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>I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the world are min wage workers running around and doing real world things, not code monkeys and glorified type writers filling excel sheets.

This is not true at all. How many products do you use that come primarily from minimum wage workers?

If a few people responsible for Google maps running stopped working the GDP loss would be much bigger than if magnitudes more minimum wage workers did the same.

Forget "how many", without those people, you'd end up without food on your table. Then the rest of the products you use wouldn't matter.

Also not true, I know the big farms of my state and they don't depend on minimum wage workers and I live in a third world country.

I doubt agricultural wages or truck drivers are minimum wage jobs where you live. Assuming US https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Farm_Labor/fl_allw...

France is one of if not the biggest agriculture power in Europe, most farmers can't even generate a 35hr min wage equivalent while working 80+ hours a week.

20% of them live in poverty, half of them make less than 22k euros a year

Truck drivers earn between min wage and 150% of min wage, while being on the road every day and not having a social life, they drive 8 hours per day and sleep in their fucking truck while some code monkey makes 300k+/year coding memeojis at apple. Guess which ones will be automated first by openai lmao

>Truck drivers earn between min wage and 150% of min wage

Where are you getting this information? It's absolutely wrong. Long haul truckers (the one's you're saying don't have social lives because they drive 8 hours per day) make $71,196 on average in the US[1].

[1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/LONG-HAUL-Truck-Driver...

He is talking about France in the sentence before. There are barely any truckers in Germany with a German nationality. They are simply not competitive. Same goes for package delivery.

Just imagine what would happen to a trucker's salary in the US if it were to create a unified market with Mexico and all of Central America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_Europe...

It's not necessarily a bad thing. Economies of Eastern European countries have been growing after all and Western Europe does not have enough workers because of its demographics anyway. My take is, that everybody is winning, there is less poverty than before, but some sideffects look ugly for a while.

>half of them make less than 22k euros a year

I'd be extremely happy making this amount. Some people are just accustomed to easier lives.

>while some code monkey makes 300k+/year coding memeojis at apple.

Meme position for a privileged caste statistically irrespective of skill in an institution that can piss money on anything and still succeed.

Farm work, especially work that doesn't require specialization (planting, maintaining, harvesting), is pretty much minimum wage work where I live, in Spain. Minimum wage here is ~1300 EUR / month. But it also differs wildly by region here, as some regions are really poor while others rich (relatively).

Besides the farm work, there is food processing workers (cutting, cleaning, basically assembly lines), packaging, workers at warehouses, people who work at the counters of the store, and all the support roles for those positions. If you go outside and eat, you have all the restaurant personnel to take into account as well.

There is a lot of low skilled labor that goes into making what we eat today. I'm not sure how you could possibly claim that none of those people are on minimum wage.

Not all of the work you cited is essential. Would society crumble without retail?

Minimum wage in Spain is significantly more money than anything I've made in my life. It's a very comfortable position for the vast majority of the world.

>There is a lot of low skilled labor that goes into making what we eat today. I'm not sure how you could possibly claim that none of those people are on minimum wage.

People doing essential work that isn't trivially replaceable have the bargaining power to charge more than the minimum wage in a moderately free market of human work, usually they do.

> Not all of the work you cited is essential. Would society crumble without retail?

Did I miss the part where the other comment mentioned retail, or where you respond to the half dozen other examples of essential work?

> Minimum wage in Spain is significantly more money than anything I've made in my life. It's a very comfortable position for the vast majority of the world.

Instead of moving the bar some more, could you just define what minimum wage would be an acceptable bar for you in this conversation?

Yes you missed retail, read it again.

https://uk.indeed.com/career/warehouse-worker/salaries

Do you really need me to Google every single essential position known before conceding that society is not maintained by minimum wage workers?

No, but I sure would like it if you defined it a bit better, since apparently we're now talking about UK numbers.

Take a look at what happened to farm employment figures over the last 100 years.

It was a good thing.

The people picking trash in my street stopped working for 2 days and it looks like I live in some third world country now, two fucking days and it looks like I live in the middle of an open air dump

If trucks stopped deliveries every city would die in a week

If construction workers stopped building / maintaining we'd be in deep shit in 6 months or less

If the people in warehouses stopped working for a week the economy would tank like it rarely does

Nurses, doctors, bus/tram/train drivers, police, firefighters, ambulances, janitors, trash pickers, plumbers, sewer workers, electricians, people taking care of water treatment plants, power plants, teachers, social workers, ...

You could delete facebook, openai, instagram, twitter, netflix, tesla and 90% of startups from the face of the earth right now and I'd have the exact same life as yesterday. Remove any of the people I mentioned above and society would crumble in no time

And none of these are even remotely close to being automated at all, nobody cares about most of these jobs. But hey, here is a dancing kangaroo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuivg5rz_aA

Are any of the positions you cited minimum wage workers where you live? Again, assuming US:

https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-...

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/garbage-collector...

>You could delete facebook, openai, instagram, twitter, netflix, tesla and 90% of startups from the face of the earth right now and I'd have the exact same life as yesterday. Remove any of the people I mentioned above and society would crumble in no time

Yes because you picked non-essential work. (?)

Even further, maybe the world would actually be better without these companies.

Now that there are great inventions like TikTok, teenagers are depressed as hell, and they don't go to meet each other to play soccer together, because the "social" networks are giving the illusion of having that connection.

> Yes because you picked non-essential work. (?)

Then again tell me who we're automating out of the work force right now ? Trash pickers or code monkeys ? Truck drivers or artists ?

Essential and non-replaceable are different concepts.

All of them? We've been working on and succeeding at automating physical tasks for decades.

Growing up my trash was picked up by a human and the truck crew had two or three people on it jogging house to house to pick up trash as the driver slow rolled through the neighborhood.

Now my trash is serviced by one person who mostly never leaves the cab and who would be better described as a skilled machine operator than as a menial labor role. The work isn't completely automated but technology has reduced the job market for trash truck crews by two-thirds. I'm guessing the barrier is higher now too, requiring training and certifications to run the robotics on the truck instead of physical fitness being the primary prior qualification.

> I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the world are min wage workers running around and doing real world things

Is this really true? It's certainly a nice soundbyte when you're making class arguments or trying to dunk on the "HN crowd", but I think it falls apart under any level of scrutiny.

Who keeps your lights on? Who drives your bus? Who manages your sewage? Who teaches your kids? Who builds your roads? None of them make minimum wage and would probably be a little insulted to be characterized as such.

It's pretty reductionist to call anyone outside our realm of tech a "min wage worker", they're just workers like or I. I think it's a pretty stupid and pointless exercise to subdivide people into useful or non-useful workers, serving no purpose but to further pet the smugness of HN AI skeptics.

I think this comment focuses too much on the “minimum wage” aspect - the core of the argument is that those are roles not at risk to AI in its present state, not necessarily the compensation aspect

>there was no 4th industrial revolution.

Yet. The industrial revolution didn't happen in a year either.

"More than a year ago"? Really? What did anyone think was going to happen in a year?

This sort of thing usually takes longer than you expect it to, and then it usually happens faster than you expect it to.

This all reminds me of my asshole great uncle making fun of me as a teenager circa 1997 while I was at the computer and on the internet.

Sarcastically asking me "Can you meet girls on that?" and then laughed.

He wasn't wrong in the short term but laughably wrong in the long term.