The idea that AI will just augment jobs never replace them

Let's take software development as an example - in 70 years of coding we have automated many things, we have plenty of libraries and languages at our fingertips. And yet we have more devs than ever, how can that be? Computers were five orders of magnitude slower 3-4 decades ago. Where did that power go into? We can clearly do today everything we did back then with less people. In reality we invented databases, applications, internet, and cloud computing, and now we have more work than ever.

Another example - in ML we suddenly got to a point where almost everything we did pre-2020 is now trivial. Why are we hiring even more devs to do NLP tasks? Our old skills suddenly became outdated, we had to learn a new paradigm, and here we are, with lots of work. Even labeling is seeing a surge - you'd think we don't need it anymore since LLMs are so smart, but in reality we need even more benchmarks and tests now that shit got serious.

Same for medicine and other fields - they all seen massive improvements and yet humans work just as hard.

> "Six separate impacts

In truth, AI technology will have several impacts:

1. Augmentation: AI will certainly augment certain existing jobs.

2. Job losses for non-adoption: new hires will be expected to use this augmenting AI, some who can’t adopt and adapt will lose their jobs.

3. Gradual jobs losses: new hires will diminish as productivity gains are realised: why have 5 when you only need three admin staff using AI to do the same tasks?

4. Jobs will be automated: some jobs will be automated and eliminated using AI. This has already happened with translators (Duolingo) and there are lot more candidates.

5. Legacy companies will disappear: traditional companies will fail to adapt and large numbers will lose their jobs.

6. New jobs will be created: new companies will emerge, as they did with online learning, with AI experts and knowledge managers. This is already happening."

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Is anyone making a good faith argument that AI will "JUST" augment jobs? Do grown ups take the word "JUST" seriously anymore?

Terrible title.

Fast forward to today where we've got the Tesla Gigafactory and you can see how far manufacturing automation has come.

Not only is it rare to find tools that are made by hand today, but most of the highest quality tools are made by machines!

Even if you argue that building tools by hand is better for the people no major economy in the world is going to go back to a less efficient and more costly model.

The Pandora's box of AI has been opened and the world is evolving. Yes jobs will be lost and yes we wont be able to predict how far this will go.

For instance, see Page 25 of this report which cites 25% net job creation through 2027 attributed to AI: https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf

People love to cite prior automations, but the automobile only made hostlers obsolete because it required different skills to work on. AI fundamentally exists to replace skill itself. We might not be totally there yet to where it's a massive threat to wealth, but the potential is there in a way that was simply never the case with grain mills, the cotton gin, the printing press, conveyor belts, automobiles, and so forth.

Seems far fetched, and also from a utilitarian point of view some will say it's Ok as long as everyone is really happy. But in every other scenario, there will be jobs. They just may not look like jobs we are used to now or require same training as required now. They may be jobs that people enjoy doing, or that people enjoy being done by people for whatever the reason. Someone who lived centuries ago would not recognize our jobs as jobs either. And maybe if someone wants to just sit in a holodeck and be fed, we will take care of it for them for the sake of global peace and quiet. For example, let criminals do whatever they want in VR, including commit crimes, cheaper than the rest of us suffering crime IRL.

We've already automated much of what is there to automate, most of our "bullshit" jobs are human communication or human reasoning. Once you fully automate 1 CSR or 1 compliance officer in an industry, you've effectively automated a large percentage of them. Instead of seeing a gradual displacement of labor, you're going to see large chunks of people become completely irrelevant. We're seeing this in the gaming industry now, where a huge focus is on AI art, aiding in (but not solely responsible for) mass layoffs.

I don't know if AI will eliminate more jobs than AS/400s did, but it will be a much more disruptive transition.

The real issue is that people need a job to make money to survive. What we need might not be to save jobs but rather to find new ways to redistribute wealth...

Is that a very widespread idea? I haven't really seen it, though I guess I try not to hang out places on the internet where there's too much nonsense.

I mainly see people arguing about how AI will impact jobs. (I think it's pretty obvious that AI will augment jobs, replace jobs, and create jobs, so a better way to frame the discussion is how much of each we are going to have and how can we make it so we get an overall positive outcome rather than negative one.)

More importantly, however, I believe that people have some seriously dumb thoughts regarding economics. Every single thing in life has some economic value despite how much I hate knowing it. I weigh things like "free time" against things like "income" all the time, and I could therefore assign a numeric value to any given aspect in my life. I do not do this because I am not a psycho. On the other hand, knowing this, I can definitely say that someone out there will notice when the price of labor falls of a cliff and then that person will come up with a job that requires labor and wouldn't be economically feasible if global labor prices hadn't fallen. More importantly, machines are expensive. Running an LLM is extremely expensive. Making modern GPUs is also extremely expensive. You won't need too sharp a fall in labor costs for humans to continue to compete against the machines. But this leads to the true problem. These AI systems, if the hallucination problem is solved, and if the profit turns out to be good, will most likely serve to further entrench the current neo-feudalist world order as the working class become poorer and the lords become ever wealthier. The scenario where a UBI is needed is ridiculous though. Should no one come up with a use for cheap human labor, the folks running the LLMs would run out of money and be forced to close down, and the jobs that used to exist would return. Every product needs a purchaser.

Finally, despite all of the above, I still think that the AI systems are a step in the correct direction. Yes, the current LLMs and spin off technologies might (most likely will) further entrench neo-feudalism. Yes, many of us (maybe even me) will be relegated to cheap manual labor. Yes, we will likely have some crazy dystopia of "post truth" in a technologically advanced dark age (I think we are actually already in that one though). But, the automation of work is a net good. The article's charts didn't show longevity, didn't show free time hours, didn't show standard of living. Taking us off of the farms saved lives. Taking us out of factories saved lives. These two things together created the modern conception of childhood. All of this was a benefit. So, despite the shifting of the labor force, humankind will likely end up in a better position despite the negatives that every new technology will inevitably spring upon us.

This was the main delusion. The reason robots don't do the jobs of "essential workers" is because they are far more expensive at the same quality. A machine getting sick or dying costs a business tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, a person getting sick or dying is discarded into the gutter and a replacement is brought in.

A lot of people are getting paid for their opinions, though, or more specifically as the article puts it, their "text production." They are paid an amount far outstripping their usefulness for superstitious reasons: it's hard to predict the quality of the opinions of a future hire, so we just pretend that more expensive is better. To balance this out, society already made that class the most heavily taxed, and kept their existence precarious through surrealistically expensive health care, mandatory education, and homeownership (and in the US, I'd add dental care specifically.)

I don't see how they aren't all trivially replaced. Capitalists act like ownership is a job that deserves compensation, rather than a wager on what is usually a sure thing. It's not. Owners buy people to make decisions for them, in fact they overbuy and overstaff (creating bullshit jobs) and pit those people against each other to guarantee the best outcomes. The losers get sick, lose their homes, and their kids can't get into college; the winners get another day in suburban paradise with 60-hour weeks and two-hour daily commutes.

I can't imagine that 90% of high-status middle class jobs would survive properly-applied generative AI even at current quality, and techniques are getting better literally hour-by-hour.

At least we'll still need doctors, although at greatly reduced responsibility. Will they also cut hair?

Call me a doomer, but I doubt there's anything we can actually do to stop mass inequality in a future dominated by AI.

I worry political options here won't work because people misunderstand the roots of political power today. What I'm about to say is a very clear idea in my head, but I struggle to explain it well.

In a democracy power is distributed to all citizens, but the reason this system is stable is because those citizens have real collective power.

Historically this power has been physical – no single entity had more physical might than the armed resistance of its collective citizens. But today that power is mostly economic. Politicians must appeal both to businesses and citizens to remain in power and businesses must appeal to people to sell their goods and services and to attract employees. The most powerful entity in a capitalist democracy is the people since they are both voters and consumers.

The issue I have is that if 95% of your population is unemployed there's no longer much value in people economically. Additionally whatever demand they have is purely artificial and coming from the state in the form of welfare.

We need to remember true value isn't money. Money is what we use to acquire resources that are truly valuable to us. Things like food, planes, oil and gold.

If those who have access to AI can now acquire these things without trading with humans or employing them then businesses no longer need to care about humans at all. Food can be acquired without humans. Jets can be built without humans. Oil can be drilled without humans. Etc...

Similarly politicians will find that if the reason they value money is so they can acquire resources and businesses can easily provide all the resource they might want then there's really no economic gain to represent the people.

In this AI dystopian world I imagine you'll have a handful of resource creating businesses and the owners of these businesses simply trade resources with each other.

An additional problem we face with say some kind of redistribution of AI created wealth is that businesses are not tied to any nation. Assuming our political systems can avoid corruption and issue a 99% tax on companies leverage AI they might as well just leave. Then you can say, well we'll nationalise the businesses instead then, which is fair enough, but then you have the corruption issues again because how would we humans collective prevent state corruption if we're literally all just a drain on the state's resources and have no physical way to resist? Why wouldn't the state just say screw these leaches if that's what is in their economic interest?

Like I say, I can't explain this idea very well so sorry for this long rambly comment, but to try to end on something constructive here I think what we need to be thinking about now isn't what the correct rate of tax is in a world of AI, but how do we ensure people retain their collective power against businesses and the state? If we have no collective power then we should assume that with time any solution we try to implement will fail.