So far, for any given automation, each actor gets to cut their own costs to their benefit — and if they do this smarter than anyone else, they win the market for a bit.
Every day the turkey lives, they get a bit more evidence the farmer is an endless source of free food that only wants the best for them.
It's easy to fool oneself that the economics are eternal with reference to e.g. Jevons paradox.
Had to look that up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
Ironically a friend of mine noticed that the team in India they work with is now largely pushing AI-generated code... At that point you just need management to cut out the middleman.
Management will cut down your team’s headcount and outsource even more to India ,Vietnam and Philippines.
A CFO looks at balance sheet not operations context, even if you’re idea is better the opposite of what you think is likely going to happen very soon.
Management did all that at companies I've worked for for years before 'AI'. The big change is that the teams in India won't 200 developers, but 20 developers handholding an AI.
Caveat that this is anecdotal, not sure if there are numbers on this.
That said, the first thing that jumps to my mind is cars. Back when they were first introduced you had to be a mechanically inclined person to own one and deal with it. Today, people just buy them and hire the very small number of experts (relative to the population of drivers) to deal with any issues. Same with smartphones. The majority of users have no idea how they really work. If it stop working they seek out an expert.
ATM, AI just seems like another level of that. JS/Python programmers don't need to know bits and bytes and memory allocation. Vibe coders won't need to know what JS/Python programmers need to know.
Maybe there won't be enough experts to keep it all going though.
When you consider how this interacts with the population collapse (which is inevitable now everywhere outside of some African countries) this seems even worse. In 20 years, we will have far fewer people under age 60 than we have now, and among that smaller cohort, the percentage of people at any given age who have useful levels of experience will be less because they may not be able to even begin meaningful careers.
Best case scenario, people who have gotten 5 or more years of experience by now (college grads of 2020) may scrape by indefinitely. They'll be about 47 then and have no one to hire that's more qualified than AI. Not necessarily because AI is so great; rather, how will there be someone with 20 years of experience when we simply don't hire any junior people this year?
Worst case, AI overtakes the Class of 2020 and moves up the experience-equivalence ladder faster than 1 year per year, so it starts taking out the classes of 2015, 2010, etc.
This is my bet. Similar to Moores law. Where it plateaus is anybody’s guess…
We've already eliminated certain junior level domains essentially by design. There aren't any 'barber-surgeons' with only two years of training for good reason. Instead we have surgery integrated it into a more lengthy and complicated educational path to become what we now would consider a 'proper' surgeon.
I think the answer is that if the 'junior' is uneconomical or otherwise unacceptable be prepared to pay more for the alternative, one way or another.
If there's a shortage, in the free market, humans will retrain.
This category is expansive enough to make fools of almost everyone on hn.
And if it could think, it would probably be very proud of the quarter (hour) figures that it could present. The Number has gone up, time for a reward.
I guess funding for processing power and physical machinery to run the AI backing a product would be the biggest barrier to entry?
This feels a lot like the dot boom/dot bust era where a lot of new companies are going to sprout up from the ashes of all this disruption.
AI certainly will increase competition in some areas, but there are countless examples where being the best at something doesn't make you the leader.
50% of a group of workers losing their jobs to this tech is not a worrisome future for him. It's a pitch!
All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc?
It's easy to imagine a world in which there are way less white collar workers and everything else is pretty much the same.
It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're better off, even if everybody else has less widgets.
It's also easy to imagine a world in which you're able to cut more workers than everyone else, and on aggregate, barely anyone is impacted, but your margins go up.
There's tons of other scenarios, including the most cited one - that technology thus far has always led to more jobs, not less.
They're probably believing any combination of these concepts.
It's not guaranteed that if there's 5% less white-collar workers per year for a few decades that we're all going to starve to death.
In the future, if trends continue, there's going to be way less workers - since there's going to be a huge portion of the population that's old and retired.
You can lose x% of the work force every year and keep unemployment stable...
A large portion of the population wants a lot more people to be able to not work and get entitlements...
It's pretty easy to see how a lot of people can think this could lead to something good, even if you think all those things are bad.
Two people can see the same painting in a museum, one finds it beautiful, and the other finds it completely uninteresting.
It's almost like asking - how can someone want the Red team to win when I want the Blue team to win?
History seems to show this doesn't happen. The trend is not linear, but the trend is that we live better lives each century than the previous century, as our technology increases.
Maybe it will be different this time though.
Yes, the lives of "people selling stuff" will likely get better and better in the future, through technology, but the wellbeing of normal people seems to have peaked at around the year 2000 or so.
But it is myth. It has always been in the interest of the rulers and the old to try to imprint on the serfs and on the young how much better they have it.
Many of us, maybe even most of us, would be able to have fulfilling lives in a different age. Of course, it depends on what you value in life. But the proof is in the pudding, humanity is rapidly being extinguished in industrial society right now all over the world.
If people don’t have jobs, government doesn’t have taxes to employ other people. If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well.
Robotics seems harder, though, and has been around for longer than LLMs. Robotic automation can replace blue collar factory workers, but I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your pipes, or a waiter serving food at a restaurant, or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores, that kind of thing. Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a human face.
These are three totally different jobs requiring different kinds of skills, but they will all be replaced with automation.
1. Plumber is a skilled trade, but the "skilled" parts will eventually be replaced with 'smart' tools. You'll still need to hire a minimum wage person to actually go into each unique home and find the plumbing, but the tools will do all the work and will not require an expensive tradesman's skills to work.
2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house" cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a slow cultural shift towards ordering food through technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going bye-bye.
3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating this with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into a destination will be solved very soon, and there are probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.
I'm not a plumber, but my background knowledge was that pipes can be really diverse and it could take different tools and strategies to fix the same problem for different pipes, right? My thought was that "robotic plumber" would be impossible for the same reasons it's hard to make a robot that can make a sandwich in any type of house. But even with a human worker that uses advanced robotic tools, I would think some amount of baseline knowledge of pipes would always be necessary for the reasons I outlined.
> 2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house" cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a slow cultural shift towards ordering food through technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going bye-bye.
That's true. I forgot about fast-food kiosks. And the other person showed me a link to some robotic waiters, which I didn't know about. Seems kind of depressing, but you're right.
> 3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating this with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into a destination will be solved very soon, and there are probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.
The way I imagine it, to automate it, you'd have to have some sort of 3D design software to choose where all the items would go, and customize it in the case of those special display stands for certain products, and then choose where in the backroom or something for it to move the products to, and all that doesn't seem to save much labor over just doing it yourself, except the physical labor component. Maybe I just lack imagination.
But if you have to be trained in the use of a variety of 'smart' tools - that sounds like engineering to know what tool to deploy and how.
It's also incredibly optimistic about future tools - what smart tool fixes leaky faucets, hauls and installs water heaters, unclogs or replaces sewer mains, runs new pipes, does all this work and more to code, etc? There are cool tools and power tools and cool power tools out there, but vibe plumbing by the unskilled just fills someone's house with water or worse...
> 2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house" cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a slow cultural shift towards ordering food through technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going bye-bye.
Takeout culture is popular among GenZ, and we're more likely to see walk-up orders with online order ahead than a facsimile of table service.
Why would cheap restaurants buy robots and allow a dining room to go unmanned and risk walkoffs instead of just skipping the whole make-believe service aspect and run it like a pay-at-counter cafeteria? You're probably right that waiters will disappear outside of high-margin fine dining as labor costs squeeze margins until restaurants crack and reorganize.
>3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating this with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into a destination will be solved very soon, and there are probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.
Do-anything-like-a-human robots might crack that, but today it's still sci-fi. Humans are going to haul things from A to B for a bit longer, I think. I bet we see drive-up and delivery groceries win via lights-out warehouses well before "I, Robot" shelf stockers.
I have already eaten at three restaurants that have replaced the vast majority of their service staff with robots, and they're fine at that. Do I think they're better than a human? No, personally, but they're "good enough".
Over the last few years, I've seen a few in use here in Berlin: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/robot-waiter-for-sale.html
> or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores
For physical retail, or home delivery?
People are working on this for traditional stores, but I can't tell which news stories are real and which are hype — after around a decade of Musk promising FSD within a year or so, I know not to simply trust press releases even when they have a video of the thing apparently working.
For home delivery, this is mostly kinda solved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
> Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a human face.
Sure… if they have the money.
But can we make an economy where all the stuff is free, and we're "working" n-hours a day smiling at bad jokes and manners of people we don't like, so we can earn money to spend to convince someone else who doesn't like us to spend m-hours a day smiling at our bad jokes and manners?
Wow. I genuinely didn't think robotic waiters would ever exist anytime soon.
> For physical retail, or home delivery?
I was thinking for physical retail. Thanks for the video link.
Tech-wise this could have existed 30 years ago (maybe going around the restaurant would have been more challenging than today but it’s a fixed path and the robots don’t leave the restaurant).
Often people will say "AI will never do X, or at least it will take decades", and then it does X, and it turns out you can cheat a lot to get X done really easily.
I'm old enough to remember when X was "play chess at top level", followed by 19 years of X = "play Go at top level". Irregardless of what you think of GenAI, the script writers of I, Robot chose X = "compose music and draw pictures".
They've already replaced part of that job at one of the grocery stores that I go to, there's a robot that checks the level of stock on the shelves, https://www.simberobotics.com/store-intelligence/tally.
I've seen this already at a pizza place. Order from a QR code menu and a robot shows up 20-25 minutes later at your table with your pizza. Wait staff still watched the thing go around.
Wouldn't you have struggled to imagine most of what LLMs can now do 5 years ago?
Hey, is there a good board game in there somewhere? Serfs and Nobles™
End of conversation.
Surely the modern history of decision making has been to move as much of it as possible away from humans and to algorithms, even "dumb" ones?
You forgot the born-wealthy.
I feel increasingly like a rube for having not made my little entrepreneurial side-gigs focused strictly on the ultra-wealthy. I used to sell tube amplifier kits, for example, so you and I could have a really high-end audio experience with a very modest outlay of cash (maybe $300). Instead I should have sold the same amps but completed for $10K. (There is no upper bounds for audio equipment though — I guess we all know.)
I briefly did a startup that was kind of a side-project of a guy whose main business was building yachts. Why was he OK with a market that just consisted of rich people? "Because rich people have the money!"
My prediction is that the poor will reinvent the guillotine
The rich were able to insulate themselves in space which is much harder to get to than some place on Earth. If the rich want to turtle up on some island because that's the only place they're safe, that's probably a better outcome for us all. They lose a lot of ability to influence because they simply can't be somewhere in person.
It also relies heavily on a security force (or military) being complicit, but they have to give those people a better life than average to make it worth it. Even those dumb MAGA idiots won't settle for moldy bread and leaky roofs. That requires more and more resources, capital, and land to sustain and grow it, which then takes more security to secure it. "Some rich dude controlling everything" has an exponential curve of security requirements and resources. This even comes down to how much land they need to be able to farm and feed their security guys.
All this assuming your personal detail and larger security force actually likes you enough, because if society has broken down to this point, they can just kill the boss and take over.
If you, a CEO, eliminate a bunch of white-collar workers, presumably you drive your former employees into all these jobs they weren't willing to do before, and hey, you make more profits, your kids and aging parents are better-taken-care-of.
Seems like winning in the fundamental game of society - maneuvering everyone else into being your domestic servants.
So, flooding those industries with more warm bodies probably won't help anything. I imagine it would make the already fucked labor relations even more fucked.
I can tell you for many of those professions their customers are the same white collar workers. The blue collar economy isn't plumbers simply fixing the toilets of the HVAC guy, while the HVAC guy cools the home of the electrician, while...
That is exactly what blue collar economy used to be though: people making and fixing stuff for each other. White collar jobs is a new thing.
I still fail to see why people think we're going to innovate ourselves into global poverty, it makes no sense.
But, 62% is very high. Keep in mind that number takes into account not only the elderly and disable, but also children.
Pretty much everyone who can work is working. We don't want children to be working, that's bad. We should all be on the same page about that.
I'm sure we are, but it doesn't look like an improvement for most people.
It seems like we'll need to generate a lot more power to support these efficiency gains at scale, and unless that is coming from renewables (and even if it is) that cost may outweigh the gains for a long time.
I also respect the operative analysis, but the strategical, long-term thinking, is that this will come and it will only speed up everything else.
Your UBI will be controlled by the government, you will have even less agency than you currently have and a hyper elite will control the thinking machines. But don't worry, the elite and the government are looking out for your best interest!
In 2010, I put together a list of alternatives here to address the rise of AI and Robotics and its effect on jobs: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Sure there can be rich people who are radical enough to push for another phase of capitalism.
That’s a kind of a capitalism which is worse for workers and consumers. With even more power in the hands of capitalists.
It just happens that up to this point there have been things that couldn't be done by capital. Now we're entering a world where there isn't such a thing and it is unclear what that implies for the job market. But people not having jobs is hardly a bad thing as long as it isn't forced by stupid policy, ideally nobody has to work.