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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

I don’t particularly like the horse to engine angle because it doesn’t capture the issue well.

When we automated physical activity people that were crowded out moved into knowledge work. Now we’re automating knowledge work so people move into ???

Leisure? Become a useless class? UBI? Something else entirely?

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I agree with this too and I find this article extremely depressing.

The AI "revolution" as described here is the wholesale outsourcing of vast swaths of thinking and decision-making to a single entity. A project coded with Claude is a project coded by Anthropic. A business whose decisions are made with ChatGPT is a business run by OpenAI.

Is that what these people really want? To become a conduit through which two or three companies get to exert control over everything in the world?

The knowledge economy was already on the way out in favour of the performance economy even before LLMs. LLMs have also shown that they can produce in the performance space, of course, so it remains to be seen how valuable humans are in that position but so far it would appear that many are willing to pay for a "human connection".

Plenty if not all people put more value into handmade things, but they can't afford to have everything handmade. An IKEA coffee table is $15. Handmade one from a woodworker is $400 - $1000.

Absolutely. Hence why manufacturing died long ago, and why the knowledge economy was already on the verge of death even before LLMs, and why we were already moving to the performance economy: because in the performance economy the consumer and the buyer are able to be disparate entities, where the buyers can have deep pockets even if the consumers don't.

In the performance economy it doesn't matter how rich the consumer is, but what the consumer wants to consume does matter. Because the buyer and consumer are disjointed in the performance economy, the consumer isn't swayed by cost. However, if the consumer prefers AI performances, which they quite easily could, then humans are in trouble. But so far it seems human performances remain what the consumer wants to consume.

(Technically manufacturing and knowledge work could have established the same separation, but since the bright minds went to performance nobody thought to before it was too late)

How are your plumbing skills?

You mean my meat proxy skills while wearing a Ratatouille machine-vision head camera that tells me what wrench to pick up and how to crimp the Pex rings?

You're telling me Google Gemini robot 2 tying a trash bag isn't also gonna be able to crimp PEX rings?

It will. But having watched the video, I can tie one faster and cheaper. This week. Next week, who knows?

The solution is probably a trash bag with a mini forklift compatible lift rings, an optical center mark, a ratcheting closure, and make a raspberry PI do the computing millions of dollars of tooling to make a robot compatible trash bag but it might be worth it, deploy the bean counters!

Plumbing is kind of a hard job, definitely not fun for anyone above middle age. And given it will pay minimum wage, I think I'd just take a life of leisure instead.

Minimum wage? Where I live, the plumber median wage is pretty much exactly the national median.

Sure, but that is today. When AI decimates the knowledge fields, a whole lot of people are going to be looking at different career options. There will not be any shortage of people hoping to make money in the trades, and with that surge in supply will come a collapse in prices.

Ah, then I understand you. But please, let's stop with this inevitability. If AI decimates, not when.

Why would it not? The economic incentives make it inevitable. Might as well expect water to not flow downhill.

It is very plausible that LLMs never get to 100% replacement for knowledge workers and the winners will the people who use both, leaving behind the people who thought all they needed to do was cut costs by doing existing workloads without humans. It remains to be seen if the constraint on quantity of knowledge work was the people or the work.

It remains to be seen, but a reasonable argument against this is found in the progression of chess AI engines. After Kasparov was beaten there was still a period where the best humans working with machines were still better than the machines on their own. Eventually (around 2020 I think?) this was no longer the case, having even the best humans on Earth in the loop was a net negative. There are reasonable arguments against this, but I've found them mostly unconvincing.

> Why would it not? The economic incentives make it inevitable.

Citation needed. Again, I wanna emphasize that I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying that it's not a given that it will.

There is very little sign that current models can do anything but (at best!) augment most knowledge workers (with some exceptions). And there are very reasonable open questions about whether it's economically, and ecologically, sustainable to continue development at anything near the current pace. There is, in fact, plenty of indicators that even the current SoTA is the result of a financial overexertion.

Apologies, I'm with you. I was speaking to the hypothetical, not trying to suggest it is inevitable. I think it is uncertain how this plays out, but I am an optimist and I think it ends up a net positive.

> There will not be any shortage of people hoping to make money in the trades, and with that surge in supply will come a collapse in prices.

And the worst case downward spiral will involve not only a surge in supply but a drastic drop in demand to go along with it.

All of those previous "knowledge workers" scurrying for the trades not only become more labor supply, but without their cushy jobs they will no longer be able to afford to hire trades people to prop up the demand side.

Double whammy.

Actually had a plumber here earlier today which was an ordeal so have been asking that myself too...