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Comment by Centigonal | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This is a topic worth discussing.

Like every previous invention that improves productivity (cf. copiers, steam power, the wheel), this wave of AI is making certain forms of labor redundant, creating or further enriching a class of industrialists, and enabling individuals to become even more productive.

This could create a golden age, or a dark age -- most likely, it will create both. The industrial revolution created Dickensian London, the Luddite rebellion & ensuing massacres, and Blake's "dark satanic mills," but it also gave me my wardrobe of cool $30 band T-shirts and my beloved Amtrak train service.

Now is the time to talk about how we predict incentive structures will cause this technology to be used, and what levers we have at our disposal to tilt it toward "golden age."

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Considering the usage of LLMs by many people as a sort of friend or psychologist we also get to look forward to a new form a control over people. These things earn peoples "trust" and there is no reason why it couldn't be used to sway peoples opinions. Not to mention the devious and subtle ways it can advertise to people.

Also, these productivity gains arent used to reduce working time for the same number of people, but instead to reduce the number of people needed to do the same amount of work. Working people get to see the productivity benefits via worsening material conditions.

People need to develop memetic immunity to AI flattery. It's exactly like how conspiracy sites on the Internet worked. A lot of people get one-shor in the beginning, but 10 years later mostly everyone understands that you can't just believe what you read on the Internet.

You'd be surprised. I'm already sorry if I sound condescending, I just don't know how to rephrase this: please but please look around how effective is nowadays all that internet, dare to say more and more effective, in pushing "alternative truth" for the obvious goal of covering dirty businesses, wars, and even more crimes.

People have had several thousand years to develop immunity to flattery and yet here we are with a President where aides have to put his name in every paragraph of a memo to get him to read it.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...

At an individual level, we have a lot of psychological plasticity and can work to overcome our limitations. At societal scale, though, we are social primates and any system that takes advantage of natural social primate behavior is likely to succeed indefinitely.

Unlike every previous invention that improves productivity, It is making every form of labor redundant.

AIUI, in most lines of work AI is being used to replace/augment pointless paper-pushing jobs. It doesn't seem to be all that useful for real, productive work.

Coding may be a limited exception, but even then the AI's job is to be basically a dumb (if sometimes knowledgeable) code monkey. You still need to do all the architecture and detailed design work if you want something maintainable at the end of the day.

real productive work like what? What do you think all this hubub with robotics is about?

I mean, I know what you are getting at. I agree with you on the current state of the art. But advancements beyond this point threaten everyone's job. I don't see a moat for 95% of human labor.

There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work". I mean I hope it's the case that the state of the art stays like this forever, I'm just not counting on it.

Robotics is nothing new, we had robots in factories in the 1980s. The jobs of modern factory workers are mostly about attending to robots and other automated systems.

> There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work".

I'd like to see that because it would mean that AI's have managed to stay at least somewhat coherent over longer work contexts.

The closest you get to this (AIUI) is with AI's trying to prove complex math theorems, where the proof checking system itself enforces the presence of effective large-scale structure. But that's an outside system keeping the AI on a very tight leash with immediate feedback, and not letting it go off-track.

> It doesn't seem to be all that useful for real, productive work.

Even the most pointless bullshit job accomplishes a societal function by transferring wages from a likely wealthy large corporation to a individual worker who has bills to pay.

Eliminating bullshit jobs might be good from an economic efficiency perspective, but people still gotta eat.

The logic of American economic policy relies on a large velocity of money driven by consumer habits. It is tautological, and it is obsolete in the face of the elite trying to minimize wage expenses.

How is it obsolete? If everyone is unemployed and a few AI barons are obscenely wealthy, the velocity of money will be low.

Seems to me like that's still a worthy goal.

How is it obsolete? If everyone is unemployed and a few AI barons are obscenely wealthy, the velocity of money will be low because most people will be broke.

Seems to me like that's still a worthy target if chasing it fights that outcome.

If the only point is distributing money, then the pointless bullshit job is an unnecessary complication.

It's not unnecessary to the person who uses it to pay their bills.

I think GP meant that the money could be distributed directly without the job in between, i.e. UBI.

Of course that comes with its own set of problems, e.g. that you will lose training, connections, the ability to exert influence through the job or any hope of building a career.

That's certainly true.

But one is well-advised to inflate and test the new lifeboat before jumping out of the current one, not after.

People fought back. Who is fighting back now?

Capitalists have openly gloated in public about wanting to replace at least one profession. That was months or years ago. What are people doing in response? Discussing incentive structures?

SC coders paid hundreds of thousands a year are just letting this happen to them. “Nothing to be done about another 15K round of layoffs, onlookers say”

Buggy-whip makers inconsolable!

This is exactly it, nobody is going to do anything about it

> Capitalists have openly gloated in public about wanting to replace at least one profession. That was months or years ago. What are people doing in response?

Great, let them try. They'll find out that AI makes the human SC coder more productive not less. Everyone knows that AI has little to nothing to do with the layoffs, it's just a silly excuse to give their investors better optics. Nobody wants to admit that maybe they've overhired a bit after the whole COVID mess.

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