I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.
Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true.
The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation.
At a mechanistic level, the “we have always found other jobs” argument misses that the reason we’ve always found other jobs is because humans have always had an intelligence advantage over automation. Even something as mechanical as human inputs in an assembly line was eventually dependent on the human ability to make tiny, often imperceptibly, adjustments that a robot couldn’t.
But if something approximating AGI does work out, human labor has absolutely no advantage over automation so it’s not clear why the past “automation has created more human jobs” logic should continue.
It also isn't true. The story of the last 50 years has been that technology, especially computer and communications technology, has facilitated the concentration of wealth. The skilled work got computerized, or outsourced to India or China. That left U.S. workers with service jobs where they have much lower impact on P&L and thus much less leverage.
In my field, we used to have legal secretaries and law librarians and highly experienced paralegals. They got paid pretty well and had pretty good job security because the people who brought in the revenue interacted with them daily and relied on them. Now, big firms have computerized a lot of that work and consolidated much of the rest into centralized off-site back-office locations. Those folks who got downsized never found comparable work. They didn't, and couldn't, go work for WestLaw to maintain the new electronic tools. The law firms also held on to many of them until retirement or offered them early retirement packages, and then simply never filled the positions. It used to be a pretty solid job for someone with an associates degree, and it simply doesn't exist anymore.
The only thing keeping the job market together is the explosion in healthcare workers. My Gen-Z brother and sister in law are both going into those fields. In a typical tertiary American city, the largest employers are the local hospital and perhaps a university or community college. Both of those get most of their revenue directly or indirectly from the government. It's not clear to me how that's sustainable.
If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure it isn't sustainable. (But I'm not an economist so take that with a block of salt.)
I don't think anyone has the answers. It's just some of us are honest enough to concede we have no answers, while others promote an answer that aligns best with their belief system.
"It'll all work out."
"It's the immigrants/blacks/jews/whatever dragging us down."
"Nothing's going to happen and we can all continue doing the work we always have."
"Burn the rich."
Etc etc.
Not a lot of serious attempts out there at even getting a hand on the issues, let alone fixing the issues.
We have enough resources for everyone to have food, shelter, education, and healthcare without the need to extract value from their labor.
All of these problems are self inflicted wounds. The solution is for humanity to stop stabbing itself and care for itself instead.
The solution is to let go of greed and embrace our humanity.
If ai does take a lot of white collar work, is it a lot of comfort that maybe jobs in a very different sector will be better in 20 years?
It seems to me like all of these people are flocking now to healthcare fields. That seems totally unsustainable.
Why? There will never be a shortage of sick/dying people. So medical staff, and also undertakers, aren't going anywhere.
But yes, the argument has been wrong often enough that the people still repeating it as a rule should be mocked and ashamed.
Anecdotally I see a lot of schadenfreude online about tech jobs after a decade or two of lecturing everybody from Appalachians in coal country, to Midwestern autoworkers, that they should just “learn to code.”
Malthusian observation can still be true...It only has to be true once, and the only reason people say it isn't right now is due to industrial fertilizers and short memories.
canned food, tractors, combine harvesters, mechanical refrigeration, freezers, chilled trucks, ocean liners, aircraft, antibiotics for farm animals, milking machines, genetically modified crops, satellite/computer weather prediction, modern pesticides, Pasteurization, vitamin and mineral fortification...
I should have clarified that industrial fertilizers (and other modern Ag) come from non-renewable fossil fuel exploitation, just as the 90% of the things you listed.
Antibiotics and GMO crops are nice too, but if you don't have the energy inputs to grow and distribute the food, it all goes tits up.
> just as the 90% of the things you listed.
90% of the things I listed only use fossil fuels because they are the cheapest energy, not because they are dependent on fossil fuels specifically. Freeze-dried food doesn't need coal power. The idea that 8 billion humans are just gonna shrug and go "oh well, guess there's no food now, we'll just all give up and die" and not try to invent any way to carry on, is silly.
Human labor still seems to be cheaper. And then theres opex/capex to be considered. Like if they achieve AGI, and AGI isnt affordable its not going to displace much.
>“we have always found other jobs”
It really depends what humans value and what they have to spend. No one could predict that Banks would need more staff to deal with ATMs. It sucks being unable to predict past a coming automation revolution, but that doesnt mean there isnt something there.
>human labor has absolutely no advantage over automation
Humans are currently needed to manage automation. Theres no clear reason why, even with AGI, that we wouldn't want humans in most loops. Thats before cost and quality.
>The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation.
Malthus is a pretty great example. We did sort out food production. There are risks with the scale at which we have done it. Malthus wasnt able to predict technologies to aid food production, but he did forecast the need.
When I see people complaining the jobs dont exist I find its the same. We dont know what the jobs are, but that doesnt mean the prediction of all of humanity being out of work are correct.
Actually the worst part of this whole thing will be that any incoming job losses being catastrophised as if the whole world is ending due to AI.
There aren't any careers and if there were, you would have to pay. Corporations certainly won't except under extremely rare situations where they have to to compete.
Of course, there are jobs that will still require human labour for some time yet, but in reality a lot jobs that require physical human labour are now done in other parts of the world where labour is cheaper.
Those which cannot be exported like plumbing or waitressing only have limited demand. You can't take 50% of the current white-collar workforce and dump them in these careers and expect them to easily find work or receive a decent wage. The demand simply does not exist.
Additionally, at the same time as white-collar jobs are being lost an increasing number of "low-skill" manual labour jobs are also being automated. Self-checkout machines mean it's harder to get work in retail, robotaxis and drone delivery will make it harder harder to find work in delivery and logistics, robots in warehouses will make it harder to find warehouse jobs.
It seems to me there is an implicate assumption that AI will either create a bunch of new well-paid jobs that employers need humans for (which means AI cannot do them) and jobs which cannot be exported abroad for cheaper. What well-paid jobs would even fit the category of being immune to AI and immune to outsourcing? Are we all going to be really well paid cleaners or something? It makes no sense.
A lot of the advice we're seeing today about retraining in construction worker or plumber seems to assume that there's an unlimited demand for this labour which there simply is not. And even if hypothetically there was about to be a huge increase in demand for construction workers, it would take years to even have the machinery, supply chain and infrastructure in place to support the millions of people entering construction.
The most likely scenario is that people will lose their jobs and will be stuck in an endless race to the bottom fighting for the limited number of jobs that are left in the domestic economy while everything else is either outsourced or done by robots and AI.
The better advice is to start preparing for this reality. Do not assume the government will or can protect you. When wealth concentrates corruption because almost inevitable and politicians have families to look after too.
Please take this seriously. Even if I'm wrong it's better to prepare for the worse rather than to assume everything will be find and you'll be able to retrain into a new well-paid career.
How many years did it take for HN to go from “worker unions bad because I make a lot of money” to “Of course there is a capitalist/worker war going on and in fact the capitalists might become technology-assisted gods”? I guess we’re all vulgar marxists when we think it’s too late to fight back.
Where did the can-do hustler attitude go? Only applicable for looking out for number one?
But now that we are all, at least the non-millionaires here, in the same boat? Curious sudden onset of catatonia
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To countermand the insane negativity for a second: LLMs are brains in a vat and therefore cannot by themselves do any tasks that goes beyond simulating keyboard & mouse in front of a computer screen.
I'm from the younger, lower end of the job market, far from the average HN user. You could accuse me of being excessively cynical. That's what happens when the systems you assumed would be there tell you to get bent the moment it's your turn to enter the job market. There's very few people my age I know who aren't angry at something. What you can't accuse me of is hypocrisy. I was never in the ranks of the SV money-above-all billionaire-loving population that's so common here, and I never wanted to join them. All I wanted was a career in something I enjoyed doing and an ability to sustain myself. I really don't understand why I am the one person you decided to turn your snarky, enraged tirade towards.
And it doesn't matter that LLMs can't act on their own. You don't need to literally replace every worker to the last one to get to the place I was talking about. A productivity boost that leads to 20-30% of all white collar workers losing their job would be horrific, and it would only get worse from there. That seems entirely possible to me. Nothing I'm talking about is particularly insane, it's all just a continuation of what's already been happening, with the same people ruling over it.
That I brought up things that cannot be automated right now was to demonstrate that we won’t go from the status quo—which is after all not a white collar automation wipeout, right now we just have layoffs from big firms that are arguably struggling but pinning it on the “Agentic Era”—to freaking mass employment + killer robots. And maybe that won’t last forever. So maybe we should fight back while we can.
Why? Does it honestly seem like there's a serious possibility that this will turn out well, that there's something people will do to stop it? Can you name a time in recent history when something like this had happened and the crisis was averted? I'm not saying I've given up, but I can't influence the situation and, with what has happened so far in my life, expecting things to get worse seems like a pretty safe guess to me.
> The things that I alluded to were examples of fighting back.
Can you spell them out for me? I read the comment again, but most of it was just rallying up against my perceived hypocrisy as a supposed representative of the tech elite. I honestly can't see any allusions to actions or anything of the sort.
The status quo right now isn't just mass layoffs, it's a very noticeable sag in the job market, especially the junior job market. I don't know if it has ever been this bad, even in past crises that affected this field. Large-scale unemployment seems like a reasonable possibility because even seasoned professionals who aren't AI salesmen are all saying that the tooling skyrockets their productivity, and because we know there's a good chunk of white collar workers doing relatively simple work that would be low-hanging fruit for automation. Also, where did I mention killer robots?
The fact that I have a 40-hour workweek is because Labor (not any political party) fought for it. The Weekend also. And getting enough income to be “middle class” rather than proletarian.
What would the modern Westerner say if they uniformly had to work 12-hour days? Probably something about Orwell’s boot stomping on a face forever and then getting back to work.
Also America’s 1950’s middle class boom.
> LLMs are brains in a vat and therefore cannot by themselves do any tasks that goes beyond simulating keyboard & mouse in front of a computer screen.
Meant to imply that (a bit obtuse writing style?) even if LLMs cHaNge evEryThing for white collar work... you still need embodiment in order to do many “human” jobs. Thus even with the maximalist take-our-jobs outlook, labor itself will not be wiped out in one fell swoop. Which means that those who are left can fight back. Because they have their labor as leverage.
I didn’t feel like spelling that out because replying to two-sentence defeatism with multiple paragraphs is a lot of work.
And then we'll see if the wealthy and powerful people will just send automated killer drones after the poors, because culling us would be more preferable than sharing their wealth
I think that most advice like this is individual - not systemic. We all won't fit into the remaining fields when white collar work gets less demand, but someone who's just pivoting now still could. There's no systemic solution that will actually be implemented. The only advice left to give to people is to not be too late. There's only so many people that can be trained to do this range of work (has a physical component that is difficult to automate + can only be done here + has an education/certification moat) just based on spots in educational programs, and they'd probably be better off getting on that sooner than later if they think that their current job is going to be in the crosshairs soon.
I work for a corporation that includes cleaning brands and I've got bad news...
I'm curious what you mean by prepare, to have savings?
50% of the workforce was in farming near the end of the 1800's. Today, 2% 40% of the workforce was in manufacturing early to mid 1900's. Today 8% 60+% of the current workforce is white collar. What will it be in 20 years ?
LLM's are only a couple of years old, we have no idea where this will go. Maybe it will be a big hallucination, maybe we are looking at the very early version of farm and manufacturing machines.
The ENIAC was larger than a person, we now have watches that are significantly more powerful. Maybe in the future, your Apple watch will have more compute than several racks of H100's.
When they came for the farmers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful food. When they came for the manufacturers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful products. Now they are coming for the white collar workers, and their highly paid laptop lifestyles.
Who is left to care ? The billionaires ?
I don't think there was a lot of support, outside the farming industry, to prevent machines from taking over peoples jobs even though 1/2 of the workforce were farmers. Similar for manufacturing.
And I do not believe the answer to those changes was to do farming or manufacturing by "hand". I also do not believe that the answer to AI is to not use it.
But, in the same way, I also do not believe that people will really care that call center workers will be replaced, that designers will be replaced, that many programmers will be replaced, that most admins and middle managers (anyone who pushes paperwork, creates reports, that just communicate and report on work "progress") will be replaced.
I also believe that these workers will get retrained and find better jobs is a fallacy - because it has not happened in the past. Farmers may have done this, but those who lost their well paid manufacturing, most lost their place in society. Blue collar workers in Detroit are not today's laptop warriors.
We will be undergoing a fundamental change in how society functions. It is quite possible the end result will be good, or at least looked at as good. But there was a lot of pain in the previous transitions, and the distribution of "winners" and "losers" will undergo significant change.
Is that a historical fact?
> I don't think there was a lot of support, outside the farming industry, to prevent machines from taking over peoples jobs even though 1/2 of the workforce were farmers. Similar for manufacturing.
Is that a historical fact?
Exactly. I have yet to read a single logically sound argument that even gives a hint of what those professions/jobs might be (remember, they have to be plentiful enough to employ large numbers of people, so "I quit my corporate job and making more as a TikTok influencer" doesn't count). Remember that a new profession has to open up new hitherto unknown revenue streams otherwise there are no companies who will pay you.
But if we're waiting to be paid to retrain there, I wouldn't hold our collective breath.
Education in what, though? No idea. And if there was one answer, and it's true that there will be fewer software developers, you'd likely be competing with many people for few jobs.
Like a politician who's asked about this in a town hall, but thinks that "our plan is to do absolutely nothing" doesn't sound very appealing.
The last work-house closed in the 1930s.
That all started not because people were afraid jobs were going to be replaced by the new loom. People had been using looms for centuries. They were protesting working conditions: low wages, lack of social protections when people were let go, child labor, work houses, etc. There were no labor laws at the time to protect workers... but there were these valuable new machines that the capital owners valued greatly. The machines were destroyed as leverage: a threat.
Since the capitalists ultimately "won" that conflict it has been written, by technocrats, that technological progress is virtuous and that while workers will initially be displaced the benefit to society will be enough such that those displaced will find productive work else where.
But I think even capitalist economists such as Keynes found the idea a bit preposterous. He wrote about how the gains in productivity from technological advances aren't being distributed back to workers: we're not working less, we're working more than ever. While it isn't about displacement of workers, it is displacement of value and that tends to go hand in hand.
I think asking, "Where do I go?" is a valid question. One that workers have been trying to ask since the Luddites at least. Unfortunately I think it's one that gets brushed under the rug. There doesn't seem to be much political will to provide systems that would make losing a job a non-issue and work optional.
That would give us the most leverage. If I didn't have to work in order to live I could leave a job or get displaced by the latest technological advancement. But I could retrain into anything I wanted and rejoin the work force when I was good and ready. I wouldn't have to risk losing my house, skipping meals, live without insurance, etc.
We saw this pre-ai with uber and door dash. I think as AI automation dies down and most companies are competing at a near optimal level with the new tools we'll need humans again in more traditional roles to build the next generation of innovations. And then the whole cycle will repeat.
Github project work on the weekends? That's not possible for most people in their mature/family years (or shouldn't be necessary - what about living life??)
Almost half of U.S. employment is from small businesses (250 or less employees). That's means there's a lot of entrepreneurship happening already. I have lots of family running their own small businesses (trades), and it's a lot of work, and doesn't necessarily pay as well as a cushy corporate job, but what I'm trying to say is lots of people can and do start their own enterprise.
Yes, lots of them will fail at running their own business, but it's not like corporate jobs are getting any safer either.
Here's another problem - how do you get healthcare without a corporate group plan? In my state the ACA offers expensive in-network only plans where you wait months for appointments.
Oh, you simply decide to use grit and willpower to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, placing some calls to people you met at certain parties aided by a small 6 digit loan from your family. /s
My default expectation of "employees should be more entrepreneurial" is that's it's a kind of victim-blaming. I'm especially cynical if the concept seems is getting introduced by groups that spent the last several decades putting up barriers to entry, drafting non-compete contracts, capturing regulators, and basically pulling up the ladders behind them.
Is it ideal working conditions? No, but its better than nothing, you can set your own hours, and you can leave when the next opportunity comes.
Oh, yeah? Did the Uber drivers and door dashers accrue the surplus value?