Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

I don't worry about AI automating away my job not because I don't think it's possible (though I do think it's much much further out than the hype would suggest), but because an AI automating away software creation is the economic equivalent of nuclear war: it would irrevocably alter everything about the way the world is run and is therefore impossible to adequately prepare for on an individual basis.

Most of us in software are automating other people's jobs: we learn and understand requirements and build things that make other people more productive or erase their jobs entirely. The rate of automation is right now limited in large part by the availability and cost of software engineers. If AGI can reduce that cost to ~0, then a massive percentage of the economy would be wiped out in a matter of months. What is any individual software developer supposed to do to prepare for that scenario?

View on HN

If AI automates software creation, which automates everybody else's job, why does it follow that a "massive percentage of the economy would be wiped out?" What is so undesirable about productivity going up by a factor of a 100 or a 1000 and everyone living like an aristocrat, because machines do all the work? Why is full employment such an obsession?

I didn't say it would be undesirable! Just that it would completely alter the world in ways that we cannot prepare for on an individual basis.

Ideally, we move to UBI and, as you say, everyone lives like an aristocrat. But we don't get there by trying to hedge against AI taking over our individual jobs.

Because the benefits of these tools are not distributed equally. The ultra wealthy will become even more wealthy and the unwashed masses will starve.

Of course the ideal outcome is the Star Trek post-scarcity utopia. But humans are not currently incentivized in a way that I can see leading to that outcome in our lifetimes.

Benefits of innovation start with the privileged, but invariably end up benefitting the masses. Cellphones once were once available only to the rich. Poor people have smart phones now.

Having a smartphone is probably not hugely conducive to an increase in quality of health or happiness.

Sounds like OP is worried that they aren’t going to be able to afford a roof over their head. No government seems to be ready to roll out a plan to deal with huge swathes of the populous suddenly being out of a job because their employer wants bigger profits.

Yet healthier foods are now less accessible to the poor. Where once the rich were fat and had rotten teeth from sweets, now the rich have trainers and personal chefs and healthier food. Poorer folks have food deserts and junk calories.

Innovation doesn't always trickle down. Sometimes it works in reverse to exploit the poor and the ignorant.

Many may argue that the science and innovation in the last century was funded by the taxpayers and the government that proportionally taxes the poor more than the rich.

Workers merely made tools to make their own work processes more efficient which was taken by many corporations and applied across the workforce without the payment of proportional savings to the people who invented it.

The mass adoption of technology funds the future research process thus the profit is diverted from the masses directly to benefit and maintain competitive advantage.

The time saved due to technology never did reduce working hours or increase leisure time of the workforce.

Thus more benefits go up rather than come down.

The benefits of innovation, do this, yes.

The benefits of ownership, however, do not.

What exactly should people do if they're not employed?

Read books, write poems, go skiing? Instead of agonizing over how to provide the means of living, actually start living?

That's all great until you get hungry. What will you do next? Just die and respawn like Minecraft?

Food would be so cheap that watching a 15 second ad that played on the disposable e-ink screen that wraps your burger will pay for it.

Note: I don't think this will happen. I think rich people now would rather let people starve so they could save the price of the 15-Second Ad Burger.

We have incentivized sociopaths to run things in the name of efficiency. We will either realize this is a false goal, remove all those people from power and influence, and live in a post scarcity society... Or we will all suffer the consequences.

If everything is automated, that includes the production of whatever goods or services may be advertised. I think that leaves only ideological advertising: theological, political, whatever.

If the food has a meaningful cost, or the adverts has meaningful revenue, then there is meaningful labour to earn money to pay — directly or indirectly — for the food and/or advertising.

Being lifelong students. Being curious. Discover passions. Be there for others who need them. Etc

The same sorts of things we do while on PTO or on the weekends, but every day.

With our current societal structure, a few people would live like aristocrats guarded with AI weaponry while the rest eke out an existence in shanty towns.

The bottleneck to wealth creation wouldnt be nothing it would be access to natural resources, which is and always has been mediated, ultimately, through violence. Land ownership is mediated by states until they lose their monopoly on violence.

Already the % of wealth that is earned through labor has dropped to record lows. The productivity gains gets swallowed by things like rent, because land has been bottlenecked through excess hoarding.

What happens when labor is commoditized to death and the only value comes from natural resources? Fighting. LOTS of fighting.

> What is so undesirable about productivity going up by a factor of a 100 or a 1000 and everyone living like an aristocrat, because machines do all the work? Why is full employment such an obsession?

Nothing is undesirable about the future you laid out in your comment, except for the fact that it will never ever happen the way you describe (be nice if it did, but I'm not holding my breath). You could have made similar claims about the computer or the internet back in the day, but what we've seen from those technologies is ever increasing concentration of wealth in a few hands, which is what technology does, it centralizes by default. And most human attempts to redistribute wealth on a large scale have been more disastrous than the inequality they were trying to solve.

> What is so undesirable about productivity going up by a factor of a 100 or a 1000 and everyone living like an aristocrat

If you can make the "and" happen, please do.

It's not absolutely certain, and there's more than one possible bad ending if it fails to happen.

> What is any individual software developer supposed to do to prepare for that scenario?

Do what happened to countless of people in past that gets "automated" away or otherwise encounter shifting times in life, become unemployed until you find a different way of surviving.

The industrial revolution changed the life of a lot of people, making vast amount of people unemployed over the course of some decades. It's not hard to imagine that future changes will happen much faster, as everything happens much faster in modern times. So once it starts shifting, the effects will probably be greater.

But, where there is a will there is a way, and surely software developers would discover this as well if they ever find themselves unemployed because of a shift in the world.

That implies heavy reliance that the employers in my past were paying me a surplus over a living wage. The reality is that many employers do not pay a living wage forcing people to seek other means to earn an extra income to top their regular wage.

If you are a software developer, which was the context here, chances are you are paid enough to have it considered a living wage if not more. Is that not the case?

What if the AI will not automate your job, but will walk past it by discovering a new piece of software truly reusable, so all the single-customer software we develop nowadays becomes way too expensive? That possibility sounds to me much more believable.

Think about it. If AI can truly automate software creation then it's going to improve itself, at which point the Butlerian Jihad begins. If you want to prepare for this start learning a trade at the renaissance fair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com