Comment by ludicity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ludicity | Hacker News Reader

I always have a lot of fun looking up the executives saying this stuff: https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/our-people-and-leaders...

CIO at Goldman Sachs, multiple "AWS businesses" started spanning "mobile, serverless computing, Internet of Things, and augmented and virtual reality". AWS businesses? What does that even mean? And the spread of sectors looks like it was precisely calibrated to be a Thought Leader.

Or consider this piece: https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/fortune-we-mu...

Everyone grifter I know in Australia is publishing pieces like this. It's simultaneously all-in on AI hype while trying to have it both ways by insisting the human will always be central. No matter what you believe about AI, the set of assumptions you have to accept to confidently state that humans will absolutely remain central is so specific that you would only say this if you were a smiling conman.

If someone wants to believe it'll remove all jobs, fine, whatever. If someone wants to believe it'll do nothing, sure, okay. If you want to believe that it's the most revolutionary technology in human history and no one's going to lose their jobs, you're just transparently pretending to be trendy while simultaneously pretending to be human-oriented.

To believe that automation must reduce demand for labor is called the lump of labor fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

"While many workers fear that automation or artificial intelligence will take their jobs, history has shown that when jobs in some sectors disappear, jobs in new sectors are created. One example is the United States, where a century of increasing productivity and technological improvements changed the percentage of Americans employed in the production of food from 41% of the workforce in 1900 to 2% in 2000. This change did not result in large-scale unemployment, because workers found jobs in newly created industries (like farm equipment manufacturing). Another way to state this is that automation or technological improvements free workers to move to new growing industries."

Anyway, the article is clearly a fluff piece. It'll be much more interesting to read about the actual impact of Devin on Goldman Sachs' engineering efforts. I suspect it will help in certain ways and hurt in others

That's fair, but I'm talking about the complete certainty that it won't reduce the demand for labor! It's the opposite of the fallacy you've highlighted being committed by posturing leaders.

I incidentally get the inside scoop on what's going on internally at these organizations through the blog, and they definitely need a lot less Devin and much better hiring practices.

Technological change can cause short term labor disruptions. They may or may not be broadly negligible. The more important point is that, throughout history, the societies that embrace new technology always end up better off (across the board, including the lower classes) in the long run, and the societies that do not always end up worse off (also across the board).

I was agreeing with this, gave it a bit of a think, then it occurred to me that surely cigarettes and the technical discoveries used to facilitate gambling addiction qualify as technology.

(But I broadly agree.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com