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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

There was a good article in the Washington Post, discussed on HN a week or two ago (would have to do some searching), about people who have already lost their jobs due to ChatGPT.

Copywriting is definitely going to get decimated. Other jobs, like medical transcription, were already on the way out due to speech recognition tech even before generative AI blew up. And before people make "buggy whip manufacturer" arguments, the sheer pace of tech advancement is making wider sections of the populace unemployable faster than new job areas open up. I definitely think AI will cause the loss of millions of jobs, regardless of whether this particular CEO is running his company poorly.

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> like medical transcription

There’s no way this is remotely legal, right? Unless it’s some sort of on-prem product?

> making wider sections of the populace unemployable faster than new job areas open up

This is a real threat to the fabric of society and will require us to rethink things like UBI and taxing the means of production rather labor.

Whether having AI do it is legal or not, I cannot say, but I do know that medical transcriptions are routinely sent out of the hospital for lower-paid third-parties to do it.

It's not going to happen. There is a huge shortage of people right now. We have WAY more work that needs doing vs available people to do the work.

I disagree; there are millions of unemployed people all over the world that can speak great English, that you can hire right now to do many things remotely.

The problem is that the vast majority of them are unable to do the things you can do with ChatGPT (writing copy, for example).

AWS is HIPAA compliant. Same can be done for ChatGPT.

> > like medical transcription

> There’s no way this is remotely legal, right? Unless it’s some sort of on-prem product?

It's definitely legal, not sure why one would think it wouldn't be. There are dedicated, HIPAA-compliant medical transcription services that use voice-to-text tech that have been around for decades. I would say in the past 10 years or so the tech has gotten to the point where it's very good, and I know companies that have laid off transcriptionists because the tech is considerably cheaper.

> And before people make "buggy whip manufacturer" arguments,

I've always wondered about that argument.

Weren't buggy whip manufacturers making lots of other things at the same time?

After all, a buggy whip is almost certainly used much longer by the new owner than a cars is, so I wouldn't expect a large amount of the economy to be comprised of buggy whip sales, because

a) Not many people had their own buggy (down need a buggy whip while riding a horse, only when a buggy is being pulled)

b) Those that owned a whip didn't replace them every 3-5 years anyway.

Did buggy whip sales go from 3% of GDP to nothing?

To me it always felt like a made-up "lesson" on how progress moves.

It was really was a disaster for whip companies, carriage companies and saddle makers, though, disruption didn’t proliferate as quickly then as it does today.

You can read some of the history of buggy whip makers. They were specialized manufacturers with established brands built around quality, special materials and style. Some were able to convert to new products but not all. They did survive a couple decades past the invention of the car, to your point, but once cars proliferated their sales cratered.

Whip manufacturers shouldn’t be shamed for hubris (what happened did not seem as guaranteed then as it now seems with hindsight) but they all would’ve done well to have converted into automobile manufacturing supply by the teens and many did not.

A link to get you started: https://civilwartalk.com/threads/what-company-made-the-last-...

> It was really was a disaster for whip companies, carriage companies and saddle makers, though, disruption didn’t proliferate as quickly then as it does today.

I'm not contending that.

I'm saying (as far as I can determine) that cars sales alone in the US today is around 4% of the GDP. That doesn't count all the businesses employed in car manufacturing, all the businesses employed by the distribution network, by auto maintenance, ancilliary auto services (insurance, car washes, cosmetic finishing, upgrades, motorsport, etc).

My argument is that the demise of buggy whip manufacturers was accompanied by a significant expansion of employment. The replacement required much more labour than the thing it replaced.

If, at the time, buggy whip/saddlery/etc sales, distribution and manufacture collectively were the largest employers of labour, then the buggy whip argument makes sense.

I don't think it was.

I don't believe that people use buggy whips as an analogy for entire economies being destroyed, just individual industries. But fair enough, and there certainly was that expansion orders of magnitude larger than the replaced industries when the automobile proliferated.

The key was it took decades - it was a slow moving disaster for them, not a sudden overnight Wonka style shutting of the factories.

It only took a handful of years once cars greatly proliferated in the 20s. Any adoption took longer then to proliferate than it does today, so I would be careful extrapolating from either the pace of adoption in the 20s or the pace of adoption from the invention of the automobile to the beginning of accelerated adoption. You've probably seen this famous graph. https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2013/11/FELT...

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