Hacker News Reader

Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

> I can't believe the AI boosters were right.

Not even sure they can believe it.

The AI field has known, but repeatedly ignored, that the knowledge work group would end up first on the chopping block, especially for those where everything they touch is digitally encoded already.

I used to joke that we're all really in trouble when robots can sort out your socks, but as of about a year ago I started seeing disturbing progress on that incredibly gnarly problem.

Most people really are going to be in denial about this as a coping mechanism, but the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be.

View on HN

I don't think it was ever ignored that knowledge workers would be the first affected by AI. I remember hearing for a long time that lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc. would all be obsoleted by AI.

I do think many (including me) were surprised that software engineering would be the first kind of knowledge work to be successfully automated. We assumed it would be one of the last, because we'd be the industry using AI to replace everyone else, not the industry using AI to replace ourselves.

I've always been interested in making my job easier first and solving business problems second :)

> creating large minorities of disenfranchised.

That's called "elite overproduction". Too many people going to college when the jobs aren't there. In the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't require a college degree.

It's much worse in less developed countries. The article today about essays in Kenya mentions that the country is creating far more educated people than it can use. Egypt had a scheme where the government guaranteed a government job to everyone who graduated from college. They had to give that up when the oil ran out.

It's hitting top people first, which was unexpected. Mathematicians who've won the Fields Medal are worried, and some are giving up math.[1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/19/mathema...

I was in denial for a long time too. Now I see it everywhere, among very smart people, too.

They say "AI just hallucinates" or "your fear is overblown" or they have a general sour grapes attitude towards it. But I don't think they're prepared for what's coming.

It's been coming "soon" for years now.

On the one hand, I confess that the "AI skeptic" position (which is where I place myself) seems a lot like "Global Warming skeptic". On the other hand, every instinct I have is telling me "this is an epic scam" and the wheels will come off, and it will crash and burn. The only question is when.

I felt this way too. But I think it's because we've lived through so many hype cycles (3D printing, IoT, crypto, etc.) which have either been modest improvements or busts.

However, game changing technology DOES come along from time to time. I think AI falls into that category, perhaps more than any other.

Honestly, I don't think any of us know exactly what's coming.

The difficult part is preventing the humans from causing the collapse of civilisation in the time before AI actually gets to ASI.

> but the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be.

I have mixed feelings about this statement. On the one hand: long-lived disparity like this is going to be very painful for those on the losing end of it. On the other hand: slowing the pace of change allows society and government to better adapt to it, and really rapid change always creates huge openings for assholes and opportunists to take over.

> really rapid change always creates huge openings for assholes and opportunists to take over.

This all depends on where the change ends. If it ends with ASI existing then it all works out.

If it ends with only sufficient AI to weaponise against the masses but not smart enough to escape the people pulling the strings then it's game over, and a totalitarian surveillance nightmare awaits.

Right now we're approaching the level of the second scenario already, but remain quite a long way (relatively speaking) from ASI. Slowing down simply makes the nightmare version more likely in the long run.

> the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be

Getting to the end asap is absolutely going to be "the vast majority of people are disenfranchised", how could it possibly be anything different? The only lever most people have is their labour, and that is being stripped from us.

Even if we aren't impoverished in the future due to some UBI scheme or whatever, it's hard to imagine what that looks like other than "disenfranchised". How do you have any kind of clout inside a system that you are fully dependent on?

Disenfranchising everyone at once beats disenfranchising enough to be a problem but not enough to motivate a solution, which is what the drip feeding achieves.

I don't have any trust that the people left standing will ever be motivated enough to figure out a solution that doesn't involve letting the rest of us starve or actively having us killed

Given the rate of progress in robotics, if AI works then there won't be anyone left standing to worry about.

That's the whole point of doing it fast, otherwise yes they will attempt to slow things down so they can take advantage of the intermediate state where some are still standing, temporarily, to get rid of the others. And that is very much what a lot of the current pausing noise is in aid of.

What people don't understand is that dictators don't kill everyone because they're just monsters.

Well, they are monsters, but the reason they do it is because it's kill or be killed for them. You have to eliminate threats before they eliminate you.

And believe me, LOTS of people will want to depose a world dictator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com