Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

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> If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff?

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?

> All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers

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.

> 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.

> or a waiter serving food at a restaurant,

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?

> 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

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.

It’s more a dishwasher level of automation than 3CPO- when you order they enter your table number and the kitchen staff puts the prepared dishes in the shelves in the robot, which the drives to your table. Once it gets there you take the dishes from the robot.

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).

This is a long-standing trend with AI.

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".

I've seen robot waiters at one restaurant in SF as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were more. They'll most likely be here on a large scale faster than we think.

> 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.

Wouldn't you have struggled to imagine most of what LLMs can now do 5 years ago?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>> or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores

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.

> a waiter serving food at a restaurant

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".

>or a waiter serving food at a restaurant

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.

Yeah, it's as though "middle class" was a brief miracle of our age. Serfs and nobility is the more probably human condition.

Hey, is there a good board game in there somewhere? Serfs and Nobles™

ML models don't make fully informed decisions and will not until AGI is created. They can make biased guesses at best and have no means of self-directed inquiry to integrate new information with an understanding of its meaning. People employed in a decision making capacity are safe, whether that's managing people or building a bridge from a collection of parts and construction equipment.

> People employed in a decision making capacity are safe, whether that's managing people or building a bridge from a collection of parts and construction equipment.

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?

Has anyone made a fully informed decision?

Look, human cognition is obviously better than machine cognition, and nobody has ever made a poor argument or decision.

End of conversation.

> All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc?

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...

> 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.

>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.

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.

I think that's mostly myth, and a very very deeply ingrained myth. That's why probably hundreds of people already feel the rage boiling up inside of them right now after reading my first sentence.

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.

"Technology increases" have not made my life better than my boomer parents' and they will probably not make the next generation's lives better than ours. Big things like housing costs, education costs, healthcare costs are not being driven down by technology, quite the opposite.

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.

There are also blue- and pink-collar industries that we all tacitly agree are crazy understaffed right now because of brutal work conditions and low pay (health care, child care, K-12, elder care), with low quality-of-service a concern across the board, and with many job functions that seem very difficult to replace with AI (assuming liability for preventing children and elderly adults from physically injuring themselves and others).

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.

Right, but the elephant in the room is that despite those industries being constantly understaffed and labor being in extreme demand, they're underpaid. It seems nobody gives a flying fuck about the free market when it comes to the labor market, which is arguably the most important market.

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.

It would be bad for compensation in the field(s) but the actual working conditions might improve, just by dint of having enough people to do all the work expected.

> All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers?

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.)

This is the real answer. Eventually, when 95% of us have no jobs because AI and robotics are doing everything, then the rich will just buy and sell from each other. The other 7 billion people are not economically relevant and will just barely participate in the economy. It'll be like the movie Elysium.

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!"

>It'll be like the movie Elysium.

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.

And this is assuming that they won’t destroy each other. Any society have conflicts and I failed to see a bunch of ultrarich not have any.

> This is the real answer. Eventually, when 95% of us have no jobs because AI and robotics are doing everything, then the rich will just buy and sell from each other

My prediction is that the poor will reinvent the guillotine

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