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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models."

Yes.

For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people than jobs for them. Gradually, more jobs for smart people were developed, but not until WWII did the demand start to exceed the supply. Hence the frantic technical training efforts of WWII and the following college boom. This was the golden age of upward mobility.

It's hard to imagine this today. Read novels from the 18th century to get a feel for it. See who's winning and who's struggling, who rises and who falls, and why. Jane Austen's novels are a good start.

The nerds didn't take over until very late in the 20th century. There were very few rich nerds until then. Computing was once a very tiny world. You could not get rich working for IBM. The ones who left and got rich were in sales.

So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

That may be where we go once AI does the thinking. That's where we go when smarts are not a scarce resource.

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> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write that subjugation of women is a "core value", simply because it has been for so many time periods.

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality.

John Henry is not going to beat the steam shovel any time soon.

> For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly.

It's not an anomaly; rather, it's the other way round. These used to be highly specialized skills that carried significant status, and got democratized by mass education in the 20th century.

We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.

> We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.

Unfortunately, that is the current stage of humanity. We all currently live in a global subscription model for food, housing, safety, etc. No doubt that we will move beyond it eventually, but the current organization of society is kept in place by the owner class which benefits from the current arrangement.

One of the steps for moving beyond it is educating the modern day serfs (our peers) about reality as it is and alternative visions of a future where we are no longer selling our labor to the owner class. It will take generations.

Worth mentioning that Chinese people have a vastly different perspective on new technology, in the west people are incredibly pessimistic. It's not the technology itself, it's the surrounding system that makes that difference. The alternative vision for the future already exists.

Although primogeniture has been discriminatory for basically the entire time it's existed, the discrimination isn't inherent. It's an implementation detail. Modern British Royal succession now uses absolute, gender-neutral primogeniture since 2013.

In fact, there are few things less discriminatory than a random birth order. You may as well be assigned a random number at birth, and the lower your number, the more you're paid. In such a system, there's nothing to discriminate against; the ordering is absolute and immutable, and everyone is treated equally.

I agree that it's a bleak idea, but Animats wasn't talking about subjugating women.

Primogeniture in any form is discriminatory precisely since birth order is an immutable, permanent, unchosen characteristic assigned randomly at birth, just like race or sex.

Primogeniture makes sense in a world where odds that you arrive at the adult age are rather low, due to the high risk of death from illness and injuries.

The oldest child is the most likely to survive. It is a rational and fair rule in such context.

Many discriminatory policies could be considered rational. It is rational for jobs to discriminate against handicapped people who require extra affordances to be able to do the same job (for example, wheelchair ramps).

“Fair” is a much trickier beast! My favorite approach to conceptualizing fairness is Rawls’ veil of ignorance: if you were going to be placed as a random member of society, rather than your current position, and you would still support a policy given this change, then the policy is fair. Knowing that, beyond the veil of ignorance, I may be a paraplegic, would I still support dismantling the ADA’s wheelchair accessibility requirements?

Things like inclusion and other theories such as the one you describe are only possible in rich and technology-advanced societies. And are vulnerable to groups chosing to play against the whole society.

When you have to struggle for life, discriminating against some categories, such as disabled people is necessary for the whole group to survive. Animals do it, and humans in antiquity did it too, out of necessity. It's actually how evolution happens. Humans still do it to some extent when they choose how to mate : they discriminate.

Is the oldest child the most likely to survive, or is the winner simply the oldest surviving child?

Rather than being distracted by whether primogeniture specifically is/was discriminatory, we should remember that "what was valued" in the societies Animats discussed very much included being male.

> We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.

The algorithms and bots that curate/generate content directed by accelerationists definitely want people to think that. There is a whole system in place now that can shape future outcomes just by convincing everyone that have no power when the opposite is true. The parent is probably a bot, or has been influenced by one to many there is nothing new under the sun solipsism bs.

Primogeniture is not actually unreasonable if you consider that children can range in ages say 15 to 20 years. On average the oldest is most mature and experienced. Both reasonable qualities up to certain point. If your existence depends on decision of single leader. I generally would pick the 30 year old one over 20 year old or 25 year old over 15 year old. Post 30 year old, it gets different, but to around there I would reasonably expect maturity and experience to matter.

> I hope.

For solving all things complex, there must be a plan.

You might ask, What Is To Be Done?

Have humans ever had a grand plan for society and succeeded in carrying it out such that the desired goal was reached? I'm not talking about something like the Marshall plan, which was a reaction to previous failed attempts and was created during an urgent need for such action, but a plan where a group of people figured out the best course of action, despite humanity existing in a different paradigm, and then enacted that plan and saw it come to fruit as they predicted?

I never got to a full plan but over the decades I had many creative ideas that try to be good but might not be. The interesting pattern is that few people are curious enough to thing (or help think) about it. Best most can do is find flaws or state it will never happen.

Never is a long time and grand plans need to be executed for their real flaws to appear. The kind of flaws that are never what we thought in advance, usually much worse.

We do need to think about it until the end of humanity. We've build countless societies/civilizations and non of them survived the test of time. It's our ultimate puzzle.

There is probably [say] someone at MS who knows how an OS should work but replacing parts in a running machine isn't easy. Burning everything to the ground isn't ideal either but it does make building more attractive.

The point I was making was more that trying to proactively shape society for some goal will always miss something critical and fail in a spectacular way. Look at Communism or the neocons of Bush Jr era with the Iraq invasion. It sounds smart on paper but when you execute it then it falls apart with tremendous human cost, and the people who are doing it refuse to acknowledge it until they are physically removed from the levers of power.

Now that I think about it though, it is more to do with inflexibility of the plan, rather than having a plan itself. If you are working off of a ideological commitment, rather than setting an end goal with a fuzzy time frame and a loose path to get there, then that's when you land in trouble.

Adaptation is good but it might turn reactionary if not populist. You also want to limit experimentation to measure results. Like when you change few or many lines of code and performance changes.

The U.S. constitution?

This a very silly view of the past through modern eyes. Intelligence, cunning, and wit have always been immensely valuable. Read the mythology of literally any culture for examples.

To extrapolate from fewer people were formally educated or literate to intelligence wasn’t valued is absurd.

As for your part about reading and writing. Literacy has always been a very valuable skill that would increase your social standing. It was scarce and difficult to acquire before the printing press, but it was always valuable.

You could drop the first sentence without losing anything other than an unnecessary insult.

Personally, I find "silly" to be a useful adjective to sum up your impending disagreement without being insulting.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do think that ingenuity, problem-solving, impulse control, and the ability to delay gratification and reach long-term goals have always been valuable skills.

You might still only be a farmer if you're smart, but you can at least be one of the more productive farmers with a more smoothly running farm.

I agree. Studies show time and time again that smart people are more efficient even at tasks that may not look like they require a smart person. So while people might not have been paid to do thinking jobs I don't buy that the intelligent did not always have had an edge, all else being equal.

What if this is modeled around the premise that in any situation where reasoning can be used, someone would have access to super-human reasoning?

Where does the human in the loop somehow manage to utilize super-human reasoning better than another person?

I'm not suggesting it's impossible, so much as wondering if we can reach a place where the human is truly irrelevant to the process, and can't make a better decision than the superhuman entity.

I'm not sure this is ever possible. It's more of a thought experiment. What's between here and there? Right now we can use pseudo-intelligence from silicon to our advantage, and being smarter than average is clearly a massively outsized advantage. It's similar to how being able to automate tasks gives you an outsized advantage, yet in so many more ways. But what if that advantage thins or even vanishes?

> all else being equal.

"Load bearing phrase", as they say.

A stupid ass that just keeps pushing on often goes further than a smart ass who gets distracted.

But they might be pushing in the wrong direction.

The point here is not that intelligence is somehow the super property where if you have slightly more intelligence then your neighbor that means you are better even if they are stronger, need less sleep, are more dexterous, are more mentally resilient etc. The point is that intelligence is an advantage.

Agree. If you've ever spent serious time in the country with farmers, the level of ingenuity is impressive among many, and they benefit from it greatly. As the grandson of depression farmers, I noticed intelligence mattered a lot, even if just for survival.

We're all hand-waving away the fact that there is no un-claimed farmland in the US. It's all owned already. You can't invent your way into possessing farmland. You will have to buy it from someone who no longer has any willingneess to sell it, unless you get lucky and find a dying person with no friends or family. If all we have is farming, no one would part with the land, as it's a valuable, vital resource.

None of this Jack inherits but wants to live in the big city and be an architect. He'll inherit and keep because there is no architecture job to be had.

As someone who grew up on a farm, "you may be a farmer but you could be a productive one" is so intensely depressing. Farming is a shitty job that requires insane amounts of back-breaking labor, never-ending toil, and all this at a time when climate change is going to utterly fuck over farmland and destroy crop yields.

In the same way that numeracy skills were in the blast radius of the Colossus.

People seriously underestimate how underpowered and tiny llms are for the tasks they need to solve.

A trillion parameter model can't tell the difference between left and right. We will need to grow them millions to trillions of times before they are half as good as AI boosters claim they are.

This isn't the end of thinking any more than the watt steam engine was the end of horses. It will be centuries before we get there. And by that point the difference between man and machine will be at best academic.

I don’t know about you but where I live only some rich people ride horses for fun sometimes; they are mostly irrelevant otherwise.

Sure, but the Watt steam engine was invented 250 years ago, which is the point.

And where I live you can sometimes still see a horse-drawn cart on the roads. Albeit rarely - they are forbidden. 10 or 20 years ago it was more common. I rode one once a bunch of years ago, went with its owner to harvest construction materials from a collapsed building.

Plus, on the way here today, I passed over a favela-type assemblage I can only describe as festering. No offense meant to its inhabitants - they are more real human beings than any of us.

Point being, the future has been here for long enough. And, as the adage goes, it's not evenly distributed. I never made any money from being strong or being intelligent; my usefulness, like that of any "nerd", was rooted in knowledge arbitrage. Now that the psychopaths in charge have cognitive prosthetics, I expect to be culled.

> So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

This is a "noble savage" conception of the past. Thinking/cleverness/craftiness was highly rewarded even in preliterate societies. Even in war, "polytropos" Odysseus comes out ahead of the dumb brutes with bigger spears.

I think you forgot discipline and long-term thinking in your core values. Even before high technology, there were things to plan and resources to manage. Especially after the beginning of agriculture.

Long term thinking is out when you can't predict more than a few months ahead at most.

You have to make those opportunities to plan long-term. Once you start to form those, it will be amazing how many opportunities present themselves.

That's a contingent fact about the place and era you live in. Medieval peasants - the majority of people who have ever lived - were not dumbasses, not all of them - but there simply wasn't a way for even the smartest to accumulate long-term wealth. At best you could maybe get your neighbours to owe you a few more favours, and maybe once in a generation if you played every card right there might be a chance for a patriarch to acquire one more piece of land, but that's it, that's your lot. (Sure you can work your ass off and produce a bit of extra grain in a given year, but then what? It's going to rot, and selling it for money is surprisingly useless to you)

Money was useful - not as much as today, sure. But traders and tradespeople existed in the middle ages, so you could buy some goods and services. Metal tools and farming implements, harnesses for horses or oxen, pots, clothes / fabrics, maybe woodwork for a house...

Some of these things you could make yourself or were commonly self-made instead of buying, but that, too, requires planning and discipline.

I'm a bit shocked that some people think of medieval life as something like Elbonia in Dilbert comics. Heck, I even find the middle ages a pretty boring time in human history, but I know enough to understand that it wasn't as simple as "everyone lived in the mud and ate mud".

> you could buy some goods and services. Metal tools and farming implements, harnesses for horses or oxen, pots, clothes / fabrics, maybe woodwork for a house

You could buy some temporary luxuries to enjoy, or save yourself a bit of labour on something you'd normally do yourself. But you couldn't really invest in your future the way we would today - everything you depended on had to be something you could make yourself, buying an implement you couldn't maintain would be setting yourself up for trouble. Increasing your productivity with tools wasn't a huge help because you always had enough labor available to hit severely diminishing returns on the land you owned. And any object of value is always at risk of being seized by the local lord or a passing army or what have you.

No disagreement about that. A peasant couldn't even properly own farmland in the feudal system.

Seasons, at least, are entirely predictable. Plant growth is somewhat predictable. Travel times are mostly predictable (early trading). The timeline of children growing up is predictable if (big if) they survive. Livestock lifecycles were known. They knew how long various kinds of food took to spoil.

These are very important things and most of them take place on longer or much longer timescales than a few months. Early humans weren't monkeys, and after they had left the tropics, they couldn't survive without planning because getting food is difficult in winter.

> Seasons, at least, are entirely predictable. Plant growth is somewhat predictable.

Decreasingly so, thanks to climate change. The increase in temp isn't the problem. It's that climate change increases the frequency of outlier temperatures on a seasonable basis. Crops don't just fail if the average is too hot. They fail if there are too many hot/cold days in a growing season. And that is the unpredictable thing we're going to be running into in the future. Certainly while we're all alive. It's already happening.

Latin American climate refugees have been fleeing north precisely because of climate change decreasing crop yields.

I'm seeing a lot of comments like this lately:

"Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive]

Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world should always just be the way it was in, say, 1800, like that was actually the realistic pinnacle of human society. You also seem to be loosely basing this argument on the availability of "rich nerds", which seems like a bizarre non-sequitur. Computing once didn't exist, and we still valued reading, writing and thinking.

I'm kind of baffled by how regularly I see comments like this. Like, come on. This is basically the AI black pill, no?

I have a good friend who doesn’t pay attention to any of this stuff. Nothing gets them down for long, they do pretty well with work, and just enjoy living life simply. They have amassed a reasonable amount of wealth, are moving up at their job, and just don’t pay any attention to all this stuff we here on the Internet talk about all the time. There is no AI black pill because they aren’t caught up in all the headlines and propaganda and bullshit. there are plenty of people out there like that. They are just living their lives. In some ways, we might be the ones who are the anomaly and getting hurt by the Internet.

I think, in a way, the Internet itself is the virus. It has infiltrated us and our minds. Rage and suffering are what get clicks and engagement. The Internet has become a suffering engine, which spins angst into gold.

But ... they are only able to live their lives and amass wealth (good on them btw) because modern western society is arranged like it is - Maritime trade, international rules based order (mostly) with compatible legal systems, free and fair elections and half decent government accountability, individual rights and property systems.

Basically England Circa 1851, plus democracy.

And because it was all put together more or less accidentally, it can all fall apart. So worrying about that and trying to do something about it is like discovering that under the deck of the ship are engine rooms, rudders, riveted steel plates and navigation maps.

Its not a slight on your friend, but one would expect him to have a mental model of a rudder, even if he does not know about the impact of cavitation.

More Black pills flying around are just an indication that the rudder is hanging off or the rivets are leaking a bit. It can be fixed, as long as no one tells the passengers the ship is actually flat or the engine room is how elites maintain power.

None of modern society and economics was put together accidentally, IMO. It was purposeful, a mix of success & failures, serendipitous, and filled with mixed motives... but that's not quite the same as an accident.

A mix of political scientists, politicians, investors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, judges, scientists, technologists, and economists have tried to mold society to their own theoretical vision for at least 150+ years. Society then reacts to that in both good and bad ways. This distorts the vision, as society changes it to its concerns. And the cycle repeats.

I think of Karl Polyani's The Great Transformation has a great way of looking at the attempts to force "market society" on England in the 1700 and 1800s, and the reaction that all societies exhibit in the face of unconstrained technological or economic change. Both the imposition of change and reaction to it can be violent, it's hard to predict. We've had such a relatively steady state since WW2 in the developed nations that we're not used to this cycle.

Accidentally is the wrong word, but considering it was never done before and had some very unusual constraints (large coal supply and coal industry, sufficient centralised state that could provide peace within its borders but had been neutered into compromise with parliamentary middle class, finance centres, maritime trade etc etc) that it was done at all does feel … unplanned?

The image that sticks in my mind the most is the Meiji Emperor in a 1870s photo dressed in a saville row suit and bowler hat. For Japan the most incredible social card to play that says “we are going to be like these foreigners and their secrets to wealth”

Nothing accidental there, but that still leaves visible joins on the Japanese soul.

In the short term they may be living their life unaffected but if we're right then they will eventually become affected. Maybe this is enough reason for us to talk about this issue and try and get ahead of it. I dont think its futile or wasted.

They’ll still lose their job to AI, whether they’re paying attention or not.

I am not saying you are wrong, just that your comment reads as "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you".

Haha. I meant it as more like… people who say “I don’t pay attention to politics at all it never actually affects me”. Well, that’s true until it suddenly isn’t. You might get away with sticking your head in the sand, you might not, hard to say it’s a wiser choice.

I don't get this take. Once a modern corporation starts making money, all the people in it diligently work to expand their influence by starting new projects and hiring as many people as possible. That seems to be human nature. Why will AI tools change that? Nobody is feeling important because they manage 50 AI agents. They feel important because they manage 50 people.

What percentage of the jobs in a modern office are truly necessary? If automation had the ability to kill jobs over the long term, we'd all have been idle since the industrial revolution. But instead we keep inventing new things that we need.

There is a possibility that the agents become better at managing the company than the people and businesses become as automated as farms did during the industrial revolution.

Yeah and you’re doing a lot of heavy lifting with the term agents.

Billions have been poured into agents and there’s no sign that they will get to a place where they on the path toward generating returns to justify more good money being invested into chasing bad.

If AI actually becomes good enough to replace intelligent people. Which, outside the online world of AI hype, is not at all a commonly accepted fact.

You don't have any idea what job they have, how good they are at it, what their company does, what industry they work in, whether their income is backed by labour, knowledge work, emotional connection, government relationships, capital investments, ...

See above.

I’m assuming their job is one at least somewhat in the firing line for AI, otherwise it’s a pointless anecdote. “My friend is a plumber and doesn’t worry about AI” isn’t particularly interesting because of course.

Your point is understandable but not knowing makes it worse for purposes of discussion since we have to assume the most likely case rather than an exceptional one.

Who said AI taking your job is "the most likely" case? Even by those extreme estimates of 30% unemployment or whatever - that still leaves ~65% of jobs not lost to AI.

I was referring to the job

A proto Torment Matrix so to speak.

I believe many here are having an identity crisis and some feel so doomed, they want to others down with them.

I feel bad for them, I really do. The posts I see here are madness and so disconnected from reality it’s actually disturbing.

It's the influence of Curtis Yarvin who basically argues that the world went bad with the French Revolution in typical, boring reactionary fashion.

>> So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

You're ignoring the astronomers of ancient Mesopotamia, the scribes of Egypt, the grammarians of India, the philosophers of ancient Greece, the orators of Rome, the physicians of Islam, the scholars of the Middle Ages, the masters of the Renaissance, and all the great natural philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, of all the ages up to 1800.

We are a technological civilisation, a scientific civilisation. Who do you think comes up with all the technology? Alexander, the Great Butcher? Attila the Hun? Jenghis Khan?

We live in the civilisation that was born in Athens, not in Sparta. Knowledge and wisdom always are the greatest power that shapes reality. This won't change just because OpenAI made a viral app.

There's literally an ancient text called `The Satire of the Trades` which bacially just pumps up nice it was to be the ancient world equivalent of a white collar worker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Golden_Age Read the section on social structure (pre 18th century)

Then consider the role of the clergy in the Middle Ages, and say nothing of Rome and large bureaucracy (Roman engineering alone).

On top of this you need to ignore very large bureaucracies and trading networks in Asia to go far with your narrative (Persian, Turkish, Mongol, Indian and Chinese).

There were a good deal of powerful nerds before the 1700s.

Not that many. They maxed out around 2% of the population in pre-industrial societies. See Pikkety's "Piketty's Capital and Ideology. (2022) He goes into this in some detail in the early chapters.

My point here is that the prevalence of smart people in the population exceeded the demand for them until the second half of the 20th century. Then, for one human lifetime, large numbers of smart people were needed. That period may be ending.

It may have already ended. In the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't require a college degree.

This is some weird manosphere bullshit. Pre-industrial societies invented philosophy and writing. People across the world know the name of Socrates from 2500 years ago. They know stories from Homer 2800 years ago.

It's a mistake (a) to think pre-industrial people were grug-brained cavemen (b) that we're going to revert into the same cavemen because a computer can do your pointless six-figure office job.

Well... 19th century engineer could have a large multi-story brownstone with family and , more importantly, servants and house personnel. A butler, etc...

Today? On an engineer's salary? Ha!

Can and will happen again. I might even be a 'clever' underbutler to some misAnthropic Engineer

>servants and house personnel

Which you mostly don't need today. You may have a lawn guy, take your car to a mechanic, and use a washer/dryer to do most of your laundry.

You actually need some help once you have kid(s).

Some people do have live-in nannies and au pairs for kids of a certain age but I'm guessing it's not very common, at least below a certain income bracket. People do use childcare and lean on relatives (or one parent just doesn't have a full-time job outside the house) of course.

Stay-at-home parent should not really count the same as servant or house butler.

I think that could be true for some engineers. I'm skeptical it was true for the majority.

"Famous" engineers--probably. I doubt the person taking care of the steam engines lived in a fancy house. I'd much more expect the steamship owners and captains to live in that sort of property.

Interesting take. If AI indeed takes over the thinking, could the next scarce resource be, humanity? I’d argue that strength is already taken over by the machines, at least in societies where thinking is already the dominant competence. What can we not get from AI? Friendship, empathy, connection, affection, mutual understanding? Like being real. Being present. Maybe time has come to invest in getting really good at all of that

> those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer.

Sorry but that is just not true.

Sure farmers aren't academics, but the sheer number of tasks, and tools required to efficiently do those tasks were vast. Innovation in winnowing was literlly life and death, as was plant/animal breeding traits.

Observing and reacting to changes in plants, lands, water, animals was critical to getting a good harvest. Packing and storing food was critical to surviving the winter.

Sure, the lack of literacy hampered knowledge recording and dissemination.

BUT, if we look mine the vast memory that is classics, knowledge, wit and cleverness were prised as often as strength and beauty.

The top comment is often something that just sweeps across centuries where technology has its own supreme teleology. With supreme confidence.

AI is not a problem because it is AI. It is because of political circumstances.

Think beyond the small worldview where technology and valuation are everything and you are just a pawn. Then you see that a better world is possible. The first step is then to not give up.

The premise here is that AI works well enough to automate the “smart” people jobs. No one but delusional workaholics are afraid that their job will get automated because they cling to the job in itself. So clearly, this is not about the tech itself.

There wasn’t a college boom post-WWII because technology came and demanded it.

> That may be where we go once AI does the thinking. That's where we go when smarts are not a scarce resource.

Take me by the hand, circumstance. I am yours to be swept away.

I'm not aware of any jobs where physical robustness is the primary job attribute. The machine is always better.

There are jobs that demand robustness, but they are about applying knowledge in extreme conditions, not about letting an AI do the thinking.

> I'm not aware of any jobs where physical robustness is the primary job attribute.

Not really disagreeing with you, but there are a few obvious examples. A lot of construction jobs are still labour intensive, and I've seen a lot of people who don't last the first day, let alone their first week. Also, security jobs, say in nightclubs, also value physical robustness. Orderlies in hospital, require the ability to move bodies, alive and otherwise. The machine is usually better.

There are a lot of jobs where physical robustness is an important job attribute. That's not the same as saying it's the primary attribute, though. You aren't paying that construction worker to lift things, you're paying him to place things correctly--a skill computers still fare quite poorly at. Lifting is not the focus.

There are plenty of occupations that benefit from being "smart". Construction is one of them, and if you study a bit medieval or renaissance architecture, you'll be amazed by what our ancestors were able to do with just a few analog tools.

The same goes for other occupations, and...farming. Breeding cattle is a complex science, so is growing crops consistently and valuing the production.

I used to be in construction. My family were the ones you would call when the average builders couldn't do the job. We were very busy, but it didn't translate into making more money. If we charged more we would get hired for the hard bit only, and let the cave men do the rest.

When nail guns and cheap power tools came in, every other yokel was suddenly a builder. That is when I got out

These takes ignore how much more important critical thinking is becoming, as LLM's are clearly unreliable and prone to slop.

I don't know. Critical thinking can become a liability when you're the only one who puts guardrails on people's preferred perception of reality.

Assuming there must be a reliable and high-quality outcome. There's nothing stopping things just becoming unreliable and bad without alternatives.

If you've done almost anything with LLMs you would know that you need to be intelligent to get good results when using them. This means, you need to be good at articulating your ideas, clearly in English. So it's more like an exoskeleton than replacement, at least for now.

  > So what was valued? ...

None of that was valued much compared to lineage, though.

Maybe I am being naive but I think there will always be room for smarts.

Every professor at any university has a dozen more project ideas than they have graduate students, every factory boss has a dozen more optimisations than ways to implement them, and looking up into the night sky we have 95% of it that cannot be explained.

The gap is not too few smart people, nor too few "jobs" that need smarts. The gap is being prepared to arrange society and wealth so the "job" is discovery, science, sharing. We are no longer hunter gatherers, no longer a feudal society, perhaps we shall stop being whatever this one is and try a new one.

(and no, I don't think there is a name for the new one yet (its not socialism, maybe not capitalism).

Lets just not fall back to Feudal if we can help it

Yes, we have an infinite amount of knowledge work that needs done. But if AI is better at it than humans, we aren’t going to use humans.

We don’t use chimpanzees for any knowledge work today, even though they’d be better at it than some other animals.

I think the evidence that AI is better at knowledge work without a human in the loop... is very limited.

Humans with many agents will be more productive, but the tendency has been for these models is to regress to the mean when it comes to strategic insights.

So far, I think you're right. But the rate of progress just seems so crazy that I'm not seeing any moats that look fundamental. I hope I'm wrong and you're right.

*Austen

Except what will matter in the future isn’t brute strength.

It’s ownership of capital and technology.

Plumbers aren’t suddenly getting rich. At best they’re not losing jobs at the rate everyone else is, but once so many people lose jobs then they can’t afford plumbers either. So even plumbers are worse off even if they’re not as badly off as the rest of us.

And all this assumes that humanoid robots don’t develop and succeed which is a major assumption.

Wow what a novel thought… not.

Dude we already live in a world dominated by capital that displaced the need for brute strength. Just go to a construction site in a developed economy. For which the returns to the owners of assets drive continual reinvestment.

Posts like this expose how many here think they bring something to the table when it’s just noise.

What a shitty regression to the mean... we need a new deal

Peter Drucker identified this phenomenon as the rise of knowledge work as "the means of production" in the 1950s and 1960s. Management (of people, tasks, responsibilities, and disciplines) and knowledge work were the two sides to organizational performance. Drucker felt that "post capitalist society" was the recognition that capital ceased being the primary factor of production. No matter how much capital you throw at a problem, if you can't retain people that know what you're doing, you won't get far.

Knowledge is a unique resource compared to the other traditional factors of economic production (land, labor, and capital). It is often invested in with capital (education and tools), but it is carried with the human, and leaves with them. It is always decaying - knowledge workers should be in constant learning mode, and stale knowledge eventually becomes a drag on performance.

I'd argue the future is about knowledge workers all becoming managers. When you use agentic AI, it has the flavor of the skills of management. Management is "a practice and a liberal art", according to Drucker, one that has been in poor supply for some time. LLMs are have somewhat stale knowledge and require the human, tools, and RAG to freshen it. And LLMs will always regress to the mean. It is pretty good at pattern analysis and starts to get shaky and mediocre with synthesis. It requires very nuanced, and elaborate prompting to shape its token output towards insightful results that aren't a standard answer. For coding exercises, that can be fine, but at high complexity levels, or when dealing with issues of strategy or evaluation, it is a platitude generator and has no unique competitive advantage.

In other words, competent, talented management mixed with knowledge work is the scarcity we are heading towards. This is arguably why you're seeing the rise of "markdown frameworks" that people swear improve performance, it's the beginnings of management scaffolding for AI.

Technical folks struggle with valuing management skills, and I expect this will increase its value and scarcity.

As for "Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks." I think the robots will be replacing that pretty shortly.

"Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values."

Ehhhhh not really? What about Christianity, where the meek shall inherit the Earth, and love is the core value (putting aside modern day Pharisees and Charlatans that twist the underlying value system)? Or Islam, whose core value is submission to God? While there have been Societies that valued parentage and birth order, that's far from universal.

> "post capitalist society" was the recognition that capital ceased being the primary factor of production. No matter how much capital you throw at a problem, if you can't retain people that know what you're doing, you won't get far.

This leads to the reformulation of knowledge workers as "human capital", and it's hardly post-capitalist. A capitalist society is one where people assemble different forms of capital to produce capital returns that are larger than the sum of the capital inputs, where the possibilities available to you depend on the amount and quality of capital that you have access to. This is all still very relevant when discussing human capital - access to human capital is determined by the quality of your professional networks, whether you decide to be present in geographic talent clusters (i.e. cities as centers of industry), and whether you have sufficient financial capital available in trade.

AI will not transition us to a post-capitalist society. Its promise is solely the ability to replace human capital with other forms: chips and electricity. It does not spell the death of human labor any more than computers and spreadsheets did for accountants.

Well it is 'post-capitalism' rather than 'anti-capitalism' or 'non-capitalism' the same way 'post-punk' relates to 'punk'. Human capital is something of a conceptual misnomer as the knowledge itself is owned by the individual and can only be licensed or contracted by investors and management, not traded on capital markets.

> A capitalist society is one where people assemble different forms of capital to produce capital returns that are larger than the sum of the capital inputs, where the possibilities available to you depend on the amount and quality of capital that you have access to.

The reason we live in post-capitalism is that capital is largely abundant these days, although many regional and cultural barriers remain due to bias, prejudice and risk aversion. But is no longer the determining factor of economic growth - necessary but not sufficient.

> This is all still very relevant when discussing human capital - access to human capital is determined by the quality of your professional networks, whether you decide to be present in geographic talent clusters (i.e. cities as centers of industry), and whether you have sufficient financial capital available in trade.

I feel this is a stretch. In a non-capitalist economic system, for example, the wealth of the collective is arguably also bounded by the scarcity of knowledge in that collective. Knowledge does not have the same properties of capital accumulation that Marx described.

> AI will not transition us to a post-capitalist society. Its promise is solely the ability to replace human capital with other forms: chips and electricity. It does not spell the death of human labor any more than computers and spreadsheets did for accountants.

Spoken like someone who didn't even read my parent comment. We are already living in a post-capitalist society, and have been for several decades.

"Chips and electricity" is reductio ad absurdum, and ignores a vast number of other input factors. AI will not eliminate labor or human capital, that's just marketing. It certainly will transform it as other tools have.

Can't say why but I enjoyed so much reading this comment

I don't need any of that. I built a life for myself with discipline and hard work. I avoid most of the drama you describe because I create my world instead of letting it be created for me.

Here are some words to live by[0]. I don't agree with everything Derek Silvers says, esp about philosophy. Its more of a guiding principle that drives rather than divides.

[0]: https://fluidself.org/books/self-help/how-to-live

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