We may not lose our jobs to robots so quickly, MIT study finds | Hacker News Reader

We may not lose our jobs to robots so quickly, MIT study finds

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13 pointsLinuxBender13 comments

>One key finding, for example, is that only about 23% of the wages paid to humans right now for jobs that could potentially be done by AI tools would be cost-effective for employers to replace with machines right now.

>While this could change over time, the overall findings suggest that job disruption from AI will likely unfurl at a gradual pace.

I'm not quite following their logic here. Isn't 23% absolutely massive? And seeing that AI capabilities are maturing exponentially, this is a tectonic shift in the economy, even if it's technically "gradual" in the sense that not everyone will be immediately replaced.

> are maturing exponentially

What does this even mean?

I was mainly referring to how compute costs keep decreasing exponentially year over year, even though the strict version of Moore's Law has slowed down. TFA's analysis is based on the cost of replacing an employee with a bot, so even if AI software stopped advancing, it'll continue getting exponentially cheaper to replace a typical employee. So at the most optimistic scenario, the current employment rate will persist only if everyone is really good at The Red Queen's Race.

This is simply wrong, because it is not a matter of cost. ChatGPT can be available for free and it would still not replace most jobs in its current state. Likewise the current state of vision-based self-driving is not good enough to replace even a single driver, even if the cars would be free. So certainly either software advances are needed OR increasing the training data or parameters will further improve the models (which is not necessarily the case).

I'm not following. If tech ChatGPT4 becomes available literally for free, or at least such that it can be re-run thousands of times for each task with some basic glue code and/or human intervention in between, then I see it replacing a huge chunk of knowledge work. There have already been quite a few impressive examples of running a whole team of LLM agents with different system prompts, communicating with each other and the external world, but price is still a limitation.

And as for self-driving, it is absolutely already replacing quite a few drivers, even if you just consider Waymo. I for one would ditch my car tomorrow if their service was available in my city for a reasonable price.

Yeah I agree, it's like saying "oh hey don't worry only a quarter of you guys will lose your jobs... but hey! Not gonna happen tomorrow!". Seems to completely ignore the impact that will have on people reliant on this income.

If history is an indicator ( see: automation), it will make our jobs more efficient.

The biggest advances have already been made, ChatGPT wise.

I'm actually excited that it will broaden to robots ( at home) and home domotics. And improve the virtual assistants ( which are already virtual).

For the rest, I don't know yet what impact it will actually have.

I think call centers could be greatly reduced ( trained on documentation and active tickets). But not many jobs in the west depend on that...

If automation is an indicator (see: the Luddite movement), it will make our jobs disappear.

A movement isn't historic effect. They were shut down long time ago and it didn't seem to have much result.

Ps. Efficiency improved with the internet too. New jobs appeared.

A movement is a consequence of the effect. Luddites were opposed to the automated looms, which also improved efficiency and gave jobs - to a smaller number of less qualified people.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/would-luddites-find-...

The actual study:

Beyond AI Exposure: Which Tasks are Cost-Effective to Automate with Computer Vision?

https://futuretech.mit.edu/news/beyond-ai-exposure-which-tas...

Geez, what about all the other studies telling me to fear for my life? I don't know what to believe!

Should I be happy or sad?

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