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Comment by _cenw | Hacker News Reader

This is my goto book to recommend when people are scared about being replaced by GPT.

The article was great. The book was insufferable and didn't add substance.

Exactly. Like so many popular non-fiction books these days, there's about 15 pages of content fluffed up with 200 pages of anecdotes to be able to sell it as a book.

I thought the same of Graeber's book about Debt. It's not a bad book and I feel like I learned something from it but Christ it was like 5x longer than it needed to be and felt very unstructured.

Ironically, a bullshit job.

What consolation is that? At least a BS job pays the bills.

You misunderstand my point. A BS job wasn't necessary in the first place, so it's unlikely to be replaced by GPT. The market is pretty bad at optimizing the amount of labor large corporations need, and this isn't going to change this.

Rather, I would say that with added capacity for work, what we choose to do is make things safer. And safety demands regulations which increase regulatory work and bureaucratic overhead to get anything done.

So the jobs become observing all of the laws that we passed in the name of safety and equity (look at workplace accident rates since early 1900s. Or child labor rates). When you look at it this way, there's no stopping, since there will always be more "dangerous" or "unfair" things to optimize away with added labor.

I don’t think this is very convincing. The higher ups might think a job is necessary even though it isn’t. So they may still invest in automating it even if it wasn’t necessary in the first place.

This article relates the two: https://compactmag.com/article/a-i-might-not-steal-your-bull...

Hmm... a lot of jobs being displaced by ML are technical, and not very bullshit.

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