Comment by muldvarp
3 days ago
Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life?
I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style and/or taking HN threads on generic-indignant tangents? Your account has been doing it repeatedly, and we're trying for something different here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045107.
Even for people living of wealth, it is not clear what the outcomes are.
If renters of your apartments can not afford to rent them, housing crashes because your city was a looser (Detroit style withdrawals).
Even for stocks we don't know who the winners are. The market as a whole usually does not respond that well on serious turmoil.
So yeah. We are likely seeing some very rough years.
Yep, most wealth is ultimately dependent on some kind of ability to scrape off tiny bits of practical accomplishments of value achieved by large numbers of people. In some cases, such as your housing example, this is a very direct dependency. In other cases the dependency is indirect and less visible.
The smarter ones among the rich have realized this and are open for something like a universal basic income precisely for that reason: to protect their wealth and the position in the food chain this wealth affords them.
UBI will never happen. I don’t understand why it’s even brought up anymore. Social security isn’t even solvent, health care is a disaster, and people still trumpet UBI like all of the enormous glaring funding holes don’t exist.
It’s embarrassing at this point. Give it up.
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Sadly, we have gone above and beyond the level of innovation where stock market disruption is a primary concern.
Luckily, we're all in this together. As long as enough people realize the weight of what's happening soon enough, I'm confident the indominable human spirit and the relative momentum of post-enlightenment social & institutional progress will carry us the rest of the way on a wave of clearly-justified solidarity.
To think otherwise --to truly face the spectre before us without hope-- is pathology, I think. Not necessarily incorrect of course, but definitely an unhealthy source of cognitive distress.
When the very first prokaryotic life forms saw the very first cells with mitochondria were they cognitively distressed? We face a similar phase change. In our lifetimes, probably.
Loser. Loose means opposite of tight.
Even as a native English speaker, this is one of my more common mistakes, along with weather/whether[/wether].
How did we end up with the word with the long-o having one o, and the word with the short-o having two?
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guaranteed: My comments are not written by an LLM ;)
It's even the 'smaller' stuff that will be horrible.
Even if you're lucky to be wealthy you'd be living in a city with fewer restaurants, bakeries, shops, anything. Because once a lot of people don't have income they won't be able to go out and buy things and shops will go out of business.
It will also lead to a lot lot LOT LOT LOT more crime. I don't see the semi-wealthy to have an enjoyable life.
"I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this." Also said after seeing the printing press, automobile, calculator, etc for the first time
It's true, even if you lose your job as a programmer you can still get a job as a barista.
Can't wait for the barista and wicker basket based economy. Although personally I just make coffee at home, so I have no need for a barista with a PhD in neurosurgery to make it for me.
Plus it just takes too much time to go to starbucks, especially with all the starbucks job applications I will need to fill out if I want a chance of getting a job.
Silly thought. No one has money for overpriced coffee if well paid jobs are gone
Except where will be the programmers paying for overpriced coffee?
My god, the printing press was invented in 1440 when most people were living in abject poverty - it took until after WW2 for humans to demand a more shared amount of money between rich and poor. If you think technology delivers improvements in living standards rather than all working people demanding better conditions you’re living in an absolute fantasy and do not understand history at all. I honestly can’t believe you think this.
> If you think technology delivers improvements in living standards rather than all working people demanding better conditions you’re living in an absolute fantasy
Demanding better conditions does not just manufacture the technology, infrastructure, and productivity needed to provide the improvement in the standard of living. I think you're in the fantasy realm, my friend.
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It does and has done so consistently throughout human history, so I do not believe this will be any different. I couldn't care less what the shared amount of money is because it some billionaire gets another million and I get a thousand, that means I win regardless of whether or not that increases the wealth differential.
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Not to be overly intensive but people "demand" rectification between rich and poor because they don't see that they have all the tools they need or they want a shortcut to smart/hard work and risk - the US, EU and many other parts of the world where societal discrimination is virtually none compared to previous generations give you what you need. I agree with you in the sense that, life never feels just, grass is always greener on the other side, etc.. Bit it's those that rise to a challenge and stop demanding, make a plan and start doing that change their fate. That's always been history. Check out all societies that demanded riches from "the rich" and ended up communist.. Didn't help most of them for sure. Massive redistribution of riches like high taxes never works long term and sets the wrong signals.
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The printing press, automobile and calculator didn't threaten the employability of a large part of the population, so no, that sentence was probably not uttered by anyone at that time.
The problem with AI isn't that it's threating software development. It's that it's _also_ threating pretty much any other job that I could reasonably be retrained for.
Also, I'm pretty conflicted about the overall impact of automobiles.
> Also said after seeing the printing press, automobile, calculator, etc for the first time
Because society has found such sustainable solutions to capital wealth concentration in the intervening years.
This is just so negative. How will it destroy your life?
There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
It will only do so if the benefits of the technology is made available to all and we will see alternatives to make an income.
Based on the past 40 years track record it seems unlikely that we will see any form of redistribution before it is existential.
That is definitely grounds for being pessimistic.
It's the economic model we live under, not technology by itself, that's the problem IMHO.
Every tech gets exploited to make some richer folks more rich. Nothing new. Since the rich-ladder *is* the power-ladder under cap'ism.
In the west "we" forgot how unions and strong labor parties gave us weekends, sick leave, holidays, etc. Now we pay the price.
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> Based on the past 40 years track record it seems unlikely that we will see any form of redistribution before it is existential.
Literally every income decile is getting richer. Don't tell me you got fooled by that fake graph showing productivity/income disconnect?
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> How will it destroy your life?
By taking away my ability to earn a living.
> There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
What great things and why would I get access to those things?
> By taking away my ability to earn a living.
But this is an economy / capitalism problem, not an AI problem? AI isn't at fault that you can't get a job, your boss is for replacing you with AI.
That's like saying we should ban cars because millions of people who would upkeep horses for others to use just lost their jobs.
You're essentially making your life purposely harder because you want uninterrupted money. Perhaps look at the issues of the system that does this?
> What great things...
Aside from the medical AI stuff (detecting breast cancer, etc) that's mostly covered, AI can be helpful if you have to do a boring task that you don't want to do yourself. This is pretty much what every technology does - your phone is created so you don't have to run home and use the landline to make a phone call - it's making an already existing task easier.
>...and why would I get access to those things?
Why not? Seriously, why not? It's a bit like asking why should I get access to a car instead of keeping my horse around. You can keep your horse or car. Nobody's pressuring you to replace your horse with a car.
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You're speaking to a member of a cult, my friend, so don't step in with both feet.
It's pretty naive to think that tools like this are not going to be exploited by American corporations to extract money from people and as an excuse for layoffs
Both things can be true at the same time:
1. tools like this are going to be exploited by corporations to extract money from people.
2. tools like this will provide great benefits for the average person.
We are currently exploited by corporations, arguably more than in the past, and yet we have the highest standard of living in history. In large part due to technological progress.
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> There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
Caveat: Only if it also produces shareholder value
It will do great and useful things for holders of significant capital. The majority will be in bread lines.
> How will it destroy your life?
for me?
if it will stay on track for few more months or years, it will be able to do my work and I will have serious trouble to be employed
"destroy your life" may be overstating things but it is definitely not a welcome change
Much of the history of industrial automation has had a dichotomy between the benefit to the general economy (good) vs. the people working in specific industries that were automated (bad); only a subset of goods see total demand rise as a result of efficiency improvements.
AI is automating a lot of things at the same time. Not evenly, there are faster- and slower-automated things. But this does suggest that instead of e.g. society as a whole doing better from all the fabric coming out of the power looms, by a large enough margin to stomp on the weavers who lost their profession, that we may face something more like the entire initial economic displacement from the first industrial revolution (including the period where weavers were replaced), everything from farms finding they no longer needed so many hands through the luddites getting the death penalty to (roughly) the invention of Communism concurrently with the Irish Potato famine, and as part of this those now-bulging cities having to invent new sanitation solutions because their "slop" problem was more literal and gave the population cholera and typhoid.
My expectation a decade ago was that software development would be the last thing to be automated, because we'd need software developers to write AI. Today, while I don't know how far most fields are from automation*, we definitely have AI capable enough at coding to write more AI.
* a decade ago I also thought self-driving cars were basically already sorted; what a pity that the software in the Paint It Black video was not as good as depicted
I can be amazed and terrified at the same time.
> I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this.
It's tricky. On the one hand, it will - in the near future - indeed screw us all pretty badly unless we completely redefine our economies to no longer conflate person's worth with ability to earn money.
On the other hand, LLMs are useful to lesser or greater degree to approximately everyone, in almost everything they do, work or personal, right now.
It's harder to be pessimistic about the very thing that gives you new superpowers every week, directly applicable to whatever your individual needs are, and is available to ~everyone for between free and (for typical westerners) peanuts.
>people who have to work for their living are amazed
The answer us right there. Most people who work for a living aren't amazed, or not just amazed. Most normal people are afraid, angry, sad etc.
> Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life?
Because it could motivate you to work with others to stop your livelihood from being ruined, especially watching in real time as the evidence they present for their promise becomes ever more promising. Amazement is not exclusive with concern. (Actually, my first though was of a kaiju movie-style tsunami blocking out the sun as it looms over a city. Indeed, I would likely be both amazed and concerned.)
If my earning ability is harmed by AI, so be it. There's more to life than how much I earn, and opposing the spread of technology to maximize my earnings is bad.
If your earning ability is eliminated due to AI and you can't survive off of welfare or savings there will not be much more to your life other than starving to death.
Nuclear war is a more likely scenario.
Welfare? There won't be welfare. Remeber that ubi was a bait and switch. The tech bro oligarchy already pivoted away from it.
So you rather be poor and talk to ChatGPT than rich and live a normal life?
Would you rather be poor in XXI century or rich in XIII? Are you rich in "normal" life? Hint: If you sell the time of your life for money you are not rich.
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That's an insanely privileged, luxury pov. Peak hn. Some people have responsibilities, bills, dependants etc
Nah just focused less on money then you, I guess!
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There is no need to be so fatalistic. Sure, AI will upset the apple cart, especially in our little corner, but the economy is built on pricing scarce resources and even if many things become abundant, most other things will remain scarce. There are only so many Manhattan penthouses or Rembrandts (dixit the Economist), so things of value remain, and it will be quite some time before a humanoid can fix the plumbing, so valuable labour will remain as well.
I, for one, am excited to see what the future holds. (side note: I live in a European country with a strong social safety net, I imagine that helps being unafraid)
You can be stupefied and also pessimistic.
More practically, society should be reimagined around AI. You're comment presumes an outcome that will be politically determined: you can still fight for the world you want.
Same feeling entirely.
it got here by training on everything we wrote down thus far. if we now start giving it all the doomsday scenarios on how it will ruin us, won't it start training on that and create said doomsday outcomes? what if instead we, collectively as a humanity, just wrote about all the positive things we could do with it and skew it in a direction that benefits the more positive side of that equation?...possible?
Isn't that a bit like asking Why don't we all be nice to each other, wouldn't the world be a better place?
Yea so why
Even if you live off of your wealth - what happens when customers of those wealth-generating businesses don't have jobs?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617
Great paper, thank you for sharing it.
Its not fair to say this when we have been chanting how "software is eating the world", or how much we love to "disrupt markets", that we won’t create mass unemployments with our technologies but that "people will transition elsewhere like we always saw", etc etc.. It’s our turn to have our jobs disrupted and now we are surprised? Come on. We don’t have to like but we are the last people who should be surprised. It’s our turn to transition and be prompt writers and do product I guess. Until this is disrupted again in a few years.
Hard truth but true nonetheless. How come we should have it both ways? We removed certain jobs, it’s our turn to have many types of jobs disrupted and have to transition.
How will it destroy your life?
Going on a slight tangent, given how bifurcated the economy is - we are only a couple of meals away from a Butlerian Jihad. It’s hard to see this in our bubble if you don’t actively try to break out of it once in a while.
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As far as I am aware this is a racist/xenophobic narrative with little to no evidence. Automatisation is responsible for job losses, not immigration. If you have studies/evidence saying otherwise please share.
I agree that too many people have shrugged at the human impact of "innovation" destroying communities as long as it didn't impact them. I believe the immigration/foreigners narrative is the successful attempt by capital owners who benefit from the real root causes.
A quick search for "labor supply" turned up this microeconomics lesson: https://youtu.be/002_HEC2l-4?is=Tu6dZfNOyK7DFpWB
Wages, like all prices, are determined by supply and demand.
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It is neither racist of xenophobic, and you using that as a argument is an extreme strawman.
There is certainly a class that has been disrupted over the last 20-30 years to the point where their lives gone worse.
It would likely have been protected with trade barriers and immigration barriers.
Om the other hand, I don't believe protectionism has ever been the solution. Why should the domestic labor be protected over international labour?
Increasing inequality is, however, one of the greatest threats so society.
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the laptop class isn't the one illegally hiring and hiding millions of aliens such that they can undercut US wages and make them selves exorbitantly wealthy. embarrassing and classless behavior, go back to reddit
I don't consider myself as part of a "laptop class", I don't live in the US and I'm anti-immigration.
Why does it “promise” to destroy your life. Thats absurd hyperbole.
I don't understand these comments. Are we living in the same reality? Do you not get the same interviews from the new oligarchy promising the end of white collar jobs?
The lack of class consiousness and understanding of power structures is beyond silly nowadays.
Had this colleague argue "there has to be ABI how else are we going to get money". Like ... no thoughts about not needing the middle class would change power dynamics of voters versus the new prospect elite.
Automation is only good if you're putting blue collar people out of work! White-collar is out of bounds! People should do the work where they add unique value
Yes, white collar people are not allowed to express concerns about losing their career. I'm sure no blue collar person ever did.
The difference is that white collar as a class gleefully aided outsourcing/automating blue collar jobs with the exact same economic argument
I already live off my wealth, and I expect AI development to destroy my life.
Once humans can be robustly replaced by machines, the military-industrial "meta build" will be a state with no humans, no cities, and 100% of all production dedicated to war. Whichever states descend to this new equilibrium fastest will crush the others and then fight over the corpse of the world forever. (Unless, of course, something like the Yudkowsky scenario happens along the way, which is totally possible)
I can't understand why anyone expects things like civil rights, property, the rule of law, nuclear deterrence, democracy, etc to survive when human beings no longer need each other. Why do investors in AI companies expect a payoff once they are no longer needed? Why (and, more importantly, how) does anyone expect a UBI from a government to which they are nothing but a drain on resources and which is in existential competition with other governments with exponentially growing robot armies?
Either the world will come to its senses and shut it all down, or there will be no winners at all.
> I can't understand why anyone expects things like civil rights, property, the rule of law, nuclear deterrence, democracy, etc to survive when human beings no longer need each other.
What’s your source on this? When humans have no obligations they usually turn around to be super nice to each other. Humans are social animals and they really really want everyone they know to do well.
In case that was not meant as sarcasm:
Are the people in the current US administration, or the tech leadership, or the people in power in Israel or Russia looking particular nice to you or interested in the wellbeing of all humans?
Were the European colonialists nice to the people in Africa or South America or the settlers in North America to the natives?
People are super nice - to their own ingroup. The relationship to everyone else is less friendly, especially if power differences are involved.
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Let's ignore all the unnecessary cruelty throughout all history and the present and assume that you are right. It doesn't matter, because people will be forced into these choices by competitive pressures even if their intentions are good. If your government tries to build a wonderful utopia for humans with the power of AI and robotics, it will be devoting a smaller fraction of GDP to producing robots that produce robots that produce war robots, so its robot army will be exponentially smaller than a different country that devotes a larger fraction.
The reason we have some nice things in the modern world, flawed though it is, is because for the last few centuries the military-industrial meta has favored countries which let people have some political and economic freedom. In a previous era, the meta was knights and peasants; a country without knights would be conquered, a country without peasants would starve, and a country that did not give the knights power over the peasants would lose a civil war. It doesn't matter what people want; technology will diffuse, someone will play the game to win, and any countries that choose less optimal choices will just be swept away.
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> Once humans can be robustly replaced by machines, the military-industrial "meta build" will be a state with no humans, no cities, and 100% of all production dedicated to war.
We will nuke it long before it gets to that point. We don't nuke other countries because they still contain lots of humans. Any AI that actually becomes autonomous and starts to clear a nation state of cities and humans will immediately receive megatons in nukes.
Nukes are not magic wands, they are mostly only worth it for targeting cities and other very dense concentrations of value and production. An enemy state going down this path will probably start out with cities full of humans (and will probably want to "mine" those cities for materials), but its growing robot production will be more broadly distributed (and EMP shielded) and therefore much harder to destroy. And they will of course have their own nukes. I agree it's possible that a global nuclear war, if it starts early enough, ends with no one still having the ability to operate AI. But that's not exactly the most attractive way to shut it all down, is it?
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'We' will not be players in this situation. Over the space of a few generations the only entities that will have any power will be the feudal corpo-state and the only entity that will have any power within that will be a thin crust of humans who control the central machinery of that corporation.
The rest of us will be irrelevant.
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So sad. You're viewing humanity, and reality itself, through a very objective lens. There is magic in every day: have some fun! Otherwise, quit complaining.
‘Dont think, play pretend and be jolly’
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