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Comment by timoth3y | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not that automation will eliminate our jobs.

The problem is that we have created an economy where that is a bad thing.

I don't think it's the economy, it's the policy. Automating a shit-ton of jobs is great for the economy. The economy is just fine if 90% of people are starving because big corps are saving shit-tons of money.

The government of a wealthy country should ensure that its citizens are able to eat, and have a sheltered place to sleep, without them needing to work. Because the way things are going, there won't be enough work to go around. Even now, with the supposed "labour shortage" there are record numbers of homeless people, and people living paycheck-to-paycheck. Housing is more unaffordable than ever. Minimum wage is not keeping up with the economic realities.

Governments need to step in; they need to change policy so big corps are paying more taxes, and that tax goes to a basic income that can cover the cost of housing and the cost of food. Maybe not right away, maybe it starts at $100/month. But eventually the goal should be to get everyone on a basic income that can cover the necessities, then if they want to be able to enjoy luxuries (concerts, gourmet food, hobbies, streaming services, etc.) they can choose to work.

Looking around here in Amsterdam, there is a lot of work to be done. And all the places that aren’t as nice, there is a LOT of work to be done.

Computational irreducibility combined with human insatiability combined with ethics entails: a lot of work to be done. Everyone needs to get to work, we aren’t done yet. If robots could do all the work… well, god bless. There is SO much work to do. That makes me think the issue is not “robots taking jobs” but the focus and intention of the collective.

Any new hire is WAY more valuable now that they can use chatGPT. So why aren’t we hiring more people?

Well, one small issue: notice how you get taxed for hiring people a lot more than buying tech? That’s probably something to be fixed.

how much of that work requires physical labor? when I think of the work to be done, I think of like, building roads and houses and factories, transitioning to renewable energy, staffing hospitals with doctors and nurses, picking up trash on the street, cleaning up oceans, research in biology and pharmacology.

I don't really think of filing paperwork, or writing code, or meetings in general. It's the stuff that requires arms and legs and fingers that's our bottleneck. ChatGPT can't help with that. Robots can, but RL is lagging.

> building roads and houses and factories, transitioning to renewable energy, staffing hospitals with doctors and nurses, picking up trash on the street, cleaning up oceans, research in biology and pharmacology

All that takes knowledge work. Physical too, but most of the cost today is knowledge work.

Exactly. A future where humans are the drones while big AI does all the thought work is the inverse of the techno-futuristic dreams of the 80s-00s

I wonder why not more people are seeing it from this angle. My tech company is in southern africa, and I struggle to find the talent to fit my customers / the market’s needs. We can’t compete with salaries in the US or western countries in general.

Now, my average tech staff can actually solve challenging coding problems that before could only be done by the few talented ones.

It does not solve all shortcomings, but it definitely shifts the collective cognitive load in the company.

If the talent at hand isn’t competent to build it, they aren’t competent to debug or support it.

Why do you say you can't compete with Western salaries? If your customers don't want to pay what it takes, why the hell would it be your potential employees' responsibility to reduce their salary so you can offer this bargain? And since you are in tech, you can sell to the whole world. If your business can't get enough profit to pay for your workers, then the company should shut down the business as a failure.

If there is a housing shortage and a jobs shortage then shouldn't people just be building houses? Why should the government be involved and just giving people money? The problem is too much government involvement already. Look at areas where there are shortages and problems with very little advancements being made. Those are the most heavily regulated industries, a system that allows for the most corruption, entrenchment and commingling of power and wealth.

What will the economy look like when the peak intelligence on the planet doesn't care about anything we do?

Probably not very different… since we basically have this in the form of insanely rich billionaires and multi-hundred millionaires, who basically exist in a life where they are divorced from everyone else and they don’t care about “us” … their money just compounding its growth automatically because they passed the tipping point where it’s hard to (other than deciding to do some crazy expensive thing like buy Twitter) spend their money faster than it comes in… I mean sure it might be a little different since an AI won’t eat or sleep, but when the heavily computerised economic activity involved in global investment and banking is already not sleeping and a sort of diffuse collective intelligence… yeah I’m not sure how different it would be unless we’re talking humans they would have to literally let the AI starve people for whatever reasons it may have… I feel like the odds of “communist revolution” type activities, where the workers seize the means of production, is probably higher for ephemeral AI overlord then for flesh and blood bosses and capital owners.

The problem is that humans are often selfish.

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