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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Labor displacement is always coming. Every new technology eliminates some old occupations and creates new ones. LLMs aren't unique in that regard. We should have a safety net to support and retrain displaced workers regardless of the technology.

And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.

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What are the jobs AI is creating, specifically?

> And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.

I don't think AI actually capable of doing so, but AI companies need to stop bragging about wanting to do this and making it their goal if you don't want people to keep bringing it up.

There are lots of new jobs in building data centers, plus all the components that go into those. For example, worldwide employee count at Amphenol is way up over the past couple years. They make a lot of electrical connectors and similar items.

Temporary construction and manufacturing jobs are not actual replacements for the jobs lost. They'll be done after the data centers are built, and then we're just back to AI having destroyed tons of jobs with no replacements.

Construction is never "done". New stuff is always being built. And eventually the old data centers will be demolished or remodeled, which also takes a huge amount of labor.

I think a lot of HN users still somehow don't understand the "lump of labor" fallacy.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...

Construction is in fact done at some point. You cannot build an unlimited amount of anything, let alone data centers.

Do you honestly believe there will be enough constant construction on data centers to replace millions of jobs lost to AI? Even if that was somehow true, there are tons of people that are not capable for one reason or another (age, physical fitness, etc) of doing construction work. Construction work also pays significantly less than many of the jobs being lost as is, so it's not a good replacement in that regard. And what happens when construction gets further streamlined and/or automated and requires fewer people? Or none at all, in the future?

Even your most optimistic hypothetical scenario results in millions of people doing hard manual labor for poverty wages. If anything, this just strengthens the case against AI and AI companies.

Construction is in fact never done. If it's not data centers then it will be something else: high-rise residences, bridges, spaceports, oil refineries, whatever. People always want more stuff and we'll never hit a limit in our lifetimes. Skilled construction work is tough and occasionally dangerous but it pays pretty well.

https://mikeroweworks.org/

Speculation about science fiction automation scenarios is not a sound basis for public policy. Lots of things could happen in the future. We can't reasonably plan ahead for all possible contingencies.

I like to think I'm generally more optimistic than average that AI growth will be a a net benefit to the economy, standard of living, and employment, but "AI creates jobs building AI data centers" is a terrible argument in favor of that optimistic idea.

Ignoring the fact that the number of data center construction jobs a given data center produces is probably vastly lower than the labor displacement possible with the compute power said data center will hold, the idea of losing your job due to AI only to get another job building data centers for more AI is some genuinely dystopian stuff.

I feel like AI would be a lot more popular if the proponents of building AI hadn't seem to have all gone to the Darth Vader school of PR. AI is a valuable tool because it allows skilled labor to be vastly more productive, not because it displaces skilled labor into jobs where they build they build the infrastructure for the robotic overlords that replaced them.

AI accelerates the entire white collar economy and makes it more efficient. It has and will continue to result in large job gains for blue collar and service workers. The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.

> It has and will continue to result in large job gains for blue collar and service workers.

Source? Specifics? This doesn't even sound plausible at face value. Even if it is somehow true, higher paying white collar jobs being replaced with service jobs that pay far less and have way worse conditions is not a positive or even a neutral outcome.

> The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.

The amount of wealth hoarding already going on says otherwise. Buying yachts and islands does not magically offset millions of jobs being lost.

> The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.

That's demonstrably false.

If it were remotely true, trickle down economics would have been a gold rush for the entire economy.

Not sure how generating exponentially more boilerplate is going to make anything more efficient. I guess we'll find out.

> And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.

This is essentially what a handful of c-suite execs have been telling the world for the past 2-3 years is it not?

It seems obvious to me that AI will drastically reshape creative industries, and greatly lower the headcount required for analytical and programming industries, in the long term. The scope of its impact on the economy is likely greater than the Internet, social media, and the telephone.

Furthermore, AI companies and consulting companies themselves are selling this idea that it will completely reshape employment.

I find it more hand-wavey to say "it's just another technology change" than it is to say "this time it's different".

There is essentially infinite demand for software. Every time new technologies have made it cheaper to build software we've ended up with more new software, and more people employed in software development. There's no reason to expect that LLMs will change that historical pattern. We'll just be using higher level tools.

But most of the people creating digital media like animation, graphic art, and special effects are probably screwed. The next few years are going to be tough for them and they have my sympathies, but they're only a tiny fraction of the labor force.

> Every new technology eliminates some old occupations and creates new ones [..] And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies

Yeah, a lazy, low-effort claim such as this doesn't really require replies, it can just fail to stand on its own.

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