Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
epoch.ai
epoch.ai
It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
The reason it feels depressing is that if recent history is any guide, 0.0001% of the human race will receive almost all the benefit. A tiny number of richer-than-rich will get even richer and everyone else will stay the same or get poorer.
To be fair I think there's a lot of truth in your statement in the short term (and arguably in the long). But in the 'long' term , it sure does look like revolutionary technology makes everyday peoples life better (I didn't even go into transportation or health care/life expectency)
Sure everybody can be addicted to some crappy social service on their phones, but that's not a mark of progress in 2025 nor definition of life fulfillment/happiness, some would say in contrary. Obesity was also for a long time mark of wealth (and in some 3rd world countries it still is), and now its a sign of low social status and failure for various reasons.
Btw life expectancy i starting to decline again in developed countries, its just 3rd world that has so much gap to cross that they still go up.
Of course historically this does seem to be a cycle. Usually it goes gilded age, revolution, broad-based growth, emergence of a new elite, repeat cycle. Unfortunately the revolution period is often very chaotic and destructive.
The nice things from (A) don't necessarily require what co-occurred with (B). There is nothing in the physics or materials of a refrigerator which requires the assembler to have been paid less than the CEO.
Wrong, It’s the most important prior.
Technology is vastly different now since your supposed “last time”, to the point where it’s an entirely different landscape for events to unfold.
Look at the state of mass apathy and lack of accountability we have in society now. That tiny group has never been more unaccountable.
AI and other automation allows more to be done with less labor which increases corporate profits, and all that is pocketed by a very small number of people. Meanwhile everyone else is unemployed. There is no mechanism to distribute these benefits to anyone.
The money goes to inflate stock and other financial bubbles and asset prices, including housing, which makes living even more unaffordable.
Long term this eventually collapses since the economy doesn’t work with no customers.
However, that's cyclical and we're in a really crappy local minima for affordability due to a rapid increase in interest rates.
Broad automation of tasks can be great for society if and only if the product of that automation is not treated as some kind of private property.
I’m not hyped on an automated future because I find it quite unlikely but if it were to happen it has the potential to be transforming beyond expectations.
Star Trek or Bladerunner? That’s a choice we can make.
Then there's the depressing practical stuff. AI being forced down our throats. AI as an excuse lay people off. AI as an excuse for massive data hoarding. AI flooding the internet, making it harder to find good content.
do { resp = callAI(input); } while (!isOutputSane(resp) && attempts++ < MAX_RETRY)
And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start building trust. Sure assistants are nice but thats about it.
Its just too flawed now to be dependable and reliable, it feels like typical 80/20 or 90/10 situation where inexperienced juniors are all over their head how future is now, and seniors just meh and go and do some work.
The parallels with crypto are amazing.
> And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro...
Cue some dude chiming in on how they are 1000% more productive now and wrote 100 apps in a weekend with Claude, etc.
It is very tiresome indeed.
Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of hiring artists is quite common.
Oh it was very real during crypto hype cycle too. The crypto people were very annoying with it.
> Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of hiring artists is quite common.
I would imagine it is fine for some concept art, based on my experimentation with multiple models for Stable Diffusion.
For generating actual assets that are consistent? I am highly skeptical. Unless we are talking about bottom of the barrel indie games.
And not only indies, when taking voice actors into consideration.
https://www.ign.com/articles/horizon-actor-ashly-burch-says-...
Or some well known studios,
https://www.ign.com/articles/activision-finally-admits-it-us...
I am somehow unimpressed.
There are people being affected by those decisions, effectively losing their jobs, and source of income, as unimpressed as you may be.
FIFA (or whatever it is called nowadays) also sells plenty every year generating incredible revenue to EA, and every year is a poor quality game.
This is why I am unimpressed that Activision is using AI in its games. I expect them to be of poor quality.
Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call, write tests. With “the robot” once the framework was largely in place, you just paste API docs for the endpoint you need, and it’s done in a minute. With tests and everything.
Now, you could argue that this is not “senior level work”. Sure, maybe. But the thing is, you need to use it to learn how to use it effectively, and more importantly to get the intuition about what it can help with best.
So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.
I think AI is a game changer but not for things that can already be automated rigirously without AI.
This is the future to prepare, not AI generating a couple of files.
On IT industry specially, I think LLMs generating code are going to become as transformative as compilers were to Assembly developers.
Yes, currently they still go through "generate language XYZ" as intermediary step, however they eventually will improve to the point, that intermediary step will no longer be needed.
And like the Assembly developers that deemed to manually assess the machine code generated by compilers and scoffed at the generated output, eventually had to cope with optimising compilers turning their knowledge into a niche field, same will happen with common programming languages.
Yeah sure, there will be some Compiler Explorer kind of way to see how the AI maps its decisions to e.g. RISC-V Assembly, but only those in the know will bother looking into it, either by curiosity or need.
Some current examples ongoing trends, more specifically IT, in enterprise consulting, we have evolved to less coding, more plumbing, where existing SaaS products get integrated with each other, mostly via configuration, or integration scripts.
Well turns out, some of those common patterns can be used to teach AIs, and let them automate integrations, instead of manually write them by hand.
https://blog.hoyack.com/top-7-tools-for-effective-agent-orch...
Do they work as well as the sales pitch?
Not yet, those optimising compilers also took a couple of decades to get right, still miss some stuff like auto-vectorization, however the job of Assembly programmer is for all practical purposes gone.
That just points to an inefficiency. Could be tackled in other ways than involving an LLM to produce essentially what's being done elsewhere every day over and over again. A framework automating and hiding all this would be just as effective. Perhaps even cleaner than all that duplication that the LLM created for you.
In other words, that month of busywork that you just saved is inherently unnecessary to do. But progress is not linear in the number of lines of code that you produce. If you think hard about a good architecture and design, coming up with that after 2 weeks of hard thinking, that could be 90% of the work. The remaining 10% are writing all that down. That could take 3 more months, and it taking more than 10% of the time points to the existing inefficiency in tooling / framework / ... But making that more efficient isn't necessarily achieved the best by using an LLM and writing it all out. There are still huge redundancies, which is what made the LLM possible. Once you boil these down in some common frameworks or tools, the LLM will also just produce the same few lines that you'd need to produce to get those 10% done in then just 10% of the total time.
Work(ed) for a company super big on a force of agents. Brought them into my workflows early on, before the company even pivoted. Ran them at home on private hardware (that 3090 had to do something), at work when access was opened up. Provided valuable feedback on hallucinations (e.g., fabricating the existence of a MongoDB CLI module wholesale, documentation and all) and barriers to adoption. Pitched an integration of four disparate systems across ~20 data points to create tenancy in a core product line from scratch, with said AI at the center of it for customer service and workload creation, reducing engineers to approvals only for ~20 tickets a week averaging ~40hrs of work, freeing up said engineers for actually valuable work instead of handholding customers through routine tasks. Got great feedback and enthusiasm on it.
RIFed this year.
Doesn't matter whether you're bullish or bearish on it, the only thing that ever really matters is if scrubbing your line item from a spreadsheet will net someone higher up than you a bonus. That's what's driving this AI mania, and what needs to be addressed via policy before these employers gut themselves and the economy in the process.
Totally agree with you on the line-item point. My point there was that if a 50% RIF is in the works, the people who haven’t figured out how to become more efficient using AI would be more likely to be affected. Statistically.
But again, hope you’re doing well and everything has worked out for you!
Still optimistic that my generalist skillset and adaptability to new technologies (like AI) will make me an asset for IT teams who can’t afford multiple specialists in rough economic times like these.
> RIFed this year
Yeah that's why they are big on the force of agents, so they can justify trimming their workforce
Anyone who doesn't see this is kind of a sucker
I'm hoping that pays off for me someday. Thus far, it's just been a lot of burnout/layoff cycles.
> engineers to approvals only for ~20 tickets a week averaging ~40hrs of work, freeing up said engineers for actually valuable work instead of handholding customers through routine tasks
Not trying to be too judgy here but to me it sounds more like you are the one helping sink the ship than help everyone to life boats
Something to think about. Agreeing to bring AI into our workflows is actually digging out the foundation beneath our own feet (and our coworkers feet)
Ah well. At least seeing me get RIFed hopefully sent up signal flares with the rest of the team to GTFO while they can, and I had a lot of good accomplishments towards the end in particular. Take the good where I can find it, I suppose.
What does this even mean? AI is mostly forced in situations where it can't actually improve on the output, like at the top of a google search.
> So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.
If your job mostly consisted of writing api clients maybe, but that's a pretty odd job.
Do you wanna bet?
But that means that whatever rather impressive internal representation of knowledge it has encoded, that knowledge itself can’t be trusted on a “factual” basis.
This is where you have stopped, but you shouldn’t. Because you’re missing what it’s great at. And it’s great at “continuing” text in a longer context. So just use it with a longer context. Use the Search functionality in ChatGPT when asking it things such that you see where it got it from. Use it in a codebase context where you point it to the relevant parts. Give it examples it should follow, etc.
For every task I have I try using AI in some way and form first. Because the downside is limited - I waste 5-7 minutes figuring out that it’s not going to work, and this is something I definitely need to do myself. But the upside is unlimited - the task is done in minutes.
Why do you think the managers/business owners need an excuse to lay people off? If it's legal and economically beneficial to them, they'll fire people. Having AI won't help them as an excuse. In fact, I would say it sounds like a much worse excuse than "the economy is on a rough spot" or something like that
More importantly, if they can imagine some economic benefit. Very plausible an executive might think a chatbot is as capable as an engineer when they don't know how to evaluate either.
There's also a negative side . . .
I am not sure where this is going but there will be some large changes to society needed if technology keeps progressing at current speed.
Militaries being used by Governments to protect the interests of capital at the expense of citizens, e.g. the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Government legislation enshrining the rights of capital and profit over the rights of citizens, e.g. copyright laws and DRM protections.
Centralization of systems and dependency of products on remote compute, e.g. public cloud service providers, social media networks, shifting from wired to wireless home ISPs and networks to reduce stability of private hosting.
They made it illegal to break DRM on their devices, send the police to protect their property, leverage the military to annihilate opposition, and now use modern technologies to prohibit end user control by requiring remote dependencies for operation.
That's how they stop you.
I don't understand, what stops you from doing that today?
Having a robot that I don't control that's stronger than me and smarter than me in my house does not sound at all comforting.
make your own company and do something about it then. or STFU.
my solution is to make companies that are cool, fun to work at, push good values and make some money.
then use that money to push for appropriate political moves like you are saying.
how would you propose to reform the government? through voting? good effing luck. it will take $$$.
additionally, i get really annoyed with all the complaining that is done about politics. did you vote? neat, that’s the system we have. want to do something about it? make some money. that’s the system we have.
these people complaining about things instead of doing something will die complaining.
coming from a liberal that is more in the center and annoyed with my overally liberal parents.
Maybe your lord is a great guy and he does everything right but tomorrow his son comes into power and he could whip you. That’s what a good company is like. My new manager is an asshole who ruined my great job.
but we can move to new feudal leaders or literally become a feudal leader ourself.
America baby!
Is it easy? nope. neither was getting a tech job or rising and surviving in it. but some of us do and some of us don’t.
anyone interested in some cold blooded american history from the mid-1800s should check out American Primeval on netflix. i really enjoyed it. it is a bit graphic.
Working on it
I love history. It’s a great cope to see how people can live fulfilling lives under completely different conditions from the standard 2025 life path. Maybe I will check it out :)
Or you could raise the capital by pitching investors that have money because you actually have a good idea.
or you don’t have a good idea. you don’t have any money. and you want to complain.
what are you asking for? that your parents were more rich? that everyone has the exact same amount of money?
what are you striving for in this comment? are you pointing out that life is unfair? i do agree with that.
But more importantly, I'm pointing out that suggesting personal solutions to systemic problems is not only inevitably doomed to fail, but is promulgating the wrongheaded thinking that has created and sustained the crisis that brought us to this point.
"I don't want all the land to be held by neofeudal corporations that exercise control over every aspect of our lives" cannot be solved by "so become a neofeudal overlord yourself!" Not only is it effectively impossible to achieve, at the very best it only solves the problem for you.
I don't want to just have a better life for myself. I want a better life for everyone.
if you want to have a better life for everyone then what is your solution? you do not provide one.
my solution is if enough people with the right thinking also become neofeudal overlords then we can exercise the change you’re talking about.
do you think some day everything is just going to magically snap into place and everyone will just be fair?
it has been fought for and died over for thousands of years to get where we are. and we are lucky that much less of us have to die in order to stand up for what we believe in.
now we can just make money and use that to effect change. pretty cool evolution of civilization if you ask me.
in addition, what’s wrong with solving the problem for me first? then taking care of others? that’s exactly the right approach.
others can then follow the same approach. now we have a lot of feudal overlords.
diversified micro feudalism is the term that this conversation has spurred. i like it!
A better world is possible, whether you believe in it or not.
gotta show them we’re not afraid to play their game and win it as well.
we should be able to play any game, any time. But based on that direct the game to be of higher moral ground.
editing this comment as apparently we’ve reached our thread comment limit.
yes, bargaining from a position of power. that would allow to direct it to a more suitable place. banding together with individuals of power to produce combined power. you say it’s impossible and then say exactly how we’re going to do it. :)
i hope you know this has been a very enjoyable conversation for me.
At best it's "bargaining from a position of strength."
But, again, I apparently need to emphasize that what you suggest is, for any given individual, effectively impossible. The only way to achieve it would be to band together in such numbers that we could, instead, work to influence politics toward the ultimate goal of equality with much more success.
Source: I have worked on both robots and small farms.
And even the people who recognize that this ideal is utterly impractical can still be strongly influenced by it, such that when a set of technological advances promises the prospect of actually being able to realize it, they jump toward it with stars in their eyes.
Unfortunately, it's not just impractical because of the lack of technology to support it (other obvious problems include the degree to which humans need social interaction to be healthy, the limited amount of land available, the number of things taken for granted in modern life that cannot be either grown or crafted alone, even with robotic help...). It's a fantasy, and always has been.
But I hear what you're saying. More "humane" progress would certainly be very welcome. In fact if neo-feudalism wins, most of us will have to "live off the land", whether we want to or not.
And those are only two of the jobs for maintaining households. If those two things aren't automated, we're not having these 'robo households' - period. Instead I think the future holds mostly the present - glorified clappers [1] and ad-tech masquerading as some sort of something that mostly does a mediocre to awful job of whatever it's supposed to be, Alexa.
Why do you hate freedom?
Wait brb, the ceiling fan I wrote in Lisp is spraying yogurt again
AI-assisted plumbers will follow this archetype.
That Audel's, my wife got me for Christmas a few years back at Lee Valley Tools, I think. Was about 1/3 of what the listed price is here.
[1] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?ds=20&kn=how%...
[2] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?ds=20&kn=read...
[3] https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/audels-carpenters...
I can see a drain plumbing system that maps out a new construction home and some sort of automated robot that builds out large sections of pipe. It wouldn't completely eliminate the plumber. But it'd change it from something like measuring, cutting, and gluing 100 times to walking around with a camera for 5 minutes and then gluing 10 things together.
I expect new “robo friendly” roads will be the first example but of course homes could do the same.
Think like how the Catholic Church never disappeared but the rest of the world moved on around it. We will never get rid of context sensitive plumbing and electrical work but it just won’t really matter
What does this mean? The world didn't start Catholic and gradually reduce its Catholicism over time. There are apparently about 1.4bn Catholics out there[0].
Maybe AI will be just as productive.
Seriously YouTube has been amazing for the world of self learning. AI could learn a lot from it.
I have at times watched a lot of videos of people making stuff or doing DIY. I suspect like 99% of the audience of those videos, they are just entertainment.
That technical progress resulted in a few companies and farm conglomerates becoming incredibly wealthy. But the benefits that we all received was we didn't have to toil in a field, and we get fresh beef on every corner.
The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive.
The wealth gap was growing since 1980. Is the median person better today when the median person cannot afford a college education or a house?
Both of those were easily afforded in the 80s.
Also remember: the average job didn't require a college education back then either. College has become a gatekeeper due to its rising costs and diminishing returns.
That being said, the home ownership rate in the US is 65% and almost anyone who wants to go to college can via loans and scholarships.
Only around 40% of people in the US have a college education. But that doesn’t mean that the other 60% are homeless and starving.
Then cultural, as we see now, there is very much an anti-intellectual anti college bias by a major user of people in the country.
Many people don't want to be itinerant, they want a settled home to make their own and enjoy for a long time if not life. 'Forever home' is a phrase and a positive one because that is a goal people have.
I want a million dollars a year income. No one owes me that. Move to where the jobs are. I moved from my hometown in south GA the week I graduated from college because there were no jobs.
Maybe rural America should stop voting for politicians who are opposed to affordable college education (or trade school) and student loan forgiveness.
> I want a million dollars a year income. No one owes me that.
Why is this always where this type of conversation goes? No one has spoken about any entitlement here, but frankly, while you aren't owed a million dollars a year, I'd say you're owed something. Assuming you're working full time, I'd say you're owed at least a living wage.
But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
People today are living all across the country and not be homeless and the people who live in the poorest states repeatedly vote for politicians that want to cut government services and cut the safety nets. Right now they are cheering DOGE. Why should I feel sorry for rural America? They are getting exactly what they voted for.
We are under no obligation as a country to make sure that people who want to live the rest of there life in the MiddleOfNowhere Oklahoma can stay there for the rest of their life who don’t want to move. Besides again, these people overwhelmingly voted for politicians who don’t want to help them.
They are also cheering for the dismantling of the Education department, defunding colleges, cutting Medicaid, inflationary tariff policies, etc.
Do you seriously want to turn this discussion into lower-class rental / apartment discussion? Okay, fine. Lets go there.
https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea...
Average rent in 1980 was $243/month. Average rent in 2025 is $1397/month.
For those who cannot afford a home, life has gotten worse. For those who _can_ afford a home, their life has gotten worse. It doesn't matter where you plan to pivot this discussion, its all bad numbers for your discussion point.
But, rural America consistently votes for politicians and people who are trying to get rid of services they need the most. They are getting exactly what they are voting for and cheering right now.
They are actively opposed to programs that would make education more affordable and cheering cutting the department of education, the post office, internet for rural America etc.
Which is all I wanted to say in the root post. I'm not gonna get gish galloped off topic any further.
So they must be okay with it.
Trump won the electoral and popular votes with 312 (58%) of the former and 77,303,568 (49.81%) of the latter, which supports saying "over half" compared to Harris' 226 (42%) of the former and 75,019,230 (48.34%) of the latter. However the population of the United States is 340.1 million of which 244.6 million are voting eligible. Some quick back-of-napkin math then will tell you that while Trump took both the popular and electoral votes enough to win, that victory represents at best the will of approximately 31% of the eligible voters. And, that's strictly the popular vote, which doesn't actually win the election. Democrats struggle in every election because of decades of meddling on the part of Republicans with regard to how electoral votes are awarded and calculated, gerrymandering in every state, anti-voter, anti-minority policies that disenfranchise people on an industrial scale from the right to vote they're entitled, etc. etc. etc.
And you can say "well the Democrats should be working harder to undo it!" and I totally agree, but between the raw numbers on the ground, the well-documented Southern Strategy that has turned formerly pro-labor and progressive swathes of America into hard right strongholds via churches, and the various culture wars that have utterly melted American's brains to a great degree spearheaded by rest-in-piss Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the reactionary media sphere he helped weld into being, it is not remotely a fair statement to say that "over half of America voted for this knowing what would happen." Some did, for sure. Not half, not even fucking close.
dare i say, gangster moves back are REQUIRED.
to whoever downvoted this, you want to take the high road? when our citizens’ voting rights have been marginalized?
or are you just turned off by the word gangster?
anyway, i propose making the gerrymandering an anti—american thing. which it is.
make it the center of everything. there should be zero other issues until the ability to vote on the issues for all our people has been corrected.
i would call out every single politician that was responsible for this gerrymandering. repeatedly, over and over again until they were harassed into a retirement recluse. that is my gangster counter move proposal.
focus on the individual politicians reponsible for this and launch an all out aggressive offensive to eradicate their whole memory from America.
But that doesn't change the argument or the truth about what is, or isn't bad for people. I recognize the political disadvantage I'm at here, but lets just stick with the truth of the matter before we get into the politics.
As I said before, I'm happy if you could just agree with me that wealth gap is a problem worth tackling.
-----
I'm not one to tackle entire problems all at once. Lets focus on things one step at a time. Lets first agree what the problems are in America. And then once we all agree on that, then we can work on them.
Cosigned all above.
> But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
I think insofar as property is treated as an investment vehicle, everyone should be able to own something. Like, the difference between a mortgage and a rental contract in terms of personal economics couldn't be further from one another. One creates wealth, one transfers wealth and concentrates it.
"Can you afford to buy a home" as an economic metric doesn't mean necessarily that you should buy a home and you are a poor if you haven't or simply choose not to. That's fine. However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment to make that requires access to okay credit, and that once done, benefits the homeowner financially decades into the future. When I got a mortgage, an insured one with no money down even, my credit immediately went down to account for having a loan, but then right afterwards jumped almost 20% in a 3 month period, even though I did nothing differently apart from paying into a mortgage instead of paying rent.
Alternatively, reform the housing market so it functions as... well, a market. A house shouldn't necessarily appreciate in value over time, and the fact that it's expected to is... strange. One could argue that if nothing has appreciably changed in your neighborhood since you bought your house, it should sell for ballpark about the same price as what you paid for it, unless you did some substantial renovations or something. And even then... if you're just making it more suited to your tastes, probably not?
In other words make houses... well, houses. Not investment vehicles.
> People today are living all across the country and not be homeless and the people who live in the poorest states repeatedly vote for politicians that want to cut government services and cut the safety nets. Right now they are cheering DOGE. Why should I feel sorry for rural America? They are getting exactly what they voted for.
Well, a lot of them are poorly educated for starters, and insanely propagandized. They've been the singular target for Republican messaging for decades now, and as you state, they've voted for those people too who have in turn damaged their schools and pillaged their industries. And that's not even going into things like offshoring and cheap international goods that have obliterated small town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's markets out of existence.
And yes it's tremendously frustrating to talk to these people since they're seemingly ready to blame anything and everyone who isn't them, their ideology, and their own choices for the fact that their home is dying, but it's still their home, and it's still dying. And like, even if their children all do what you're telling them to do, that means millions upon millions of people about to immigrate to cities from these rural areas. So like, you gotta deal with them one way or another. They're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence.
You would be surprised at how low the credit rating you have to have to get an FHA mortgage. It only needs to be 580 to qualify for 3.5% down.
> However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment
And then later you said
> A house shouldn't necessarily appreciate in value over time, and the fact that it's expected to is... strange.
So exactly how do you keep a property from appreciating in an area that people want to be in? My parent bought their home in 1978 in South GA for $50K. According to Zillow it’s now worth $180K. Inflation adjusted it should be worth $245K (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/).
> And that's not even going into things like offshoring and cheap international goods that have obliterated small town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's markets out of existence.
So you support Trump’s inflationary policies about tariffs that will make goods more expensive in an effort to bring jobs back to the US (which won’t happen).
The world where every other country was demolished by wars and allowing the US not to have to compete with other developed nations is gone. Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back to the US. Would you be in favor of taxing those in the 90th percentile in wealthy (which you only have to make around $160K to be in) enough to support all of the other people so they can buy houses?
I think a lot of people here have absolutely no idea how “rich” they are compared to the average American and aren’t willing to give up enough of their income for “equality”.
> So like, you gotta deal with them one way or another. They're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence.
Let them suffer. They would rather vote for politicians who hate the same people they hate - non Christians (except for Jews for some reason), minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, college educated, etc. They aren’t voting against their own interest because they are “uneducated”.
They see the country eventually becoming more diverse and minority/majority and are doing everything they can to fight the inevitable.
They themselves would rather not have universal healthcare because it might help the “illegals”.
Of course other cohorts are the middle class evangelicals who think they are going to burn in hell if gay people have equal rights and Jesus won’t have any place to come back to if Israel isn’t protected. I’m not exaggerating at all to make a point.
Then you have people with money who like the status quo and don’t care about inequality.
> But that doesn’t mean that the other 60% are homeless and starving.
No one said starving. I'm saying that the average person is in worse straights than the average person from the 1980s.
If your message is 'Maybe not everyone needs a house' then it kinda sounds like you agree with me?
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1991/demo/sb91-0...
In fact home ownership rate has consistently been in the mid 60s since 1960
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/home-ownership-ra...
In which way is the average person worse? Worse health? Worse life expectancy? More homeless people?
People who own a home in 2025 have to pay $350,000ish on a wage of only $66k.
Home prices have gone up dramatically more than wages.
> In which way is the average person worse?
The amount of debt needed to own a home. Which is related to income vs cost-of-home. This ignores the fact that to reach $66k+/year salaries to begin with, you needed tens-of-thousands in student loan debt as well (which the average person in 1980 didn't need).
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1. Costs of education have gone up. It costs more money to be able to get a comfortable salary to begin with in today's world.
2. Younger folk are entering a very high-priced housing market, despite being already saddled with student loan debt (and thus starting off with no savings).
3. The bulk of "starting a new life" costs are car, house, and education. While yes computers and food have gotten cheaper, I would argue that car/house/education costs are the primary gatekeeper into income and/or class mobility.
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For the 40%ish who cannot afford a house, it gets even worse. Rental prices in 1980 were $243/month. Do you want me to run the numbers on how screwed they've gotten? Or do you have the gist yet?
Also remember: 1980 was a recession year with high unemployment and incredible inflation. We're comparing ourselves to the WORST time of stagflation and some of the worst geopolitical crisis of that era.
Even still, somehow, some way, the homeownership rate is the same, people aren’t going homeless and people’s needs are being met. How is that? If people are worse off meeting their Maslow hierarchy of needs?
Gotcha. I'm glad that I've forced you to ignore my argument rather than addressing the elephant in the room.
The average student loan debt in 1980 was zero because the vast majority of people could get by on free and public high school education btw. Especially if we assume that we're talking about the median income household.
To achieve this equivalent to 1980s lifestyle, we're talking what? $200k extra debt burdens on every average / median person? $40k in student debt and $150k++ in extra housing debt? Plus 4 years lost in education (as 1980s folk could work those 4 years instead). How is this a better or even equivalent life?
all knowledge is on the internet. we do not need college at all. that will come to be more evident. but colleges got lots o’ money from donors to prolong their livelihoods.
> Home Ownership Rate refers to the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner
So this rate is not that of people that own a home, but homes that are owned by someone that resides there.
Consider people in shared housing, young adults staying with parents, etc.
Male crime rates correlate with economic opportunity too, so even if you don't care about the 1930s and the economic reset of WW2 and its rebuilding (and WW1, but to a lesser extent), you should care about the possibility of crimes rates continuing to regress. Serious crimes don't get solved at a much higher rate than in the past, even if they have decreased since the 90s.
Home ownership is a lagging indicator and doesn't show the whole picture: If people used to buy a home at 25 and move into it, but today they wait and live in their parents house until 30 before moving into a home, the stats might appear the same. The quality of life won't be. Home ownership rate needs context too, in some countries rent is low and house prices are high(er than the US), where many people rent through retirement, and where the implication of rising house prices is not as bad unless rent also raises.
As I asked before, what do you propose? Rent control? Affordable higher education? I agree with that. But half of America as seen by the support of DOGE and the lack of support for student loan forgiveness of any kind don’t. America is getting exactly what they voted for - especially in the poorest, least educated states that vote Republican.
This is a sign of low class status and lack of success. Rich people change the world to fit their needs. Poor people change themselves to fit the world. Leaving your entire family and social network behind for work is extremely middle class behaviour
That's due to the post-war boom. The book Capital in the 21st Century goes over this, that the period between 1950 - 2000 was an anomaly for the US that cannot be replicated, yet people bring up this stat as if it were normal.
Students expect a lot more services from universities today. They expect regular formative assessments. They expect various support services. They expect warm, air conditioned buildings without draughts. They expect healthcare, mental health support, disability services, and expensive facilities for everything: projectors and screens and computers and everything.
Could that also be part of the drive of cost? The services definitely are, theyre a big driver of the increase in admin staff at universities.
The cost of education is pretty irrelevant anyway because nobody actually pays it. You get a loan. That is paid by someone else: you, later. But young men and women heading off to university don't have a moment where they have to give up the opportunity to go because they don't have the money.
The house is due to population increasing far faster than new houses being built. That's a function of policy, not of rich people existing.
The wealth gap increasing is a moral failure of our billionaires. They should take pride in building a better tomorrow for their fellow countrymen. And what we have now is the exact opposite of that.
Douglas Adams described it well:
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want." "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?" "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
Today, the average person has affordable access to a lot of things that may have been luxuries, or simply didn’t exist, 100-200 years ago. Running water, electricity, internet, mobile phones, modern sanitation & infrastructure, and any number of tiny cheap devices that improve QoL.
And yes, we also have huge problems with wealth disparity and late stage capitalism.
The problem is, we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Like, we do not have widespread food scarcity problems today. Extremely advanced medical technology is available, if too expensive.
Our tech bubble is only one small part of actual technology. There is still very cool research going on in other fields. Big tech is all about personal computing & social media, and yeah, AI in this area is dubious and hard to get excited about.
At the same time, there are SO MANY other areas of technology which can have huge impacts on humanity. For example, the tech behind modern AI models has already produced breakthrough research in the field of protein folding. (https://youtu.be/P_fHJIYENdI) This will have a big impact on our ability to solve biological problems.
All that to say… let’s stop being so closed-minded about tech. Yes, the big tech social media, app, and SaaS companies are not going to give us a utopian future. But technology is way more than that. It includes robotics advances for cheap manufacturing, cheap energy from small scale hydro or even nuclear installations, advances in our ability to fight diseases and viruses (the COVID vaccine would not have been possible as quickly without modern technology), more clever & efficient construction techniques, and the list goes on and on. Tech is absolutely solving tons of real problems that we face. We can be excited for that and also not care about the next knock-off AI wrapper SaaS company.
I didn't say they were. I said they had better jobs to go to than working in the fields. I'm not saying their lives were better than ours are now. Obviously not.
USA recovered remarkably well, but only because there was a big pivot away from crony capitalism and towards "socialism" under FDR. Big investments in The People, unions, education, infrastructure.
We are going in the former direction right now.
(Also, it is not clear to me how any of this is relevant to "The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive".)
My point is not that the person I was replying to is definitely wrong about FDR's policies, but rather that the effects of FDR's policies are uncertain enough that the fact that FDR imposed them in the 1930s cannot credibly used to lend strong support to any argument for any economic policy to be imposed today. The post-WWII economic boom for example happened after most of FDR's policies had been repealed.
I think it's damaging to clear thinking by muddying the waters.
I give you an example of returning the favor to you:
"Causual relationships can be hard to discern. Some say when people spout a spurious claim without evidence nor citations that falls in line with the entrenched structural power interests it simply shuts down critical thinking and causes people to not advocate for themselves and their own self interests which lets deep systemic issues fester and rot and leading to mass violence."
https://a.co/d/9rTmcYe https://a.co/d/5aIpwPC https://a.co/d/0ujVgWg https://a.co/d/0g5HHDh
FDR committed the grave sin of making a lot of rich people slightly less rich, in the short term. Deregulation is the answer to everything, including the problems caused directly by lack of regulation and governance. Hilarious.
Society has to change before humanity has any further technological progress that will benefit everyone. We're simply in the "how to min max wealth growth" stage.
If John Deere can help it, those Deerebots will be sealed shut, TPM'd & DRM'd to hell. You'd pay a subscription and have to take them into a service center to get them serviced and have the firmware updated. They basic subscription tier will only work with genuine Monsanto(TM) seedPods(R)
The real problem is that farming is fucking hard. I bought a vertical tiller somewhat as a hedge against societal collapse from the political movement to destroy America, but I'm under no illusions of that being a straightforward food supply. The main aim is to be able to do food plots for neighbors in trade.
Honestly I've got to wonder if we're going this far, why do you even need to live off the land? As in, why turn soil just to get free sun and water? Why not just indoor hydroponics? Or even still using soil, but inside in a much more controlled fashion.
They don't. You live better than Henry VIII in almost all ways (other than you can't establish a new state religion). You have access to painkillers, dentistry, sight correction, and information on a daily basis, along with more chicken than he did. The fact that that's true for hundreds of millions of people is incredible.
Over what time period? 5 years? 100 years?
And this is the core of my argument, let’s talk more about the cool shit.
The historic benefits of technology come from eliminating the waste of human effort:
- Motors and engines removed the waste of using our muscles as an energy source
- Computers removed the waste of people's time doing calculations and admin manually
- Electronic Communications removed the waste of carrying information in physical form
What's the most prevalent form of waste today? I think it's dishonesty and corruption. And AI seems set to make more of it.
If a task is repetitive then the output is predictable so it should be automated deterministically, not with fuzzy AI bullshit
Like teaching an AI model to learn arithmetic instead of just building a calculator
A policeman standing on a public square threatening to incarcerate anybody who is violent results in no violence actually happening at that square. Take away that regulation (in form of the policeman) and watch the actual violence start.
Many things are moral, but have no legal coverage, some things are moral but illegal, and some immoral but legal.
But yea, that’s the only language that a corporate entity understands, unfortunately.
One of the most fundamental limits on the market is the criminalization of killing other people, giving it a prohibitive extra "cost". This kind of restriction on the choices of participants is so incredibly well-accepted that we simply take it for granted, and seldom think about it as a "regulation" even though it is.
That regulation prevents CEOs from "rationally" deciding it costs less to assassinate rivals' employees than it costs to improve their product.
Hence why I can't stand such techno-optmism, apparently most folks live in an ideal world free of economics.
Some jobs will be automated away. Good thing. Braindead stuff that a machine can do should be done by a machine. Doesn't mean we'll all soon be just picking our noses. There will be other work to be done, and if unregulated capitalism has its say then it can easily lead to even more worker exploitation.
Yes, it has led to a significant reduction in hours worked: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
Of course, the effects aren't equally distributed across all countries. For example, annual work hours per worker have almost halved in Germany since 1950, but only seen a more modest decrease in the US. So political factors still play a role in how the benefits of increased productivity are used by society.
But it's a strong effect. And those numbers don't even consider other factors such as how increased life expectancy combined with mostly unchanged retirement age, and being older when we first start working, give people an extra decade or two of not being part of the workforce at all.
The number of vacation week and public holidays has increased, which explains the majority of the difference in "annual work hours".
The 10x in productivity is in no way reflected by the number of work hours.
Good thing when people actually have another job available for them.
Not everyone lives in regions where there is another job across the street.
No, but it hasn't led to a massive increase in incomes either (after adjusting for inflation)
But meanwhile everything gets more expensive so while yes people still have jobs and work as many hours as before, we have much less to show for it
I’m honestly very excited about this type of work. The benefits to society - better healthcare for less money, humans with their beautiful, creative brains not spending 40 hours a week looking at documents unnecessarily - are incredibly obvious. The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have to overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in place. We’re able to do this work in spite of that wasteful, inefficient system, not because of it.
I think the only thing that will actually push people to overthrow it is exactly the type of work I’m doing. Much like the first industrial revolution begat our first efforts at creating a more socialist, just, and democratic society (eg, like Fiorello La Guardia for instance). The benefits to this the first time were extremely tangible.
What should they be doing once all the meaningful jobs are automated away?
> The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have to overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in place.
> I think the only thing that will actually push people to overthrow it is exactly the type of work I’m doing.
Stripping people of their livelihoods is one way to encourage them to overthrow the system, yes. Make no mistake though: the revolution will not be kind to you.
My point is that looking at patient's biopsy slides or invoices, for 40-80 hours a week, to find known cancers/viruses, or to make sure numbers match up with statements, is not meaningful work. In fact, I'd argue that any work that can be automated without performance degradation isn't meaningful work for humans.
For the case of pathologists, this frees them up to look more carefully at cases where patients are experiencing symptoms and the cause can't be automatically. That means better patient care for both common and exceptional cases. And, perhaps, when put into use globally, it frees some pathologists up to take other roles in medical or scientific fields, doing something that isn't easily automated.
For accountants, it frees them up to only look at cases where things mismatch, or, well... science, teaching, art, local farming, carpentry, really anything that isn't staring at invoices and statements 40 hours a week. It seems particularly silly to me that anyone would argue "comparing numbers on documents" is "meaningful work."
A pretty popular quote by Stephen Jay Gould: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." I'd assert that many of our world's pathologists and accountants are doing the equivalent of living and dying in those cotton fields and sweatshops, if they're doing work that could be automated.
> Stripping people of their livelihoods is one way to encourage them to overthrow the system, yes. Make no mistake though: the revolution will not be kind to you.
Chill, dude. It's not like I'm making millions building these things. It's all just SaaS software, a sector where profit margins generally always trend downwards as the market for the product matures. Put another way, these companies are nowhere near as profitable as companies that extract our psychological profiles, target content and ads to make us feel miserable, and then use that to sell us stuff (Meta, Google, et al). I could easily go to Meta and make twice what I do now.
Plus, I contribute time and labor to organizations like the DSA, JVP, and local nonprofits, volunteer at my local food bank and for other local organizations, choose to shop at local co-ops and farmer's markets, and more to build the type of economy that can support actual meaningful, not-easily-automated work for humans to do.
Abolish private property I guess?
Like fuck me someone was trying to sell my company an AI todo list the other day. What problem does it even solve?!?!?
Go out, buy a new iPhone. AI will come tomorrow and tell you when your mother gets to the airport and add it to your calendar and hire you a robotaxi to shovel your obsolete meat corpse into the worker ant distribution hub to escort her back to your techno-panopticon.
I can really recommend the book Blood in the machine if anyone is interested in how automation early on affected workers.
Do they? Seems more like developed countries just outsourced the sweatshop factory work to other countries. "Out of sight, out of mind" as they say, I guess.
Unless there's a new world war or draconian regulation, we're good. It's pretty much locked in.
Humanity has been around in basically the same form for 2 million years (and the same form for probably 200 000 years) yet life for the average person on the planet really started improving circa 1950.
The industrial era did a lot of things but it also made cities, famous for being horrible places to live in, even worse. It took the realization of that fact and action against pollution to improve that.
Worker's rights movement also had to spring up for 40 hour work weeks, 2 day weekends, sick leave, unemployment benefits, pensions, disability benefits.
Slavery was barely abolished 150 years ago, and it's still present in some places. Ditto for serfdom.
Hunter gatherers had healthier diets that settled populations thousands of years after the invention of agriculture.
MANY things were better for society and neutral or worst for the average person.
25 years ago, sure: online shopping/banking, email and chat -- these are all things my Blackberry or Nokia could handle. The touchscreen smartphone hasn't really moved the needle much in that regard.
And I basically agree about sort of time saving, we got smart phones, which I think was of questionable benefit compared to the invention of computers, the internet, and cell phones in the first place.
Uber has saved me a remarkable amount of time.
More-generally:
When I lived rurally (in college) cabs had to be booked in advance, that's just common sense.
So much time was saved you don't even realize it because most of the above was just practically impossible to do before - and frankly beyond the scope of what any human actually needs. But the scope crept anyway and now they're all normal parts of modern life taken for granted. As for where that time went - capabilities exploded, but any spare time also got eaten by tighter work hours from a more competitive market. That's capitalism for ya baybeeeee
the difference this time is that humans just moved to other activities where they were useful, and with super-AI(if it will happen) this is not the case anymore.
I'm not sure which particular hype won't manifest but a lot of the AI progress is kind of inevitable.
Transformation will be painful as it is hard to re-train people or get people to do stuff that is not really their forte.
What I see is companies failing behind implementing existing well known technologies.
It is people who want to keep doing whatever they were doing for years that later will be angry, because whatever they were doing stopped making sense but they don’t understand it. They will not want to understand things that put them out of job…
Sorry, what Europe are you talking about ? I don't think that's true.
In terms of AI particularly I can only focus on the here and now, and the real world effects that I'm seeing are split between enabling creepy men to produce deepfakes of women they're stalking and enabling bad faith actors with the ability to erode faith in our democratic systems. Om both counts I repeatedly see the "techbros" who develop the tech waving their hands or actively supporting it.
All of the benefits right now like being able to code marginally faster or bounce ideas off of aan LLM feel like playing with firecrackers while watching dangerous men develop guns after we got a hold of gunpowder.
Your definition of "society" implies that it means "everyone".
If you circumscribe the definition more narrowly to the owners of wealth/capital, the benefits to them (and the thin managerial class just below them) are pretty clear.
The degrowther culture of the mainstream comes to push out all nerds eventually.
"Out of these 14 tasks, we guessed that only 6 require abstract reasoning alone to perform. Strikingly, we classified only one of the top five most important tasks for medical scientists as relying solely on abstract reasoning. Overall, the most critical aspects of the job appear to require hands-on technical skills, sophisticated coordination with others, specialized equipment use, long-context abilities, and complex multimodal understanding."
Almost all of 14 R&D tasks listed in the table including that are not suited for data-driven AI with abstract reasoning can be solved by CP. Provided that we are allocating enough compute resources with at least similar to that we're currently providing data-driven AI with the crazy amount cloud networks of massively parallel compute CPU/GPU/TPU/etc.
Fun facts, the modern founder of Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming is George Boole, the grandfather of Geoffrey Everest Hinton, the "Godfather of AI" and "Godfather of Deep Learning".
[1] Constraint programming:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming
[2] Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming: A Fruitful Collaboration - John Hooker - CMU (2023) [video]:
https://www.youtube.com/live/TknN8fCQvRk
[3] "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - MIT (2011) [video]:
Fun facts, the presenter John Hooker was asked about how to determine the suitability of a particular heuristic solver for specific problems in his presentation. He casually answered that if he knows the solutions to that he will probably win a Nobel Prize. But perhaps AI/LLM can help in a way to recommend the solver based on the type of applications or problems.
If I'm not mistaken there's also Donald Knuth (TAOCP) asking questions after the JH's presentation, how often you see that?
[1] Diagrams AI can, and cannot, generate:
Any experts want to help me?
> ...this means that only 20% of labor productivity growth in the US since 1988 has been driven by R&D spending! Capital deepening accounts for around half of labor productivity growth in this period...
This is like saying that Jeff Dean's net worth is attributable not to his programming skills, but to the capital deepening of his bank account. The authors are working with concepts at a level of abstraction where they've lost contact with what they're saying.
B requires A. C requires both A and B. But also, A has a cost and B has a cost, and spending more on A or B can maybe get you more C.
Maybe spending more on developing better computers won't actually help anything (because they've already got 640k memory, which is enough for anyone). But only half of the people who can benefit from them have actually bought one so far, so collectively spending twice as much on buying computers can make them collectively twice as beneficial.
https://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html
Feels like we're still in the exploration phase of GenAI, but ML seems like it is in the deployment phase.
Would it blow your mind if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI that can do math/code better than 99% of humans but ordering a hotdog on doordash would be cutting edge and barely doable?
I don't disagree that "common" tasks are more valuable. I only argue that the argument these are easily automatable is a viewpoint based on ignorance. RPA has been around for over a decade and is not used in many tasks. AI is largely the same, until we get massive unrestriced access to the data for it we will not automate it.
Good luck getting it to write a competitive video card driver for Nvidia hardware or anything else that requires actual creative problem solving that isn’t github boilerplate.
I personally get more value from AI when coding more complex and novel things. Not fully automated, but English has become the most valuable language for me when coding.
To them, AI is years (decades?) away from being able to produce an Excel clone.
To average people, excel is just a tool to add up columns of numbers. Something AI is readily capable of today.
Jensen says they use AI to build their chips.
Color me surprised.
This not even remotely close to true. Like not even a little bit. I use Cursor and Gemini for work daily and I'd be hard pressed to think AI is a "better" programmer than any professional software engineer. Sure it makes writing code faster and more efficient, because you just click tab and three lines are written for you. It absolutely isn't better than me at coding though.
The claim about math is even more unbelievable than the claim about coding. We still don't have a single theorem proved and published by a LLM without human aid. LLMs barely follow a discussion in basic topology. It's incredibly ridiculous to state they're better than 99% of people. More like 0% of mathematicians and maybe 50% of college freshman.
Given the amount of time I have spent fixing code written like this over the years it is not encouraging.
I'm pretty sure that by "do math" the parent was referring to applying math, as one would do in the course of other tasks, and not mathematical research, just as by "code" they likely referred to writing code to solve a problem and not to algorithmic research.
And from my experience teaching & tutoring both math and programming at various levels, I would absolutely agree with the claim that AIs like Claude 3.7 Sonnet surpass over 99% of humans at typical short tasks.
It'll probably take some more time until context, memory and tool-use are improved sufficiently to allow AIs to tackle longer-term tasks effectively, but I'm sure it'll get there. And just as an example of progress, there was recently a post about the first "fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review without human edits or interventions" [0].
[0] https://www.rdworldonline.com/sakana-ai-claims-first-fully-a...
Online food ordering is a lot older than 15 years.
Through this kind of obfuscation, they incentivize the growth of things like ghost kitchens, which are basically faceless factories. Nobody would order from them if they drove by one. but on the apps, they are displayed as standalone restaurants.
As for referring to them as "faceless factories", I can't even start to imagine what sentiment that should evoke in me. I don't have an issue buying food products made at actual factories, and have visited quite a few. As such I don't have any issue ordering from a ghost kitchen located in an industrial area that may look like a factory on the outside.
Disconnect between progress being done (ie. alphafold) and trying to infer answer from some historic stats on r&d investment, ratios, their past estimated impact etc. is... just weird.
It's also funny that the whole ai itself together with constant breakthroughs is r&d.
They cite "societal disruption" through the wholesale (or significant) replacement of labor via AI, but then shrug off the problem as one for government to solve - governments they own, control, and/or influence. Yet if we take them at their word and they get rid of labor - who the heck do they expect to buy their stuff, and with what income? Capital's plan is very much (Eliminate Labor) + (Continued Sales of Products) = (We Keep All The Money), and I'd like to believe the HN community at the very least can see how that math does not work.
Capital would have to concede to a complete rework of civilization away from consumption and towards a higher goal, but that would entail tearing down the power and wealth structures they benefit from now with no guarantee of a brighter future tomorrow. Plowing ahead with AI while prohibiting any attempts at systemic revolution isn't just irresponsible, it's insane, and I'm tired of having pretend it's not for the sake of a stock price somewhere.
Present systems are incompatible with an AI-dominated future, full stop.
Your entire argument is why I reject GDP as a reliable measure of economic health (that is to say, I agree with you 100%). It can be a component of it, sure, but as the standalone metric it's relied upon as-is, it's awful. Doesn't capture inflation, doesn't capture real productivity growth, doesn't capture employment rates or labor compensation or income distribution. Heck, GDP is literally an ideal expression of Goodhart's Law: we have built entire systems designed to game a single number that was proposed as a metric of economic health, which no longer makes it a good metric of economic health!
If someone's sole defense is "GDP Up = Good", I do not take their argument seriously - because it isn't.
My company is actively in the process of demonstrating the “Learning machine” which is a Weiner style cybernetic system of systems
It’s unquestionable at this point that machines will displace all human labor where labor efficiency is the key factor for investment/use. Start with transfer learning from existing human machine interfaces and then expand to onpolicy with human feedback to SARSA.
The only remaining question is the persistent one “who benefits”
Almost nobody is working on what to do after
Games for status will continue.
Consuming experiences will continue (experiences that require humans will be premium).
And in a good case, we will still have plenty of work to do to decide what to do (going to space, making earth sustainable, merging with machines, ...).
One interesting possibility is that this is not something humans need to work on at all - because, as Nick Land famously put it, "Tomorrow can take care of itself." [0]
The US pays $12,000,000,000,000~ in salaries per year the TAM of automation is, assuming that 10% of work can be automated, $1.2 trillion dollars.
You can take all the salaries of the world and assume you can automate a percentage of that and you will consistently arrive to a big number.
One only has to think of the ubiquity of excel VBA still, and that'd probably still be regarded as fancy for most.
How can anyone be techno-optimistic about the future where AI is mass replacing their jobs to the point they cannot pay their rent?
How would anyone pay their rent or taxes when they get mass laid off by AI in this age and where job postings get less and less, where businesses push for efficiency. Here, I see businesses and startups will try to copy Elon’s style of layoffs and try to get away with it.
I don't think UBI works here either especially with rent increases, rent, childcare, taxes, etc and it sounds too unfeasible and utopian.
Also there is a narrative of “There will be new jobs created in the AI era” but I just don’t see this happening since AI will replace jobs faster than they are created. Case in point with prompt engineering.
Seems like those who are techno optimistic are the rich, investor class invested in the very things that push their narrative and where money isn’t a problem at all.
This class of people haven’t thought about this nor that they care when AI job replacement happens since they are already invested in it.
The (literal) trillion-dollar question, though, is who benefits from this significant acceleration in economic growth? Every major technological revolution, from the Agricultural through the Industrial and into the Digital Revolution, has produced further and further stratification of society. Will this one be the exception?
I can see four ways this can go:
1. We repeat our mistakes, with power concentrating into ever-fewer hands while everyone else enjoys less and less autonomy (at best, in exchange for the bare minimum token quality-of-life improvements to prevent revolts)
2. We learn from our mistakes and achieve the fully-automated luxury gay space communist utopia that techno-optimism has promised us
3. We riot and conduct an anti-automation purge, Butlerian Jihad style
4. We discover that AI wasn't all it's hyped up to be and any AI-driven technological revolution is still a long ways off
I'm hoping for #2. I'm expecting #1 or #4. Society is trending toward #1 or #3.
Our intuitive understanding of bullshit jobs would be enough.
The problem with all these jabs at R&D and science is not recognizing that R&D and science produce the very foundations that lead to the ability to do production in the first place. I'm certainly not saying we should dump all our money into R&D, but I do find it weird that others talk as if the ground you stand on doesn't matter. You literally cannot stand without it. The truth is that you need both. I suspect why we shy away from R&D is for 2 big reasons.
First, it has a lot of failure. The hardest thing about doing research is being able to stick with it when 90% of what you do doesn't work. It's fucking hard. But of course it is. If it was easy it would have already been done. So returns on the work can take a lot of time and the visibility of the failure is emotionally draining to those without enough resilience.
Second, we do not accurately capture nor ascribe the value nor of research. People who create ground breaking scientific revolutions that create the capacity for trillion dollar markets never end up with 1% of the result of their work. You don't see Tim Berners-Lee being a billionaire, nor Linus Torvald. You didn't see it in Einstein and cases like Turing are quite common through history. Certainly this is an alignment issue as we as a society should be encouraging such pursuits as their benefits vastly outweigh anything that has been done by Apple or Google. Not to diminish their achievements, they have both done fantastic and incredible things, but do they not sit on the foundations created by Turing, Burners-Lee, Hopper, and others. Or look even today, the work done by LeCun, Sutskever, Karpathy, Fei-Fei Li, Hinton, and yes, even Schmidhuber has created more than a few dozen multi-billion dollar enterprises. Yet as far as I am aware, not a single one of them is a billionaire. I do not believe (I could be TOTALLY wrong) their combined net worth is a billion. Even if it was, that would be a far cry from what many of the mogul we see today. Do we really think Zuckerberg has created more value than these people? Certainly this is entirely dependent upon your definition of value and I think most of use could agree that it would be incredibly naive to believe this exclusively means the money in their pockets. If you really do believe that, I will say that you're part of a problem. Money is a proxy, sometimes we need to stop and think "a proxy for what?"