Comment by babypuncher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by babypuncher | Hacker News Reader

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I would argue we've even already seen this play out with productivity gains across the economy over the last 40 years. The American middle class has been gradually declining since the '80s. AI seems likely to accelerate that trend for the exact reasons you point out.

A lot of people recognize this pattern even if they can't articulate it, and that's why they hate AI so much. To them, it doesn't matter if AI lives up to the hype or not. Either it does and we're staring down a future of 20%+ unemployment, or it doesn't and the economy crashes because we put all our eggs in this basket.

No matter what happens, the middle class is likely fucked, and anyone pushing AI as "the future" will be despised for it whether or not they're right.

Personally, I think the solution here might be to artificially constrain the supply of productivity. If AI makes the average middle-class worker twice as productive, then maybe we should cut the number of work hours expected from them in a given week.

The complete unwillingness of people in power to even acknowledge this problem is disheartening, and is highly reminiscent of the rampant corruption and wealth inequality of the Gilded Age.

Technological progress that hurts more people than it helps isn't progress, it's class warfare.

Right there with you. Sure, I have gained a lot as a software engineer in the valley (I guess I'm upper-middle class now), but I'd give it up and go right back to lower-middle class (1980s) status I was raised in if it meant my kids could also aspire to a similar lower-middle class life.

This suicide-pact of "either AI goes crazy and 100 people rule the world with 99% of the world's wealth" or "AI fails badly and everyone's standard of living drops 3 levels, except for the 100 people that rule the world with 99% of the world's wealth" is not what I signed up for. Nor is it in any way sustainable or wise.

Too much class distinction / wealth between lower/upper classes, and a surplus of unemployed lower-class men is how many revolts/revolutions/wars have started.

You can easily live a “lower middle class 1980s life” on minimum wage today. Find a 1980s apartment, an early 2000s used car, and don’t bother paying for TV, Starbucks, a cellphone, etc.

The rent on a literal 1980s apartment (let alone SFH mortgage) in every area that I’ve lived in has scaled up faster than average income. This is the trend for essentials.

Consumer electronics are cheaper; this is the trend for substitutable goods.

Love me the right 20-30 year old car, but the dramatic cost rise around covid times means the savings is only relative to new. A 3x increase in old car prices hasn’t been matched by 3 fold wage increases for most.

And of course we’re discussing this in a larger conversation about automating away 1980s jobs.

If you want 1980s, you have to go all in. That means you can't live in today's areas which have improved in the 40+ years since the 1980s, but move to areas that are not developed yet or have stagnated - you don't get those improvements, amenities, and job markets/school systems of 2020s at 1980s prices today.

You also aren't buying today's average used car (which has gone up about 50% per CPI numbers, not 300%, since 2020), with a backup camera, blind spot monitoring, side curtain airbags, etc. Hop on FB Marketplace and find the cheapest used car from 2010+ that runs: it's still more fully featured, with better safety and fuel economy than that 1980s car, and likely cheaper in adjusted dollars than 1980s.

What 1980s jobs have been automated away without providing alternatives? Switchboard operator> Call center rep; typist> administrative assistant, video store clerk> regular store clerk, etc.

this is straight up not even true, and even if it was, you're ignoring the fact that things like cell phone and internet are required to function in modern society.

$10 a month cell phone plan to pay bills and a $50 Android phone easily fits into this budget for essential internet use.

Remember, the OP wants to live a "lower-middle class (1980s)" life, so he doesn't need the latest camera phone, Snapchat, Netflix, and more.

They are only required for a modern lifestyle. Plenty of Amish manage without them.

That's because they literally live in an isolated society where everyone else accords to the same rules about technology. Unless you're going off to live on a commune, you're not going to be able to live like the Amish in 2026.

Technological progress that hurts more people than it helps isn't progress, it's class warfare.

We've never seen such a thing before, so I don't know how you can draw such sweeping conclusions about it.

The longer we ignore the collapse of the middle class, the angrier the bottom half of the economy will get and the more justified they will feel in enacting retribution. We absolutely have historical precedents for what happens here: The French Revolution, the Gilded Age, etc. People will only tolerate a declining standard of living for so long.

Maybe so, maybe not, but you are trying to argue two completely different points here.

Well, I see I've thoroughly angered the billionaire wannabes. Funny how they never offer any solutions to these problems and just make a stink about them being acknowledged in the first place.

> Technological progress that hurts more people than it helps isn't progress, it's class warfare.

I think this is right. The historical analogue I keep drifting toward is Enclosure. LLM tech is like Enclosure for knowledge work. A small class of capital-holding winners will benefit. Everyone else will mostly get more desperate and dependent on those few winners for the means of subsistence. Productivity may eventually rise, but almost nobody alive today will benefit from it since either our livelihood will be decimated (knowledge workers, for now) or we will be forced into AI slop hell-world where our children are taught by right-wing robo-propagandists, we are surveilled to within an inch of our lives, and our doctor is replaced by an iPad (everyone who isn't fabulously wealthy). Maybe we can eek out a living being the meat arms of the World Mind, or maybe we'll turned into hamburger by robotic concentration camp guards.

I like how you identified the pattern of defeat and still complied in advance.

What?

Yes.

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