Hacker News Reader

Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com