| I’m an economist. On the basis of current evidence, I view AI as a complement to human labor, not as a substitute for it. That’s the source of my rejection of the wild labor market disruptions theories. I just don’t see any evidence yet that whole categories of jobs are being eliminated, with the single exception (so far!) of the end of “professional essay writing services for cheating college students,” and similar services. That used to be a big business in Kenya, but is now effectively gone. (Covered in the New York Times this weekend if anyone is looking for the discussion.) |
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| ▲ | bcrosby95 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The first thing LLMs seem likely to automate is automation itself. I'm curious what the past few hundreds of years of industrialization would have looked like if the first thing they automated was building, designing, and running the factories themselves. | |
| ▲ | skew-aberration 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Past changes to economic relationships haven't replaced labor either, yet they have led to conflict and starvation. You are setting an incredibly high bar here, essentially a strawman. If people feel disenfranchised due to their diminishing political and economic power, there will be enormous potential for conflict. This is a pattern across history and central to all the economics I've ever read. As an economist, do you not concede that economic changes induced by e.g. industrialization were pertinent to communism/fascism/WW2/cold war? That would be a remarkably unorthodox position. Do you not consider these events to be civilizational level dangers? > I just don’t see any evidence yet that whole categories of jobs are being eliminated There are more textile workers now than ever. They primarily live in poor conditions in impoverished countries, whereas they used to be highly skilled workers in the most prosperous countries who were even able to politically organize in their own interest. | | |
| ▲ | sampullman 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Is the core of your argument that the industrial revolution and other such changes should have been aborted due to their downstream negative affects? They also lead to great advancements in quality of life, and the capability of sustaining much more human life. We can't predict the long term outcome of new technologies, so the best we can do is blindly forge ahead and try to mitigate the obvious short term problems. | |
| ▲ | Negitivefrags 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I suspect that the conditions the textile workers lived in when western countries were creating textiles is not so different in absolute terms from the condition that they live in now. It's just that the western world moved on. Almost all economies that have developed have started with textiles. This is the starting point on the ladder. Eventually, we will run out of poor countries that haven't had a textile industry yet, and at that point, either it will be entirely automated, or we will no longer have cheap textiles! But I'm betting on the automation. | | |
| ▲ | skew-aberration 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Textile manufacturing was dominated by Western countries until the 60s/70s btw. Berkshire Hathaway was a textile mill when Warren Buffet bought it. Besides, if people are living in the same conditions today as the presumably Dickensian ones you were imagining, that alone suggests that the benefits of automation might not be widely distributed... |
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| ▲ | riffraff 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Past changes to economic relationships haven't replaced labor either, yet they have led to conflict and starvation. Conflict sure, but mass starvation? What exactly are you thinking of? We lived with 20-30% unemployment in various European countries until a few decades ago but I don't think mass starvation was an issue. | | |
| ▲ | skew-aberration 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Starvation due to conflict due to changes in economic relationships, not due directly to unemployment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines Almost every mass famine in the mid to late 20th century was caused by internal conflict. And almost every civil war is rooted in economic and societal organization. Great Chinese Famine, Soviet famine of 1932–1933, Russian famine of 1921–1922, Second Congo War, Nigerian Civil War, Soviet famine of 1946–1947, Khmer Rouge famines, 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia, North Korean famine, Cuban famine, Spanish famine, Mozambican Civil War famine. List goes on. Famine due to military occupations during WW2, such as in Vietnam, Indonesia, Greece, Ukraine, Iran, etc. The second biggest class of preventable famines would be those caused by the longer-term impoverishment and exploitation of the peasantry, leaving them vulnerable to natural events. This seems much less probable now, even as of the 20th century. It would cover Irish Potato famine and many of the climate induced famines under feudal or colonial rule. In that second class, we might imagine that the famine could not have occurred if the populations had more economic (and military) power. Instead of being able to keep the scarce food required for subsistence of the local populations, food was exported to pay rent to foreign occupiers or to obtain necessities which cannot be produced locally due to laws set by the occupiers. |
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| ▲ | wuwue 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You’re lacking nuance. It is not a 1 for 1 substitute (it’s imperfect) but the firm is increasing investment in capital and reorganising operations with the expectation of reducing labour. Therefore the firm is experimenting with substituting parts of human capital with non-human. However I do broadly agree with you. | |
| ▲ | jiggawatts 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > ... current evidence ... Is a load bearing term! (pardon the pun). AIs are now tackling Millennium Prize Problems, which our best and brightest have failed to solve, despite trying very hard for decades to claim the $1 million reward money, not to mention the fame! You have no way to judge from the AIs of "today" what the AIs of... literally tomorrow (not even next year) will be able to do in terms of replacing humans. The supposed solution to the Navier-Stokes problem was done with an unreleased OpenAI model that is already 2x as good at mathematics as GPT Astra, which was released mere days ago! I'm already seeing comments by distraught mathematicians saying that they feel like they've made a mistake in their career choices. Others are saying that their joy for their work has turned to ashes because "why bother" when an AI can do the same, but a thousand times faster!? | | |
| ▲ | frrt 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’d suggest you update your prior’s as there’s misleading info in your post. | | |
| ▲ | jiggawatts 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | A frontier AI model would never give me a sentence this unintelligible. This just supports the argument that AIs are ready to replace humans. |
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