Comment by enduser
5 months ago
This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to automate everything will be out-competed by companies/countries that use humans and robots together to maximum effect.
Overseeing robot is a time limited activity. Even building robot has a finite horizon.
Current tech can't yet replace everything but many jobs already see the horizon or are at sunset.
Last few time this happened the new tech, whether textile mills or computers, drove job creation as well as replacement.
This time around some component of progress are visibile, because end of the day people can use this tech to create wealth at unprecedented scale, but other arent as the tech is run with small teams at large scale and has virtually no related ondustries is depends on like idk cars would. It's energy and gpus.
Maybe we will be all working on gpu related industries? But seems another small team high scale job. Maybe few tens of million can be employed there?
Meanwhile I just dont see the designer + AI job role materializing, I see corpos using AI and cutting the middleman, while designers + AI get mostly ostracized, unable to raise, like a cran in a bucket of crabs.
> because end of the day people can use this tech to create wealth at unprecedented scale
_Where?_ so far the only technology to have come out widespread for this is to shove a chatbot interface into every UI that never needed it.
Nothing has been improved, no revelatory tech has come out (tools to let you chatbot faster don’t count).
Honestly, this comment sounds like someone dismissing the internet in 1992 when the web was all text-based and CompuServe was leading-edge. No "revelatory tech" just yet, but it was right around the corner.
In the backend, not directly customer facing. Coca cola is two years in running ai ads. Lovable is cash positive, and many of the builder there are too. A few creators are earning a living with suno songs. Not millions mind but they can live off their ai works.
If you dont see it happening around you, you're just not looking.
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I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.
> Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight.
Oh? I sat down for a game of chess against a computer and it never showed up. I was certain it didn't show up because computers are unable to without human oversight, but tell me why I'm wrong.
Apparently human chess grandmasters also need “oversight” from airplanes, because without those, essentially none of them would show up at elite tournaments.
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Humans still play chess and horses are still around as a species.
(Disclaimer: this is me trying to be optimistic in a very grim and depressing situation)
I try to be optimistic as well. But obviously horses are almost exclusively a hobby today. The work horse is gone. I think the problem is political to a part, if we manage to spread the wealth AI can create we are fine. If we let it concentrate power even more it looks very grim.
B2C businesses need consumers. If AIs take all the jobs, then most of the population-minus the small minority who are independently wealthy and can live off their investments-go broke, and can’t afford to buy anything any more. Then all the B2C businesses go broke. Then all the B2B businesses lose all their B2C business customers and go broke. Then the stock market crashes and the independently wealthy lose all their investments and go broke. Then nobody can afford to pay the AI power bills any more, so the AIs get turned off.
And that’s why across-the-board AI-induced job losses aren’t going to happen-nobody wants the economic house of cards to collapse. Corporate leaders aren’t stupid enough to blow everything up because they don’t want to be blown up in the process. And if they actually are stupid enough, politicians will intervene with human protectionism measures like regulations mandating humans in the loop of major business processes.
The horse comparison ultimately doesn’t work because horses don’t vote.
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I am somewhat confident that horses are going to replace cars and tractors pretty soon, possibly within my lifetime and quite likely with my son's.
He's going to learn how to drive (and repair) a tractor but he's also going to learn how to ride a horse.
Unless the state of the art has advanced, it was the case that grandmasters playing with computer assistance ("centaur chess") played better than either computers or humans alone.
Perhaps you have missed the essential point. Who drives the cars? It's not the horses, is it? And a chess computer is just as unlikely to start a game of chess on its own as a horse is to put on its harness and pull a plow across a field. I'm not entirely sure what impact all this will have on the job market, but your comparisons are flawed.
In the case of horses and cars, you need the same number of people to drive both (exactly one per vehicle). In the case of AI and automation, the entire economic bet is that agents will be able to replace X humans with Y humans. Ideally for employers Y=0, but they'll settle for Y<<X.
People seem to think this discussion is a binary where either agents replace everybody or they don't. It's not that simple. In aggregate, what's more likely to happen (if the promises of AI companies hold good) is large scale job losses and the remaining employees becoming the accountability sinks to bear the blame when the agent makes a mistake. AI doesn't have to replace everybody to cause widespread misery.
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> Computers replaced humans as the best chess players
Computers can't play chess.
I think the big problem here though, is that humans go from being mandatory to being optional, and this changes the competitive landscape between employers and workers.
In the past a strike mattered. With robots, it may have to go on for years to matter.
A strike going long enough and becoming big enough becomes a political matter. In the limit, if politicians don't find a solution, blood gets spilled. If military and police robots are in place by that time, you can ask yourself what's the point of those unproductive human leeching freeriders at all.
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In this scenario wages will have been driven down so much that there will be barely anyone left to buy the products made by these fully automated corps. A strike won't work, but a revolt may and is more likely to happen.
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Why not just have the robots oversee the robots?