Honestly true and I’m sick of it.
A very vocal group of people are convinced AI is a scheme by the evil capitalists to make you train your own replacement. The discussion gets very emotional very quickly because they feel personally threatened by the possibility that AI is actually useful.
And of course it will only become more powerful. It's a dangerous game.
Are not mutually exclusive. LLMs will train people's replacements while same people pay for the privilege of training those replacement. LLMs also allows me to auto-complete a huge volume of boilerplate, which would take me several hours. It also helps people step out of writer's block, generate a first draft of prototype/mvp/poc etc quickly without wasting long hours bike shedding. It also helps my previously super confident cousin, who blamed me for killing his dream of next AirBnB for dogs, Uber for groceries, instagram for cats not materializing due to me being selfish hoarding my privileges and knowledge, to finally create those ideas and kill his own dreams and definitely ignoring/avoiding me these days.
LLMs are same as knives, crimes will happen, but also necessary in the kitchen and industries.
I read this like you are framing this as though it is irrational. However, history is littered with examples of capitalists replacing labour with automation and using any productivity gains of new technology to push salaries lower
Of course people who see this playing out again are personally threatened. If you aren't feeling personally threatened, you are either part of the wealthy class or for some reason you think this time will be different somehow
You may be thinking "Even if I lose my job to automation, there will be other work to do like piloting the LLMs", but you should know that the goal is to eventually pay LLM operators peanuts in comparison to what you currently make in whatever role you do
Also, “this time it’s different” depends on the framing. A cynical programmer who has seen new programming tools hyped too many times would make a different argument: At the beginning of the dot-com era, you could get a job writing HTML pages. That’s been automated away, so you need more skill now. It hasn’t resulting in fewer software-engineering jobs so far.
But that’s not entirely convincing either. Predicting the future is difficult. Sometimes the future is different. Making someone else’s scenario sound foolish won’t actually rule anything out.
I'm earning a salary so I can have a nice life
Anything that threatens my ability to earn a salary so I can have a nice life is absolutely my fucking enemy
I have no interest in automating myself out of existence, and I am deeply resentful of the fact that so many people are gleefully trying to do so.
Nonsense. We make far, far more than people did in the past entirely because of the productivity gains from automation.
The industrial revolution led to the biggest increase in quality of life in history, not in spite of but because it automated 90% of jobs. Without it we'd all still be subsistence farmers.
"We" were never subsistence farmers, our ancestors were
I'm talking about real changes that have happened in our actual lifetimes.
In our actual lifetimes we have watched wages stagnate for decades, pur purchasing power is dramatically lower than our parents. In order to afford even remotely close to the same standard of living as our parents had, we have to go into much larger amounts of debt
We have watched jobs move overseas as automation lowered the skill requirements so that anyone could perform them, so we sought the cheapest possible labour to do them
We have watched wealthy countries shift from higher paying production economies into lower paying service economies
We have watched the wealth gap widen as the rich get richer the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. Some of the shrinking middle class moved up, but most moved down
The fact is that automation is disruptive, which is great for markets but bad for people who are relying on consistency. Which is most people
This graph is going up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
The reason you believe otherwise is that people on social media think they're only allowed to say untrue negative things about the economy, because if they ever say anything positive it'd be disrespectful to poor people.
> We have watched wealthy countries shift from higher paying production economies into lower paying service economies
Service work is higher paying, which is why factory workers try to get their children educated enough to do it.
> We have watched the wealth gap widen as the rich get richer the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. Some of the shrinking middle class moved up, but most moved down
They mostly moved up. But notice this graph is positive for every group.
https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=wealth&wealthend=03012023...
You think service workers at a fast food restaurant or working the till at Walmart are higher paid than Factory workers?
> They mostly moved up. But notice this graph is positive for every group.
The reason it is positive for (almost) every group is because it isn't measuring anything meaningful
Salaries may have nominally gone up but this is clearly not weighing the cost of living into the equation
Fast food workers aren't service-economy workers, they're making burgers back there.
More importantly, factory work destroys your body and email jobs don't, so whether or not it's high earning at the start… it isn't forever.
> Salaries may have nominally gone up but this is clearly not weighing the cost of living into the equation
That's not a salary chart. The income chart I did post is adjusted for cost of living (that's what "real" means).
Also see https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-growth-since-1979-has-not-been...
What exactly do you consider the "service industry" if you don't consider food services (like restaurants and fast food) as part of it?
I suspect we have very different ideas of what "service industry" means
> Also see https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-growth-since-1979-has-not-been..
Did you even read the whole thing?
```Dropping “wage stagnation” as a descriptive term for the full post-1979 period doesn’t mean we think the wage problem for American workers has been solved. Wage growth in the post-1979 period has been slow and unequal, largely as a result of intentional policy decisions. This policy-induced wage suppression has stifled growth in living standards and generated inequality. The last five years saw rapid and welcome progress reversing some of these trends—but it will take a long time to heal the previous damage, even if the post-2019 momentum can be sustained, which looks very unlikely at the moment.```
Admitting there is a problem but saying "it isn't stagnation" is just splitting hairs.
"Wage growth has been slow and unequal, but it isn't stagnation!"
"policy-induced wage suppression has stifled growth in living standards and generated inequality" there was wage suppression but it's not stagnation!
What a stupid article.