolistic entity but we have safety checks for that too with anti-trust policy.
Yeah I remember when Microsoft came perilously close to dominating the desktop OS market and using that dominance to push their other products, like their suite of Office software. Fortunately the safety checks of anti-trust policy kicked in and they were forced to break up the company to prevent such abuses from happening in the future.
The same thing routinely happens when ISP, TV, and media companies merge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating#Existing_programs
https://fortune.com/longform/media-company-ownership-consoli...
Ignoring that sense, I think it’s a reasonable opinion to hold today, even if it turns out to be wrong.
Fun fact: there are more bank tellers in America now than when ATMs were invented.
Proportionate to the population?
The introduction of ATMs meant that a branch could be operated by far fewer people than before, which reduces their operating costs - but more importantly: the investment or business risk involved in opening a new branch in the first place.
Where previously a branch could only be opened in a city with a population big enough to supply, say, 10 branch employees, after the introduction of ATMs it becomes possible to open far more branches in more cities and locations as only, say, 3 people, would be needed to run it.
So previously there would be a smaller number of larger branches, now there’s a larger number of smaller branches, but more people employee overall.
The sun is owned and operated by corporations for their own benefit?
Nevertheless, it’s a great read in its own context.
(AI risk is an entirely separate issue)
Plato's allegory of the cave, but the cave wall is Stable Diffusion.
Moby Dick, but the whale is AGI.
As automation starts to do more and more of the work of today’s laptop and professional class, we’re gonna hear a lot of fancy whining about it. These people can’t write as fast as ChatGPT, but they sure can write.