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Comment by TimByte | Hacker News Reader

The worry with AI is not "productivity is bad." It's whether the displaced labor has anywhere comparable to go

Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.

Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.

Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.

The emphasis there should be on "marketing". The actual state of things is that white-collar work is alive and well, and if anything is being helped by AI.

Helped or overworked?

Automation is a boon when it automates away tedium, but also a curse for the people that subsist by enduring that tedium.

> Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.

Says the knowledge workers, who have collectively spent the last 50 years talking down to the physical laborers with a smug "should have gone to college!" attitude.

You'll be fine. Automation of any kind is a boon for everyone. We massively over-allocated human talents to office jobs over the past few decades and stopped building anything in the physical world (like houses, infrastructure, etc), this is only the pendulum swinging back to reality. Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay, long before AI was a thing.

How many people do we actually need sitting in meetings about meetings about powerpoint presentations for future meetings....or implementing react components into a dashboard UI in a slightly different way for the 3,000,000th time? Even without AI, this was bound to happen.

In the early 1900s there were literally hundreds of different automobile manufacturers globally. We didn't need that many, just as we don't need 1,000,000 people working on 100 slightly different versions of the same CRUD project management software. Humans will human. We'll find new stuff to do, as we have done since the dawn of humanity.

"Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay"

I wouldn't take his word too seriously. According to him, corporate lawyers, administrative assistants and compliance officers shouldn't exist.

Uhhh...what jobs do you think AI is going to be tasked with automating?

The most valuable non-foundation-model AI companies are...legal apps. This means he was right, not wrong.

Funny you make this statement without giving examples of timeframes, what this looked like in real terms for real peoples lives living back then, nothing. Just 'between 1880 and 1950 we found new stuff to do'. It's all selling magic and hopium based on nothing.

Real example: 75% of the global workforce were farmers in 1880, most on a subsistence basis. The people who left the farm for the factories during that time period weren't forced to. They chose to, because working in a factory was better than staying on the farm. Just like a generation of rural Chinese people made the same choice more recently.

In fact, there's nothing stopping you from buying a farm and living like its 1880 today.

You can quite literally go out and start living a subsistence farmer lifestyle tomorrow. The average person in 1880 did not have the tools needed to cultivate a large parcel of land, so you'd approximate their lifestyle quite easily with a tiny parcel of arable rural land which is extremely cheap to acquire in most countries.

It's not magic and hopium, its simply automation and increased productivity via leverage. AI is the assembly line of the digital revolution.

You need 0.5 to 1.5 acres per person for non-mechanized industrial argriculture. Nowhere with land that is truly arable enough for that is going to _sell_ you 1 acre at a time. In the U.S., you buy at least 40 acres at a time. In the U.S. Midwest, that's going to set you back (on average) $379,000. That's before you buy the equipment you need to be able to farm the land in the first place. Unless you industrialize and grow crops to sell to other people, you will not be able to afford the property taxes on the land to be able to keep it, either.

So, no, you cannot just go out and buy an acre and garden.

What? Yes, you absolutely can buy half an acre. You think in 1880 people went on Zillow to buy land?

You're just going to have to do this the 1880 way.

Knock on the door of a land owner and offer to buy/rent half an acre so you can farm. You'll find takers. My extended family literally has this arrangement with many people who farm different crops during different seasons.

Too hard to to do it that way? Welcome to 1880! Most people weren't land owners on the land they farmed back then and didn't have 'Perfectly arable' plots, and this was pre-fertilizer.

Oh and you'll have to use horse and buggy to get around to find land owners (no evil automobiles from those evil factories full of automation!) who will allow you to farm their land, just like 1880. So good luck.

I don't know how many times I need to explain this to tech doomers: nobody forced people out of subsistence farming. They chose to leave it. It was not a utopia.

Why is you're 'real example' 100% hypothetical? Give me real examples. Or at least real information from places like Manchester at the time. Not this hypothetical stuff the implies much ignoring things got worse for generations.

If you read up on the industrial revolution, those people that moved became less healthy, less happy, forced into dorm style housing. Give me real examples of what 'working out' looked like in the past. Because from my research, 'things worked out' meant worse outcomes for quite a long time (like generational timeframe). Give me examples please of what this successful transition in the past looked like for real individuals.

Again, it's magic and hopium.

Interesting there is a possible implication here. If salaries drop from more people doing physical labor instead of white collar work then the automation of physical work may be delayed even longer. It may be cheaper in the short term to pay humans than machines due to an oversupply in physical labor.

The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.

I don't see what the big worry is unless you're heavily invested. Plenty of investments go bust.

Because of the huge amounts involved.

As people have pointed out - this also happened during the DotCom bust. Eventually all that infra got used.

Fun fact!

During the DotCom crash, about $5 trillion in market cap disappeared.

NVidia's market cap is currently around $5 trillion.

Fiber buried in the ground in 1996 is still useful. Servers from 1996, not so much outside of the retrocomputing community. The bulk of those trillions of dollars on AI is not going into useful long term infrastructure. It's going into equipment that will only be useful to scrappers after its initial life is over in three to five years as the sorts of places that can handle the heat load of 25 clothes dryers on high stuffed into 3.5 cu ft of space aren't going to run second hand machines. They aren't useful as in-office developer machines unless your office has 1000A of power to dedicate to that one single machine and the air conditioner need to keep the room the server is in from bursting into flames.

And I suspect those GPUs don't even have video outputs so cannot be used as video cards.

The data centers are the reusable infra. Not the servers.

Sure, the data centers can be used as hay barns.

Did you see the news about the shennanigans of the SpaceXaiXsocialmediasite IPO and the consequences of that?

Sounds like that other great destroyer of lives and capital - war.

> The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing?

Honestly? That's the best case scenario for humanity.

When AI can replace knowledge-based work, capital has no need for humans anymore. That's almost an ELE.

There is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?

Do you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.

Changing the tax system to tax capital rather than labour would probably get you 90% of the way there without great societal upheaval (capital would fight back though).

Obligatory land value tax mention

There's also the worry whether productivity is real.

If you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.

There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.

Just because they weren't paid doesn't mean women were not doing economically valued labour. The washing machine is probably the greatest productivity unlock since the steam engine.

The Washing Machine Project (https://www.thewashingmachineproject.org/) is trying to provide this benefit to people without ready access to mains electricity, by providing hand-cranked, portable washing machines. Hopefully it's more of a success than OLPC was: https://bathsdr.org/resources/the-washing-machine-project-in... shows mixed results.

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