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Comment by richwater | Hacker News Reader

That's quite an unsubstantiated leap. The world has gone through plenty of digital transformations and the number of people in poverty has only _shrank_.

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It's hard not to make that leap when so many layoffs are (according to PR releases anyway) attributed to AI adoption. Even if the reality on the ground is that many of these workforce reductions are to make the balance sheets look better (presumably as a bet on AI), it's impossible to ignore the accelerating wealth gap, especially in the context of the gutting of regulations and state actors leveraging world events on prediction markets. We will not be given a fair deal if we simply wait for our benefactors to provide one.

Doom is popular right now. People want to feel terrible and pessimistic and their media diets only reinforce this.

To be fair, the labour market for a recent humanities graduate is quite crap right now, too.

In particular, CS students are feeling it more than most majors. (Especially compared with the shock that most of them probably thought CS was the field for job security.)

Saw an article recently that said CS majors were up there with performing arts majors and art history majors in terms of unemployment rate.

This is true. Computer Systems Engineering is pretty high.

It's going to be bad indefinitely until we don't really have "jobs" any more in any sort of meaningful sense.

To be fair the last 60 years have seen wealth distribution consolidate at the top of this country at rates never seen in human history.

Yes, but during those transformations, the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ.

You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.

It isn't the first time a new technology has been pitched to replace many worker's jobs, both successful and unsuccessful versions of the promise have come to pass several times.

I think what they are saying is "that something can replace a job does not inherently imply the next step is poverty". From that perspective, you can absolutely have it both (and many other combinations of) ways.

That was exactly what a great many things were marketed as, such as the jacquard loom and dynamite.

What actually happened in each case was that employment went up for a good long while, as the efficiency boost to the sectors touched made investment far more viable. Eventually successive rounds of automation did reduce employment in each of weaving and mining, but it wasn’t an overnight catastrophe as initially advertised or feared.

> the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ

The assembly line was explicitly about replacing skilled with relatively unskilled labor.

The number of people in absolute poverty has shrunk, but the proportion of national income held by the wealthy has increased, so economic mobility is declining. There are many reasons for this, but typically deployment of technology is a capital expense and employers aim to realize all the gains from their investment, notwithstanding the upskilling and/or deskilling effect it has on workers, who are treated as fungible economic units rather than people. Nobody likes this except capitalists.

Then it should easy to show a world where we are all not in abject poverty. We’re waiting.

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