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Comment by Davidzheng | Hacker News Reader

I will bet ANY amount of money that 30% of current jobs will be displaced with AI advances in the next twenty years.

Put your money here <https://longbets.org/>.

Darn well I really was hoping my children and grandchildren could continue my wonderful data entry career but OCR ruined that, and now they can’t even do such meaningful jobs like read emails and schedule appointments, or do taxes like an accountant. What meaning will they have in life with all those ever so profound careers ruined!! /s

Fair! But I'm just reminding the comment above that continued employment is not really guaranteed for most jobs which are mostly mental.

We need to stop this infinite rights mentality. Why should continued employment be guaranteed for any jobs? That’s really not how we got to where we are today, quite the opposite actually. If it ok with people I’d like to seen humans solve big problems and go to the stars and that’s going to take AGI and a bunch of technological progress and if that results in unemployment, even for us “elite” coders, then so be it. Central planning and collectivism has such a bad track record, why would we turn to it now at such a critical moment? Let’s have lots of AGIs and all competing. Hey anyone at OAI that know whatever Q* trick there might be, leak it! Get it to open source and let’s build 20 AI companies doing everything imaginable. wtf everyone why so scared?

perhaps not rights to have a job in general but there is value in thinking about this at least at the national scale. people need income to pay taxes, they need income to buy the stuff that other people sell. if all the people without jobs have to take their savings out of the banks then banks can't loan as much money and need to charge higher interest rates. etc etc

if 30% of the working population loses their jobs in a few months there will be real externalities impacting the 70% who still have them because they don't exist in a vacuum.

maybe everything will balance itself out without any intervention eventually but it feels to me like the rate of unprecedented financial ~events~ is only increasing and with greater risks requiring more intervention to prevent catatastrophe or large scale suffering

Big "if" on massive change within in months. Most businesses have very little change capacity.

oops yeah, sounds absurd, i was falling asleep when i wrote it. p sure i was thinking about the first few months of covid lockdowns in the US as a comparison when i was writing the reply

Fair enough. I guess some other things, e.g., an initial defensive reaction such as usage restrictions could come quite fast.

It will take years not months and I’m against any intervention. Redistribution and socialism inspired governments policies will just make things worse. Progress requires suffering, that the history of our species, that’s the nature of reality.

I know of at least one person making nearly 6 figures doing data entry.

It turns out some websites work hard enough to prevent scraping that it is more cost effective to just pay a contractor to go look at a page and type numbers in rather than hire a developer to constantly work around anti-scraping techniques (and risk getting banned).

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