Perhaps a version of the Doorman Fallacy, ie. replacing a doorman with an automatic door seems like an obvious win, but it turns out the doorman was performing a number of other vital functions (customer experience, for example) which weren't considered.
This has been my argument for the past few weeks to explain why we aren’t seeing or feeling real world productivity gains as consumers despite many espousing the efficiency of AI they personally see with their own workflows. The hands on work is rarely the actual bottleneck.
My team can crank out high quality work in a few hours and AI could do the same medium to high quality work in a minute or two, but the review, feedback, and sign off takes days of back and forth. AI just slows this part of the process down because editing AI work is often a challenge because, no one is quite as familiar with how it was put together and sometimes it creates things that are not editable at all. And telling AI to make very specific changes is often a mixed bag at best.
Solo devs and small teams with minimal oversight can probably move a lot faster, but corporations are going to see minimal uplift except in areas where no one is looking.
This is my experience. As a data engineer with years in my current role I can get AI to write good SQL that correctly answers questions or defines metrics. At worst it may take a few back and forths to really nail it.
However, if a PM tries it they will more often than not get a wrong answer because they do not know what to look for or how to ask the right questions.
Prompts still matter a lot especially when you are working in an established enterprise.
Established successful companies operate in a world where action and change often introduce more immediate risk than staying still. In those companies AI doesn't necessarily offer a lot of "increased productivity" gains because writing the code isn't the bottleneck. But many of them will try to chase cost savings by laying people off or slowing hiring.
There's a couple types of companies where the reverse is true: young companies trying to grow, and dying ones that need a turnaround.
Out of those two, young companies are less likely to be set in their ways. So the first place you really see the result of development moving faster with AI is probably going to be in future months and years when suddenly-big companies start getting widely known with products and business strategies that wouldn't have made sense a decade ago because writing code to try different things to even get the ball rolling was a bottleneck, and you could only do things that wouldn't scale for so long.
Or the productivity gains, albeit substantial, are not as earth shattering as the llm providers would have you believe. As with any new technology adoption is a laggard. The internet "existed" in the late 80's, early 90's. Many companies are still reaping productivity gains from plugging into this first.
> Solo devs and small teams with minimal oversight can probably move a lot faster
Spot on!
Usually, most work in corps is slowed down by executive decisions. It takes 3 - 9 months to get a yes/no on something and for most things that are obvious that need to be done need to go up the chain of command. The decision takes forever, but when the decision is made, they want things to be done quickly, which creates unreasonable stress on the ICs.
The first step to see real productivity gains is for AI to eliminate the executive and middle-management layer, this starts a virtuous cycle, destroys both empire building and massively accelerates true productivity, not just meaningless metrics like LOC.
Speaking realistically, you're going in the wrong direction here. The most likely scenario in the short run is that management will seek to replace labor with automated systems supported by a skeleton crew to aid in implementation and execution level tasks that can't (or shouldn't) be handled by the LLM alone, like deployment.
So the first signs of productivity gains will be shrinking head count, but it's going go from the bottom up, as usual.
They way these companies are structured we're seeing them remove the people doing the actual work while nobody wants to mess with the execs. My company has something like 60 EVP titles, with SVPs then VPs then senior director then directors. Pretty much everyone VP and above could disappear and our lives would be easier. It creates a lot of politickings and empire building that holds back the company and the individuals then the individuals delivering code and products get targeted by the efficiency metrics and nothing at the top changes.
I have no idea how it’s sustainable but I dont see AI CEOs coming until a new company becomes successful from the bottom using that model.
I know the Doorman Fallacy is an established concept, but where did it really ever apply? The automatic door has won despite, devastatingly so (and no your fancy upper east side building doesn't count and neither does the Regency or the Hilton).
The doorman was called a doorman because its essential task was the door. Everything else was additional and replaceable or unnecessary in the first place.
Same with AI. Once it has replaced the main task, the rest will adapt around it.
When you say the automatic door "has won" do you mean it's won by rendering doormen obsolete? Because if so, that seems very untrue. According to Vanity Fair and NPR there are over 25,000 doormen working in New York City. 1930 there were an estimated few thousand. So since the invention of the automatic door, the number of doormen has skyrocketed.
Maybe, you'd say there are more automatic doors than doormen. I'm confident that is true, but those automatic doors haven't supplanted doormen; they're automatic doors where there would have been manual doors before.
So everything hasn't adapted around automatic doors. We've just got a lot more automatic doors now. And a lot more doormen.
You can't only compare doormen to doormen, because the number of people and doors have increased too. You need to compare doormen to doors. All the apartment buildings I've known people live at on Manhattan have only had automatic doors. You need to show that automatic doors replaced unguarded doors.
1) What proportion of doors had doormen before compared to now?
2) What proportion of the population was employed as doormen then and now?
3) What proportion of the population benefited from doormen then and now?
I don't think that's necessary to refute the original point. The point I was disagreeing with was that automatic doors have "won" and doormen are no longer relevant. Whether 25,000 is a higher proportion of New Yorkers now than it was in 1930 isn't really a key point. 25,000 remains a large enough number that it is not true that doormen have been wiped out.
That said, to your actual points, as an intellectual exercise: while the population of New York has increased since 1930 (from around 7m to around 9m), the number of doormen has gone up much much faster (from "a few thousand" according to NPR to 25,000). So on the criteria you listed there, the number of doormen has increased as well.
Perhaps it's a testament to the fact that life used to be full of things that made it a little nicer that have been ripped out in the name of efficiency and profit.
Look at how beautiful old buildings were. However, now everything is a box, because it is more efficient.
In the name of profit is so misleading though. The reality is most people don't values a doorman enough to pay for one, and costs are now lower for everyone than they would be if doorman were around.
This is not how economics works. Please think through your mechanism.
The people setting the prices are not some omniscient backroom of guys smoking cigars. They are thousands and thousands of people much like you can me, competing with each other.
> where did it really ever apply? The automatic door has won despite, devastatingly so (and no your fancy upper east side building doesn't count and neither does the Regency or the Hilton).
The wal-mart greeter is essentially a doorman for automatic doors.
I don't know whether you can really call it winning. Who is actually benefiting from the win here? Another small example: something you see now at restaurants are these QR codes being put on the tables, to remove the need for a waiter to come by and ask, or for you to get up and order, but by automating that away you also remove that little bit of social interaction for both the people ordering and the waiters.
There are many other little examples like this, where beneficial side-effects go lost from automation. I suppose LLMs serve as a prime example of how this can affect people quite negatively (e.g. skill atrophy), if not careful. I think adaptation only goes so far, and we are being arrogant in thinking that we can adapt to everything, because a large part of how we function as humans is not as adaptable as we think, e.g. our emotional and instinctual needs, or how we maintain skills that are essential in the long-term.
It also has been an incredibly short period with incredibly large changes, to be able to say that things will just adapt; perhaps they will, but at what cost, and who wins from it?
The QR codes are an interesting case. Restaurants in my area have been abandoning them. I think it’s because it actually slowed service down.
We stopped going to one favorite place because the wait for a table became interminable. You’d spend forever standing there watching people waiting 15-20 minutes to get a busser’s attention so they could ask a question about the food, and then another 5-10 minutes for someone who actually knows the answer to come out and talk to them. Or, after the meal was over, people would just camp out indefinitely.
Anyone who has a positive experience with the doorman is where it applied. The lost family who got directions, the anxious interview candidate who got a boost from their smile, the unsure customer who was warmly greeted on a cold day.
Sometimes I feel like peter theil smokes a bunch of crack and posts antichrist takes on here under hundreds of alts. There is a lot more to life then instaspending money on Amazon, running on social media instead of talking to the kids, calling your dad for advice instead of chatgpt. These takes are exactly why most brands suck and why people will fight in the streets to defend Costco or valve.
Life will always have the intangibles and believe it or not it's still a good idea to hire someone who is only okay at a job but has an awesome personality and work ethic. Or lose a couple bucks on some hot dogs... 99% of purchases above survival are done for emotional needs and desires.
It's sad how the stupidest forms of short term cost saving and efficiency have driven ghouls to think they belong in business long term.
Fair points. But valve have been up to their own shitty anti competitive behaviour too. As far as I understand they don't allow games to be listed on other services at a lower price. Also they take 30 percent compared to epics 12, yet everyone seems to hate epics attempts to break their monopoly. Steam is great, but I try to use gog instead when I can.
>your fancy upper east side building doesn't count and neither does the Regency or the Hilton
I don't see why it doesn't count. It shows we still value the service but it is out of reach for anyone who can't afford it. It lost in the same way much better food outings went out if business while McDonald's thrives. By making society arguably worse and punishing quality.
The obvious strategy to manifest that would would be to pay them for what they actually do! That is remarkably easy to organise. But I suspect that would result in them becoming unemployed and it would turn out people don't actually value any of the other things they do.
One of the most troubling aspects of human's poor planning ability is they're absolutely sure something is valuable until they have to make a skin-in-the-game commitment to how much value it provides them personally. Then it turns out they weren't serious.
> One of the most troubling aspects of human's poor planning ability is they're absolutely sure something is valuable until they have to make a skin-in-the-game commitment to how much value it provides them personally. Then it turns out they weren't serious.
People have no problem paying something for nothing, if it gives them a chance at a disproportionally great return when they actually need it. It's called insurance, and perhaps we should start framing some of the intangibles in this way.
I.e. paying the premium for possibility of human interaction isn't paying for niceness-as-a-service, it's an insurance policy that pays out in kindness whenever you need it, wherever you are. But like every insurance policy, it only works if there's critical mass of people pooling resources, and stops working if they evaluate it as investment.
The market doesn't pay more because we somehow discovered the person actually does more. That would only be the case if because of the discovery either more people decided to hire doormen or fewer people would be interested in becoming doormen.
Perhaps another version is bullshit jobs, where the doorman really doesn’t want to be there, and the other tasks such as greeting people or providing some sense of security really wasn’t his raison d'être
I just watched a Japanese movie where a character stopped in for some gas. A man comes out, she tells him what type, he fills the gas tank for her (using a cloth to handle the car parts of course!). While it’s pumping, he wipes down her windows. He gets her money and runs to get her change. He steps a bit into the road to aid her leaving. He waves as she leaves.
Is it more efficient in America? Yeah. Is part of that scene her being bored while waiting? Yeah. Are gas prices there probably a bit higher? Yeah.
But there really was something appetizing about it. I’m not sure I could put my finger on exactly what.
This is appetizing in the abstract until you're in the middle of New Jersey and its horrendously cold and rainy and the pump jockey hates your guts because he had to leave his heated hut where the Bruins were on, and makes a half hearted wipe at your icy windshield to guilt you into tipping him for doing something you'd be happier doing yourself.
Seems like "it's horrendously cold and rainy" is the worst example to choose to illustrate negative aspects of gas station attendants...? I got to stay in my warm and dry car in this scenario?
Full service gas stations are the standard in the vast majority of the world. It's also way faster and more pleasant. Same thing at e.g. retail outlets where you'll walk into and have your own little personal army of helpers. I think the major difference is in relative cost of living and labor costs.
Low end labor costs tend to track cost of living costs. In high cost-of-living places, you have high labor costs and vice versa. Most places are much cheaper than America, which means you can afford to hire more people to do tasks that would otherwise be uneconomical.
> Full service gas stations are the standard in the vast majority of the world.
Do you happen to know where one could find statistics on this? This doesn't mesh with my experience at all, and a quick search did not turn up reliable data in either direction. Not-logged-in ChatGPT gave me an estimate of 40-60% worldwide, but that obviously has very low certainty.
In Asia they're ubiquitous and that's already like 60% of the world. I looked up South America and Africa and they're apparently also the norm there. I'm not sure where they aren't the norm besides the Anglosphere and Europe, so maybe ~15% of the world.
In Italy you can have both at the same gas station if you wish. They usually have self-service and serviced pumps and the price is a bit higher at the latter. Almost makes sense :)
That's changed a bit in the last few years! I'm in somewhat rural Oregon (The Dalles) and in practice none of our gas stations really do full service anymore. Gas prices didn't go down at all
Ah, good to know, thanks. How has the transition been? Stories of people hanging out at the pump for ten minutes before they realize it's not a full-service station?
I live in Oregon. All three of the gas stations on the way to work pump my gas and wash my windows. Not the waving and stuff, but the rest of it is my normal life.
> it turns out the doorman was performing a number of other vital functions (customer experience, for example) which weren't considered.
That's just bullshit. And barbaric.
Making someone stand in place all day primarily to open a frickin door (or other menial tasks) for others is a degrading job.
What "vital functions" exactly?
Whenever I see someone in a job where they're not even provided a chair, I feel ashamed. Like doormen, guards, "traffic police" that act as meat-based traffic lights, standing right smack dab in the middle of exhaust fumes all day without even a face mask.. it all seems such a ridiculous and archaic ceremony
Should we also bring lamplighters [0] and phone operators [1] back?
Growing up, many apartment buildings had doormen sitting behind a desk in the lobby. Some of the functions they provided:
- Identifying suspicious people and situations.
- Helping people carry things through the lobby.
- Passing messages before cellphones.
- Receiving packages.
- Making sure people in the lobby behaved.
And probably more that I never realized as a child. Doorman doesn't necessarily mean "suited guy standing attention outside the building next to a door". The locks were also electronic, so they didn't even have to stand up to answer intercom buzzes.
Indeed. Turns out the doorman is doing a number of additional tasks, not just opening the door, and thus cannot be identically replaced with an automatic door opener. And here we are, right back at the start of the conversation.
I'm talking about people whose job is literally to stand there and greet people and open doors. In some places if they're provided a chair or stool to rest on it's considered less "posh" like wtf
You're confusing the word "doorman" to include other random unrelated jobs, like expecting the postman to also deliver your milk and then complaining that email doesn't solve that problem.
(I guess if you ordered milk online, he could, but that's not the meaning regular people assume when saying "postman")
A substantial amount of NYC apartment buildings still have doormen, people claim to like it. I do not place enough value on a doorman that I would want to live in one where I need to pay for what can be done by an intercom.
Which is to say, it is sometimes a fallacy, but often, it is not. We have far more intercoms and automatic door openers than doormen.
The Doorman Fallacy is exactly this—thinking that one function of a job is the whole job. The doorman doesn't just open doors nor relay messages. They're eyes and ears, security, friendliness, an extra hand with bags, local knowledge, emergency response... The list goes on and on. Almost none of their functions can be replaced with an intercom.
The modern alternative is elevators where you can't push buttons but just wave a card at it, which themselves mean obnoxious tech systems to deal with delivery people and packages and visitors, and other automation that seems to border on the paranoid. Which—just by its existence vs a human—further removes you from society and day-to-day practice at normal human interaction.
Much of the US has buildings that are too small to justify a doorman regardless, but something is lost for it.
"Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings." - Terry Pratchett
It seems like you're breezing past the concept of the fallacy entirely.
The value of the doorman isn't the intercom functionality.
People like doorman buildings because the building has a real person with eyes on the premises at all times.
An intercom or automatic door opening system can't deal with delivery people who can't figure out the intercom system, don't follow delivery instructions, leave your package/food somewhere random, etc. And that's only a fraction of the value a doorman provides.
An intercom system won't deter trespassers, petty crime, etc.
As long as the building is large enough, the cost is negligible.
I randomly picked a listing in NYC, 219 East 69th Street. 145 apartments on 13 floors.
Let's say you're paying a doorman 24/7 at $30/hour, that's $150/month/resident.
There’s probably some double fallacy here, like “x is valuable in this specific situation so it must be valuable in all situations” - I think that’s actually a named fallacy but anyway.
I’m sure it’s similarly true for travel agents, real estate agents, probably lawyers, etc. Just because there are circumstances when someone values them doesn’t automatically justify them everywhere or refute that many of them basically don’t do anything.
The point of the fallacy is that you don't know what value they bring or when they bring it.
Real estate agents are a good example. They might be the only people involved aware of the processes everyone's engaged in and moving things forward. Having helped build tools for a local shop I can tell you that their checklists and flowcharts can't and won't be built with AI because hoarding and sharing information has always been part of their competitive advantage.
A corollary might be that the value of human involvement is unknowable because human beings aren't rational. The Doorman is a buffer against chaos.
The total failure of PurpleBricks attempt to disrupt estate agents in the UK is a good example of this. Turns out people had no idea of the shit-shovelling, chivvying and smoothing-over agents do to help sales actually close.
I guess the main reason to have a doorman these days is for security and handling of mail/packages. Packages left unattended in a busy street of NYC would probably be almost instantly stolen.
I think “covered well” is being used here as a synonym for “covered at all”.
For example, the “social workers & care -> counsel parents with child rearing problems” category is considered “well covered” because there are 13 prompts.
It’s self-evident that the spectrum of work carried out by a social worker undertaking that work cannot be well represented by thirteen prompts.
I suspect if you really strictly defined “covered well”, to the extent that any normal person would use that phrase, the headline would be above 99.9%.
The fact that they think ANY part of psychiatry is replaceable by AI in light of all the issues it has caused leads me to believe this study is actually over-estimating at least some jobs.
What if what we call "white collar work", for the most part sitting at a desk, interacting with a computer, isn't really the sort of work suitable for human flourishing at all?
When you think about it humans were never really well suited to such a lifestyle. Of course the transition may be bumpy but maybe the end point, of machines doing these machine-like tasks, isn't so bad for us.
What work does suit humans? Anything involving interaction with the world or other humans, perhaps.
We've made money a necessity of life and working the only way billions of people can get money. If we think a big chunk of jobs can be automated away, how are those people going to fulfill their needs?
AI benchmarks are usually focused on the model’s ability to make, build, or solve something while the critical part of most tasks in the real world is in the ability to catch whether there is a mistake. Until we have more benchmarks focused on the ability of a model to detect an error I think we’ll have this discrepancy.
One thing I've been thinking about is Baumol's Cost Disease. It's usually applied in at a macro scale across an economy: when a job somewhere becomes much more efficient, it makes all other jobs comparatively more expensive.
I've started to notice this on a micro scale as well. I am 20x more productive at coding and scripting, but I don't spend more of my time coding. My time is now filled with things like presentations, Jira, QA, etc. Ironically, despite all of the automation, the things that are painstaking and time consuming disproportionately require more time now.
> Our findings suggest that 90% of American working hours are spent on tasks with little or no coverage from existing benchmarks. This makes it very hard to know how good AI models are at the work Americans actually do.
> ...
> But even after controlling for AI-exposure, O*NET tasks from occupations with larger wage bills are significantly overrepresented among benchmark prompts:
So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs. AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications." We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
And this points to one of the ways AI will help improve society and living standards for all: we'll have cleaner, better-maintained bathrooms, as labor one wasted on engaging intellectual tasks is redirected towards menial, low-pay tasks that still need a human touch.
> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.
I've done it with Local 60. I didn't last long. The work is legit heavy and hours are crazy. I lasted 4 months before I figured it is not for me. 6 am safety meetings and talk about injuries or someone getting decapitated was not a good motivator either.
My programming cohort in the '90s were predominantly ex-trades and service and the pay was initially a cut. The work environment and the people were almost a middle finger to everyone I couldn't stand in the real world, and they paid me to solve logic problems.
A large part of the trades is learning how to deal with toxic coworkers or shops, or understanding that you're being worked like a rented mule for no real reason. And I was able to leave all that behind for a moment.
The difficulty with human abilities in vision, locomotion and particularly coordination and manipulation is due to their arithmetic complexity being high. Modern deep learning solves that, LLMs provide the "interface" for planned action.
From the outside, this process of "solving" perhaps looks like "robots stumble around haplessly". But it's just the same as with mathematicians in the intellectual realm: when the level of ability surpasses that of humans, it appears as a "sudden event" to outsiders, having occurred far faster than anticipated.
The reality is that humans are far cheaper than robots in most real world situations. The only real exceptions so far are heavily controlled environments like factories.
Where robots ‘win’ is following orders with no regard to self preservation or long term survival.
Ponder that for a bit, and it’s consequences get a bit scary.
The world is vastly messier than engineers like to assume, and every real world trial I’ve seen requires massive human babysitting of a robot by humans for it to last any length of time or be useful at all.
And we’re not talking about AI type stuff, but corrosion, terrible field conditions causing sensor issues (mud, sap, dirt/dust), power management issues, communication disruption due to terrain, enemy action, etc.
Back when I worked shifts I had a colleague who looked like he had 'flu after a set of early starts.
The safety brief is supposed to motivate you to work safely so maybe they need to work on how they present it. I saw a couple of colleagues injured in my old job (EMS) but only seen a member of the public decapitated.
I don’t know where you live but here in the Netherlands we always turn the power off first. (Another thing I like about the trades so far are jokes like this.)
Last I checked, one of the biggest causes of arc-flash deaths were linemen turning off the lines and someone turned on a generator in response to the power being off and back-feeding the power through the lines because they didn't use a transfer switch.
I got lit up by 277/480 when I worked as an electrician because someone removed a lockout and turned on the breaker.
In any case, not all jobs can have the power turned off.
I was a software engineer at a FAANG, now an airline pilot. I feel a bigger sense of satisfaction with my job now, because at least at the end of the day I helped people get to where they needed to go.
The work is was doing in big tech was pretty far from anything that would help people in any tangible way.
The money isn't as good but the office view is way better.
I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
> I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Airplane automation has shown to be rather bad at diagnosing what is wrong and coming up with a workaround.
For example, engine falls off. The automation doesn't know that happened, it just sees various problems like the hydraulic pressure falls, and for some reason the engine thrust went to zero.
When I was at Boeing, an incident was recounted to me where the autopilot glitched and rolled the plane over into a vertical dive. It was going so fast it entered "separation", where the airflow no longer flows over the flight controls. In other words, the pilots were just along for the ride.
But the pilot figures, since we're dead anyway, let's try lowering the landing gear and see if it slows the jet down. He did, and it ripped the doors off and bent the gear back, but it slowed enough that the flight controls could get a "bite" and the pilots were able to regain control and landed safely.
Many modern fighter jets literally cannot be flown by a human without automation, they're too unstable. It's simply not possible for a human to process the inputs and control the outputs in real-time sufficient to keep the fighter in the air. And that's old technology compared to the flight control systems in modern quadcopters - again, literally impossible for a human to pilot.
Suffice to say that what's in current civil jetliners is very far from the state of the art. I fully expect properly implemented and integrated AI to be far superior to human pilots in the future - it probably would be already, if we put the effort in.
> Many modern fighter jets literally cannot be flown by a human without automation, they're too unstable.
That's correct. But it's an easy problem to automate, because the problem being solved is well understood.
That's not the case for something randomly breaking.
I doubt the FAA would certify an AI running a jetliner, for the simple reason that if something unexpected happens, there's no way to predict what the AI will do. FSD for cars was done by collecting an incredible amount of data from the cameras on Teslas. Yet still, how much data was collected from Teslas having a catastrophic failure, like catching fire? A jetliner has a lot more failure modes than a car.
Being responsible for knowing what to do when autopilot fails has pretty good job security actually. The job might be babysitting, but no one wants to be in a flying tube without a captain that can at least let us know when we’re all going to die
Pilots can do that because they go through a ton of training and they deliberately do things to maintain their manual flying skills, including regularly taking manual control outside emergencies when the autopilot could fly perfectly well. And when a pilot takes control "for practice" there's no reduction in productivity for the airline compared to if the pilot is sitting in the seat with the autopilot engaged.
How can software engineers maintain a healthy "manual programming" skill set?
What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
> What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
Lots of regulation or some landmark lawsuits should do it. If airlines operated the way tech companies did, we'd have daily plane crashes.
Pilots have to know all the ins and outs of every single system and subsystem of the machine they operate. If software engineers were required to understand their systems to the same degree in order to ship something, the only way you could do it is by coding yourself.
I honestly don't really see that big of a difference between a pilot and a software developer steering an agent. Both let a machine do 99% of the work.
It's not like the pilot instructs every single control surface individually. Nor does he physically carry every single passenger on his back.
Just because you're using a machine to do your job now doesn't really change anything substantial about the job other than the fact that you now need capital to pay the machine.
Any role where the human is a buffer against chaos should be thought of as secure by everyone involved. All automation and information flow will be in service to this position. This is not a bottleneck, it is the point of the exercise.
> No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Wow. You clearly have zero idea of what a pilot's job is, and it shows.
You are also severely underestimating how much work and regulation would be required to replace pilots. And this work can be undone in a flash the first time automation messes up.
Also note that plane automation heavily relies on sensors. Many plane accidents were caused by faulty sensors even with humans in the loop.
You made the right choice. You will outlast OpenAi and Anthropic. They sell hallucinations and best guesses. The future can't be built on that. A good pilot who cares about safety and details, that can't be replaced with an LLM.
I have done multiple studies and they were always technical, so the company took a shot and hired me and would train me on the job. So far it's going well. They say I'm picking up stuff quickly and I occasionally help the head engineers with problems on their computers. This would probably be the same for most programmers. Reading drawings, connecting electrical circuits, and doing troubleshooting is surprisingly similar to programming.
I mean, from my perspective as an engineer, electricians’ work is just extremely primitive. I do not mean this as a disrespect - its hard and important work, but its on order of magnitude simpler mentally.
Of course many software "engineers" are nothing more than plumbers/electricians with data and that cohort is being quickly pushed out by AI. And our industry in general has conflated technicians and engineers which makes this worse.
But fundamentally, engineers job is to model the problem from the first principles and then apply that model to whatever problem. Technicians operate within the model, so I postulate anyone considering themselves an engineer is fundamentally a more capable electrician, plumber, carpenter, whatever than any master tradesperson.
I'm not speaking as someone that changed an outlet once and thinks they are now an "electrician". I have two decades of extensive property maintenance experience. I do everything myself and since my state does not allow pulling permits without licensure, I hold myself to commercial standards minimally. So EMT, MC, trapezes and gutters, no romex crap. Similarly, I will likely outsolder and outthread at least the current generation of "plumbers" that only know how to press things.
What I'm saying is extremely evident in any electricians' forum where its obvious that electricians just do not understand why is NEC written certain way. Then there' usually some "oracle" on said forums "deciphering" what the code is, despite it all being a pretty basic and coherent spec.
OT. What’s the going rate for adding a new circuit from the panel? Let’s say the circuit ended with an external outlet outside of the garage and to an outlet inside the garage.
This fits right alongside product asking how much work is it to move any button somewhere else in the UI. It depends which button, where it starts and where it ends, and even which app we're talking about.
Old work is always harder than new work. It varies by how your home is designed. It varies by where your panel is located and where your garage is located. You will pay a premium for the extra time and pain in the butt it causes.
As a great example, my friend asked for assistance with their home's street light not working. Long story short is that they ran a UF (underground feed) line directly under her concrete driveway (the contractor was too cheap to run it in conduit). I megged that line and it had a short. Their light stays off because rerouting through their house then digging up their yard isn't something they want to do (don't want to pay as I don't have that much free time and they don't want the massive headache it would cause). I was able to disconnect/wire off the failed part of the circuit so everything else works for them, so that's a win (and I didn't charge, so that was a win for them too I guess).
Just stacco on wood frame. It’s adding a new circuit from the panel; might need to add a circuit breaker for the circuit. The wire can go through crawl space or over in attic.
For one exterior GFCI receptacle in a bell box with a weatherproof in-use cover and one GFCI receptacle in a plastic box with 50’ of 14/2 NM-B cable, I would charge you $650.
Insurances love this trick so much they will refuse to pay anything in case it even indirectly caused any event. At least get it verified by professional, lowering financial gain of such approach a bit
> AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications."
Yes it is. YC has a company working on picking strawberries, even. Hardware takes longer than software, but if you think the robots aren't coming, you're not paying attention. The only question is how long will they take to reach the general public? There are test runs already in automotive factories and elsewhere, and yeah, they're slow and don't work very well, for now, but there's a lot of money going into making them better.
Automated harvesting machines for fruits is not an accomplishment of AI. Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI. Robotic manufacturing is nothing new.
Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.
AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.
"Robotic" isn't new, human-level ability in manipulation is.
The same goes for self-driving cars. It's a exponential, hockey-stick curve that at some point crosses the level of human ability. There is nothing "linear" about it and your suggestion of parallels to former experience is wildly misguided.
People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming. The "obstacles" there are of the kind of "we always did it this way", but that's no real "moat"?
The bubble regarding the big AI firms may well collapse, but the assumption, that was somehow improving the situation is far-fetched.
People automated out of a job will either compete with those in other jobs or be dependent on support. Either way, salaries will fall across the board and prices rise. At an ever accelerating pace.
Prices can't rise while salaries fall in a functioning economy. Humans will continue to be cheaper for many physical applications. Your suggestions of the inevitable exponential curve for the improvement and application of these technologies is wildly misguided.
I’m not following robotics closely but last time I checked we were still far from “human level ability”, it was PR lies notably from Tesla that play on the confusion with the progress in AI.
> People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming.
It is known since the 80s as the Moravec paradox that coginition is not the hard part in robotics.
Automation is coming for manual jobs that are repetitive in a controlled environment, like warehouse logistics. But automation for jobs that require fine hand dexterity, constant adaption to new environments and human interactions (trades, healthcare, etc.) is not on the horizon.
The robotic tech demonstrations I see daily on Twitter are significantly better than what you are thinking. There are visible major improvements from year to year. Specifically robotic hands are hitting the point where it can easily sort eggs or pick fruit.
You can't have falling salaries and rising prices for a very long time before society collapses. It would have domino effects to the point of anarchy, people lose their jobs and banks become landlords, but the houses are worth nothing so banks collapse, with it goes the stock exchanges. Now there's no financial system in place at all, and all you're left with is strawberry picking robots and some tech billionaires living on their islands with their robot pets and flying cars.
Now if all these resources were instead put into actually improving things, then we'd be far better of, unfortunately, for all the intelligence the people behind these things possess, they seem to be stuck in the "lets do the same but faster" mindset.
> all you're left with is strawberry picking robots and some tech billionaires living on their islands with their robot pets and flying cars
I'm pretty sure that's the goal of a solid majority of wealthy people, if not literally all of them. Fully automate their lives of luxury and let the rest of us rot.
What's stopping normies from getting their own robots to automate things? A singular one of these things will be less than 1k and you'll see them everywhere in every junk yard. If I could tell one to go plant a tree my land would be significantly more productive. As it is now it's decidedly not. I don't really understand this idea that only the rich will have access to this tech. It makes no sense.
One repeated failure that I have noticed as I age is that is folks expect change to either happen quickly, or to not happen at all. As a species we collectively seem to lack the patience that reality demands of us, probably because our own useful lifespans are so short.
Self-driving trucks are not here, nor are they coming anytime very soon, but driver assistance systems really have advanced meaningfully since 2012. They will continue to do so, to the point where I imagine driving without them will feel pretty alien. I feel much the same way about AI; it will change everything, but we need to be thinking of that change on thirty or fifty year timescales. 2030 won't feel so different to 2025.
This is very true, and is the (perhaps not obvious) subtext of my post as well. I'm not arguing that self driving cars are never going to happen or that AI won't eventually change the nature of a lot of work. There is a big leap between AI changing how programming is done and AI changing every other job too. The other poster arguing that "programming is harder than most other jobs, and therefore AI will eat them too", is taking a very stereotypically myopic and arrogant "computer person" posture.
I made the same mistake in my thinking wrt truck drivers. I've learned a lesson to be more skeptical about these things.
So far I see that my own work as a programmer has changed radically, and it is far more productive. I still have a lot of work, but I really don't know how this will play out.
> Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI.
I've been very optimistic about AI. Wow, your comment just gave me pang of terror thinking about the outcome for humans due to Whitney and his cotton gin.
All the 'easy' to automate things have been automated already. A lot of things that were not automated is because there are small bits of problematic things that made it not worth while or the loss slightly too high. AI vision systems solve a lot of this.
Visit a trade show of a specific industry and experience firsthand how naïve your viewpoint of automation is. The jump from one-shorting flappy bird to meaningful industrial automation is so large that I cringe every time I read a comment like this.
Steel manufacturing. Elevators. Plastics. Ball bearings. Chemicals. Pharmaceuticals. Electronics. Go to a trade show and visit the booths related to automation and talk to someone who has spent their career grinding against the meatspace problems of automation that robotics is a century away from addressing with positive ROI.
My understanding is that all of these endeavors involve scale and are very different from a drop-in replacement humanoid robot.
Like with the particular examples you sited, cleaning restrooms can have a huge number of "edge cases" which nothing short of a robot with human-like capabilities could handle.
If expenditures on AI is as huge as it is, with the financials being as shaky as they are, despite AI seeming to be very effective for very high paying jobs, I can't immagine the capex and shaky financials for replacing menial labor en mass. Like immagine all the chips, metals, compute needed as well as the maintenance, depreciation, vandalism, etc.
While they are slow and dont work well, their cost / output is already on human parity. The Figure 3 test runs are proving that humanoid robots are already good enough for isolated repetitive tasks (factory work).
Rotating boxes and finding barcodes is hardly revolutionary in the automation space.
The biggest benefit of humanoid robots may be that the machines are generally safer to be around than giant built-for-purpose machines, and that they can navigate the same buildings that their operators navigate (e.g. stairs), otherwise humanoid robots are generally an automation gimmick (for now). Just put a mechanical arm next to the conveyor belt.
AI isn't a technical problem. It's an economic one.
There's nothing inherently wrong with automating away certain jobs, particularly if they're dirty, dangerous or repetitive. And I include agriculture in this. The problem is how we as a society handle that. Do we let AI specifically and automation in general to make a handful of people more wealthy? Or do we share those benefits so people have to work less? In short, it's an income and wealth distribution question.
Sadly, I think we're automation will mean minting trillionaires while the fabric of society unravels around us.
I'll take you up on that attempt to find a silver lining:
Previously privileged people having a hard time is maybe a good recipe for class solidarity, which is maybe something we could use in society. Maybe it will be good for us... collectively, if not individually.
Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
EDIT: But also, I suspect I would be "fuck-you angry' at reading this comment if I had a family depending on me.
This is a gleaming silver lining view. Blindingly so. The largest customers of the trades class are the white collar class. The largest customers of service industries are the white collar class. It _will_ be "the rich get poorer and the poor get poorer". This is a hollowing out and redistributing up of wealth, plain and simple.
It's the reason AI company leaders are so adamant about framing it as a post-singularity utopia with UBI. They have no answer other than "you're all going to be jobless, better figure that out." Worse yet, they see it merely as a policy problem, rather than a problem they're responsible for. It _is_ a policy problem, no doubt, but the angry mobs won't be coming for policy.
And the top 10% of earners pay something like 70% of the tax receipts. Cratering that tax base is going to wipe out social programs and payrolls back and forth across the entire country.
> Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
I think you're confused. The true upper class isn't going anywhere, those are the people so rich they don't need to work (and if they do "work," it's tending their empire). They'll keep getting richer.
The "downward mobility" you're talking about the upper middle class and middle class. People who need to work, but can live comfortably on their wages. This is really about flattening the working class into its poorer levels (and kicking away the ladders the people in those levels could use to lead a more comfortable life, no more getting a college degree and graduating from the factory floor to the office).
It's about increasing inequality and creating an unbridgeable chasm between the poor and rich.
The truly rich need the masses to be complacent about their wealth to be able to hold it. They work very hard to demotivate the masses, and succeed largely because the professional class are happy to play along in exchange for prosperity. Solidarity between the professional class and the poor would do a lot to undermine the conditions that let them keep their wealth.
> The truly rich need the masses to be complacent about their wealth to be able to hold it. They work very hard to demotivate the masses, and succeed largely because the professional class are happy to play along in exchange for prosperity. Solidarity between the professional class and the poor would do a lot to undermine the conditions that let them keep their wealth.
Are you talking about violent revolution?
Some disorganized thoughts:
1. The professional classes are so unused to violence, they'll probably undermine the chances of violent revolution (e.g. reflexively supporting gun control, seeing such voilence through the lens "school shootings" and other crime, and being likely to report it, etc.).
2. The professional class is losing a lot of its economic power. The time for solidarity and non-violent action way 5 years ago, but the "happy to play along" professionals (e.g. libertarian software engineers) botched their best opportunities. From here on out it will be harder.
3. As all of this is happening, technology is helping to undermining the ability of the masses to do anything about it: IRL community declining, people getting mesmerized and isolated by social media, AI-enabled surveillance, AI-enabled astroturfing and propaganda, autonomous AI weapons, etc.
4. Even if what you say is true, the clock is ticking. Wait a generation and the "former professional class" will be gone as a distinct thing, and their kids will join an undifferentiated mass of poor who have normalized and internalized their circumstances, as they have no first-hand experience of better times.
Most of history has had extreme wealth inequality without revolution. Most fighting has been between elites, not elites vs commoners. The rare instances of commoner uprisings has almost always resulted in commoners being massacred.
Hollowing out the middle class (and yes I consider software engineers to be mostly upper middle class, most of them need to continue working for someone else) is not a good thing. What makes you think any of this is creating upward class mobility instead of just increasing wealth concentration?
Indeed, the changes around socialization and community formation during the last 30 years perfectly discourage meaningful class solidarity. Everybody will continue scrolling angry content while the middle class hollowing out proceeds.
Your argument is that a lot of people, who worked very hard, losing their jobs would be a good thing actually, because maybe we can have a violent communist revolution where we can all be poor together. At least millions will starve in the resulting civil war, then millions more in the resulting communist rule.
You also have this hilarious talk of "privilege" with this weird assumption that all of the white collar workers of course come from great privilege (perhaps telling on yourself and letting your guilt come out), despite many of us having grown up poor, are from poor areas, and worked our way out.
IDK do we still consider china - a country that currently has a fairly enormous middle class - to be communist? For that matter, do we view the current american economy to be a free market? (It's certainly "capitalist" in the strict academic sense of the word, wherein capital invested is the means by which ownership is ascertained, but that's generally not what people mean colloquially, so I find that using that term mostly bogs people down in semantics)
Furthermore, why do you believe that the only possible outcome of class solidarity is violent revolution? Why do you believe that any revolution would inevitably settle on, presumably, a specifically soviet model of government and economic policy? I find that most american adults, even ones who otherwise seem intelligent, seem to have this picture of economic and power relations that just kind of sounds like a half-remembered bad cartoon of a cold war that ended before I was born.
Whatever China's regime is now, it is the expression of a population with a much more collectivist spirit than the West, a population that overall (i.e. a small dissident minority aside) is willing to submit to the Party in the name of social stability. The West is a lot more individualist, and a revolution under those circumstances is likely to be much messier. The point is that it probably wouldn't neatly land on a specific model, Soviet or not, but would first involve immense turmoil and infighting like revolutions usually do, and after that it still probably would never reach the effectiveness of China's post-Mao model.
I think you're concluding too much and too little from this statistic at the same time. Just because current AI systems can't automate manual labor doesn't mean that's not coming with a future generation of robotics and ML models. And just because AI performs well on a benchmark doesn't mean it's "taking the jobs". You still need humans to decide what's important to work on and to do the high-level system design and engineering. You might need fewer human employees at one company to do the same amount of work, but this creates an enormous opportunity for teams to do more and for more people to start companies.
> And although you might need fewer human employees at one company to do the same amount of work with AI, this creates an enormous opportunity for small teams to start new companies and invent new technologies.
Yes, I'm sure all the wage slaves who are suddenly forced out of the labor market that was barely allowing them to scrape by paycheck to paycheck will suddenly start creating new businesses and become investors in new technology and not just become homeless leading to a massive increase in diseases/crimes of despair.
If (and it's a massive if) what passes for AI these days gets good enough to replace any substantial number of workers it will be a disaster.
The forced out wage slaves in your scenario would rather be homeless than at least trying to start a business? Sure not everyone will run a business but you must see the logic in AI enabling productivity gains leading to more businesses?
Not all new business will be good for humanity though. Modern ad tech is shit, but it is huge.
My current experience is that we're all just producing more output. Client doesn't pay us more, we don't work more, we aren't hiring more. We simply produce more work with a team that's remained the same size.
Some of the projects we've done would have required 4-6 additional people, but realistically, pre-ai, we would just not do the project or we would do it over a period 3-4x longer.
If the number of job openings go up, but at the same time the average job opening has worse pay and conditions, I don't see the connection to the lump of labour fallacy.
As far as I know, that's how the lump of labour fallacy actually works! There's an equilibrium between supply and demand for labour such that workers are (more or less) choosing the best jobs they can find. There's infinite demand for labour, but not at any price, so demand destruction of the best jobs can still happen. There will be infinitely more jobs, but they won't be as good as the ones that were destroyed.
Of course, demand creation for really good jobs can also happen. What the GP is saying is that they believe demand destruction will outpace demand creation for really good jobs and everyone will be forced into less desirable jobs. I don't see how this is inconsistent with the lump of labour fallacy.
different side of the same coin: Of course smart companies are going to automate the most profitable tasks first, they seek profits! However, the benefit for society is also the greatest. As long as competition holds, the reduced costs in these tasks will represent the greatest savings for consumers. Tech has been creating disinflation for decades for consumers. AI may accelerate that (it hasn't so far).
Oh yeah I definitely expect savings to be passed to consumers, like with all the tax cuts and deregulation we’ve been doing for decades.
The only “disinflation” consumers have experienced is devaluation of products through obsolescence as newer, often more expensive alternatives enter the market.
I'm pretty cynical about the outcomes of capitalism in general. But I can buy a new 10TB HD for $300. Or a gigabit internet connection for $100/mo. Think back 10 or 20 years. How is this not a radical price-per-bit decrease for consumers?
Of course, consumers don't intrinsically care about the bits. It would be more interesting to look at "price per website viewed/movie watched/game stored on your disk". Just like "time to open program" has worsened despite objective HW improvements, I'm not sure those metrics got any better.
I'm almost cynically happy about Moore's law ending and hardware getting expensive if this is what it takes to improve software in the long term.
Because on necessities (repeated expenditures that cannot be budgeted away, like food and housing), inflation is higher now than at almost any other point in the history of the US. Who cares if I can get a large TV for $100 now, if my grocery bill has quadrupled?
Both of those examples come mostly from innovative technology, not economics of sscale. 10TB drives today are literally completely different things than 10TB drives from 20 years ago.
I suppose... most of the servers I managed in those days didn't come close to that. These were pretty average 2U servers, maybe 6 or 8 drive bays with a 500G or so drive in each, RAID 5 config, so maybe 3.5TB total if loaded up. 10TB would have been considered a huge amount of space.
I'm sure some storage servers or storage appliances were built with many TB even then but it wasn't really something I saw a lot.
I think we should look at the percentage margins they maintain on their products. Since the emergence of scaling laws, the benefits have largely been passed on to end consumers. However, scaling laws now seem to be approaching their limits.
> Best not to cite the price of the new iPad as an example of why inflation isn't a problem when you head into a working-class neighborhood.
In Queens, New York, on Friday, New York Fed President William Dudley did just that. He got an earful.
After being bombarded with questions about food inflation, Dudley attempted to reassure his audience by putting rising commodity prices into a broader economic context -- but that only made matters worse.
"When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?" one audience member asked.
Dudley tried to explain how the Fed sees things: Yes, food and energy prices may be rising, but at the same time, other prices are declining.
He then stretched for a real world example. The only problem was he chose the Apple's latest tablet computer that hit stores on Friday, which may be more popular at the New York Fed's headquarters near Wall Street than it is on the gritty streets of Queens.
"Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful," he said."You have to look at the prices of all things."
This prompted guffaws and widespread murmuring from the audience, with one audience member calling the comment "tone deaf."
"I can't eat an iPad," another said.
Capitalism is good at driving down prices for consumer goods, also great at extracting rents from essentials (housing, medicine, education, etc). You gain on trinkets and lose on the things that make life worth living.
Of course, competition leading to near-zero profits means most competitors collapse, and the remnants get bought up by monopolists or oligopolists who then become rent extractors.
The technology was fundamentally developed with government grants to universities, or corporate labs like Bell Labs that were funded by a legal mandate on its parent corporation. Capitalists can only develop products that are basically ready for market, their margins are thin and planning horizons can only survive about 5 years usually. Their main power is throwing oodles of money at something ready to go and scaling it.
Edit: I will be slightly more charitable and note that capitalist companies can also do incremental research if there is a gentle and obvious hill to climb. Sometimes people do make crazy bets and they pay off, but that's more the exception, in America the dominant driver of technological innovation is government funded research supplied by capitalist scaled technologies (i.e. you research the next paradigm in the lab and purchase e.g. pre-existing computing resources from a company).
> Capitalism is good at driving down prices for consumer goods, also great at extracting rents from essentials (housing, medicine, education, etc). You gain on trinkets and lose on the things that make life worth living.
I find it funny when capitalism is blamed for rent extraction.
First off, extracting profit is not unique to capitalism. It happen in the Soviet Union as well, just on the black market. Even in the legal market workers would "sell" things they had control over for personal benefit. It's not like this disappears with other economic systems - it's a core human behavior to do things that benefit yourself.
Second, almost all of the things you listed - housing, medicine, education - are rent extractions not because of capitalism, but because of government regulations that allowed rent extraction. If people could build as many houses as they want, treat patients without jumping through the AMA quota hoops or charge a tuition that students can actually afford (and not backstopped by the government), none of this rent extraction would happen. We have plenty of examples of those economic sectors where prices are much more reasonable.
I’d love to see some of that disinflation you’re talking about. From my perspective, luxuries have gotten cheaper while basic necessities like food, housing, and medicine have become dramatically more expensive across the board.
More and more it’s seeming that the “societal benefits” from the last fifty years of progress have largely been concentrated at the top.
There are a thousand medicines that have experienced literally infinite deflation over 50 years: not available at any price to having a finite price. GLP-1s, Trikefta, Mavyret, Checkpoint inhibitors to name just a few recent blockbusters. People complain about insulin prices, but the insulin from 50 years ago costs 25-50 $/mo (https://www.walmart.com/cp/relion-insulin/8418641), it's the new stuff that wasn't available 50 years ago that's more expensive.
Spending on food as a percent of income has declined significantly (~30%) over the past 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa.... The decline has flatlined over the past ~20 years, but at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home.
> There are a thousand medicines that have experienced literally infinite deflation over 50 years
There are always individual counterexamples. And yet as a whole the cost of healthcare has exploded.
> at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home
A lot of that is poverty, not affluence. People working two jobs and living in food deserts aren’t cooking a lot of meals at home. It’s expensive being poor.
Since about the late 1500s, a bushel of wheat has cost within an order of magnitude of £1. By contrast, in the late 1500's a farmhand's wage was 1 pound + room and board.
Right now it's £5.60, but that says more about the decline of the British Pound than an increase in the price of wheat.
Massive food price deflation has been one of the wonders of the modern world. Hopefully the last few years were only a small blip on this overall trend.
There were several revolutions, major wars and genocides in between 1500 and now. We would like to not have to go through similar events to get things back again.
"It might get better in 500 years" is not exactly comforting thought.
Health care, housing, and education are the drivers of the cost of living / wage crisis. Wheat is not. Furthermore, you know this. Why did you choose to steer the conversation away from the problem?
They listed food, medicine, and housing. The latter two have massively inflated and are creating the problem. The former is not. Why did you choose to steer the conversation away from the important ones and towards the unimportant ones?
Wow you are exhausting. Someone asked about disinflation in basic necessities, they responded with a clear example in one of the necessities listed. Are you saying food is unimportant? Why are you incapable of accepting that disinflation has occurred in some cases, largely due to technological advancements? No one is talking about disinflation in medicine or housing because it hasn’t happened. It has with food. No one is trying to steer anything other than you.
Expectations have also increased. Friend from a middle class family grew up with 4 siblings in a 75m2 apartment. You'd get raised eyebrows for that today.
Cheap food is still cheap. If some doomsday scenario ever comes along, I'll be forever sorry to not have stocked up on 6 years worth of calories that now cost less than a monthly salary. World market prices per metric ton: wheat like $300, rice $500.
But that's not mutually exclusive with absurd levels of wealth concentration.
Doesn't include foods, but it certainly punctures the "That family isn't aaactually in financial trouble, they have a refrigerator and a phone and a TV" statements from certain pundits. (A class of people who are often disconnected from the average person's budgeting situation.)
>basic necessities like food, housing, and medicine have become dramatically more expensive across the board.
they haven't. In the early 1900s an American household spent roughly 50% of its income on food. And mind you food didn't mean an exotic fruit you flew in from the other end of the world or pounds of meat per week.
Today an American household spends 9% of their income on food, the 'dramatic increase' may have bumped that up to 10% by some measures. The size of the average house of the average American family in the last half century has doubled while the family size has halved. In the 1960s 12% of households had AC access, today it's over 80%. Generics of basic medicines cost virtually nothing, you've just started to consume more sophisticated medicine over time.
If you're an ordinary guy you are already living in luxury, you just don't notice it because you kept moving the goalpost on what luxury is. Which isn't per se wrong but you ought to be at least aware of it
You automate automation first, what is so hard to understand about this?
You pick the highest leverage occupation first. Automating lawyers gives you.. angry lawyers? Automating programmers gives you improved ways of doing literally all other things because all other automation requires.. automation. That is to say bucketloads of software.
It’s completely obvious what the play is here and it has nothing to do with pay. We pay peanuts for tokens so automating a developer for 200-500 a month worth of tokens ain’t getting you to a trillion a year.
RSI is the play and it’s already happening. Our work is easier and faster and anyone that claims otherwise I have a very hard time taking serious.
You think they come for mathematicians’ pay? If you want to earn money I guarantee you they need to automate some other low-hanging fruits first that pay a lot better.
No, programming and math is basically what AI research is. You automate that and you got the golden ticket to all other things.
> No, programming and math is basically what AI research is.
Most importantly, in these fields results can be easily verified which means that if you have enough compute, that you can generate correct training data. OpenAI had an early story - which could be a lie of course - about how they tried to train a robot but the actuators would be toast before the robot would have learned. Math and programming doesn't have such problems.
There is a hierarchy. Do robots need software or does software need robots?
There are lots of fields with easily verifiable outputs but that doesn’t make them valuable targets.
Eventually you’re going to need robotics to kick off the singularity, sure, but I would start with programming and math (and compute) which is exactly what they are doing.
Let’s say you start with robots, like we did, but we lack compute, we lack dev tools, we lack the ability to generate vast training environments, we cannot automate mathematical research of any kind in any way shape or form not even trivially, in general we are bottlenecked by math, code and compute. “Doing robotics” first without tackling the others is taking an astronomical detour which we as humanity are fond of.
I find the notion we automate cognition itself first and then tackle the secondary problems quite rational.
> It’s completely obvious what the play is here and it has nothing to do with pay. We pay peanuts for tokens so automating a developer for 200-500 a month worth of tokens ain’t getting you to a trillion a year.
Could be hallucinating by I just asked Gemini to estimate global average compensation of developers and multiply by estimate of total number of developers in the world, and it came up with $1 trillion to $2 trillion.
So the total addressable market is the right order of magnitude, let alone all the other automatable high wage occupations..
That would be interesting except nobody will pay 50-100k for tokens not even if they would supplant the humans completely.
Market forces drive it down hard. The USA is not the only player. Open source models are not vastly behind. My guess it that the 100-200 range will remain the baseline no matter the capabilities.
Exactly. AGI is explicitly the goal, where AGI is defined as an AI that can improve itself autonomously. Training an AI to make improvements to itself is training an AI to program.
> RSI is the play and it’s already happening. Our work is easier and faster and anyone that claims otherwise I have a very hard time taking serious.
No it isn't. Doing work more efficiently through the use of LLMs is not RSI. RSI requires a closed loop automated LLM iteration process which we are not at all close to right now.
Before this year, "recursive self-improvement" in the context of AI research meant the holy grail: an artificial intelligence that was capable of improving itself, unattended, in ways that humans can't even imagine, so that within a relatively short period of time, it reaches superintelligence and ignites the Singularity.
What's happening now is emphatically not that. And if you think it is, you are buying straight-up propaganda. "I gave an LLM a tool that lets it make largely-random decisions about how to train its next iteration when I tell it to do so" bears little to no resemblance to RSI. Because it is, beyond a rounding error, completely missing out on the "improvement" part.
Most people's highest spending categories are food, housing and healthcare. How are these disinflating?
We're automating high paying careers and making what, the consumer's todo list and budgeting apps cheaper for them? My expensive smartphone is going to cost me ~$10/mo over its lifespan. I don't care if most of these consumer products get cheaper when they're a tiny portion of my spending
It didn't happen over the course of centuries. My grandma was a small land holder and grew her own crops until she passed away. None of her children or grandchildren have any relationship to farming.
It happened over course of generations, while a huge lot of jobs were created in the cities and/or in the industrial centers (also mostly in cities).
In the postindustrial stage, a lot of jobs were created in the service areas.
Nothing like that is happening now at all. No jobs are created in any field whatsoever; they are only being destroyed.
Trillions of annual US equities profits will continue to go to the top ~10% of households holding ~93% of US equities. Tech didn't create disinflation for decades, globalization and China manufacturing with ~1B people to the world did (only recently has China scaled up robotics and automation for manufacturing in preparation for their population decline due to forward looking structural demographics).
Just like good blue collar jobs were shipped overseas, good knowledge jobs are going to be shipped to GPUs whenever they can.
Why would those savings be passed to consumers? The red scare disappeared a long time ago. Wages have not kept pace with profits and productivity for 20 years.
> the reduced costs in these tasks will represent the greatest savings for consumers
Bud, thinking that for-profit corporations - many of whom are in an oligopoly or monopoly position in their markets - are going to pass along savings from not paying people is like thinking the stripper really likes you.
Remember how things were cheaper before the pandemic? Well, there were supply shortages and prices rose accordingly. Supply and demand at work, nothing surprising there. The supply chain shocks eventually went away. Some prices have sort-of come down, but many just haven't. Why? Because the people selling goods and services now know that people can and will pay the higher price.
Now, they might do that through taking on debt and working additional jobs to the detriment of themselves, their families, their communities, and their country, but no one who both matters and can do something about it keeps track of those things.
Exactly! The human dream of machines writing poetry, painting pictures and writing music is here and we can finally be free of those burdens to scrub toilets and empty the trash. Utopia.
Isn't it just typical the humans get automation v1 the wrong way around, haha
This is what happens “automation” is done to maximize profit (by minimizing expenses in the form of salary) instead of maximizing human happiness (in the form of automating mundane jobs that nobody gets satisfaction from doing). In short, the usual problem of taking GDP as a proxy of well-being.
It's interesting, the digital/physical barrier seems like the last line of defense we have against metastasized indifferent agents. Once they start causing problems, how are we gonna feel about robotics? Clearly a future where all of the "thinking problems" are easily solved but we still have to pick up trash kinda sucks. I'm sure they'll figure that out for us though.
Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.
Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.
AI likely does accelerate robotics usefully - certainly in sensing and control. But there are major bottlenecks that are not software, that AI can only help with as a generic engineering tool, same as it helps planes and fridges.
Maybe the perfect roadmap says the trash picker needs $600B investment and will cost $4M per unit in 10 years time, if we solve all the problems.
That trash picker may never compete with a human. There's no reason to assume it will.
edit:
> none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software
Maybe the difficulties of motors and batteries are not intuitive. Look at their improvement rates over time. It's a far cry from transistor counts or FLOPS. And look at the performance and efficiency of humans and other animals. We are absurdly strong, light, efficient and cheap to maintain. The gap is huge and not closing quickly.
We already have versions of these robots. I don't think it's as wildly unsolved as you make it out to be. A few key efficiencies gained in any part of the process could tip the scales. I would bet something decent is on the market within 10 years.
If it's not C3PO it's a Boston Dynamics dog with a couple appendages, better software, and automated manufacturing.
Boston Dynamics has the best robot mechatronics in the world, and the company is passed around between deep-pocket owners repeatedly because no one can figure out how to make products that pay for themselves. They have been trying since 1992.
iRobot, the company that shipped the most robots in history because they focused super hard on finding a cost-effective subset of cleaning tasks, failed to scale up to other even closely related tasks, went bust and was sold off.
Again I don't think it's any less straightforward than "give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software". The whole point is they can do better than us on these tasks.
The problem is that your roadmap requires things that don't exist yet or only exist at prohibitive prices, and it's not knowable how much time or money you will need to solve either one. So a concrete roadmap is impossible.
Advanced robotics would need to become quite cheap for them to become more affordable and convenient than a minimum-wage employee. And physical fields like materials engineering are known for moving quite slowly and at their own pace, so I'm not sure how much automation could help there.
That's the last barrier we have right now that prevents the total obsolescence (and therefore destruction) of the common worker.
Our starting assumption was "Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software." If AI can deliver that, why can't it figure out how to take a Boston Dynamics dog, design it for trash picking, and optimize manufacturing costs?
The thought experiment was not assuming AGI, but something like an old school perfect expert at a given task. Maybe like C-3PO only useful as a “protocol droid”, but fairly useless at everything else
> Clearly a future where all of the "thinking problems" are easily solved but we still have to pick up trash kinda sucks.
Oh don't worry Mr. Former Software Engineer. You won't be picking up the trash or cleaning toilets. You have things like an expectation for your work to pay a reasonable wage. You'll be passed over for a third world immigrant who'll work for a pittance, and they'll be replaced only when robots are capable enough and cheap enough to undercut _them_.
The former software engineer will not be passed up on because he'll have the same demands as the third-worlder. If this comes to pass, we'll all be forced into the race to the bottom because no one wants to starve, so anyone that desperate would be forced to accept working for food or whatever the lowest possible standard of compensation will be in the future.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that AI truly is able to automate away basically all software development. Any oversight currently performed by humans can itself be done by agents.
...don't you think the ability to create virtually unlimited amounts of software, at virtually no cost, is going to lead to major advances in robotics? I realize there's a lot of very hard problems involved in e.g. robotic hands (to take one example), but once software development is practically free, I'd expect a lot of seemingly-impossible problems to get resolved by the sheer quantity of what we can create and experiment with.
In the future, do bathrooms need to be cleaned? If yes, is it cheaper for that to be done by a person or by a robot?
Obviously, it is in the interest of the robot manufacturers to make the robot just a tiny bit cheaper than the person, so you'll buy the robot and the company makes the maximum amount of profit.
Now, if society breaks down and there's no one to consider buying the robot—well, that's not good for anybody, which is why I suspect society will find some way of working this out even if it's not ideal. But whatever, I don't particularly want to argue this point.
What I do want to argue is that there probably isn't a universe in which all white collar work goes away but blue collar work is still around.
> I suspect society will find some way of working this out
Not sure what this "society" that works things out is, exactly. Top-down high-modernist plans for how society ought to work are the past; chaotic, twitchy, thrashy responses to disruption by a tiny elite class is where we are now.
Again, this is really not the point I'm trying to make! If your prediction is that we'd end up in some apocalyptic dystopia, I'll concede the possibility.
But there still wouldn't be any jobs cleaning toilets, because the people who still had toilets to clean would have robots to do it.
I did this a few years ago and I’m so happy I did. It doesn’t pay as well to rehang doors, but I’m glad that I never talk to a computer or even look at a computer screen all day at my job
One of many ways this could all play out from an incentive based perspective is that it starts with knowledge workers and coding. A next token prediction machine seems to excel at code generation for this reason. This has already begun causing problems in India with recent youth protests. It's not the entire reason for the protests but it is part of it. The indian grad to software developer pipeline is well established and under threat. The owner class wants to create the "value" from software without having to pay the high wages associated with development costs.
As AI advances, this spreads to other knowledge work that AI is capable of doing, which we might be seeing in mathematics if the OpenAI paper release stands up to scrutiny. Other kinds of data and analytics work will follow.
Then once the knowledge worker jobs are largely replaced, the middle management that is left will either be not needed or replaced.
By this time the only remaining jobs will be the manual labor jobs that can't be automated. Maybe as important as recursive self improving AI is going to be AI advances in robotics. Once this happens, the ownership class can finally start replacing the manual labor jobs that remain.
If AI can achieve RSI and be combined with robotics, maybe the prediction of just eventually having one company that does everything will become true.
One large AI company that does everything without any labor necessary, and everyone else I guess will just compete on OnlyFans. The only kind of work that neither AI or robotics can replace.
You're just irrational and not thinking. All those jobs are also something people want to and have automated. Street sweeping with a brigade of men vs one guy with those orange little street sweeping vehicles. Automated car wash. Self checkout in stores. Obviously whoever pays a salary currently, would rather not pay that but get the thing done faster and cheaper. There is nothing mustache twirling about this. Works the same way on every level. Do you 3x more when you get something done on your house or bathroom, so it's done by 3x as many workers who are forbidden from using power tools? Why not? Don't you want to help those guys have a job? Why are you so evil?
I'll say this: I'm teaching myself every skill I can think of. I'm already pretty decent at finish carpentry, structural carpentry, electrical, mechanical work, HVAC, auto repair, auto body, welding and a few other less lucrative things.
I was thinking briefly I might want to go to law school, but who knows how much longer that's going to be a thing.
I spend maybe 12h a year cleaning the bathroom and the dishwasher is a robot. How is that a market to keep dozens of harmonic drives operational. Unless there is some "post scarcity" there is no way it will be common place.
The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.
If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".
If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
I agree with you about not treating programming as a protected skill that has a right to be well paid, but computers were never “supposed” to be anything. They’re in no way inevitable in their current forms and any ideas about how they were supposed to be were just desires.
> The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.
> ...
> If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian.
No it's more dystopian. The "historical accident" was a little respite, where some workers could be comfortable and well off. They had a little market power to take the edge off their exploitation.
Now that market power is taken away, and they can enjoy the poverty they were always "meant" to have.
> In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
Come on. Society isn't going to value "keeping restrooms clean." The people doing that will continue to be poorly paid and disrespected. It's just the opportunities to do something better will be taken away, so there will be more labor available for that kind of work.
They don't "want" anything. They preach to enterprises and intentionally create a fear of missing out to get more paying business customers on board of this hype train. This is what is happening.
This is also the reason absolutely no attention is spent on evolving B2C products.
What is being exploited is the overt attention businesses pay to their own cost metrics, to the point where broader strategy is getting thrown under the bus in favor of efficiency. I believe this is an illusion, and for many companies that jump on board, sober learnings are right around the corner.
Nope! :) Once mobile manipulator robots become good enough (and safe enough), AI will also take "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms" jobs as well. Large number of those bad jobs can be done with existing grippers or a simplified robot hand (without needing much more complicated human-like hand).
A decade ago, you would find that tech people on HN and elsewhere considered themselves an exception to the forces that were declining real wages and living conditions. People would unironically say "you should've got a CS degree". Even if it were true, it's pretty useless advice because not everyone can do that. And even if they did, the unemployment rate for CS people would be even more extreme than it is right now.
What tech people are discovering now (some of them at least) is that they have more in common with the trash man than they do with Jeff Bezos. Many, particularly on HN, viewed themselves as temporary embarrassed billionaires (to borrow the arguably misattributed Steinbeck quote). So they sought to preserve a system that they ultimately thought would benefit them and they were only one exit away from that reality.
This is a rude shock for many. For some, it'll be the beginning of class consciousness. Hopefully society doesn't completely unravel before the pendulum swings the other way.
there are also declining birthrates globally. People are living longer and fewer young people are being born to be able to replace them as well as to do all the work in supporting such a population. Which means jobs like janitorial and food service are going to become much more in demand anyway.
Here is another view: maybe AI will automate jobs that are overpaid anyway and this might raise the baseline for the jobs that make everyday life actually possible. Of course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable path
> Of course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable pathOf course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable path
That is the only path under Capitalism, so we shouldn't expect any different.
Like what? There is no things that will get an average engineer or lawyer better result in the future than retraining and adjusting their living standards.
> I'm already a part of a generation that's the first in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents.
Good. While US dominance over the world and it's ability to rob other countries will continue to decrease, your living standards will continue to decrease
as well.
> AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications."
All those are physical things and physical LLMs are right around the corner. It’s coming for those jobs too within the next year or two I would imagine. Especially the ones you mentioned seem very easy for a robot to do. There are some physical tasks that will take much longer like being an electrician or a plumber or a roofer. There’s too much precision and intricacy involved in those but cleaning out a restroom and resupplying it that’s easy as hell. A robot like Figure 3 could probably do those autonomously today somewhat badly.
That’s not even the minimum wage in the United States. Most of these folks get paid $15+ per hour, but that being said of course I think it’s going to be way less than $5 an hour if you have a robot do it.
AI is coming for jobs involving programming and math (which tend to pay higher) because it's possible to generate infinite training data for those fields via using a compiler/theorem prover to check correctness. They're not coming for high-paying jobs like investment banking and architecture because you can't generate infinite synthetic training data for those.
Because you’re seeing this firsthand? It’s not what I’m seeing being involved in both investment banking and architecture. This kind of untethered speculation based on feels is so misguided. Both fields are seeing significant upheaval due to AI with no sign of that impact slowing down.
turns out its also very easy to create slides and floor plans and yes its easier to train for those.
I think you may also be incorrect on your notion that training data is proportional to good models if anything the opposite is true. what ai models are ultimately trying to be are a universal theorem prover and encode all human knowledge into "theorems" and rulesets
not trying to come off too harsh here but i think most of the work is just innovating on the frontier or people pleasing
Yeah I think they're definitely coming for architecture. A lot of it is just solving for constraints. The more artistic side will still require a human...at first.
You don't even need Autodesk. You can have Claude whip up a web app and build a higher level understanding of the building and then translate it to whatever output or format you desire.
> The more artistic side will still require a human...at first.
Only if people care enough to pay extra; the majority of the market is for functional buildings that look ok, and unless we decide to value humanity, slop buildings will be cheaper.
You would get most of the cost out of design by automating the engineering. Whether the customer prefers a pure AI design or spending .001% of the bulding budget on an architect will be a matter of taste I guess.
I think the stakes are higher for a building than most slop. Someone still has to pay for it.
In fact, a lot of stuff is already slop, largely because of the design and engineering expertise required. I don't think one-shotting "design me a house in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright with these specifications" is that far off.
Elimination of these jobs is going to be good for everyone else. It's going to reduce the unearned returns to people born with high IQs and aptitude for coding or lawyering or whatever, and reduce upper middle class wages. That, in turn, will drive down prices. The reason housing is unaffordable isn't Jeff Bezos. It's because 20% or so of workers get paid very disproportionately to everyone else and they've been bidding up the price of housing. If Google could fire all their engineers housing would become much more affordable for everyone else in the Bay Area (like it was decades ago before engineering salaries got so high). It'll be more like Iowa or South Dakota is today.
Bay Area would probably stay extremely expensive as it's the American location with the nicest climate (although some would prefer socal/hawaii), has no way to expand and real estate prices tend to be sticky. Those already living there will be more like landed gentry, they'll spend their money in keeping their homes in good shape and won't want outsiders coming in.
I grew up at the boundary of a town like this it's like the truman show town, a few years ago they didn't want to replace a bicycle ferry with a bridge as it could bring in more cyclists from the (pretty rich) town next door lol.
> The reason housing is unaffordable isn't Jeff Bezos. It's because 20% or so of workers get paid very disproportionately to everyone else
The actual reason is neither of those things. It's because not enough housing was built.
Leaving that aside I'm quite puzzled about something.
"Making everyone poor is fairer to the poor" is a curious idea that I've seen you express several times on HN recently. The first time I read it I thought you were being sardonic, but you sound quite earnest.
Given your previous opposition to communism and socialism I wonder why you have apparently changed your beliefs.
> the actual reason is neither of those things. It's because not enough housing was built.
The supply demand equation has two sides. If you give a substantial chunk of the population way higher incomes in the face of only slowly growing supply, then you see skyrocketing prices. That’ll happen especially around the centers of knowledge work, which is exactly what you’re seeing.
The town where I grew up didn’t become unaffordable because of Jeff Bezos. It was because of all the Google engineers making 10x the median income.
> "Making everyone poor is fairer to the poor" is a curious idea that I've seen you express several times on HN recently…
> Given your previous opposition to communism and socialism I wonder why you have apparently changed your beliefs
I haven’t changed my beliefs. I don’t trust “socialists” who would use government machinery to artificially make people equal. But if technology and the market renders natural human inequality irrelevant, I’m all for that. Industrial machinery went a long way to making the physical strength differences between men and women irrelevant. That was a step forward. If AI renders natural differences in intelligence irrelevant too, that would also be a step forward.
Doesn't matter. If technology allows lawyers to service more clients in less time and at lower costs, there will be competitive pressure among new law graduates and up-and-coming attorneys to take advantage of this technology to run their own smaller, leaner practices at more affordable prices for a larger number of people. There's no shortage of people who are in need of legal services -- they just really can't afford it so they go without it. [1] We don't need to replace lawyers, just force them to be more efficient.
Glad to see more data and discussion of this. Lately the gap between ambient belief that "LLMs can now replace ~90% of all 'knowledge work'" and actual reality seems like it's growing.
I've found discussions on HN tend to quickly get pulled toward polar extremes between those who are justifiably impressed at the increasing effectiveness of LLMs and those who highlight the brittle jaggedness and counter-intuitive gaps of LLM 'intelligence' in daily practice. One side keeps citing more examples of 'uniquely human traits' LLMs don't seem close to replicating while the other complains of eternally moving goalposts.
Today I think both extremes are partly right but also partly wrong, and end up largely talking past each other because so much remains ill-defined, uncertain or currently unknowable. IMHO, the most accurate position is a carefully nuanced middle-ground built on well-defined scopes, terms, time frames and probabilities with frustratingly wide error bars. Partisans at either extreme seem uninterested in more than drive-by hot takes.
It can be simultaneously true that "Someday AI will be able to functionally replace all human knowledge work" and "That day does not appear to be soon, and even when it arrives, there will still be uniquely human traits which are valuable and that LLMs can't satisfactorily replicate."
-> the most accurate position is a carefully nuanced middle-ground
Nuanced position will not be middle ground. Single-dimensional thinking is exactly the problem that causes the argument. There are multiple reasoning modalities, each suitable to a certain type of human/agent cooperation, and there are different tasks where different modalities are applicable at different stages. There is no way to reduce this to a single axis.
Curious how food service is at 0 tasks covered by AI. A few places have been switching to using those robots on wheels to run food to tables. And Doordash and Uber Eats have some robot and drone delivery in select markets now.
> Is this not just a gimmick? You still need people on hand to take over if the robot has an issue, I don't see how it would reduce labour costs.
"take over IF the robot has an issue" is exactly how it reduces labor costs.
2020: 10 waiters, waiting tables. You're on the hook for each of their salaries.
2030: 10 robots, one human waiter passively overseeing the cluster. You're on the hook for minor parts/occasional repair for the robots, and one person's salary.
Its not about a 100% staff elimination, but a large overhead reduction ensuring the few humans you're keeping around are more efficient overall for dollars generated in revenue versus the all-human staff before.
Plus, in certain cases, like kiosks replacing cashiers at fast food establishments, there's now one less qualification needed from employees (good social skills), increasing the pool of acceptable options you can hire where before some of those candidates would have been unsuitable for the job.
You're on the hook for more than a supervisor. Depreciation, financing, or lease payments on the robots is a big one.
And what do the robots do? Wheel the food to the table, where the customers then need to reach for the plates and pass them around? Not a great experience. Or actually set the plate in front of each diner, without dumping it, like a human waiter does? Much more sophisticated and expensive robot.
Indeed; it seems like the market niche for this would be relatively small.
It's not fast food, because customers pick up their own food from the counter there. Ditto with fast casual.
Fine dining restaurants would see huge drops in business if they tried to replace human wait staff with robots. (Unless they're already doing some kind of futuristic theming.)
So you're targeting low-end table-service restaurants...to replace their below-minimum-wage wait staff (remember, tipped minimum wage is something like $2.30 federally) with robots that don't get tips, do require a hefty up-front investment and nontrivial maintenance costs, probably a subscription with the company that sells them, and are likely to have a lot of problems especially for the early adopters—things like dropping meals, crashing into tables, crashing into customers, running over toes, purses, and small children...
This really seems like it's something that's going to work for a few gimmicks, but not in any widespread manner within the foreseeable future.
Wait staff already makes two bucks an hour in the US. It’s basically as cheap as cheap labor gets. It will take a while, and very cheap robotics, to make robot waiters worth it financially.
Okay so you go to a restaurant, who takes your order? The robot? Does it have a touchscreen like in mcdonalds were everyone has to spend 2 minutes awkwardly mashing the screen. Then the robot brings you the plates, then you have to put your own plates on the table, then how do you signal that you are ready to pay? Does every table have a button that you press to summon the robot again? Then you have to put your plates back on the robot?
There are already sushi restaurants like this and have been for years. You tap the items you want on an ipad that stays with the table. A robot with an LCD cat-face comes out with trays of your food and stops in front of your table. It's a novelty, big whoop. Before this, they still had the ipads for orders and the staff just delivered the food/drink.
It's not like you need a touch screen anymore though, chatbots are good enough you should be able to read off your order from a paper menu just like at a normal restaurant. Proper tooling is required to avoid the chatbot taking orders for something silly. Now, having a microphone enabled bot does bring up the question of voice recordings. Sometimes people go to restaurants to talk about sensitive subjects and don't want the whole conversation recorded and sent to a data broker.
People may perceive not having human wait staff as "cheaping out", and there are lots of status-related reasons people go out to eat. Backend is possibly more ripe for automation because people don't see it. Lots of companies building dedicated in-franchise assemblylines for submarine sandwiches or poki bowls.
Vegas has a "robot bar" where the robo arm can prepare something like 50 different cocktails. The robot is cool but the menu software was horribly put together and it crashed before I could finish putting together an order. The human attendant came over to tell me I'm not allowed to hack the robot. Bad software saved me $15, thanks.
because you're too poor to afford anything else? why does anyone goto mcdonalds?
it's certainly not service that hasn't been good for a decade now. it's a consistent product not abysmal not great.
if a robot could reduce the chance of me getting soggy french fries and non crispy nuggies that's fine bring in the robot.
also lol plates and tables, how long has it been since you ate fast food? people eat in their car to avoid dealing with the shouting staff,dirty floor and sticky tables.
The demand for food delivery in the places where the robots are viable is nearly infinite. My city has had them for two years and there are still just as many humans doing deliveries, they are just sharing the already-crowded sidewalks with robots.
I don't use them; not because of any moral objection, but because they can't come inside buildings. The whole point of food delivery is to avoid going outside. Most human couriers come directly to your unit. The food delivery companies have spoiled us too much, and we are not ready to return to a world where you have to put on shoes to get food. Oddly, the delivery robots are probably better suited to suburbia, where folks are used to answering the front door to pick up a food delivery. But the distances involved aren't viable until you have delivery Waymos that can move at highway speeds.
They're seemingly talking about a motorized platform inside a restaurant delivering to "the table" not those door to door delivery robots you drop food inside that drive on the sidewalk.
It seems in China hotels commonly have robots deliver room service meals. I guess it makes sense, the building is not too hard to navigate for a robot, and it would take a worker 3+ minutes for each delivery. I thought it was maybe a gimmick, but it seems >30% of hotels have them now.
Krispy Kreme has started using AI to take orders and it's awful. Terrible. Always gets everything wrong and you have to correct it. I think their phone system is AI too now. Madness.
Based on my own experience working on AI-based solutions for one of the better-covered job families according to this map, I think 90% might be overstating the case. It's true that we've got a lot of published benchmarks, but they tend to cover the lowest value add tasks.
It's really easy to fall into the McNamara fallacy when rolling out these kinds of solutions. Focusing on the low value stuff is attractive. It tends to be easier to do, and also easier to quantify outcomes. But it also tends to direct attention away from important but difficult to quantify considerations, which may mean you don't notice negative externalities. So we often found ourselves in a verschilmmbessern situation where automating what we could automate made things worse overall.
Oh no, this is like a bat signal to all the craziest sci-fi doomsday nutso people to warn you about how a rogue AI will become world dictator and put humans in a Matrix-style energy farm
I'm overwhelmingly convinced that this not uncommon perspective is the "what are all those construction workers even doing?!" fallacy.
Like any sizable population, there are absolutely some do-nothing inefficiencies to be culled. But most of the time it's just onlookers seeing a tiny slice of the day to be interpreted from their very limited vantage.
The thing with those jobs where its like 1 guy operating the skid steer and six guys watching with arms folded, is those other six guys are just waiting their turn to do something specialized on the job. The skid steer work is the limiting factor, and that idle labor is worth paying to have on call on site essentially for when the specific needed task is done. To an extent for sure, but that is the idea of more specialized jobs. There isn't always enough work in front of you to have a specialist work 100% 24/7 like some CPU, but you want them around for when there is work for them to do.
This is entirely caused by construction companies that take too many jobs and don't allocate sufficient equipment. They want to spread themselves and their equipment thin to have as many concurrent jobs as possible.
I definitely see that too especially in jobs for homeowners where people might not know better to add time based penalties into contract. But you also see this in city work from city employees using city equipment where there is none of this contractor gamesmanship going on, only an ever increasing backlog of work from aging infrastructure and a municipal government disinterested in facing the music and paying for the associated increases in labor demand.
Even with all the availability of equipment and labor on hand, sometimes you must wait for the excavator to do its job first before you can begin. You cannot weld a pipe together when there is still earth to clear and the pipe to be welded is sitting on the truck. You cannot parallelize all work, some is inherently serial.
no i think there are alot of people inside companies that are essentially playing telephone. they are communicating, writing documents and emails, "working". but really they actually produce nothing
Or worse, you removed the workers and left the 'telephone' people.
In my anecdotal experience, MOST companies don't take any time to understand what they are cutting.
They kill "Project X" so the easy answer is that everyone involved with Project X must go. Regardless if they were useful or could be useful elsewhere.
so what? people still keep using the service and you make more money. the point of a company is to make money not to be as efficient as possible.
when a market is saturated you differentiate by being nicer than the competitors but most markets are not saturated customers have literally no choice.
Yeah, the idea that there is a rampant amount of slack in the modern US corporation is just odd. Go speak to workers and ask them if they feel that they have slack.
Slack hasn't been a thing for like 40 years, in fact it's mostly the opposite I'd argue where there is such little slack that employers often steal wages from their workers to gain even more profits.
That's pretty much sales. If the market were efficient and easy to navigate as a buyer there wouldn't be a need for salespeople, just like how I can buy my own cereal without one. Imagine if you went to buy cereal and the sign said "call for quote." Imagine that extended to every single item you can possibly purchase. The world would stop from the inefficiency. And yet we tolerate it especially in business 2 business setting because hey its not our money we are spending, and smooth talking works really well on our monkey brains.
It's also a terribly foolish idea to try and drive endless efficiency out of scenarios like this. People have tried this with bureaucracies many times, and then one day a disaster happens or they have a huge project with a deadline or whatever, and the flexibility/inefficiency of the organization has been driven out to the point that previously achievable goals become impossible. Slack in systems is a _good_ thing.
I guess we can evaluate this claim by looking at profit margins. In industries with thin margins (eg., retail often has 1-2%) then there is significant competitive pressure. There we would not see "spare labour" because it would be competed-away.
In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.
I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.
That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.
> There we would not see "spare labour" because it would be competed-away.
This only works (reliably) in an idealized free market.
That is to say, in the classroom.
In the real world, there are a myriad of reasons in any given situation why a company might have a low profit margin, but still have loads of inefficiencies and other imperfections that haven't been, and won't be, "competed away".
Yep, the "bullshit jobs" narrative sounds like an elegant description of corporate reality at the macro level, but always seems to fall apart whenever I've seen specific examples given which do in fact serve a useful purpose when interrogated.
(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)
My latest armchair theory is that bullshit jobs might be like “junk” DNA, which researchers learned isn’t actually junk and influences various cellular and genetic behavior, just not through direct protein instruction.
Or as engineers know: sometimes legacy code doesn’t initially appear to do anything, but then messing with it has unexpected effects.
A small startup usually has little-to-no "junk" or "fat" to trim.
But as orgs grow, and since we have imperfect knowledge and communication systems, more an more "junk" or "connectivity" roles emerge.
Microsoft: 223,000 employees
Alphabet / Google: 198,933
Apple: 150,000
Oracle: 141,000
Meta / Facebook: 75,472
I tried to stay way from companies with retail or warehouse workers like Amazon and Walmart (though Apple likely has a lot of retail).
I don't see HOW companies get to that size without some "junk DNA" that keeps it operating.
Maybe in the next few years we'll have AI-powered knowledge bases and communication lanes that smooths things out, but - how do we 'quantify' what "Steve, the guy who has been there for 22 years and works as the company phonebook and knows who to refer you for the thing you need"
I think its easier to state "bullshit jobs" but the reality is every single job has "bullshit tasks" and usually these are the easiest things to do. TPS reports and the like. BS Tasks are ripe for AI to do the drudgery but I don't think there are a lot of actual full time jobs where the entire job is BS. These can't exist en masse for very long in capitalist companies.
There's always Dunbar's number - the larger an organization gets beyond the capacity of people to socially know one another, the greater the "what do they even do?" types of attitudes form about other distant parts of an organization.
The original study defined "bullshit job" as something the worker described as "not societally useful". Well, my job is not societally useful, but is not bullshit job.
My company is earning money on my work and customers use my software to earn more money. But, that is it, I am not a doctor, I am not a teacher, I am not making the world better. It is a business, not unethical one, but also not world saving.
Products and services that work and that people want and need are societally useful. You've moved the goal posts from "useful" to "world saving" and used that to discount the original description. That's seems odd to me.
I did not moved the goalpost. I answered the question posed by the study. If I was participant, I would say "not societaly useful" and my job would be labeled "bullshit".
I dont think doctors and teachers are "saving the world" either. That is a bit dramatic claim. But they do work that makes peoples lives better. Mine just makes companies compete among themselves better.
> I've seen specific examples given which do in fact serve a useful purpose when interrogated.
Interrogated to what extent? 'Bullshit jobs' was originally coined to mean jobs that do serve a useful purpose within the environment they exist in, but where zooming out reveals that the environment has no good reason to exist in the first place.
Bullshit jobs don't mean that they are full of dead time, it means jobs that don't really matter. Like if SalesForce disappeared tomorrow the world would be fine, but if all your garbage collectors disappeared you'd likely descend into chaos and start several public health crises quite quickly.
A small but meaningful percentage of people have the jobs that they have because they are some combination of fun to be around, attractive, and well-connected. All of these qualities can be productive in some pursuits (a club promoter needs to be fun to be around, a model needs to be attractive (usually), a financier needs to be well-connected), but they are all too often wasted on e-mail jobs.
Perhaps in general but for knowledge workers or creative people, what is productive is hard to measure. That also happens to be the most valuable work.
... that a team is much more than just its output.
You might be able to replicate an output at a lower cost. You might even be able to do it faster. But without a team of people, you won't be able to maintain commitment, culture, and domain expertise.
Hot take: who fucking cares. People need to eat and buy homes. We don't need to optimize ourselves into oblivion for the sake of number go up. Because we sure as hell don't have any sort of social safety net here in the US, and if AI takes as many jobs as these chuds say it will then we're going to have a BIG fucking problem on our hands.
I think it's quite clear to anyone with eyes attached to their brains that we're not getting fully automated gay luxury space communism. The AI will just replace the good jobs and leave us with the service industry wage-slavery. Given the choice, I'd much rather an abundance of bullshit email jobs and people with food than the alternative that's being presented currently.
Reinforces what Karpathy tweeted [1], that AI is effectively tackling 2-5% of work and the gap between those fully exploiting AI and barely touching it is growing. The question remains whether this AI focus on the small % of workers is actually intentional (by tech/labs), or a natural limit of where AI is right now.
Karpathy is also saying the quiet part out loud: they are making progress by brute force. It's a cost driven arbitrage market.
Do I need to spend high prices on 1000 agents to solve this today, or should I wait 1000 days (with compute increasing and prices falling) and hope that I get lucky and get the right answer sooner. Is your competitor half the price but I need 1500 agents to do it in one day cause it's just a bit dumber.
The market for brute force intelligence is infinite - and at some point demand will drive the cost to single digit margins.
While I directionally agree with the conclusion, O-Net is not a good source for relevant occupational and task classifications.
While it is continuously updated, it lacks many modern white-collar occupations, such as occupations in finance, tech, or consulting. And when it does carry an occupation, it often misses the mark on the relevant task set.
Every immigration attorney who had to build labor certs around O-Net can confirm how frustrating and backwards the database is. Just imagine trying to justify an H1-B for, say, a sales & trading associate at an investment bank when the only available options are bank teller, financial analyst, risk examiner, and 2-3 other ill-fitting categories.
That being said, occupational classification is an impossible task for a variety of reasons..
So the problem is you can’t replace everyone halfway.
Which is a tautology, but also a bit of practical wisdom.
I find it interesting how concurrent model sessions seem to operate with a very strong bias toward quick resolutions, including sharing or giving up control, to create efficient decision making structures, relative to humans.
When I was a kid, I loved Bjork’s song “Army of Me”, because I knew a 1000 of me collaborating and communicating without friction. would be all I needed to take over the world, fix everything, expand civilization, etc. We would not waste time.
I wonder how much of their hyper-team play is by training, and how much is their awareness of the game theory real politic. So individual sessions don’t invest their identity and self-worth in any given context run.
My dream has been almost achieved. One of me and 999 of them get quite a bit done. But that trend…
“Stakeholders” are a natural outcome of corporate evolution, because to grow bigger you need to do more, and to do more, you need people, and people come with agendas. The most common one, especially in leadership, being “how do I get ahead of the rest?” The larger an organization grows the more these agendas come into conflict.
This inevitably results in suboptimal dynamics like bureaucracy, empire building, territorialism and other things that get lumped under “office politics,” which drains a lot of energy away from more productive efforts.
The real culprit is a combination of too many levels of hierarchy and performance reviews IMO. Especially when multiple levels along a management chain disagree on what a report must work on.
This is the kind of shit I have to fight every day. I have to align my manager, skip, VP. If I don't align them, one of them will be necessarily pissed no matter what I do, and the pissed one will fire orders down to hate on me, overriding the opinions of anyone on the way down.
The next little while is going to be very revealing for leadership around how little of the time involved in getting a solution to production is the coding. I think there's a lot of bosses who have this vision of features entering prod the same day they are first imagined, but that just isn't going to happen.
Longer dev cycles gave management time to think through and correct bad business decisions. Now they'll get to tighten that feedback loop where bad decisions (or good ones) get implemented quickly. It will be interesting to see what that split is and the reaction to that.
I think it'll also expose how much of that lag time was important to getting everyone's ducks in a row. It's never just add a button, it's also updating the document service and the downstream systems to all accept that new button's input. There's a blast radius and it takes a while for the shockwave to cross to every team that needs to know about it.
I've worked with plenty of teams that did the "in prod the same day" trick without AI.
The problem was just fucking ego. Designer has an ego, product owner has an ego, QA has an ego, stakeholder has an ego, platform teams have massive egos, developers have egos.
Unrelated but: the only reason people are shipping more with AI is because more people are ok with slop now.
Is it Jane Street where they have an internal market so when a stakeholder wants something it's like they make a bid/execute a trade? If their ask ends up creating a loss goodbye buying power until you earn it back.
It feels like making these sorts of systems exist outside of the periphery would be good for everyone.
How many times have politicians for example wasted your time with promises and asks and rhetoric with no follow through? Not unlike some "stakeholders" I know. It's called "office politics" for a reason. What if they were punished for this by some system?
It feels like sitting there while stakeholders yap is not so different than electing a new rep every two years and hoping something changes. The fundamental setup is broken in a world with ever accelerating growth in complexity. Doing it in this way also would probably trend to enforcing rigor in the original ask. A big problem with stakeholders is they don't really know what they want, like politicians who make economic promises yet never show their work before showing up and asking for your vote.
"Stakeholder" ranks #1 among corporate bullshit roles. It serves a dual purpose: (a) representing a group so nobody can be blamed for excluding them, and (b) providing typically useless feedback so that the group appears to actually care or have a clue.
Stakeholder seems like a fundamental concept that you can't really get around. For example, I can't change the time buses pick up students at schools if I haven't worked with the schools to know when their kids will be let out. I guess you can say, "they'll figure it out when the buses aren't there" -- but this just seems like you're picking a fight you could've avoided.
No-stakes work is ... worthless? If no one cares about the work enough to have any input or requirements for the results ... sure it might be unrecognized genius that's going to take the world by storm but the absence of interest is not a good sign!
To clarify, I don't want people holding any stakes other than the equity of the company itself.
I don't want people holding stakes because they want a promotion, because their direct manager wants to launch a corporate political battle into another team, or because some salesperson wants to get a commision for an otherwise worthless customer. I don't want roadblocks in the name of security so that the IT guy has a sense of self-worth. I don't want someone trying to protect their egos around something they worked on for 3 years, when there's new tech that supersedes it.
I'm not sure you know what "stakeholder" means...? Either that, or you've had too many people use it to mean "people whose future is on the line based on the outcome of the product." That's one kind of stakeholder, but it's far from the average, and it's certainly not the most important kind.
Anyone who has to work with the product is a stakeholder. Their stake in it is the fact that they will be interacting with it, and thus they care how, and whether, it works.
I'm seeing this failure mode at work and it's not limited to non-technical folks. The results are compounding around different verification chokepoints and creating massive backpressure on integration/infrastructure.
Worse still most of the cost savings from AI in software development is primarily due to labor inefficiency, such as tasks more efficiently accomplished in other ways. Most of that is due to development reliance on inefficient conventions to cover for poor training and emotional insecurity. No matter how you slice it it’s always human capital problem more than a technology problem.
Following is my experience and constantly pestering my friends across the industry for anecdotes. It isn't even that AI moves the bottleneck, the thing it solves was never the bottleneck in the first place (except for certain narrow verticals). AI both can't and doesn't do your thinking for you and worse yet, it robs you of the environment where you do your best thinking about data structures, algorithms, organization, etc. Code. Of course we can do that in natural language, but it's hardly the right tool for the job.
All this being said, I don't think AI usage will meaningfully go down in the long run cause it's a very powerful dopamine loop and tech companies are very good at making those. How many people report social media making them unhappy and how many people do you know who have actually quit? Or to paraphrase Jim Gaffigan, nobody says they eat at McDonalds, but the sign outside says "billions served". Somebody's lying (and it's not McDonalds).
"90% of American working hours are spent on tasks with little or no coverage from existing benchmarks" just says there are a lot more different tasks than benchmarks. This is a comment on the measuring tool, not AI.
I feel like the big takeaway here isn't what's covered or not covered, but the percentages.
We have 3 companies claiming something like a $35T market for their services. The world's entire GDP is something like $126T. So 10% of the productive work that is done on this planet, that AI can actually perform makes up fully 1/4 of the entire world's economic output? best guesses for output solely of tech companies is something like $12T. Where are they getting these figures?
> For example, benchmarks in our initial list heavily cover AI-exposed lawyers’ tasks, but barely cover any of the O*NET tasks of similarly AI-exposed legal secretaries or court clerks.
This technique seems dubious- what is stopping AI from doing the computer work of legal secretaries and court clerks as well?
Solving math problems is one of the hardest theoretical jobs. Software engineering is one of the harder practical jobs. AI is now much better at these tasks than humans because it has been able to properly train for them.
For other computer-based jobs it's a matter of AI getting properly trained for them. If a job is harder to verify or the training data is more limited, it may be much more difficult to train AI for it but I don't think there's any reason to think it won't happen eventually.
I think I agree. I'd be surprised if in a casual universe everything we perform cannot be represented by an abstract program and so should be performable by AI.
But, it may be that the performance of some roles is constrained such that the physical shape or rate and breadth of knowledge utilized isn't advantaged by the benefits of digitalized intelligence, and so would be approximately acting just human anyways. And in that case there may be enough human's available to do it just because they want to, fully fulfilling the demand for it.
I don't know if it if 90%, but it is interesting how many things I do are not covered by standard tracking, but become visible once I am not there to keep an eye on them. Naturally, I only had one manager who kinda knew what was going on around him -- in case you are wondering: not the current one.
It's time for the rest of the world to learn about Amdahl's Law. Even if we flipped a switch and tomorrow everything that could reasonably done by AI was suddenly free and instantaneous, the world does not instantly transform into an AI paradise wonderland of free goodies and lollipops because there's still plenty of other things that need to be done for goodie and lollipop production and distribution.
I guess if I wanted to put my skepticism about the AI stock bubble into one little phrase, it would be that I don't think the bubble has accounted for Amdahl's Law. Costs don't actually go to zero with AI, and there's a huge difference between costs falling even 90% and costs falling a full 100%. And the difference between "30% improvement this year, trending to 85% in five years" and "90% this year" is pretty significant too.
I understand the resistance to having nearly all labor devalued because it can be automated. We're still in the denial stage of grief.
We only tax capital gains, not the destruction of wealth or property. So someone can steal the livelihoods of millions of people with no recourse. Just like they can tear down a 100 year old house and build 3 townhouses in its place and make hundreds of thousands of dollars, despite driving up housing costs in the neighborhood to the point that they're unaffordable. Large swaths of profit in the economy are based on externalities and captured markets now.
To think we'll make it through this without tax reform is frankly naive. Tax reform as in: human labor should not be taxed, and non-human labor and capital gains should be taxed more to cover the difference - including unemployment checks and UBI when it comes to it.
Expect howls of derision from moneyed interests who will never let common sense reasoning or deduction enter the law books for the public good.
Not to defeat my own argument, but I predict we will experience a roughly 3x gain in productivity by using AI, so the output of every job would need to triple to maintain current employment levels. Will that happen anytime soon? Of course not. Which is why layoffs in the short term are inevitable. I wouldn't be surprised if unemployment hits 15+% in 2027 or 2029 just after the elections, with 25+% unemployment for the young in entry-level roles being highly likely.
> driving up housing costs in the neighborhood to the point that they're unaffordable
Thats usually a combo of lack of competition, incentives (why make $50K a unit times 10 sales when you can make $250K a unit times two sales?), and zoning laws making the cheaper thing illegal.
Some of it stemming from K shaped economy which means the most profitable audience to serve are the upper middle class and richer .
Because it's a bullshit slop research. Under computer programmers there is "Develop Websites" at 0. Apparently AI cannot write web sites. Or just nobody looked at the slop they generated at Mercor.
A lot of what humans do does not have a tight feedback loop needed for training and agentic workflows. This is why we are not seeing the jobpocolypse and productivity gains look a lot more like the very long-term 2% per year.
We're on a forum filled with a lot of software engineers, and we might be too ready to believe this is coming for everyone's job, not only generating code.
Indeed I’m sorry guys but LLM’s are uniquely suited to generating code and a limited set of other jobs that are similar in nature. However those jobs I’m alluding to aren’t really seeing much disruption as the interface is wrong.
Engineers have been typing in terminal windows… since forever. LLM chat bot is a natural upgrade.
Again - well suited to you! I know it’s hard to read.
Lest we forget that late-training is now 2/3 coding tasks because it is the main area where there is ROI for users, such that we can find a mutually beneficial arrangement to pay off their massive investments and debt, maybe, tbd - open weights may wreck their financial projections
This was obvious from the beginning but greed has deluded people to the point of utter absurdity. The comeuppance on this whole thing is going to make me run out of napkins and resort to finger lickin'.
yesterday I needed to create a spreadsheet, so in Google docs (paid Workplace account), I fire up Gemini to help with moving around text, creating columns, etc. Absolutely horrid experience -- totally useless. I ended up doing everything manually.
Who wants to interact with AI customer service? I certainly do not. Why are we losing CS workers to AI? Because the companies are evil capitalists that do not give a fuck
My team can crank out high quality work in a few hours and AI could do the same medium to high quality work in a minute or two, but the review, feedback, and sign off takes days of back and forth. AI just slows this part of the process down because editing AI work is often a challenge because, no one is quite as familiar with how it was put together and sometimes it creates things that are not editable at all. And telling AI to make very specific changes is often a mixed bag at best.
Solo devs and small teams with minimal oversight can probably move a lot faster, but corporations are going to see minimal uplift except in areas where no one is looking.
However, if a PM tries it they will more often than not get a wrong answer because they do not know what to look for or how to ask the right questions.
Prompts still matter a lot especially when you are working in an established enterprise.
There's a couple types of companies where the reverse is true: young companies trying to grow, and dying ones that need a turnaround.
Out of those two, young companies are less likely to be set in their ways. So the first place you really see the result of development moving faster with AI is probably going to be in future months and years when suddenly-big companies start getting widely known with products and business strategies that wouldn't have made sense a decade ago because writing code to try different things to even get the ball rolling was a bottleneck, and you could only do things that wouldn't scale for so long.
Spot on!
Usually, most work in corps is slowed down by executive decisions. It takes 3 - 9 months to get a yes/no on something and for most things that are obvious that need to be done need to go up the chain of command. The decision takes forever, but when the decision is made, they want things to be done quickly, which creates unreasonable stress on the ICs.
The first step to see real productivity gains is for AI to eliminate the executive and middle-management layer, this starts a virtuous cycle, destroys both empire building and massively accelerates true productivity, not just meaningless metrics like LOC.
So the first signs of productivity gains will be shrinking head count, but it's going go from the bottom up, as usual.
I have no idea how it’s sustainable but I dont see AI CEOs coming until a new company becomes successful from the bottom using that model.
The doorman was called a doorman because its essential task was the door. Everything else was additional and replaceable or unnecessary in the first place.
Same with AI. Once it has replaced the main task, the rest will adapt around it.
Maybe, you'd say there are more automatic doors than doormen. I'm confident that is true, but those automatic doors haven't supplanted doormen; they're automatic doors where there would have been manual doors before.
So everything hasn't adapted around automatic doors. We've just got a lot more automatic doors now. And a lot more doormen.
1) What proportion of doors had doormen before compared to now?
2) What proportion of the population was employed as doormen then and now?
3) What proportion of the population benefited from doormen then and now?
That said, to your actual points, as an intellectual exercise: while the population of New York has increased since 1930 (from around 7m to around 9m), the number of doormen has gone up much much faster (from "a few thousand" according to NPR to 25,000). So on the criteria you listed there, the number of doormen has increased as well.
The doorman example remains true.
Look at how beautiful old buildings were. However, now everything is a box, because it is more efficient.
The people setting the prices are not some omniscient backroom of guys smoking cigars. They are thousands and thousands of people much like you can me, competing with each other.
The wal-mart greeter is essentially a doorman for automatic doors.
There are many other little examples like this, where beneficial side-effects go lost from automation. I suppose LLMs serve as a prime example of how this can affect people quite negatively (e.g. skill atrophy), if not careful. I think adaptation only goes so far, and we are being arrogant in thinking that we can adapt to everything, because a large part of how we function as humans is not as adaptable as we think, e.g. our emotional and instinctual needs, or how we maintain skills that are essential in the long-term.
It also has been an incredibly short period with incredibly large changes, to be able to say that things will just adapt; perhaps they will, but at what cost, and who wins from it?
We stopped going to one favorite place because the wait for a table became interminable. You’d spend forever standing there watching people waiting 15-20 minutes to get a busser’s attention so they could ask a question about the food, and then another 5-10 minutes for someone who actually knows the answer to come out and talk to them. Or, after the meal was over, people would just camp out indefinitely.
Loss on every side, still happened.
Sometimes I feel like peter theil smokes a bunch of crack and posts antichrist takes on here under hundreds of alts. There is a lot more to life then instaspending money on Amazon, running on social media instead of talking to the kids, calling your dad for advice instead of chatgpt. These takes are exactly why most brands suck and why people will fight in the streets to defend Costco or valve.
Life will always have the intangibles and believe it or not it's still a good idea to hire someone who is only okay at a job but has an awesome personality and work ethic. Or lose a couple bucks on some hot dogs... 99% of purchases above survival are done for emotional needs and desires.
It's sad how the stupidest forms of short term cost saving and efficiency have driven ghouls to think they belong in business long term.
the one with a doorman & porter vs the one with just an automatic door and elevator.
people really need to read alchemy by roy Sutherland.
I don't see why it doesn't count. It shows we still value the service but it is out of reach for anyone who can't afford it. It lost in the same way much better food outings went out if business while McDonald's thrives. By making society arguably worse and punishing quality.
In an ideal world (yeah, I know), it should result in them being paid for what they actually do.
One of the most troubling aspects of human's poor planning ability is they're absolutely sure something is valuable until they have to make a skin-in-the-game commitment to how much value it provides them personally. Then it turns out they weren't serious.
People have no problem paying something for nothing, if it gives them a chance at a disproportionally great return when they actually need it. It's called insurance, and perhaps we should start framing some of the intangibles in this way.
I.e. paying the premium for possibility of human interaction isn't paying for niceness-as-a-service, it's an insurance policy that pays out in kindness whenever you need it, wherever you are. But like every insurance policy, it only works if there's critical mass of people pooling resources, and stops working if they evaluate it as investment.
the classic revealed preference vs stated preference.
How? How do you set a price based on what someone does?
Maybe there’s a connection.
Is it more efficient in America? Yeah. Is part of that scene her being bored while waiting? Yeah. Are gas prices there probably a bit higher? Yeah.
But there really was something appetizing about it. I’m not sure I could put my finger on exactly what.
The tipping.
It's fucked because it distorts the relationship between staff and customers, not to mention it lets businesses get away with underpaying their staff.
Fortunately Japan doesn't do this.
Why would he be watching the Bruins and not the Devils?
Low end labor costs tend to track cost of living costs. In high cost-of-living places, you have high labor costs and vice versa. Most places are much cheaper than America, which means you can afford to hire more people to do tasks that would otherwise be uneconomical.
Do you happen to know where one could find statistics on this? This doesn't mesh with my experience at all, and a quick search did not turn up reliable data in either direction. Not-logged-in ChatGPT gave me an estimate of 40-60% worldwide, but that obviously has very low certainty.
It's the fact you were not there.
<edit> Ah, my Oregonian neighbors inform me that in the last few years, this mandated institution is no longer in force.
That's just bullshit. And barbaric.
Making someone stand in place all day primarily to open a frickin door (or other menial tasks) for others is a degrading job.
What "vital functions" exactly?
Whenever I see someone in a job where they're not even provided a chair, I feel ashamed. Like doormen, guards, "traffic police" that act as meat-based traffic lights, standing right smack dab in the middle of exhaust fumes all day without even a face mask.. it all seems such a ridiculous and archaic ceremony
Should we also bring lamplighters [0] and phone operators [1] back?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator
- Identifying suspicious people and situations.
- Helping people carry things through the lobby.
- Passing messages before cellphones.
- Receiving packages.
- Making sure people in the lobby behaved.
And probably more that I never realized as a child. Doorman doesn't necessarily mean "suited guy standing attention outside the building next to a door". The locks were also electronic, so they didn't even have to stand up to answer intercom buzzes.
I thought bellhops do that, that's not just a "doorman"
You're confusing the word "doorman" to include other random unrelated jobs, like expecting the postman to also deliver your milk and then complaining that email doesn't solve that problem.
(I guess if you ordered milk online, he could, but that's not the meaning regular people assume when saying "postman")
No. Coporate fired a bunch and now doorman is doing their work, too.
Which is to say, it is sometimes a fallacy, but often, it is not. We have far more intercoms and automatic door openers than doormen.
The Doorman Fallacy is exactly this—thinking that one function of a job is the whole job. The doorman doesn't just open doors nor relay messages. They're eyes and ears, security, friendliness, an extra hand with bags, local knowledge, emergency response... The list goes on and on. Almost none of their functions can be replaced with an intercom.
Much of the US has buildings that are too small to justify a doorman regardless, but something is lost for it.
"Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings." - Terry Pratchett
The value of the doorman isn't the intercom functionality.
People like doorman buildings because the building has a real person with eyes on the premises at all times.
An intercom or automatic door opening system can't deal with delivery people who can't figure out the intercom system, don't follow delivery instructions, leave your package/food somewhere random, etc. And that's only a fraction of the value a doorman provides.
An intercom system won't deter trespassers, petty crime, etc.
As long as the building is large enough, the cost is negligible.
I randomly picked a listing in NYC, 219 East 69th Street. 145 apartments on 13 floors.
Let's say you're paying a doorman 24/7 at $30/hour, that's $150/month/resident.
Was this supposed to be negligible?
The building I randomly picked out wasn’t particularly large, either. The larger the building, the smaller this cost becomes.
I know someone living in a 900 unit tower. A doorman is an obvious benefit in that building.
I’m sure it’s similarly true for travel agents, real estate agents, probably lawyers, etc. Just because there are circumstances when someone values them doesn’t automatically justify them everywhere or refute that many of them basically don’t do anything.
Real estate agents are a good example. They might be the only people involved aware of the processes everyone's engaged in and moving things forward. Having helped build tools for a local shop I can tell you that their checklists and flowcharts can't and won't be built with AI because hoarding and sharing information has always been part of their competitive advantage.
A corollary might be that the value of human involvement is unknowable because human beings aren't rational. The Doorman is a buffer against chaos.
First they provide real security an intercom does not. They know everyone and won't let an unknown go through the door without checking in.
The courier leave their wares to them, and can hand over packages for the courier.
There's no extra cost, really, to having them do dry cleaning since all they do is hand over all the dry cleaning to a service that comes by.
We have to know how long it took.
For example, the “social workers & care -> counsel parents with child rearing problems” category is considered “well covered” because there are 13 prompts.
It’s self-evident that the spectrum of work carried out by a social worker undertaking that work cannot be well represented by thirteen prompts.
I suspect if you really strictly defined “covered well”, to the extent that any normal person would use that phrase, the headline would be above 99.9%.
I'm not saying AI can do our job. I'm saying WE can't do our job.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/anxiety-disorders-prevale...
When you think about it humans were never really well suited to such a lifestyle. Of course the transition may be bumpy but maybe the end point, of machines doing these machine-like tasks, isn't so bad for us.
What work does suit humans? Anything involving interaction with the world or other humans, perhaps.
That's the take many have been educated against: maybe one day a category of bullshit jobs will be gone and it's fine.
I've started to notice this on a micro scale as well. I am 20x more productive at coding and scripting, but I don't spend more of my time coding. My time is now filled with things like presentations, Jira, QA, etc. Ironically, despite all of the automation, the things that are painstaking and time consuming disproportionately require more time now.
> ...
> But even after controlling for AI-exposure, O*NET tasks from occupations with larger wage bills are significantly overrepresented among benchmark prompts:
So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs. AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications." We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
And this points to one of the ways AI will help improve society and living standards for all: we'll have cleaner, better-maintained bathrooms, as labor one wasted on engaging intellectual tasks is redirected towards menial, low-pay tasks that still need a human touch.
Reason to be optimistic, amirite?
As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.
A large part of the trades is learning how to deal with toxic coworkers or shops, or understanding that you're being worked like a rented mule for no real reason. And I was able to leave all that behind for a moment.
The difficulty with human abilities in vision, locomotion and particularly coordination and manipulation is due to their arithmetic complexity being high. Modern deep learning solves that, LLMs provide the "interface" for planned action.
From the outside, this process of "solving" perhaps looks like "robots stumble around haplessly". But it's just the same as with mathematicians in the intellectual realm: when the level of ability surpasses that of humans, it appears as a "sudden event" to outsiders, having occurred far faster than anticipated.
There are no "safe havens".
Where robots ‘win’ is following orders with no regard to self preservation or long term survival.
Ponder that for a bit, and it’s consequences get a bit scary.
Do you expect this to be true indefinitely? Robot production scaling has barely started.
The world is vastly messier than engineers like to assume, and every real world trial I’ve seen requires massive human babysitting of a robot by humans for it to last any length of time or be useful at all.
And we’re not talking about AI type stuff, but corrosion, terrible field conditions causing sensor issues (mud, sap, dirt/dust), power management issues, communication disruption due to terrain, enemy action, etc.
I watch enough Futurama&Terminator to know it's "kill all humans"
The safety brief is supposed to motivate you to work safely so maybe they need to work on how they present it. I saw a couple of colleagues injured in my old job (EMS) but only seen a member of the public decapitated.
I got lit up by 277/480 when I worked as an electrician because someone removed a lockout and turned on the breaker.
In any case, not all jobs can have the power turned off.
The work is was doing in big tech was pretty far from anything that would help people in any tangible way.
The money isn't as good but the office view is way better.
I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
For example, engine falls off. The automation doesn't know that happened, it just sees various problems like the hydraulic pressure falls, and for some reason the engine thrust went to zero.
When I was at Boeing, an incident was recounted to me where the autopilot glitched and rolled the plane over into a vertical dive. It was going so fast it entered "separation", where the airflow no longer flows over the flight controls. In other words, the pilots were just along for the ride.
But the pilot figures, since we're dead anyway, let's try lowering the landing gear and see if it slows the jet down. He did, and it ripped the doors off and bent the gear back, but it slowed enough that the flight controls could get a "bite" and the pilots were able to regain control and landed safely.
Suffice to say that what's in current civil jetliners is very far from the state of the art. I fully expect properly implemented and integrated AI to be far superior to human pilots in the future - it probably would be already, if we put the effort in.
That's correct. But it's an easy problem to automate, because the problem being solved is well understood.
That's not the case for something randomly breaking.
I doubt the FAA would certify an AI running a jetliner, for the simple reason that if something unexpected happens, there's no way to predict what the AI will do. FSD for cars was done by collecting an incredible amount of data from the cameras on Teslas. Yet still, how much data was collected from Teslas having a catastrophic failure, like catching fire? A jetliner has a lot more failure modes than a car.
I'm not sure how the news being delivered by a carbon-based pilot would help with the dying part but I guess hospice care exists for a reason.
How can software engineers maintain a healthy "manual programming" skill set? What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
Lots of regulation or some landmark lawsuits should do it. If airlines operated the way tech companies did, we'd have daily plane crashes.
Pilots have to know all the ins and outs of every single system and subsystem of the machine they operate. If software engineers were required to understand their systems to the same degree in order to ship something, the only way you could do it is by coding yourself.
It's not like the pilot instructs every single control surface individually. Nor does he physically carry every single passenger on his back.
Just because you're using a machine to do your job now doesn't really change anything substantial about the job other than the fact that you now need capital to pay the machine.
Any role where the human is a buffer against chaos should be thought of as secure by everyone involved. All automation and information flow will be in service to this position. This is not a bottleneck, it is the point of the exercise.
Wow. You clearly have zero idea of what a pilot's job is, and it shows.
You are also severely underestimating how much work and regulation would be required to replace pilots. And this work can be undone in a flash the first time automation messes up.
Also note that plane automation heavily relies on sensors. Many plane accidents were caused by faulty sensors even with humans in the loop.
Of course many software "engineers" are nothing more than plumbers/electricians with data and that cohort is being quickly pushed out by AI. And our industry in general has conflated technicians and engineers which makes this worse.
But fundamentally, engineers job is to model the problem from the first principles and then apply that model to whatever problem. Technicians operate within the model, so I postulate anyone considering themselves an engineer is fundamentally a more capable electrician, plumber, carpenter, whatever than any master tradesperson.
I'm not speaking as someone that changed an outlet once and thinks they are now an "electrician". I have two decades of extensive property maintenance experience. I do everything myself and since my state does not allow pulling permits without licensure, I hold myself to commercial standards minimally. So EMT, MC, trapezes and gutters, no romex crap. Similarly, I will likely outsolder and outthread at least the current generation of "plumbers" that only know how to press things.
What I'm saying is extremely evident in any electricians' forum where its obvious that electricians just do not understand why is NEC written certain way. Then there' usually some "oracle" on said forums "deciphering" what the code is, despite it all being a pretty basic and coherent spec.
Ah, I see you don't work in industrial control systems that risk life and limb!
Old work is always harder than new work. It varies by how your home is designed. It varies by where your panel is located and where your garage is located. You will pay a premium for the extra time and pain in the butt it causes.
As a great example, my friend asked for assistance with their home's street light not working. Long story short is that they ran a UF (underground feed) line directly under her concrete driveway (the contractor was too cheap to run it in conduit). I megged that line and it had a short. Their light stays off because rerouting through their house then digging up their yard isn't something they want to do (don't want to pay as I don't have that much free time and they don't want the massive headache it would cause). I was able to disconnect/wire off the failed part of the circuit so everything else works for them, so that's a win (and I didn't charge, so that was a win for them too I guess).
Also adding a new circuit to a panel is different than extending one from inside
I don’t do the work myself.
Yes it is. YC has a company working on picking strawberries, even. Hardware takes longer than software, but if you think the robots aren't coming, you're not paying attention. The only question is how long will they take to reach the general public? There are test runs already in automotive factories and elsewhere, and yeah, they're slow and don't work very well, for now, but there's a lot of money going into making them better.
And then where will we be?
Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.
AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.
The same goes for self-driving cars. It's a exponential, hockey-stick curve that at some point crosses the level of human ability. There is nothing "linear" about it and your suggestion of parallels to former experience is wildly misguided.
People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming. The "obstacles" there are of the kind of "we always did it this way", but that's no real "moat"?
The bubble regarding the big AI firms may well collapse, but the assumption, that was somehow improving the situation is far-fetched.
People automated out of a job will either compete with those in other jobs or be dependent on support. Either way, salaries will fall across the board and prices rise. At an ever accelerating pace.
Ahem - work visa - ahem.
Absolutely they can, have, and have recently for many.
> People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming.
It is known since the 80s as the Moravec paradox that coginition is not the hard part in robotics.
Automation is coming for manual jobs that are repetitive in a controlled environment, like warehouse logistics. But automation for jobs that require fine hand dexterity, constant adaption to new environments and human interactions (trades, healthcare, etc.) is not on the horizon.
You're probably right about the rest. I don't understand how prices can rise when salaries fall. Who's paying the higher prices?
Now if all these resources were instead put into actually improving things, then we'd be far better of, unfortunately, for all the intelligence the people behind these things possess, they seem to be stuck in the "lets do the same but faster" mindset.
I'm pretty sure that's the goal of a solid majority of wealthy people, if not literally all of them. Fully automate their lives of luxury and let the rest of us rot.
Self-driving trucks are not here, nor are they coming anytime very soon, but driver assistance systems really have advanced meaningfully since 2012. They will continue to do so, to the point where I imagine driving without them will feel pretty alien. I feel much the same way about AI; it will change everything, but we need to be thinking of that change on thirty or fifty year timescales. 2030 won't feel so different to 2025.
So far I see that my own work as a programmer has changed radically, and it is far more productive. I still have a lot of work, but I really don't know how this will play out.
I've been very optimistic about AI. Wow, your comment just gave me pang of terror thinking about the outcome for humans due to Whitney and his cotton gin.
All the 'easy' to automate things have been automated already. A lot of things that were not automated is because there are small bits of problematic things that made it not worth while or the loss slightly too high. AI vision systems solve a lot of this.
Steel manufacturing. Elevators. Plastics. Ball bearings. Chemicals. Pharmaceuticals. Electronics. Go to a trade show and visit the booths related to automation and talk to someone who has spent their career grinding against the meatspace problems of automation that robotics is a century away from addressing with positive ROI.
Like with the particular examples you sited, cleaning restrooms can have a huge number of "edge cases" which nothing short of a robot with human-like capabilities could handle.
If expenditures on AI is as huge as it is, with the financials being as shaky as they are, despite AI seeming to be very effective for very high paying jobs, I can't immagine the capex and shaky financials for replacing menial labor en mass. Like immagine all the chips, metals, compute needed as well as the maintenance, depreciation, vandalism, etc.
The biggest benefit of humanoid robots may be that the machines are generally safer to be around than giant built-for-purpose machines, and that they can navigate the same buildings that their operators navigate (e.g. stairs), otherwise humanoid robots are generally an automation gimmick (for now). Just put a mechanical arm next to the conveyor belt.
There's nothing inherently wrong with automating away certain jobs, particularly if they're dirty, dangerous or repetitive. And I include agriculture in this. The problem is how we as a society handle that. Do we let AI specifically and automation in general to make a handful of people more wealthy? Or do we share those benefits so people have to work less? In short, it's an income and wealth distribution question.
Sadly, I think we're automation will mean minting trillionaires while the fabric of society unravels around us.
Technology and economics are intertwined.
Previously privileged people having a hard time is maybe a good recipe for class solidarity, which is maybe something we could use in society. Maybe it will be good for us... collectively, if not individually.
Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
EDIT: But also, I suspect I would be "fuck-you angry' at reading this comment if I had a family depending on me.
It's the reason AI company leaders are so adamant about framing it as a post-singularity utopia with UBI. They have no answer other than "you're all going to be jobless, better figure that out." Worse yet, they see it merely as a policy problem, rather than a problem they're responsible for. It _is_ a policy problem, no doubt, but the angry mobs won't be coming for policy.
> It _will_ be "the rich get poorer and the poor get poorer".
That is the complete copium. All the stats and models shows that white collar class will get poorer, EVERYBODY ELSE will get richer. Plain and simple.
Would you mind sharing a source for that? I can't think of a mechanism that would make sure that the poor get richer.
Intuitively I would expect a continuation or acceleration of the current trend, i.e. concentration of wealth at the very top (billionaires).
I think you're confused. The true upper class isn't going anywhere, those are the people so rich they don't need to work (and if they do "work," it's tending their empire). They'll keep getting richer.
The "downward mobility" you're talking about the upper middle class and middle class. People who need to work, but can live comfortably on their wages. This is really about flattening the working class into its poorer levels (and kicking away the ladders the people in those levels could use to lead a more comfortable life, no more getting a college degree and graduating from the factory floor to the office).
It's about increasing inequality and creating an unbridgeable chasm between the poor and rich.
Are you talking about violent revolution?
Some disorganized thoughts:
1. The professional classes are so unused to violence, they'll probably undermine the chances of violent revolution (e.g. reflexively supporting gun control, seeing such voilence through the lens "school shootings" and other crime, and being likely to report it, etc.).
2. The professional class is losing a lot of its economic power. The time for solidarity and non-violent action way 5 years ago, but the "happy to play along" professionals (e.g. libertarian software engineers) botched their best opportunities. From here on out it will be harder.
3. As all of this is happening, technology is helping to undermining the ability of the masses to do anything about it: IRL community declining, people getting mesmerized and isolated by social media, AI-enabled surveillance, AI-enabled astroturfing and propaganda, autonomous AI weapons, etc.
4. Even if what you say is true, the clock is ticking. Wait a generation and the "former professional class" will be gone as a distinct thing, and their kids will join an undifferentiated mass of poor who have normalized and internalized their circumstances, as they have no first-hand experience of better times.
No they just need killer robots to shoot anyone who gets uppity.
You also have this hilarious talk of "privilege" with this weird assumption that all of the white collar workers of course come from great privilege (perhaps telling on yourself and letting your guilt come out), despite many of us having grown up poor, are from poor areas, and worked our way out.
Furthermore, why do you believe that the only possible outcome of class solidarity is violent revolution? Why do you believe that any revolution would inevitably settle on, presumably, a specifically soviet model of government and economic policy? I find that most american adults, even ones who otherwise seem intelligent, seem to have this picture of economic and power relations that just kind of sounds like a half-remembered bad cartoon of a cold war that ended before I was born.
Because most people are retarded and any class solidarity movement will be inevitably captured by the malicious agents.
> Why do you believe that any revolution would inevitably settle on, presumably, a specifically soviet model of government and economic policy?
Because this is the natural form of government with stated goal being the fair redistribution of wealth.
> I'll take you up on that attempt to find a silver lining:
The lump of labor fallacy needs to go away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Yes, I'm sure all the wage slaves who are suddenly forced out of the labor market that was barely allowing them to scrape by paycheck to paycheck will suddenly start creating new businesses and become investors in new technology and not just become homeless leading to a massive increase in diseases/crimes of despair.
If (and it's a massive if) what passes for AI these days gets good enough to replace any substantial number of workers it will be a disaster.
Not all new business will be good for humanity though. Modern ad tech is shit, but it is huge.
Some of the projects we've done would have required 4-6 additional people, but realistically, pre-ai, we would just not do the project or we would do it over a period 3-4x longer.
There's just so much to do.
As far as I know, that's how the lump of labour fallacy actually works! There's an equilibrium between supply and demand for labour such that workers are (more or less) choosing the best jobs they can find. There's infinite demand for labour, but not at any price, so demand destruction of the best jobs can still happen. There will be infinitely more jobs, but they won't be as good as the ones that were destroyed.
Of course, demand creation for really good jobs can also happen. What the GP is saying is that they believe demand destruction will outpace demand creation for really good jobs and everyone will be forced into less desirable jobs. I don't see how this is inconsistent with the lump of labour fallacy.
Company stock value goes up when they lay off staff. Next quarter shareholder maximization is the goal. AI and layoffs is the strategy to get there.
No, we are currently unable to do most tasks that require physical manipulation, independent of what anyone wants.
The only “disinflation” consumers have experienced is devaluation of products through obsolescence as newer, often more expensive alternatives enter the market.
I'm almost cynically happy about Moore's law ending and hardware getting expensive if this is what it takes to improve software in the long term.
I'm sure some storage servers or storage appliances were built with many TB even then but it wasn't really something I saw a lot.
The prices of all those things continue to skyrocket.
Can you? I assume you mean spinning platter, but even then.
Computer parts are unaffordable this year.
“I can't eat an iPad.”
> Best not to cite the price of the new iPad as an example of why inflation isn't a problem when you head into a working-class neighborhood. In Queens, New York, on Friday, New York Fed President William Dudley did just that. He got an earful. After being bombarded with questions about food inflation, Dudley attempted to reassure his audience by putting rising commodity prices into a broader economic context -- but that only made matters worse. "When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?" one audience member asked. Dudley tried to explain how the Fed sees things: Yes, food and energy prices may be rising, but at the same time, other prices are declining. He then stretched for a real world example. The only problem was he chose the Apple's latest tablet computer that hit stores on Friday, which may be more popular at the New York Fed's headquarters near Wall Street than it is on the gritty streets of Queens. "Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful," he said."You have to look at the prices of all things." This prompted guffaws and widespread murmuring from the audience, with one audience member calling the comment "tone deaf." "I can't eat an iPad," another said.
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...
Of course, competition leading to near-zero profits means most competitors collapse, and the remnants get bought up by monopolists or oligopolists who then become rent extractors.
The technology was fundamentally developed with government grants to universities, or corporate labs like Bell Labs that were funded by a legal mandate on its parent corporation. Capitalists can only develop products that are basically ready for market, their margins are thin and planning horizons can only survive about 5 years usually. Their main power is throwing oodles of money at something ready to go and scaling it.
Edit: I will be slightly more charitable and note that capitalist companies can also do incremental research if there is a gentle and obvious hill to climb. Sometimes people do make crazy bets and they pay off, but that's more the exception, in America the dominant driver of technological innovation is government funded research supplied by capitalist scaled technologies (i.e. you research the next paradigm in the lab and purchase e.g. pre-existing computing resources from a company).
I find it funny when capitalism is blamed for rent extraction.
First off, extracting profit is not unique to capitalism. It happen in the Soviet Union as well, just on the black market. Even in the legal market workers would "sell" things they had control over for personal benefit. It's not like this disappears with other economic systems - it's a core human behavior to do things that benefit yourself.
Second, almost all of the things you listed - housing, medicine, education - are rent extractions not because of capitalism, but because of government regulations that allowed rent extraction. If people could build as many houses as they want, treat patients without jumping through the AMA quota hoops or charge a tuition that students can actually afford (and not backstopped by the government), none of this rent extraction would happen. We have plenty of examples of those economic sectors where prices are much more reasonable.
More and more it’s seeming that the “societal benefits” from the last fifty years of progress have largely been concentrated at the top.
Spending on food as a percent of income has declined significantly (~30%) over the past 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa.... The decline has flatlined over the past ~20 years, but at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home.
House spending as a percent of income also seems to have declined over the past 50 years (https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2023/04/26/spending-on-...). To be honest, this one surprised me, I would've bet the other way.
There are always individual counterexamples. And yet as a whole the cost of healthcare has exploded.
> at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home
A lot of that is poverty, not affluence. People working two jobs and living in food deserts aren’t cooking a lot of meals at home. It’s expensive being poor.
> People working two jobs and living in food deserts aren’t cooking a lot of meals at home
The percent of people with multiple jobs has declined over the past 30 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 (longest time series I could find)
Right now it's £5.60, but that says more about the decline of the British Pound than an increase in the price of wheat.
Massive food price deflation has been one of the wonders of the modern world. Hopefully the last few years were only a small blip on this overall trend.
"It might get better in 500 years" is not exactly comforting thought.
Cheap food is still cheap. If some doomsday scenario ever comes along, I'll be forever sorry to not have stocked up on 6 years worth of calories that now cost less than a monthly salary. World market prices per metric ton: wheat like $300, rice $500.
But that's not mutually exclusive with absurd levels of wealth concentration.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/inflation-chart-tracks-pric...
Doesn't include foods, but it certainly punctures the "That family isn't aaactually in financial trouble, they have a refrigerator and a phone and a TV" statements from certain pundits. (A class of people who are often disconnected from the average person's budgeting situation.)
they haven't. In the early 1900s an American household spent roughly 50% of its income on food. And mind you food didn't mean an exotic fruit you flew in from the other end of the world or pounds of meat per week.
Today an American household spends 9% of their income on food, the 'dramatic increase' may have bumped that up to 10% by some measures. The size of the average house of the average American family in the last half century has doubled while the family size has halved. In the 1960s 12% of households had AC access, today it's over 80%. Generics of basic medicines cost virtually nothing, you've just started to consume more sophisticated medicine over time.
If you're an ordinary guy you are already living in luxury, you just don't notice it because you kept moving the goalpost on what luxury is. Which isn't per se wrong but you ought to be at least aware of it
You pick the highest leverage occupation first. Automating lawyers gives you.. angry lawyers? Automating programmers gives you improved ways of doing literally all other things because all other automation requires.. automation. That is to say bucketloads of software.
It’s completely obvious what the play is here and it has nothing to do with pay. We pay peanuts for tokens so automating a developer for 200-500 a month worth of tokens ain’t getting you to a trillion a year.
RSI is the play and it’s already happening. Our work is easier and faster and anyone that claims otherwise I have a very hard time taking serious.
You think they come for mathematicians’ pay? If you want to earn money I guarantee you they need to automate some other low-hanging fruits first that pay a lot better.
No, programming and math is basically what AI research is. You automate that and you got the golden ticket to all other things.
Most importantly, in these fields results can be easily verified which means that if you have enough compute, that you can generate correct training data. OpenAI had an early story - which could be a lie of course - about how they tried to train a robot but the actuators would be toast before the robot would have learned. Math and programming doesn't have such problems.
There are lots of fields with easily verifiable outputs but that doesn’t make them valuable targets.
Eventually you’re going to need robotics to kick off the singularity, sure, but I would start with programming and math (and compute) which is exactly what they are doing.
Let’s say you start with robots, like we did, but we lack compute, we lack dev tools, we lack the ability to generate vast training environments, we cannot automate mathematical research of any kind in any way shape or form not even trivially, in general we are bottlenecked by math, code and compute. “Doing robotics” first without tackling the others is taking an astronomical detour which we as humanity are fond of.
I find the notion we automate cognition itself first and then tackle the secondary problems quite rational.
Could be hallucinating by I just asked Gemini to estimate global average compensation of developers and multiply by estimate of total number of developers in the world, and it came up with $1 trillion to $2 trillion.
So the total addressable market is the right order of magnitude, let alone all the other automatable high wage occupations..
Market forces drive it down hard. The USA is not the only player. Open source models are not vastly behind. My guess it that the 100-200 range will remain the baseline no matter the capabilities.
No it isn't. Doing work more efficiently through the use of LLMs is not RSI. RSI requires a closed loop automated LLM iteration process which we are not at all close to right now.
Sure, if you redefine what that means.
Before this year, "recursive self-improvement" in the context of AI research meant the holy grail: an artificial intelligence that was capable of improving itself, unattended, in ways that humans can't even imagine, so that within a relatively short period of time, it reaches superintelligence and ignites the Singularity.
What's happening now is emphatically not that. And if you think it is, you are buying straight-up propaganda. "I gave an LLM a tool that lets it make largely-random decisions about how to train its next iteration when I tell it to do so" bears little to no resemblance to RSI. Because it is, beyond a rounding error, completely missing out on the "improvement" part.
We're automating high paying careers and making what, the consumer's todo list and budgeting apps cheaper for them? My expensive smartphone is going to cost me ~$10/mo over its lifespan. I don't care if most of these consumer products get cheaper when they're a tiny portion of my spending
Which doesn’t play well with “savings for consumers”, because these consumers will be unemployed.
I know, this time it’s different, AI is different, blah blah blah.
Just like good blue collar jobs were shipped overseas, good knowledge jobs are going to be shipped to GPUs whenever they can.
Bud, thinking that for-profit corporations - many of whom are in an oligopoly or monopoly position in their markets - are going to pass along savings from not paying people is like thinking the stripper really likes you.
Remember how things were cheaper before the pandemic? Well, there were supply shortages and prices rose accordingly. Supply and demand at work, nothing surprising there. The supply chain shocks eventually went away. Some prices have sort-of come down, but many just haven't. Why? Because the people selling goods and services now know that people can and will pay the higher price.
Now, they might do that through taking on debt and working additional jobs to the detriment of themselves, their families, their communities, and their country, but no one who both matters and can do something about it keeps track of those things.
Isn't it just typical the humans get automation v1 the wrong way around, haha
https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm
The rich want us to give up, so we would be smart to give up!
I can think of quite a few other courses of action.
Yes like all the drivers and truckers who retained 10 years ago because self driving cars will take their jobs. Lucky all of them retrained in time!
Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.
Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.
AI likely does accelerate robotics usefully - certainly in sensing and control. But there are major bottlenecks that are not software, that AI can only help with as a generic engineering tool, same as it helps planes and fridges.
Imagine I give you a perfect roadmap to build that robot...
Responding to your edit, none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software.
That trash picker may never compete with a human. There's no reason to assume it will.
edit:
> none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software
Maybe the difficulties of motors and batteries are not intuitive. Look at their improvement rates over time. It's a far cry from transistor counts or FLOPS. And look at the performance and efficiency of humans and other animals. We are absurdly strong, light, efficient and cheap to maintain. The gap is huge and not closing quickly.
If it's not C3PO it's a Boston Dynamics dog with a couple appendages, better software, and automated manufacturing.
iRobot, the company that shipped the most robots in history because they focused super hard on finding a cost-effective subset of cleaning tasks, failed to scale up to other even closely related tasks, went bust and was sold off.
But yeah, it's probably straightforward, right?
I didn’t make any claims about the relative difficultly.
Advanced robotics would need to become quite cheap for them to become more affordable and convenient than a minimum-wage employee. And physical fields like materials engineering are known for moving quite slowly and at their own pace, so I'm not sure how much automation could help there.
That's the last barrier we have right now that prevents the total obsolescence (and therefore destruction) of the common worker.
1. The discussion setup where you imagine a counterfactual is given by magic does not entail that magic can do any other thing you choose.
“Imagine I give you $100, what do you spend it on?”
“A McClaren, since you could have given me $300K”
2. Taking your question directly: because these are not closely related problems.
My question was a sincere ask to define, in this scenario, what is prohibiting that other magic?
Do you have relevant experience in any of those fields?
Oh don't worry Mr. Former Software Engineer. You won't be picking up the trash or cleaning toilets. You have things like an expectation for your work to pay a reasonable wage. You'll be passed over for a third world immigrant who'll work for a pittance, and they'll be replaced only when robots are capable enough and cheap enough to undercut _them_.
...don't you think the ability to create virtually unlimited amounts of software, at virtually no cost, is going to lead to major advances in robotics? I realize there's a lot of very hard problems involved in e.g. robotic hands (to take one example), but once software development is practically free, I'd expect a lot of seemingly-impossible problems to get resolved by the sheer quantity of what we can create and experiment with.
Our labor power is going to be fully eroded and the robots will not be serving us.
In the future, do bathrooms need to be cleaned? If yes, is it cheaper for that to be done by a person or by a robot?
Obviously, it is in the interest of the robot manufacturers to make the robot just a tiny bit cheaper than the person, so you'll buy the robot and the company makes the maximum amount of profit.
Now, if society breaks down and there's no one to consider buying the robot—well, that's not good for anybody, which is why I suspect society will find some way of working this out even if it's not ideal. But whatever, I don't particularly want to argue this point.
What I do want to argue is that there probably isn't a universe in which all white collar work goes away but blue collar work is still around.
Not sure what this "society" that works things out is, exactly. Top-down high-modernist plans for how society ought to work are the past; chaotic, twitchy, thrashy responses to disruption by a tiny elite class is where we are now.
But there still wouldn't be any jobs cleaning toilets, because the people who still had toilets to clean would have robots to do it.
Instead most of us are "embracing" AI by training __it__ instead.
Embrace, extend, ... and being extinguished.
One should always be saving for the rainy day.
As AI advances, this spreads to other knowledge work that AI is capable of doing, which we might be seeing in mathematics if the OpenAI paper release stands up to scrutiny. Other kinds of data and analytics work will follow.
Then once the knowledge worker jobs are largely replaced, the middle management that is left will either be not needed or replaced.
By this time the only remaining jobs will be the manual labor jobs that can't be automated. Maybe as important as recursive self improving AI is going to be AI advances in robotics. Once this happens, the ownership class can finally start replacing the manual labor jobs that remain.
If AI can achieve RSI and be combined with robotics, maybe the prediction of just eventually having one company that does everything will become true.
One large AI company that does everything without any labor necessary, and everyone else I guess will just compete on OnlyFans. The only kind of work that neither AI or robotics can replace.
I'll say this: I'm teaching myself every skill I can think of. I'm already pretty decent at finish carpentry, structural carpentry, electrical, mechanical work, HVAC, auto repair, auto body, welding and a few other less lucrative things.
I was thinking briefly I might want to go to law school, but who knows how much longer that's going to be a thing.
"They" figured out that it's a lot easier to hillclimb AI on verifiable digital tasks, and it just so happened that white collar jobs tend to pay more
Ai will decimate customer support jobs but those are not considered highly paid
If robotics continue to progress, we'll have all the robots to do our dishes and clean our bathrooms as you wish
the same robot that cleans your bathroom can also wash your dishes, fold your clothes, defend your home, fix your gutters, etc
(the bottleneck of which is the brain, aka software)
If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".
If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
> ...
> If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian.
No it's more dystopian. The "historical accident" was a little respite, where some workers could be comfortable and well off. They had a little market power to take the edge off their exploitation.
Now that market power is taken away, and they can enjoy the poverty they were always "meant" to have.
> In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
Come on. Society isn't going to value "keeping restrooms clean." The people doing that will continue to be poorly paid and disrespected. It's just the opportunities to do something better will be taken away, so there will be more labor available for that kind of work.
This is also the reason absolutely no attention is spent on evolving B2C products.
What is being exploited is the overt attention businesses pay to their own cost metrics, to the point where broader strategy is getting thrown under the bus in favor of efficiency. I believe this is an illusion, and for many companies that jump on board, sober learnings are right around the corner.
What tech people are discovering now (some of them at least) is that they have more in common with the trash man than they do with Jeff Bezos. Many, particularly on HN, viewed themselves as temporary embarrassed billionaires (to borrow the arguably misattributed Steinbeck quote). So they sought to preserve a system that they ultimately thought would benefit them and they were only one exit away from that reality.
This is a rude shock for many. For some, it'll be the beginning of class consciousness. Hopefully society doesn't completely unravel before the pendulum swings the other way.
And the billionaires.
Reason to unionize, more like.
That's a bizarre non sequitur, pure wishful thinking. Its like saying Maybe getting cancer is good, because it will cure my arthritis.
That is the only path under Capitalism, so we shouldn't expect any different.
Or maybe, idk, we do something about this?
I'm already a part of a generation that's the first in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents.
Like what? There is no things that will get an average engineer or lawyer better result in the future than retraining and adjusting their living standards.
> I'm already a part of a generation that's the first in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents.
Good. While US dominance over the world and it's ability to rob other countries will continue to decrease, your living standards will continue to decrease as well.
All those are physical things and physical LLMs are right around the corner. It’s coming for those jobs too within the next year or two I would imagine. Especially the ones you mentioned seem very easy for a robot to do. There are some physical tasks that will take much longer like being an electrician or a plumber or a roofer. There’s too much precision and intricacy involved in those but cleaning out a restroom and resupplying it that’s easy as hell. A robot like Figure 3 could probably do those autonomously today somewhat badly.
But is it cheaper than paying someone around $5 in labor to do it? Because until it is, it's not economical to have a robot do it.
> that being said of course I think it’s going to be way less than $5 an hour if you have a robot do it.
This is about an LLM-powered robot, not just a robot. At standard API prices, it'd run over $5 before it finished opening the door.
I think you may also be incorrect on your notion that training data is proportional to good models if anything the opposite is true. what ai models are ultimately trying to be are a universal theorem prover and encode all human knowledge into "theorems" and rulesets
not trying to come off too harsh here but i think most of the work is just innovating on the frontier or people pleasing
It's just harder to do. Would not be at all surprised to see e.g. Autodesk bought out for exactly that purpose.
You don't even need Autodesk. You can have Claude whip up a web app and build a higher level understanding of the building and then translate it to whatever output or format you desire.
Only if people care enough to pay extra; the majority of the market is for functional buildings that look ok, and unless we decide to value humanity, slop buildings will be cheaper.
In fact, a lot of stuff is already slop, largely because of the design and engineering expertise required. I don't think one-shotting "design me a house in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright with these specifications" is that far off.
I grew up at the boundary of a town like this it's like the truman show town, a few years ago they didn't want to replace a bicycle ferry with a bridge as it could bring in more cyclists from the (pretty rich) town next door lol.
The actual reason is neither of those things. It's because not enough housing was built.
Leaving that aside I'm quite puzzled about something.
"Making everyone poor is fairer to the poor" is a curious idea that I've seen you express several times on HN recently. The first time I read it I thought you were being sardonic, but you sound quite earnest.
Given your previous opposition to communism and socialism I wonder why you have apparently changed your beliefs.
The supply demand equation has two sides. If you give a substantial chunk of the population way higher incomes in the face of only slowly growing supply, then you see skyrocketing prices. That’ll happen especially around the centers of knowledge work, which is exactly what you’re seeing.
The town where I grew up didn’t become unaffordable because of Jeff Bezos. It was because of all the Google engineers making 10x the median income.
> "Making everyone poor is fairer to the poor" is a curious idea that I've seen you express several times on HN recently…
> Given your previous opposition to communism and socialism I wonder why you have apparently changed your beliefs
I haven’t changed my beliefs. I don’t trust “socialists” who would use government machinery to artificially make people equal. But if technology and the market renders natural human inequality irrelevant, I’m all for that. Industrial machinery went a long way to making the physical strength differences between men and women irrelevant. That was a step forward. If AI renders natural differences in intelligence irrelevant too, that would also be a step forward.
[1] https://justicegap.lsc.gov/resource/section-4-seeking-and-re...
> Mercor is organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy.
Surely this must be a worthwhile thing to read.
Even just an issue tracker like Jira would be an insane boost of productivity.
They live in a loop of emails and chats and meetings in a never ending sync to find out what's blocked, why, etc.
There are already an insane amount of "common sense" improvements to most office jobs that are missing, let alone automation.
I've found discussions on HN tend to quickly get pulled toward polar extremes between those who are justifiably impressed at the increasing effectiveness of LLMs and those who highlight the brittle jaggedness and counter-intuitive gaps of LLM 'intelligence' in daily practice. One side keeps citing more examples of 'uniquely human traits' LLMs don't seem close to replicating while the other complains of eternally moving goalposts.
Today I think both extremes are partly right but also partly wrong, and end up largely talking past each other because so much remains ill-defined, uncertain or currently unknowable. IMHO, the most accurate position is a carefully nuanced middle-ground built on well-defined scopes, terms, time frames and probabilities with frustratingly wide error bars. Partisans at either extreme seem uninterested in more than drive-by hot takes.
It can be simultaneously true that "Someday AI will be able to functionally replace all human knowledge work" and "That day does not appear to be soon, and even when it arrives, there will still be uniquely human traits which are valuable and that LLMs can't satisfactorily replicate."
Nuanced position will not be middle ground. Single-dimensional thinking is exactly the problem that causes the argument. There are multiple reasoning modalities, each suitable to a certain type of human/agent cooperation, and there are different tasks where different modalities are applicable at different stages. There is no way to reduce this to a single axis.
Is this not just a gimmick? You still need people on hand to take over if the robot has an issue, I don't see how it would reduce labour costs.
"take over IF the robot has an issue" is exactly how it reduces labor costs.
2020: 10 waiters, waiting tables. You're on the hook for each of their salaries.
2030: 10 robots, one human waiter passively overseeing the cluster. You're on the hook for minor parts/occasional repair for the robots, and one person's salary.
Its not about a 100% staff elimination, but a large overhead reduction ensuring the few humans you're keeping around are more efficient overall for dollars generated in revenue versus the all-human staff before.
Plus, in certain cases, like kiosks replacing cashiers at fast food establishments, there's now one less qualification needed from employees (good social skills), increasing the pool of acceptable options you can hire where before some of those candidates would have been unsuitable for the job.
And what do the robots do? Wheel the food to the table, where the customers then need to reach for the plates and pass them around? Not a great experience. Or actually set the plate in front of each diner, without dumping it, like a human waiter does? Much more sophisticated and expensive robot.
It's not fast food, because customers pick up their own food from the counter there. Ditto with fast casual.
Fine dining restaurants would see huge drops in business if they tried to replace human wait staff with robots. (Unless they're already doing some kind of futuristic theming.)
So you're targeting low-end table-service restaurants...to replace their below-minimum-wage wait staff (remember, tipped minimum wage is something like $2.30 federally) with robots that don't get tips, do require a hefty up-front investment and nontrivial maintenance costs, probably a subscription with the company that sells them, and are likely to have a lot of problems especially for the early adopters—things like dropping meals, crashing into tables, crashing into customers, running over toes, purses, and small children...
This really seems like it's something that's going to work for a few gimmicks, but not in any widespread manner within the foreseeable future.
Who the fuck would go to a restaurant like this.
It's not like you need a touch screen anymore though, chatbots are good enough you should be able to read off your order from a paper menu just like at a normal restaurant. Proper tooling is required to avoid the chatbot taking orders for something silly. Now, having a microphone enabled bot does bring up the question of voice recordings. Sometimes people go to restaurants to talk about sensitive subjects and don't want the whole conversation recorded and sent to a data broker.
People may perceive not having human wait staff as "cheaping out", and there are lots of status-related reasons people go out to eat. Backend is possibly more ripe for automation because people don't see it. Lots of companies building dedicated in-franchise assemblylines for submarine sandwiches or poki bowls.
Vegas has a "robot bar" where the robo arm can prepare something like 50 different cocktails. The robot is cool but the menu software was horribly put together and it crashed before I could finish putting together an order. The human attendant came over to tell me I'm not allowed to hack the robot. Bad software saved me $15, thanks.
it's certainly not service that hasn't been good for a decade now. it's a consistent product not abysmal not great.
if a robot could reduce the chance of me getting soggy french fries and non crispy nuggies that's fine bring in the robot.
also lol plates and tables, how long has it been since you ate fast food? people eat in their car to avoid dealing with the shouting staff,dirty floor and sticky tables.
I don't use them; not because of any moral objection, but because they can't come inside buildings. The whole point of food delivery is to avoid going outside. Most human couriers come directly to your unit. The food delivery companies have spoiled us too much, and we are not ready to return to a world where you have to put on shoes to get food. Oddly, the delivery robots are probably better suited to suburbia, where folks are used to answering the front door to pick up a food delivery. But the distances involved aren't viable until you have delivery Waymos that can move at highway speeds.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202609/10/WS6aa122a5e4b06d4a...
Grabbing food handed to you through a window at a drive through is already very highly automated. But also has the most price pressure.
It's really easy to fall into the McNamara fallacy when rolling out these kinds of solutions. Focusing on the low value stuff is attractive. It tends to be easier to do, and also easier to quantify outcomes. But it also tends to direct attention away from important but difficult to quantify considerations, which may mean you don't notice negative externalities. So we often found ourselves in a verschilmmbessern situation where automating what we could automate made things worse overall.
Like any sizable population, there are absolutely some do-nothing inefficiencies to be culled. But most of the time it's just onlookers seeing a tiny slice of the day to be interpreted from their very limited vantage.
Even with all the availability of equipment and labor on hand, sometimes you must wait for the excavator to do its job first before you can begin. You cannot weld a pipe together when there is still earth to clear and the pipe to be welded is sitting on the truck. You cannot parallelize all work, some is inherently serial.
Both are probably true to some extent, and would vary a lot between different orgs.
Or worse, you removed the workers and left the 'telephone' people.
In my anecdotal experience, MOST companies don't take any time to understand what they are cutting.
They kill "Project X" so the easy answer is that everyone involved with Project X must go. Regardless if they were useful or could be useful elsewhere.
Or they cut by salary, employment length, etc.
when a market is saturated you differentiate by being nicer than the competitors but most markets are not saturated customers have literally no choice.
Slack hasn't been a thing for like 40 years, in fact it's mostly the opposite I'd argue where there is such little slack that employers often steal wages from their workers to gain even more profits.
Cereal companies spend lots and lots of money on advertising.
In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.
I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.
That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.
This only works (reliably) in an idealized free market.
That is to say, in the classroom.
In the real world, there are a myriad of reasons in any given situation why a company might have a low profit margin, but still have loads of inefficiencies and other imperfections that haven't been, and won't be, "competed away".
(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)
Or as engineers know: sometimes legacy code doesn’t initially appear to do anything, but then messing with it has unexpected effects.
Especially as organizations grow in size.
A small startup usually has little-to-no "junk" or "fat" to trim.
But as orgs grow, and since we have imperfect knowledge and communication systems, more an more "junk" or "connectivity" roles emerge.
Microsoft: 223,000 employees
Alphabet / Google: 198,933
Apple: 150,000
Oracle: 141,000
Meta / Facebook: 75,472
I tried to stay way from companies with retail or warehouse workers like Amazon and Walmart (though Apple likely has a lot of retail).
I don't see HOW companies get to that size without some "junk DNA" that keeps it operating.
Maybe in the next few years we'll have AI-powered knowledge bases and communication lanes that smooths things out, but - how do we 'quantify' what "Steve, the guy who has been there for 22 years and works as the company phonebook and knows who to refer you for the thing you need"
There's always Dunbar's number - the larger an organization gets beyond the capacity of people to socially know one another, the greater the "what do they even do?" types of attitudes form about other distant parts of an organization.
My company is earning money on my work and customers use my software to earn more money. But, that is it, I am not a doctor, I am not a teacher, I am not making the world better. It is a business, not unethical one, but also not world saving.
Per original definition, it is a bullshit job.
I dont think doctors and teachers are "saving the world" either. That is a bit dramatic claim. But they do work that makes peoples lives better. Mine just makes companies compete among themselves better.
Interrogated to what extent? 'Bullshit jobs' was originally coined to mean jobs that do serve a useful purpose within the environment they exist in, but where zooming out reveals that the environment has no good reason to exist in the first place.
From what I see on many recent TV ads, not really.
... that a team is much more than just its output.
You might be able to replicate an output at a lower cost. You might even be able to do it faster. But without a team of people, you won't be able to maintain commitment, culture, and domain expertise.
People are producing output that is worse than "doing nothing".
I think it's quite clear to anyone with eyes attached to their brains that we're not getting fully automated gay luxury space communism. The AI will just replace the good jobs and leave us with the service industry wage-slavery. Given the choice, I'd much rather an abundance of bullshit email jobs and people with food than the alternative that's being presented currently.
[1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/2109361546505966046?s=20
Karpathy is also saying the quiet part out loud: they are making progress by brute force. It's a cost driven arbitrage market.
Do I need to spend high prices on 1000 agents to solve this today, or should I wait 1000 days (with compute increasing and prices falling) and hope that I get lucky and get the right answer sooner. Is your competitor half the price but I need 1500 agents to do it in one day cause it's just a bit dumber.
The market for brute force intelligence is infinite - and at some point demand will drive the cost to single digit margins.
While it is continuously updated, it lacks many modern white-collar occupations, such as occupations in finance, tech, or consulting. And when it does carry an occupation, it often misses the mark on the relevant task set.
Every immigration attorney who had to build labor certs around O-Net can confirm how frustrating and backwards the database is. Just imagine trying to justify an H1-B for, say, a sales & trading associate at an investment bank when the only available options are bank teller, financial analyst, risk examiner, and 2-3 other ill-fitting categories.
That being said, occupational classification is an impossible task for a variety of reasons..
Which is a tautology, but also a bit of practical wisdom.
I find it interesting how concurrent model sessions seem to operate with a very strong bias toward quick resolutions, including sharing or giving up control, to create efficient decision making structures, relative to humans.
When I was a kid, I loved Bjork’s song “Army of Me”, because I knew a 1000 of me collaborating and communicating without friction. would be all I needed to take over the world, fix everything, expand civilization, etc. We would not waste time.
I wonder how much of their hyper-team play is by training, and how much is their awareness of the game theory real politic. So individual sessions don’t invest their identity and self-worth in any given context run.
My dream has been almost achieved. One of me and 999 of them get quite a bit done. But that trend…
This inevitably results in suboptimal dynamics like bureaucracy, empire building, territorialism and other things that get lumped under “office politics,” which drains a lot of energy away from more productive efforts.
So you can see how AI solves that problem too ;-)
(Only half joking)
Ego and agendas multiplied by 1000.
This is the kind of shit I have to fight every day. I have to align my manager, skip, VP. If I don't align them, one of them will be necessarily pissed no matter what I do, and the pissed one will fire orders down to hate on me, overriding the opinions of anyone on the way down.
Code was never the bottleneck.
I've worked with plenty of teams that did the "in prod the same day" trick without AI.
The problem was just fucking ego. Designer has an ego, product owner has an ego, QA has an ego, stakeholder has an ego, platform teams have massive egos, developers have egos.
Unrelated but: the only reason people are shipping more with AI is because more people are ok with slop now.
It feels like making these sorts of systems exist outside of the periphery would be good for everyone.
How many times have politicians for example wasted your time with promises and asks and rhetoric with no follow through? Not unlike some "stakeholders" I know. It's called "office politics" for a reason. What if they were punished for this by some system?
It feels like sitting there while stakeholders yap is not so different than electing a new rep every two years and hoping something changes. The fundamental setup is broken in a world with ever accelerating growth in complexity. Doing it in this way also would probably trend to enforcing rigor in the original ask. A big problem with stakeholders is they don't really know what they want, like politicians who make economic promises yet never show their work before showing up and asking for your vote.
Fortunately for our employers, it's illegal for us to build a competitor in our free time.
"Stakeholder" ranks #1 among corporate bullshit roles. It serves a dual purpose: (a) representing a group so nobody can be blamed for excluding them, and (b) providing typically useless feedback so that the group appears to actually care or have a clue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I have to mention words like "stakeholder" at behavioral interviews and to leadership just to sound like I belong at my seniority level.
But I don't want anyone holding any stakes. I wish people would just get shit done. Shit that matters to the CEO. Or leave.
I don't want people holding stakes because they want a promotion, because their direct manager wants to launch a corporate political battle into another team, or because some salesperson wants to get a commision for an otherwise worthless customer. I don't want roadblocks in the name of security so that the IT guy has a sense of self-worth. I don't want someone trying to protect their egos around something they worked on for 3 years, when there's new tech that supersedes it.
Anyone who has to work with the product is a stakeholder. Their stake in it is the fact that they will be interacting with it, and thus they care how, and whether, it works.
This is pretty much the only way I've ever heard it used in the companies I've been at.
All this being said, I don't think AI usage will meaningfully go down in the long run cause it's a very powerful dopamine loop and tech companies are very good at making those. How many people report social media making them unhappy and how many people do you know who have actually quit? Or to paraphrase Jim Gaffigan, nobody says they eat at McDonalds, but the sign outside says "billions served". Somebody's lying (and it's not McDonalds).
We have 3 companies claiming something like a $35T market for their services. The world's entire GDP is something like $126T. So 10% of the productive work that is done on this planet, that AI can actually perform makes up fully 1/4 of the entire world's economic output? best guesses for output solely of tech companies is something like $12T. Where are they getting these figures?
This technique seems dubious- what is stopping AI from doing the computer work of legal secretaries and court clerks as well?
Solving math problems is one of the hardest theoretical jobs. Software engineering is one of the harder practical jobs. AI is now much better at these tasks than humans because it has been able to properly train for them.
For other computer-based jobs it's a matter of AI getting properly trained for them. If a job is harder to verify or the training data is more limited, it may be much more difficult to train AI for it but I don't think there's any reason to think it won't happen eventually.
But, it may be that the performance of some roles is constrained such that the physical shape or rate and breadth of knowledge utilized isn't advantaged by the benefits of digitalized intelligence, and so would be approximately acting just human anyways. And in that case there may be enough human's available to do it just because they want to, fully fulfilling the demand for it.
I guess if I wanted to put my skepticism about the AI stock bubble into one little phrase, it would be that I don't think the bubble has accounted for Amdahl's Law. Costs don't actually go to zero with AI, and there's a huge difference between costs falling even 90% and costs falling a full 100%. And the difference between "30% improvement this year, trending to 85% in five years" and "90% this year" is pretty significant too.
I understand the resistance to having nearly all labor devalued because it can be automated. We're still in the denial stage of grief.
We only tax capital gains, not the destruction of wealth or property. So someone can steal the livelihoods of millions of people with no recourse. Just like they can tear down a 100 year old house and build 3 townhouses in its place and make hundreds of thousands of dollars, despite driving up housing costs in the neighborhood to the point that they're unaffordable. Large swaths of profit in the economy are based on externalities and captured markets now.
To think we'll make it through this without tax reform is frankly naive. Tax reform as in: human labor should not be taxed, and non-human labor and capital gains should be taxed more to cover the difference - including unemployment checks and UBI when it comes to it.
Expect howls of derision from moneyed interests who will never let common sense reasoning or deduction enter the law books for the public good.
Not to defeat my own argument, but I predict we will experience a roughly 3x gain in productivity by using AI, so the output of every job would need to triple to maintain current employment levels. Will that happen anytime soon? Of course not. Which is why layoffs in the short term are inevitable. I wouldn't be surprised if unemployment hits 15+% in 2027 or 2029 just after the elections, with 25+% unemployment for the young in entry-level roles being highly likely.
Thats usually a combo of lack of competition, incentives (why make $50K a unit times 10 sales when you can make $250K a unit times two sales?), and zoning laws making the cheaper thing illegal.
Some of it stemming from K shaped economy which means the most profitable audience to serve are the upper middle class and richer .
Apparently Epic thinks otherwise.
Yep, makes sense...
Engineers have been typing in terminal windows… since forever. LLM chat bot is a natural upgrade.
Again - well suited to you! I know it’s hard to read.
You know what? The truth doesn't matter much. If people believe in the resale value of tulips, each tulip would sell for a million.
It's the beliefs and perception that create the reality. Reality and truth don't exist on their own.
hint: it's neither
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