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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

Jobs that require physical effort will be fine for the reasons you state

Any job that is predominantly done on a computer though is at risk IMO. AI might not completely take over everything, but I think we'll see way fewer humans managing/orchestrating larger and larger fleets of agents.

Instead of say 20 people doing some function, you'll have 3 or 4 prompting away to manage the agents to get the same amount of work done as 20 people did before.

So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be.

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> So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be.

And that's probably something most people are okay with. Work that can be automated should be and humans should be spending their time on novel things instead of labor if possible.

What society is ready for that? We are looking at an possible outcome that will make the Great Depression look like a strong financial era of growth and prosperity. I don’t think most people are ok with the road to the goal in this case, doesn’t matter if you have work or not, mass unemployment destroys societies.

> What society is ready for that?

A free society.

I interpreted the parent comment as asking what society _specifically_? Not some abstract concept, but something that exists a step or two away from where we are right now.

That is correct, living in Sweden with pretty high levels of social protection, but even so, high levels of white collar unemployment would make our very high risk housing market (we as a population has a very high loan ratio, much of it committed to housing) collapse once people can’t pay. That would make the banks likely to collapse because their money no longer exist and they’re all of a sudden real estate brokers with inventory far below what they paid out in loans. Union coffers would deplete fast, there would be no blue collar work so they also get dragged in with the storm. Oh and of course, the stock exchange will crash completely.

Covid gave us a glimpse, this would make it look like child’s play, because there’s no solution and it’s not getting better.

The rich will of course get richer, even if absolute value goes down, the relative value of their wealth will go up.

But what is their wealth, exactly? Assets which no longer have value. Money which no longer has a use. Who's going to maintain their jets when the economy collapses? Who's going to build the parts? Who's going to build the tools to build the parts? Who's going to mine the ores?

Their lives are built atop the same supply chain we all depend on. They don't have their own miners, or aerospace engineers to design planes, or naval architects to build their boats.

They can not consume the marginal capacity of an economy that doesn't exist.

They will still be ahead as long as they can provide to people swinging the batons.

all jobs will be automatable, and there will be no room for humans to work on novel things.

That's like saying we shouldn't push the space exploration boundary because people are so used to staying within it.

If you want to make the argument that singularity has occurred and that knowledge oracles are no longer needed, that's a bold claim.

If you want to make the argument it would escape our control, etc. that's a valid argument for proper controls.

If you want to make the argument that LLMs are sentient and that it's not ethical to "enslave" them, that's also a pretty bold stance currently.

Humans have been inventing technology and improving the quality of life (of our species!) for a very long time and that strategy hasn't changed IMO

I'm not saying any of that I am just saying that you and everyone you love will be killed by this technology and the world as we know it will be destroyed.

Why do you think humans automating more things destroys us? Did the calculator or horse and buggy make us obsolete?

Why didn't the Internet cause a massive death plague?

Because they didn't completely automate all labor. Your frog is boiling, and extrapolating that his hot tub will continue to become increasingly comfortable.

>And that's probably something most people are okay with

You think most people are okay with most white collar jobs disappearing? I certainly am not, personally.

A job that can be automated should be, the alternative is you pay people to do tasks that aren't needed. Why would most people want to have higher prices and more complexity unless it added value to the products or services they are using?

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