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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

> a revolution in knowledge-worker productivity.

That's a nice euphemism for "imminent mass layoffs and a race to the bottom"...

In my lifetime there have seldom been much layoffs due to improved technologies. The companies tend to invest to keep up with the rival companies. The layoffs come more when the companies become loss making for whatever reason eg. the UK coal industry going, or Detroit being undercut by lower cost car makers.

Knowledge worker productivity has increased in other ways over the decades. Increases don't always lead to mass layoffs. Rails made (and still makes) many many web devs much more productive than before. Its arrival did not lead to mass layoffs

Productivity has always meant the ability to do more with less. Or it can mean doing even more with more.

Were we at a peak 1000+ years ago and have only gone downhill since at every technological breakthrough?

These productivity gains won't be shared with the employees. I think some people underestimate what a violent populus can do to them if they squeeze out even more Yacht money from the people.

Every one of those employees is capable of either using the new tools to start their own companies and solve unaddressed customer problems, or negotiate for comp that has equity. This has always been true.

The losers here are algorithm junkies who refuse to learn new skills and want to solve yesterday’s problems.

So you surely wouldn't be against a harsh inheritance tax so every generation can get a fair shot at the same issues?

Psssh, y'all been letting the billionaires and trillionaires do this forever now. Products only get more subpar and profit margins only grow and we're all too busy hating each other for sex, skin colour, sexuality, etc because we're just animals.

Ain't gonna change unless we genetically engineer our dumbass evolutionary history out of ourselves.

The idea that someone should be paid by a corporation when they don't provide value is very strange to me. Doing so seems like the real race to the bottom

what about when someone provides long-term value? They would be replaced by a short-term thinking corp (namely, all of them) for providing less value than an alternative with it's value purely in the short-term.

We are accelerating by preferring short-term gains. Like a fire becoming an explosion, that's modern society. Corps now throw the future under the bus for a slight boost in short-term value.

This conclusion is the lump of labor fallacy. It's not that simple.

It’s that sang, “radiologist aren’t losing their jobs due to AI .. only radiologist who don’t use AI are losing their jobs”.

The technology is not dystopian but our economic system makes it so.

Up to you to figure out which will hold.

No, the job market will adapt, just like it did during the industrial and information revolutions, and life will be better.

It will be better for those who already have it good. How it will affect those who don't is the real question here.

You have no idea if that's true or not.

"The job market will adapt and horses will simply find employment elsewhere now that we have cars"

The industrial revolution is not an apt analogy. Humans were still too essential to getting factories to actually work. Horses becoming useless - by no fault of their own - is an apt analogy. We are rushing to a world where humans can be fully replaced.

This "humans will always be in the loop no matter what" is just Cope. We simply don't know what will happen or the what the upper bound of AI capabilities will be. But 100% automation and humans as knowledge workers being as useless vs AI as horses vs cars is no longer sci-fi. We don't know if it will, but this is a future that actually could happen within our lifetimes.

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