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Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

See Brave new world.

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

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.

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