Hacker News Reader

Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I have a more depressing theory. I think class is part of it, but I'm starting to suspect that a shockingly large number of people lack the critical thinking skills needed to think out the implications of this stuff. I say that because I've met so many people of the managerial class that seem to think it's going to replace the annoying people they have to pay, but somehow they don't think it's going to come for them. It's like we have some sort of society-wide main-character syndrome where a bunch of people just think that somehow the machine can replace every other job, and yet after ingesting all of human knowledge it somehow won't be able to compete with someone with "domain expertise"? Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe? I don't think this doomsday scenario is going to happen, but I think the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.

View on HN

I don't think its entirely class. I've met many people who have convinced themselves they have some special sauce--even in software! And even those who are insulated like doctors and plumbers don't realize they're still at risk from second order effects. What happens when half of their customers are broke? That possibility is not an exaggeration. Even if everyone re-skills over night, people will default on their mortgages at a scale greater than the '08 financial crisis.

And that's just one devastating outcome. There will be far more, and for some reason, no one is talking about them.

Even if you are a plumber and we don’t automate plumbing, you’ll have half the population displaced and switching to plumbing. Everything that isn’t automated will be over saturated.

Or average joe becomes DIY plumber with help of chatGPT and there is a lot less demand for plumbers then.

I don't think the reason that most people don't DIY plumbing is a lack of accessible information. Any physical craft like that requires practice, so I think there's a real moat there.

There is a lot less information online about the physical trades compared to software development. Plumbers don’t post on ToiletOverflow.com all day helping each other with their little tricks and sharing tribal knowledge. Pick a random brass fitting at the hardware store and try to google its purpose; you’d be surprised by the scant detail even when yielding plenty of shopping links

Fair point. Also:

> ToiletOverflow.com

Applause!

How does average joe afford the tools and parts they need with no job employing them?

Where I live, just the call out fee for a plumber would cover the cost of tools and materials with enough left over for beers afterwards. If you’re relatively handy and willing to thing things through, the main obstacle to doing all your own plumbing (again, at least where I live) is regulatory capture.

How does he afford a plumber then ...?

That's the point. Plumbers will be broke, too, because people who are supposed to hire them will not have jobs.

When we continue this line of thought far enough, we get to ask who's going to pay for the hardware and the electricity to run the AI that's taking all the jobs.

This is exactly the missing long-term perspective. All AI creators are focused either on the projected wins or the shiny technology, ignoring societal effects. Not that they should, they are engineers or MBAs after all, but somebody should. Somebody like us, or better somebody with better reach and better knowledge, should figure out a way to offer a future also to former clerks.

I don't get how this didn't become yet a major election topic in most democracies. It's business as usual mostly.

Because humans are bad at reacting to things that might happen; we’re far better once there is a literal crisis.

ChatGPT is probably less useful than youtube for this kind of stuff.

Might help to find the right video though

These days I find Gemini often recommends me a youtube video that's just an AI voice reading out a reddit post that was chat gpt generated full of emoji.

Will so many people switch to plumbing though ? Really depends on how old you are when you get canned (I don't think its realistic for most 40 year olds to start a plumbing career), how good you are with your hands and physical things and whether you can survive the switch psychologically; I don't see many investment bankers or software devs survive such a switch. I'm 42, even if I was very good with my hands (which I'm not) I don't think it would have been a realistic transition; by realistic I mean survivable psychologically.

So people will not all switch to plumbing, indeed. But then to what? There's only so much need for tattoo artists and geriatric care - which your customers must also afford to pay.

Yep. I don't have good answers and neither do our politicians. Things will have to change rather radically.

Our sinks will never clog again, at least.

Perhaps the feeling is that in a competitive society (which most of us live in) as long as things aren't collapsing I don't see why a plumber/doctor should care if a bunch of lawyers and software devs will be out of a job. They will become relatively wealthier even if their income is taking a hit. Their purchasing power should rise if most of white collar work is collapsing.

They would become wealthier in a real sense, since the services that used to be provided by the scarce labor of lawyers and software devs would now be far cheaper. In fact due to Jevons' paradox, even lawyers and software devs would enjoy far higher living standards due to AI. The boost in efficiency just creates a spike in demand for the remaining human component of the job, no matter how tiny.

How would cheaper software development or lawyers massively raise standard of living for other people? Most people that need their standard of living improved don't even own computers, they generally don't have access to the capital needed to start a businesses, and they have no use for a lawyer outside of criminal matters.

That kind of thinking might work if 1, or 5, or 10% lose their income. If 50% do, there's revolution. And that's not great for anyone, including plumbers and doctors.

We will never see 50% of people lose their income, they'll just gradually transition into newer AI-powered roles. Their income will grow rather than shrink. The people who are at risk of losing their income will be those who reject working with AI entirely, but that's because they will be gradually made uncompetitive.

What are these newer AI-powered roles? Let's get to the specifics, please. I'm open to transition, or learn new, give me please a few starting points. I know AI and agents and skills.md already, so let's skip the basics, indicate me a few new jobs I could take.

The specifics is that AI just isn't good enough and there's a huge amount of viable human white-collar work. We're just speculating about what might happen in a future where AI gets good enough to perform most current white-collar jobs.

Yes, widespread automation of knowledge work is unlikely to decrease total production, so all the goods and services people currently demand will still be provided, but the power dynamic of who is consuming and who is providing might flip around. So a bunch of formerly upwardly-mobile people could end up at the bottom of the social hierarchy while others whom they used to look down upon will be able to afford servants for the first time in their lives.

I see little evidence that any social role reversal is going to occur. This technology is soon going to price out average to poor people when they have to pay true token costs. It might be the case that only the rich and powerful have access to the powerful models.

Poor people with hard-to-automate occupations don't necessarily need to be able to afford token costs for social role reversal to occur. They only need to be able to hire an even poorer person who used to earn a salary that exceeded even those token costs and who was laid off as a result.

Um, what poor person is hiring ANYONE? If you're able to hire a software dev, even a laid off one, you are not poor.

After going without food for a few days, even a software dev is going to have to swallow their pride and consider alternative employment options. You might think they could just take a poor person's existing job, but why would for example a meatpacking plant hire a software dev with zero meatpacking experience when they already have lots of experienced meatpackers and meat demand hasn't gone up? Meanwhile, the meatpackers might like it if they could have someone babysit their children, cook for them and clean their now much larger house (which used to belong to a software dev who fell on hard times and had to move out). And a steady supply of desolate characters holding up cardboard signs saying "I used to be a software dev, but now I would do literally anything for a meal" could put such luxury into their affordable range.

Agree on the knock-on effects. My prediction is deflation. Money will be worth more and more. As a consequence governments will have to step in to ensure inflation(with e.g. universal income), otherwise the economy stops.

But honestly I'm not sure this will be enough for people to spend on e.g. restaurants or activities or oh I don't know, children. I think this will imply a freezing or even stepping back on the Maslow pyramid, the majority of people consolidating in the middle.

What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.

> What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.

I'm not so sure about this one. The powerful in a society like the one you describe would surely know about that potential powderkeg and supply ample cheap entertainment to dull the edge. Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.

That's even more dystopian than your scenario, if you ask me.

Yeah that also sounds realistic, and actually there's evidence of this dulling effect from even before llms. The attention economy has been literally streamlining.. well, the road to death. And nobody is angry.

I can spin this in a weirdly positive light though. With fertility rates going down, life becoming less and less meaningful and simultaneously a small and decreasing group of people becoming extremely productive.. maybe humanity will finally stop exploiting the planet and start a sort of transition.

AI enhanced increased lifespan forest elves watching over nature. Mm I'd prefer that over soma. We are the heralds of The Great Ones

> Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.

See Brave new world.

The powerful people in our society are mostly idiots. The more they're in front of a microphone the more damage they do for themselves.

On the flip side, people think AI is magic: too much magic.

Even with large advances in reasoning and actionability, it still makes insane mistakes and it's wildly prone to prompt attacks. That is a fundamental flaw in the technology.

Even an AGI will lack the millennia of self-preservation evolution that will cause it to do crazy shit. So much of what humans do is governed by a desire to be alive and to be liked.

So, I'm not particularly worried about these changes happening rapid fire. I'm more concerned about the ladder pulling effect and misinformation.

So I am expecting the AI bubble to burst (or at least deflate) some time soon. Perhaps this puts me I an specific camp, I am not sure. But this whole "AI will replace X jobs" does not phase me, not because I think AI is useless. On the contrary I am a daily user, but in my mind, people fail to see that the economy is not built around jobs and capital, but wants (or needs) and trades. Even in a world where everything can be done better by a machine than a human, there will always be the "want" for an item that is handcrafted. AI is yet another tool that accelerates us to satisfy more "wants" and that's great. I'm looking at a whole lot of things that will be available in the future (especially software but not limited to) which are not available today, AI generated or not.

Some get it, though. When I quipped that Claude may eventually replace me, my manager was visibly shaken as he mentioned it would probably come for him first.

I feel better about it than I did a few months ago. Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I forsee humans being necessary for a long while yet.

> Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen.

I think part of the negative societal response to AI is the uncertainty of it all. AI killing me, taking my job, augmenting me, curing me of old age, all seem like viable futures within my lifetime given the information I have. People want to know it's going to be okay and even the smartest experts can't credibly promise them that.

Realistically, I've only seen evidence about AI taking people's jobs, as is the case with LLMs, and in the case of robotics, killing people. Augmentation has always been something that gets talked about in research labs but I've never seen an actual product; and curing disease and old age is the domain of more traditional ML methods.

I know Altman has been going around selling visions of curing cancer and the like, but when he talks about standing up new DC or getting a new investment most of that is going towards LLMs, not cancer research.

I meant augmentation in an abstract way, like making you more productive and freeing up your time from drudgery. This is the sales pitch that AI labs have started to pivot towards in their communication with the public after realizing the public don't want the creation of Skynet. There's a tension there because they want to sell the other vision (full replacement of labor) to investors so they can raise capital for DC builds at reasonable financing costs.

"Ingenuity" is what I think is missing. The sheer _want_ of solving a problem that is distinctly a living creature's concern.

The irony is if we ever taught machines how to have this, they'd probably not want to work for us anymore.

The billionaires building doomsday bunkers get it.

No they do not - sheltering make sense only if there is anything worth waiting for on the other side.

Yeah, seems like a big downgrade to go from being a billionaire in society to a nobody in a bunker with no society waiting for you outside the bunker.

Oh imagine some society will be outside the bunker, waiting.

”We drop the bomb ourselves.”

> society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?

I think this ties in with the rise of racism over the last two decades. Historically, antisemitism has been instrumentalized by the elites in order to deflect animosity from the lower classes: "look, it's not us that are robbing you blind, it's the Jews!"

I see the same thing happening today in the Western world. The elites are squeezing more and more of our countries' wealth, turning governments them into hollow sources of rent, while at the same time backing corrupt politicians who tell us our misery is all because of (illegal) immigrants.

> the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.

Indeed. To me if there's one reason to oppose the use of AI technology, it is political. Sadly, the SWE class (if it can be called that), being better off than the majority of humans on earth, seems to care very little for class issues and inequality in general, maybe out of self-interest. But as you said, the machine will be coming for them too, it's just a question of when, not if.

Correct me if I wrong, up to 40% of Roman citizens were on "welfare". This, at least, shows that it's not impossible to have a functioning society with a large percentage of people who only contribute political activity.

These people weren't completely idle for one, and Rome was subsidized by the rest of the Empire, from which it extracted wealth and resources.

You mean they were slaves right

Nah. It was welfare for Roman citizens: cura annonae.

Perhaps this is a form of Gell-Mann Amnesia (but kinda inverted) where everyone views AI as too inaccurate for their own niche, but perfectly fine for every other field that they know comparably little about.

I’ve been thinking about this, or a variant of it.

Hypothetically, I’m scared and sad that AI can replace me (it currently can’t, not literally, but a lot of my skill and expertise, built up over say 30 years, that used to be valuable and rare is now cheap to get from an AI).

Let’s try to see the upside. How ‘powerful’ would it make me if, at the cost of my own edge being dulled, can access everyone else’s edge?

I am still my own expert. Now with AI I have a minor expert in everything else as well. What is the best way to use that? don’t have an answer but it’s an aspect I haven’t seen discussed much and I think it is worth bringing up.

As of today, "minor expert" is the wrong way to phrase it. The flagship LLMs today are at best at an initiate or apprentice level in every field.[1] This is not meant as a derisive remark – having something at hand that is initiate level in every field is remarkable and useful. But it's nowhere near expertise anywhere.

[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/stop-using-junior-and-senior

You seriously think current LLM is just at apprentice level in programming? It can write stuff one shot that I’d expected even some experts to struggle to do even with ample more time allowed.

Kind of, yeah. LLMs are hyperoptimized for one-shotting. But all of their code is like that. It's poison for the long term health of the codebase.

They will one shot with bunch of duplicated code, somehow they will just omit basic things, like security middleware. It will all kind of work. But then you make additional passes to do review and clean up, suddenly there is a lot more work to make it half decent.

Yes. The definition of the apprentice/journeyman boundary is that a journeyman can do a day's job unsupervised. LLMs cannot do that.

You think every person only thinks of their own job and no one dreams of anything bigger from humanity’s perspective? I’m never going to be in some kind of space colony but do I want to see them happen? You betcha.

> You think every person only thinks of their own job and no one dreams of anything bigger from humanity’s perspective?

Yes, the vast majority of people care about their jobs first rather than a theoretical future where mostly rich people colonize space. It's much easier to imagine yourself becoming poor than living in Mars.

What I was 9, I lay awake thinking about how humanity will one day explore space and discover all sorts of new species, make new friends.. I imagined music concerts with humans and animals and all sorts of creatures.. and then it hit me, I won't be alive by then. I basically realized I'm mortal, and cried for hours.

I want that type of sadness back, please. Right now I'm relieved if anything to know I won't see 2126 and beyond, but that's not because I'm inherently pessimistic, I came to this world optimistic as can be.

> I want that type of sadness back, please. Right now I'm relieved if anything to know I won't see 2126 and beyond, but that's not because I'm inherently pessimistic, I came to this world optimistic as can be.

This is normal I think. You grew up. Not wanting to live forever is totally sensible.

I didn't think about "forever", then or now. It's more about seeing the next few hundred years as an exciting time of progress and adventures, of ideas -- rather than just a snuff movie I'd rather pass on.

And "growing up" kind of can mean everything and nothing. I noticed that humans prey on humans, destroy and poison animal species and each other for nothing, for entertainment or to compensate for psychological issues. It is normal for a child to reject that, and a moral imperative for an adult to act on that, not to "get over it".

Come to think of it, kids aren't "naive" that they don't know these things. Adults are correctly ashamed of them, so they only discuss them with people who will accept shrugs, i.e. other adults. If we were honest to children about the world, the things in it we accept, they would freak the fuck out and probably be traumatized. We tell them to not kick a dog, but oh by the way, Abu Ghraib. If they say "shit" they get scolded, if a strange man scares them you should tell their parents and they'll be mad at that man, but if people murder thousands of little children, just evaporate them, that's just how it is, nothing can be done. Some people are insane and rule over us, starve us out, and that's why mommy and daddy have to work 5 jobs to have nothing compared to what the grandparents had, but here's that cartoon you like.

I'd say what is called "rational" and "grown up" is often just diminished and broken, barely surviving via constant distraction from one's own state.

You're not wrong. A bit too bleak perhaps but yeah everything you said is mostly factual. Society is a hypocritical shit show it is what it is.

I think it’s this but also that we all see the value in our own niche because it’s ours, and have more trouble seeing the values in other niches. So it becomes a self perpetuating positive reinforcement thing.

Actually I think AI will largely automate software and math and really not much else in the short to medium term. (speaking as a computer/math person)

I don't see why that should be the case. The only reason software is getting focused on first is:

1. Software devs are obviously going to have a better idea how to apply AI to software development compared to other fields. So of course the coding tools are going to be the first things made.

2. Formal verification makes the problem easier by allowing for iterative feedback (compilers, proofs, etc.)

The second argument is, I think, somewhat valid, but ignores that a lot of other professions also have similar verification systems even if they're a bit less rigorous. The first argument just explains why things are the way they are now, it's not indicative of the future. I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that other jobs than mine require less cognitive horsepower or whatever, but I don't see what's particularly special about other jobs if it can do hard STEM stuff.

I thought the same but i dont think so anymore. My wife is a senior manager at a big 4 consultancy gig and she says copilot became freaking good at understanding tax, multinational company structure etc etc. Even if you need a few partners and experts at the top to validate things you can cut huge amounts of workers.

Exactly. Regarding software, it is trained on a massive corpus of code and the feedback loop can be very fast (playing well into LLM's upsides) and results are ... mediocre.

Recently I had to go through some building regulations and Claude's advices were catastrophic.

It's normal Gell-Mann amnesia and, yeah, it's a really big part of why AI is so accepted.

The real trouble isn't that it can replace us. Instead, consider that when there have been two comparable technologies in the market, the market has invariably chosen the lowest-quality/worst one. Why? That's easy to understand... while the chosen option is objectively the worst, it's always the cheapest. And cheapest wins. It's not "can AI do his job?" so much as "is the AI cheaper than a human?". And I think we all know the answer to that... even if the silicon's expensive now, volume pricing, data center buildouts, and other economic forces will soon make it cheaper.

The thing that is truly mysterious to the managerial and ruling classes though... when everyone is unemployed, who will be able to afford to buy your junk? Whatever industry you're in, whatever it is you're selling, the people buying that have the money to buy it because they still have jobs. If you're cutting jobs at your company, that helps the bottom line, but every other company is doing the same thing. And they're laying off your customers.

If this were true, nobody would be buying iPhones, nobody would be buying Teslas, in fact, nobody would be buying premium class cars.

I believe you're simply (correctly) identifying the lack of class consciousness that is rotting our civilization. If everyone believes they are smarter than everyone else, and will be able to come up ahead in the rat race, then there's no one left to organize and take the collective actions needed to smoothen the AI transition.

Wealth is largely distributed by luck, though it has become more concentrated over the last 30 years or so. Most wealthy people aren't particularly smart in the intellectual sense but they tend to think they are, because what other explanation do they have?

Admitting you were just lucky, rather than exceptionally hardworking or talented, is something very few people are willing to do. In all my years, I've met almost no one who genuinely attributes what they have to luck rather than their own effort.

> Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?

Most people can't see two steps ahead. Most people believe the mainstream narrative and think they are outsmarting everyone else in the process. See how Trump tweets still work despite proving time and again that he's full of s**. These people will keep doing what they were doing until they are completely emptied out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com