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The American manufacturing industry is scrambling to transfer some of the industrial trade and process knowledge from the retiring remnants of pre-offshoring industrial America into the two generations of people that didn’t have apprenticeships, pensions, (often) union membership with good benefits, etc. Trade schools were very expensive for industrial trade skills that were seen as dead-end careers compared to white collar jobs or non-manufacturing trades, and almost none of the companies saw any reason to spend all that money training people into expensive skilled professionals when they had all the professionals they could possibly need for decades after the industry largely collapsed, here. Keeping the workforce viable was always someone else’s problem— the individuals, the governments, larger companies— until it was suddenly everyone’s problem. They spend decades myopically chasing quarterly results before they realized they were running towards a cliff.

Unless your company had for some reason enough margin to just spend a lot more money than the competition to train and retain workers that you largely didn't need for a decade you were forced by the market to cut that corner. Market capitalism is inherently unsuited for long-term thinking. Even if everybody saw the cliff a decade ago, they all had to run towards it or be outcompeted by those who did. See also all other problems that can be externalized, e.g. pollution.

Tackling long-term problems and externalities must be done by someone outside the market.

“The market” doesn’t stop business owners from slightly overpaying for labor or training people for the future or providing pensions. It’s the business owners who are choosing to do this. Say a business could make 8% margin by cutting corners and applying only short term thinking, but the same business could make 6% by not doing these things. The choice is up to the business owner. Nobody is forcing them to maximize short term profits. They’re not going to simply vanish just because they aren’t profiting as much as someone else.

The problem is that most business owners and shareholders are cut from the same cloth and only care about maximizing short term profits.

> “The market” doesn’t stop business owners from slightly overpaying for labor or training people for the future or providing pensions. It’s the business owners who are choosing to do this.

Well, laws and regulations forbid the obvious contracts that would help you fix these things.

Really? You guys have laws that mandate profit-maximization?

If it's a publicly traded company then literally yes, public companies are mandated to make as much money for their investors as possible. It's a very stupid law but there it is.

Where is this law? Public companies (or rather their management) have fiduciary duties to shareholders. And it is usually safe for management to mostly assume that means making money.

But eg no one has sued Google management for giving company resources to charity. And in general, companies can have all kinds of goals, as long as shareholders are ok with them.

Going on a tangent: it's usually safe to assume that investors want money, because you can further most goals you care about with money. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence for an AI flavoured take on the same topic.

That's a common misconception, but it's not true.

> To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

Huh? What does that have to do with anything?

When a company pays for training and education of an employee, they risk that the employee jumps ship and takes that investment with her. Contractually, you could use bonds or contract penalties to curb that kind of behaviour, but there are limitations on what contract terms are enforceable or even legal.

Back in the day, companies recognized that not all the value they created would come back to themselves directly, but that keeping the economy and the trade healthy still had indirect benefit. Because as much as there would be employees that used you for training and then bounced off to someone else, there would also be employees that trained elsewhere and then bounced to you. Everyone stands to benefit from the practice of training being normalized, yet nobody does it anymore because they're afraid to be the first.

After all, if there's no chance of employees being trained anywhere else because nobody else is doing it yet, why would you decide to start training employees? The exchange wouldn't be equivalent in any way, there's a real possibility that you would never benefit at all. You'd be the only source of training, so anyone who bounced off from you could never have been someone who bounced off to you.

Back in what day and where?

In the bad old days, Adam Smith already complained about how apprentices were treated.

Think about stuff like the Ford Trade School, around 1916 to the early 1950s. Job security was better back then, so workers were more likely to stay than nowadays, but there aren't nearly as many schools or programs like that anymore. I figure it's because companies are too afraid to train workers that might not stay with them, but unwilling to offer accordingly competitive pay or benefits. If they did, I figure they'd have the benefit of more workers they train staying with them, as well as the benefit of more workers trained elsewhere joining them. This also creates the problem (and fear) of being taken advantage of by the workforce if you offer training programs better than your competitors.

Ford stuck his noses into all your family business. I'm not sure anyone still wants that?

Btw, Ford famously raised wages to 5 USD a day, because he had crazy high turnover. Workers weren't all that likely to stay than nowadays.

I'm not quite sure what the latter half of your comment is arguing for or against. Are you saying that it is in the best self interest of individual companies to train workers? Or are you saying that training workers is something altruistic?

No we don’t. There’s an old case that everyone always takes out of context. Under modern american corporate law, directors and management have broad discretion to do what they think is in the best interests of the corporation, broadly defined.

A good while ago, I also read about a company [0] using a legal framework for the company structure/charter, the Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), specifically to ensure how they want “best interests” to be defined. Sounded very fitting for the purpose, and cool that such a system exists (at least in some states, I believe?).

[0] https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi#4

Yes. And you can also see how OpenAI has structured themselves. (Whether it's working is another question.)

Or see how Bosch is set up.

> Say a business could make 8% margin by cutting corners and applying only short term thinking, but the same business could make 6% by not doing these things.

Sure there is, market forces quickly push the person making 6% out of business, because the one making 8% can lower their prices, or use that extra capital to buy up more resources.

Why spend excess to train when you can do it somewhere else for a lot cheaper? Cheap energy subsidized often by taxpayers is the real issue, and instead of those subsidies helping those paying for it, it's just moved capital upwards.

That's not how the market actually works. One company could lower prices. Or they could keep their prices high to condition their customers to higher prices, and maintain the higher margins.

Indeed, the last decade of business has been all about businesses preferring higher margins over more efficient markets.

> Market capitalism is inherently unsuited for long-term thinking.

How so? See how eg Amazon's shareholders were famously patient with them. Similar for Tesla, and lots of other companies. Including both public and private.

Amazon and Tesla have financial privileges that a metalworking shop with a few dozen to a few hundred employees don’t have.

The adoption of CNC machine clearly shows that it isn’t true that metalworking shops don’t plan for the future.

Maybe, maybe not. But comment I replied made universal statements about how the market is inherently unsuited for long term thinking.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50068391 for a bit more nuance aside from the universal statements.

Not everybody did, and many of the ones that didn’t are still open because they were the ones focused on the long game. Even a small shop just needs one skilled person to retain that knowledge and it doesn’t take a business genius to see that you need to train that person. In the grand scheme of things, having the equivalent of a couple interns is a very minor expense. It was pure shortsightedness.

> but we really need to think about how the next group of people are going to learn the skills and nuance to applying them

That's what school is for. For the last 150 years we've automated a bunch of things, and then we send people to school to learn how those automations work, so they can make better automations.

Maybe law school will have to be a year longer. Or maybe some forward thinking firms will have new associates check the work of the LLM to gain that experience.

> Maybe law school will have to be a year longer.

Law school is already 3 years long in the US (after 4 years of undergrad), and most agree the second two are a complete waste of time. Other jurisdictions are different, but the US market is by far the largest.

Who is "most"? Is this the same "most" that thinks college degrees are pointless and you should just go found a company (i.e. those that aren't paying attention and just want a credential)?

It’s people who graduated law school. First year was brutal. Second and third were a breeze and kind of boring.

The first year is really teaching you the lingo and how to think like a lawyer. After that it’s almost entirely electives and rarely requires hard work (Fed Courts being the exception).

I've also heard of successful lawyers who did correspondence classes and night school for 18 months or something and just went and took the bar exam. I guess those guys mostly make their money by putting up billboards and farming out referrals?

>I guess those guys mostly make their money by putting up billboards and farming out referrals?

I don't know why the manner in which someone studied law would have any impact on how or what they practice now. Most of the law and skill learned is by actually practicing, not what you learn in law school. Law school is about how to think like a lawyer, not how to practice law.

Pretty much any even mid-sized legal market is going to have really well-respected attorneys who graduated from some fancy top 5 law school, and some really well-respected attorneys who graduated from a local law school where they took night classes.

So many employers over-index on name brand credentials though. In Law and otherwise. In tech we’ve all witnessed a brilliant, hard working, experienced developer candidate who went to a no name school get overlooked in favor of some doofus who happened to go to Stanford.

The manner in which a lawyer studied obviously impacts their practice. If someone passes the bar at the age of 35 without a degree from anywhere, they're not going to be hired as an associate. If they want to make money, they're going to be a sole practitioner, and need to spend their time attracting clients. The economics of that naturally lead to a situation where a lawyer would arbitrage between paying for ads and doling out referrals. That's not to say they can't think like a lawyer or be a great lawyer, just that the starting point and the ladder to making money are very different from both that of a 26-year-old grad entering a firm and that of someone who leaves a firm to start their own practice.

Are we talking about a famous lawyer in Albuquerque?

In the future, I think AI lawyers will be arguing with AI lawyers for the most part.

Like how people use AI to write their resume and then the HR department uses AI to screen the resumes, the 2 AI's duke it out.

Governments want to use machines to decide who to kill. As the Overton window shifts it seems natural that machines will adjudicate, too.

Makes sense and money will still be valuable and can be used to lobby/influence the AI judges just like how people judges are now too

You know the observation that the average American commits three felonies a day, or Beria's evil classic "show me the man and I'll find you the crime"? I'd be more worried about an AI judge applying that approach, and not being able to bribe the thing. After all, what use does an AI judge have for money?

When mass surveillance becomes complete and hooked up to AI that can analyze every person, 24/7, we will all go home every night to a daily ticket listing every little minor crime we committed throughout the day, with the fine payment on autopay. Law Enforcement Wet Dream.

Yeah. It's true, and what a horror.

We see this coming, and we intend to survive and have nothing to lose...

Reminds me of Demolition Man.

I get the impression, that's all "too abstract" for people.

Will they understand the point when football gets taken over by AI, robot players and all?

Or won't they even stop at AI pastors and pray for the second coming of "Super J AI"?

It's funny, I've been working on a short story in which, 20 years from now, the only job still exclusively reserved for humans is professional sports. When a pitcher loses his hand during the World Series in a freak accident with a food processor, a detective has to investigate the AI gambling cartel and the IoT devices it's infiltrated...

Still, school isn't quite the same as learning skills through work experience, is it?

True, but have you seen the state of education in the year of our Ai-ssiah, 2026?

> That's what school is for.

It's not.

We have advanced CNC mills and lathes, and apprentices still learn doing things manually to understand how the tools work, their failure modes, and more.

There are machines that mix drinks, but you still learn to bartend by doing it manually and making mistakes, not starting out with machines.

Same with writing. Same with software. Doing the "simple", automatable thing is how you learn how the system works.

School can't be the same. Plenty of people have tried, but being effective in the real world is different.

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.

> There are machines that mix drinks, but you still learn to bartend by doing it manually and making mistakes, not starting out with machines.

You could say the same about grilling burgers. And yet, there are millions of burger cooks around the world grilling hundreds of millions of patties everyday with zero knowledge of how to grill burgers, at McDonald's and other bottom of the barrel fast food chains.

If not for the social aspect of being asked what you want for a drink and then watching it being made, bartenders would've already been replaced by mixer kiosks by now.

> You could say the same about grilling burgers. And yet, there are millions of burger cooks around the world grilling hundreds of millions of patties everyday with zero knowledge of how to grill burgers, at McDonald's and other bottom of the barrel fast food chains.

If there are cooks successfully grilling burgers, I think they would have to have knowledge of how to grill burgers.

It was literally pressing one button. A double sided grill closed, 40 seconds later it opened back up and 8 perfectly cooked patties are ready. That was 15 years ago in eastern Europe, they've replaced it with an even more automated process at least once since.

The "clamshell" grill was introduced at McDonald's in the 1980s. Prior to that you cooked the burgers on a flat grill, it was still all by timer but you had to sear-press and turn the burgers by hand. Still a very defined process with almost no need for judgement.

  > In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.

This is such beautiful rhetoric.

It's not mine originally, but it's been attributed to so many people that I don't know who to credit.

> That's what school is for. For the last 150 years we've automated a bunch of things, and then we send people to school to learn how those automations work, [...]

Mostly agreed here.

> so they can make better automations.

That's not true at all. Aspiring accountants learn how to use spreadsheets, instead of doing their sums by hand. But we don't expect them to make better versions of MS Excel or come up with LLMs that can do all of that for them.

School is mostly designed to dump information on people's heads. To function in a business and be able to DO things effectively, you need experience.

Schools came up with internships (which originated in the apprenticeship system) because they could not provide this experience, so how do you expect people to gain the necessary knowledge just from schools if there are no more internships or junior roles?

This is kind of a new complaint. Places like adp have being trying to automate away mundane hr tasks. Oracle and SAP have been trying to automate away the mundane admin tasks. Siemens does it for OT. There's a huge long tail of trying to solve this as if it were a problem in almost every field. This has been going on for decades and no one complains that we will lose expertise in these fields if the drudge work goes away. But bring in an AI... and everyone is suddenly concerned about corporate drudgery.

Anyone who does not do the grunt work of learning how things work at a granular level will run into trouble when their agent suggests "let's re-write the firmware!" and the user says "sure, whatever that means", the model will get stuck or break something, and there will be no one around to understand what is going on.

With strict version history that may be okay, but hopefully their agent already thought of that for them too!

Whenever you "automate away" things that are actually a part of you, you lose a part of yourself by definition.

When you automate physical movement, you atrophy. That implies ill health and helplessness/lack of resilience should your automata fail.

When you automate intellectual movement, the consequences are even more dire.

Most people lead a very immobile life already, in both aspects. They don't realize the consequences, if everybody did the same.

I don't think toiling away at mundane tasks is the only way to build expertise in a field, or even a particularly good one. Today's farmers barely touch hand tools anymore and they're able to produce crops just fine.

This is hitting us hard in tech, and it weights heavily on me, how will the junior people learn if the tasks we all did to learn when we were junior are now automated away. Here is a very real writeup from an Affirm New Grad about what it was like to be a new grad over the last year - https://medium.com/affirmengineering/ai-reflections-of-a-new... (I run eng at affirm) - it takes a lot more intentionality to learn. Both by doing some things by hand, but being very vocal about what you don't know- "Allow your uncertainties to be visible, and slow down to address them."

In school long ago, I learned to do multiplication and division using logarithm tables, and to compute square- and cube roots using pencil and paper. Haven't done any of those things since then.

> Whilst it's great to get the time saving from not delegating to a junior (LLMs are much faster at the basic level 1 work) there's going to be this big knowledge gap that you really only gain from actually doing the mundane boring shit.

That might be true, but that's not something for you to worry about as a customer of these services.

I don't worry about how my hairdresser practices either. I just pay for a good (enough) haircut.

> I don't really have an answer to that one other than still giving that work to junior staff, but they will then just utilise an LLM to help complete the job, and rightfully so, I'd have done exactly the same thing.

We can check how other industries have gone through these kinds of transformation before. Eg spreadsheets removed a lot of the worst drudgery that junior accountants and junior bankers used to have to do. But their industries adapted.

It is not something for me to worry about as a customer, but it is something for me to worry about as a member of the society

Sure. And for that my last paragraph applies.

I think the new batch of engineers are going to think faster on their feet, but less precise.

We humans are _amazing_ pattern matching machines and learning “if you do this thing this other thing occurs” is literally what our brains were built for.

It’s just the current few thousand years of technical progress that have been a departure from this reality - we found out about analytical thinking and that by deeply analysing something you can do a shit ton more.

If you look at scientific progress before Industrial Revolution it’s all trial and error between patterns. And I feel like the new crop of devs are silently settling in into this very human and familiar pattern.

On the one hand I think it will probably be good for the “mental health” of people in this profession - you become more like an alchemist acquiring bags of tricks on what works, sharing incantations with others, because sitting down and learning _why_ it works in detail would be a time luxury few would be able to afford.

But that would mean the people under the hood that build the LLMs and who debug the really broken system would be charging the premium.

I honestly don’t think that in and off itself would be such a bad thing.

What I personally am really scared about is the price for labour that is sharply declining. I don’t worry about ASI too much, but when you read history it is absolutely full of stories of great human suffering because “labour was cheap” no need to improve working conditions because there is always someone else willing to take it up.

We had the Industrial Revolution _because_ of the plague making labour expensive and driving the benefit for innovation. Before that nobody really cared. With LLMs doing things becomes vastly cheaper, so the labour itself becomes cheap with it.

Now looking at the state of the engineered world - how absolutely shitty everything is (as opposed to what it technically could be) - there is a shit ton of stuff to be done so the work should be there to fill it. But maybe the capital will move in another direction - nobody can predict the future, I just hope we don’t end up in a dystopian hellscape for the sake of my children.

I've been having an identity crisis since generative AI started that is basically, "how am I going to learn anything with my ADHD brain when AI can do 10% of it immediately". That initial 10% would take me weeks or months to achieve on my own, and AI can do it right now, and that makes it even harder for me to bother. I hate it. I badly wish to do it myself because then I could achieve more than 10%, but now AI is right there and I just can't seem to justify the effort...