Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer?
In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic.
US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?
If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts.
The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock, and AI models that will do anything a human office worker can do for less money. Now, they don't know how to build either yet. But they'll spend every last dollar on the planet trying.
Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards.
> Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards.
That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources so houses can build more war-bots and get more resources....
no - they'll still be fighting for resources for their AI data centers and armies. Its still zero sum. The house with the largest robot army and best data centers wins.
Then the targets become the launch pads. Those space-based datacenters will need constant resupply and maintenance. Destroy launch capability, and their orbits will decay and all that computing capacity will burn up in the atmosphere.
We are so so so far away from self-sustaining machinery in space that it's not even funny.
There is no such thing as a self-sufficient version of any industry in space, and you should expect this to remain the case for approximately the next 10,000 years. Until then, everything that happens in space will have a supply chain rooted on Earth.
I won't deny the comfort value of yachts and private jets, but I doubt that this material comfort is the main value proposition of these things. Instead, it's status symbols, status above slightly less rich people. The yachts are in a way an epiphenomenon of intra-elite social competition, and if you don't manage your network well, you can easily lose out in the next generation. Investment into social relations is what really matters. And when you're generationally rich, you typically think about making impressive impacts over society, the kind that impresses your social circle, based 9n their philosophy, which typically happens to be self serving but with just enough other stuff to not seem to crass. Taste is the highest status thing,not intelligence, not skill.
It's hard to extrapolate. What will be the goals and motivations of this super elite? Let's say all of us normal people just die off either starving or just by not reproducing any more, just watching VR, sedated with subsidized happiness drugs. Let's just suppose that. What then? Will the rich keep reproducing? What will limit their reproduction if material abundance is there? Will the elite families keep each other in check not to over-reproduce? Or will these people repopulate the earth, each living on yachts and in comfort, living an elite life? Surely that will bump up against all kinds of limits, similar to what the current earth-populating humans are facing. You can't have a super yacht per person to an unlimited amount of millions of people. At some point they will have to willingly not reproduce despite having all access to robot care, robots watching your every whim etc. I don't see any stable endpoint.
> If it was just programming being automated, then whatever.
There is nothing on horizon which automates a programmer’s work. Typing in code is faster now, and some things “only need pointing out” like an existence of a “bug” which an llm + harness might be able to mitigate. Automated tests might capture regressions and possibly written by llm + harness.
If you replicate this in other professions what will you get?
"Forcing redistribution" doesn't always happen. Typically, redistribution happens when negotiating leverage has increased such that the beneficiaries of any redistribution can make it more painful to not redistribute than to redistribute. I.e. they have labor power, which can be converted to force if necessary.
In a world where capital can substitute for labor, however, that substitution also applies to force-wielding labor. People want to strike because of intolerable working conditions? Send in robot scabs. People want to demonstrate en masse against a regime? Have robot officers police them, and have models identify participants so post-event disincentives can be applied. They want to have a violent uprising? Send in the mass fleet of drones.
Ideally, you'd avoid these outcomes entirely by molding the population into ideal consumers and distract them with superficial sports team style conflicts, so they never get to the point where collective action is even conceivable. But they're a useful backstop if those strategies fail.
It doesn't have to be all that dramatic. Just ensure that they don't reproduce at replacement level. In fact that's already happening. Crank it up a bit more, make things South Korea++ and it's just not a problem. If nobody shows up in the next generations out of whatever reasons, there's no risk of some kind of uprising you'd have to crush with a robot army. Just wait, push cultural messaging that encourages individualism and implicit antinatalism and it will seem perfectly humane. Legacy humans will simply go away, without any major incident.
I think your first equilibrium would be hard, for two reasons. First, empirically insurgencies are extremely difficult to exterminate; over the long run they tend to win. Second, in the U.S. at least, people tend to look at politics up close, and when you're myopic like that it appears that the government is a force onto itself. But zooming out, U.S. government actually mirrors the will of the people extremely well (with the exception of some issues on the margin). If there is overwhelming political support for redistribution it would be very difficult to resist.
The second equilibrium seems more likely-- the capitalist class grants the public a bare minimum to keep us from forcing political action. In the AI world "the minimum" is probably a much better standard of living than we have now, as the marginal cost of many products and services approaches zero. So we end up living much better material lives, but are still not free. Maybe this is stable, or maybe the ruling class loses dominance over time. At that point, who knows.
The capital-owning class owns the political apparatus, so they're not really worried about "political action." Through their ownership of government, they also own and control the military and police, so they are not worried about a violent uprising. So, what will actually happen when all economically relevant activity can be done cheaper than human labor, by a mixture of AI and robotics, and 99% of us are economically irrelevant?
> "they also own and control the military and police"
I'm always amused by how some intellectuals dehumanize the armed services, as if they were no more than mindless robots instead of humans with their own families and community ties.
> instead of humans with their own families and community ties
This is an age-old problem with armies and has a similarly age-old solution: just send soldiers from one community to police other communities. For example, during the Tienanmen Square Massacre, some Beijing-based units refused to fire on protesters, so units from further away were called in instead.
Is there any relevant recent evidence of them not just doing exactly what they’re told? “Oh they will refuse unlawful orders” hasn’t exactly panned out
> The capital-owning class owns the political apparatus
That is not nearly so uncontested, not even in the US. Did you forget how all the tech bros went to Trump's inauguration, bowing their heads and kissing the ring? With Trump being very small fry on the scale of "capital-owning class" this means there are other factors at work than just wealth dominating politics.
Also, the situation gets much more unclear in other countries. Otherwise, why wouldn't the most capital-friendly party rule in each and every country?
On the other hand they would never be able again to leave their bunkers, given that it is not hard to assemble a DIY drone and equip it with some explosives.
> And that is going to happen when all we have are what maybe some AR15s, and they have drones firing precision targeted ordinance at us from 50k feet?
We have enough guns for every man, woman, and child to have at least one. There aren't enough drones or expensive precision targeted ordinance in the world to defend against that for any length of time. It's another version of the lessons recently taught in Ukraine and Iran.
Plus I think it is different when a poverty stricken population tries to rise up as compared with one that is historically wealthy. I expect we won't wait until we are actually poor before we collectively decide to refactor our government.
I love comments like this, mostly for the unbridled optimism and historical ignorance they embody. If you truly believe that a loose collection of small arms is the kryptonite that the command and control apparatus of the US is vulnerable to I recommend familiarizing yourself with what happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Both cases vividly display what a few Suburbans full of motivated feds can do to an entire compound of well-armed civilians over the course of a long weekend.
I'm the last person to accuse the US of being sanely-governed, but you'll forgive me for not worrying any more about a conspiracy of billionaires with access to US nuclear arsenal all agreeing that the best way to ensure they live long and healthy lives unencumbered by vengeful proles/superpowers is to nuke the top 500 cities than I do about Roko's Basilisk or the end of the world as predicted by the Aztecs...
I'm even less worried about AI models obtaining corporeal form to stride into the US nuclear bunkers to launch missiles against their own power infrastructure and datacenters...
No they won't, not if they have just enough bread and circuses and someone below them to hate. Boil the frog slowly enough and it'll work out just fine for the capital class.
Bread, circus, strife, anger, hopelessness, antinatalist cultural products and it doesn't need anything aggressive or spectacular. People will just cease to reproduce seemingly of their own will. South Korea to the nth power.
I don't see how you can relate this to communism. Sounds more like oligarchy/roman empire: a few own almost everything, but most have almost nothing and are being controlled with bread and games. Marxism is the opposite where everything is owned by everyone (in theory).
What would be the name of the society where, say, 30,000 people + technology produce enough food and goods to satisfy the needs of the rest of Earth population?
So those people will get whatever they need for life but will not be technically obligated to produce anything.
We will first switch to 4 day working week, then 3 and so on, right?
We will see Universal Basic Income "experiments" [1] more often until they become a norm.
Some suggestions for naming this, depending on how you organize ownership, redistribution, who gets to decide what you need: paternalism, welfare capitalism, neo-feudalism, technofeudalism, welfare state, social democracy, UBI-and-oligarchy, oligarchy, plutocracy.
We are already in a position where we could house and feed everyone, but we choose not to do so. Instead a few own almost everything, money gets spend on killing people, instead of feeding them.
If we choose not to do it now, i don't see how we can make UBI work in the future.
> and they have all of the guns and trucks and toxic masculinity culture that requires survivalism and toughness and defending muh freedom
Nothing will happen so long as the people are gleefully fighting one another, but if we reach a point where populism rules across the board and bridges the left/right culture war, things could get exciting. There is a reason the elites are spending so much effort stoking culture rivalry in the US.
There are plenty of other countries, with different cultures, and different expectations for how things should work. France for instance, is known for having unions that strike, frequently. Socialism isn't a evil concept in some countries. When America has been co-opted by various factions, why would it be up to the "Yanks" to show the rest of the world the way?
The French government will be bankrupt in the next couple of years. Over the last 100 years, France went from one of the richest countries in the world to somewhere with a median (not mean) GDP that is considerably lower than Mississippi's. Probably not the example you think it is.
That being said, if nobody has a job, nobody can afford the stuff being sold then everything collapses. Acting like that isn't true isn't rational either.
> The French government will be bankrupt in the next couple of years.
Their finances aren't in great shape, but if you think the ECB will let that happen, I have a bridge to sell you. (And the need for a bailout is far from a foregone conclusion.)
> a median (not mean) GDP
That's not a measure anyone uses for anything, so not sure how that's relevant.
But sure, let's go with the idea that Mississippi is "better off" on this metric. GDP per capita (which is a mean, not a median) is not a good proxy for standard of living. A French person working 35 hours per week living modestly might be much happier with less money than someone from Mississippi working 3 jobs, 6 or 7 days a week, for a total of 60 hours, who doesn't really have the time for "living" at all, modestly or otherwise.
(I'm being generous to you when I say "might be" there. What I really mean is "almost certainly is".)
> I think they'd employ some number of humans for entertainment.
The key point is: some number. Chances are you and everyone you love won't make the cut.
If 10 billionaires control the all the capital of the planet, they could exterminate 99% of humanity and not even notice any change in their day to day life. 83 million NPCs are more than enough for 10 people.
At that point, why bother to employ? If we have no recourse, no power to resist them (as must be the case in that scenario), then they might as well just keep us as pets.
Has anybody written about this ? in fiction or as report even. It seems obvious the current techbros are only thinking about a radical shift where labour changes meaning and human societies are irrelevant for those who owns datacenter and have pocket deep enough to buy the rest when people can't sustain their own lives.
> They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock
Don't you? For the cost of less than a new car, I can have a live-in butler/maid? I'd sell my car and downgrade to afford one at $25k if it actually worked. I can't afford to and don't want to hire a human to live in my house and do all my chores for me, 24/7, plus the overhead and the headache and liability, but a robot for $25k is pretty tempting. Never have to fold laundry or the dishes again? Or remember that it's Tuesday and I was supposed to take out the trash, right when I'm in bed?
It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma and everyone's vocally defecting.
If you're folding the dishes, I agree that you should probably get someone else, perhaps a robot, to replace you there. ;)
But overall I absolutely agree. I don't want (and can't afford) a household employee; if I could buy a $25k appliance that would reliably take care of all my household chores, I wouldn't even need to think about it.
Is it defecting if you get a robot to do your dishes, instead of doing them yourself? As you said, it's not taking a job from anyone, just freeing up time for yourself. If anything, this specific use-case sounds like it would be a major boon for nation-wide productivity with little downside.
We have had that for decades, its called a dishwasher. Its so common that its a compound word instead of dish washer. I feel like there are basic concepts of psychology and history that you don't understand if this is the point you want to make.
Sure, but I still have to clear the dishes from the table, dump any larger food scraps into the compost bin, and put them in the dishwasher. Then when it's full I have to run the dishwasher, and empty it when it's finished, putting everything away in its place. When I'm running low on dishwasher detergent I have to remember to pick some up the next time I go to the store (or put in a grocery delivery order). Sure, that's all still much less labor than washing the dishes manually myself, but I'm always in favor of taking even more labor off my plate (heh).
(Also there are circumstances where I'm cooking and will manually wash some things, like perhaps a set of tongs, because I know that the other two sets of tongs we own are dirty and already in the dishwasher. I know I'll need the tongs while cooking tomorrow's meal, but the dishwasher won't be full enough before then to warrant running the load yet. This sort of situation actually comes up quite frequently for me.)
Obviously I'm talking about the part of dishwashing that's not already automated, and the compound word comes from way before — a "dishwasher" was a job long before it was a machine. What were you saying about basic concepts of history?
The dishwasher does automate a large part of doing the dishes, but not the whole of it. A Jetsons-style robot maid would also be able to clear the dishes from the table, restock the cabinets, and set the table before dinner - in addition to doing the cooking, cleaning, lawncare, etc.
It maybe wasn't the least-automated part of the chores, but if anything, doesn't that strengthen their point? We as people were happy to automate our dishwashers, and would probably spend more money on other chore-automations as well (see: Roomba, robotic lawn mowers, etc).
Uhm, no? What if it has a glitch or bug or gets hacked and wants to hurt me or someone else? I'd rather do all of that myself than own a movable bot that could crush my head like a melon for any reason while I'm sleeping, no thank you
This is just a function of the overton window. A couple decades ago most people probably thought a robot vacuum (with a camera on it!) was creepy, but now they're fairly commonplace, or at least well-accepted[0].
The bot safety issues are certainly real, but that's a trust/confidence hump to get over, and robotics companies will get there eventually.
[0] Even considering we know employees of the manufacturers have abused the camera access!
That depends if AI gets to the point where it can fully replace workers, as opposed to just augmenting them. I heard Alex Imas on a podcast recently talking about how a SWE can be running 10 agents to be 10x as productive, then that SWE is more valuable so firms should want to hire more SWEs and pay them more.
That works for a while, but what if AI gets to the point where it can manage the 10 agents as well as the SWE? Of course you could say the SWE can now manage 10 agents who each manage 10 agents so he's even more valuable, but that has to break down eventually. You don't need 1,000 SWEs each managing 10,000 agents - you hit a bottleneck in the ability to give them work fast enough (even if you need the SWE at the top at all).
I think it's easier to think of from the perspective of blue collar labor. It's further out there time-wise, but let's assume we get a humanoid robot that can do any labor a human can do. It costs $25,000 and maybe a couple grand a year to operate. Works 20 hours a day when it's not charging.
The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots - there's already a GC doing that, and you can't scale building nearly the way you can scale writing code because of physical constraints. When the robot I've described exists, a huge swathe of the population is going to be unemployed. There's no competitor to hire them because the competitors just get robots too.
>The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots
Some of them will. You've slashed construction labor cost to 5% of what it was before. With that and a similar reduction throughout the supply chain means we're going to start building a lot more stuff.
Even if we start building a lot more stuff, you still don't need those construction workers. You have a GC to manage the whole project, aided by an AI who's handling scheduling/operations/logistics. You have a detailed plan to build against.
So why do you need former construction workers to manage the robots? Why can't the GC and management AI run the whole thing?
Maybe there's some scenario where you still need something like one licensed person from each skilled trade to be responsible for the robots employing those trades. But there's no way you need everyone who worked on building sites managing robots, no matter how much construction you're doing.
That's pretty far away from where we're at. If things do get that far it's not going to be a problem. Eventually the robots will murder us in our sleep and our worries will be over.
For which poor unemployed people who just got laid off due to AI are the Robots building house for? More abstractly, for whom are we creating are these productivity miracles and surplus for. Does a rich person suddenly need a million iPhones for himself and himself alone?
"Past performance is not indicative of future results". People stopped being in farms because automation freed manual labor and people could move up in the value chain. We are getting to the point where there will be no chain left to go up to, at all. If you don't see the difference, I don't know what else to tell you.
this time we're automating humans that can do anything that humans can do.
you should be asking what happened to the horses which were replaced by the tractors.
the answer is elsewhere in the thread, their pop dropped 88% or w/e, we didnt need them anymore.
"Becoming viable" does not mean "automatically put into execution". You still need to take overall demand in account.
Consider this: if demand was not a factor, anyone living in a moderately wealthy country would be practicing labor arbitrage and sending money to poorer places. Ask yourself why this doesn't happen.
1) corporations moved manufacturing to where labor was cheap, but brought back the goods to sell them. This only works for as long as there is healhy consumer market somewhere. If AI really gets to automate most white-collar work, there will be no healthy consumer market left anywhere around the world.
2) The essay touches on this: any of the previous offshoring / job displacement movements happened on a much longer timeframe than what is being pushed now by the powers that be.
In a world where it’s dramatically cheaper to build infrastructure like roads, power, and plumbing, lots more land becomes desirable as a place to live.
Take Phoenix, for example, once air conditioning became cheap and pervasive.
The argument isn’t that AI brings the labor cost down to 0 in isolation. It brings the labor cost of the same amount of production down. So you get more production (more things = more supply -> lower prices) out of less labor.
We don't need "AI" to figure out that technological advances increase productivity. The problem with yout argument is assuming that increased productivity mean overall reduced costs. It does not.
Healthcare, housing, education all have gone up despite increased productivity. Then you have things that are already so automated that there is no way to make them cheaper unless sacrificing quality - food, clothing, etc.
Then we have all the types of consumer products that have prices completely decoupled from the cost of labor. No one in their right mind the "cost of labor" has any relation whatsoever with Apple charging $1000 for an iPhone and/or Motorola charging $180 for a Moto G.
Healthcare, housing, education all have gone up despite increased productivity.
The hypothesis of Baumol’s Cost Disease is that these industries are exactly where we should expect prices to rise because they’re still dependent on low-productivity-growth human labor.
We were talking about infrastructure costs under increasing labor productivity. Now what are we talking about?
If the premise is that AI won’t improve productivity in industries like healthcare, education, and housing construction, then why are we worried about “the dead economy”?
No. You are getting it backwards. The premise is: even if AI improves productivity, we the people are not going to benefit from it.
The mistake you are making is that you are assuming that a system where productivity per unit of labor is higher automatically translates into increased global output. It does not. This idea of a dead economy theory is precisely the concern we are heading to a world where machines can make practically everything on the cheap, but it won't matter because the moneyed class won't need to satisfy the demands of the general populace.
So we have a bunch of billionaires sitting around, surveying a world where a much smaller amount of labor will produce a much larger amount of output, and they collectively decide not to hire that labor or spend capital on the technology that generates that output in combination with that labor because… they have enough money already?
No, ffs. You are missing that if they can do whatever they want with just "a small amount of labor", then the whole system gets to a point where Capital becomes the bottleneck for global productivity. People can not be trained faster than the machines can be created, so all that capital will go to an increasingly smaller number of workers.
To illustrate the point: Facebook laid off thousands of developers at the same time that it was hiring AI researchers, paying them tens of millions of dollars as a signing bonus.
Its also the 'labor theory of value'. That's the economic theory that Communism is based on. It has never been accurate and wasn't even considered legitimate during Marx's lifetime. It has possibly the worst track record of predictions of any theory ever conceived by people. Yet somehow academics still reference it. Nobody who actually is impacted by making the wrong economic predictions does though. Funny that...
> where subways cost 1/20th of what they do today.
1) We are talking about reducing the cost of labor, not overall costs.
2) Your logic only applies in the micro, not on the macro. If the cost of producing one thing goes down while population keeps their purchasing power, then what you are saying would make sense. The whole point of the article is that accelerated automation can bring a scenario where the cost of producing "things" would go down, but the economically active population would shrink drastically.
Someone will always have to prompt the AI, it can't just do that on its own. Or rather, maybe it can (you can just prompt it to "kindly do the needful" in a completely unspecific way) but the results won't be any good.
Sure, but the question is at what layer of abstraction do you have to prompt the AI?
You used to have to prompt the AI by starting to write the actual line of code you want, which it could autocomplete. Then you had to prompt it to write simple scripts or functions. The amount of scope you can prompt keeps getting bigger and bigger. Eventually, you have a PM or a CEO just telling it what features you need. Maybe it's a PM and a designer and a CEO and a CTO, but it will eventually get to the point where the number of people you need to do the prompting shrinks orders of magnitude from company sizes today. Maybe you just give the AI some money, prompt it to start a money-making business, and it goes out and does the same research and analysis that a seasoned entrepreneur would do to find an opportunity then builds out the business from there.
> the results won't be any good
Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on that. The trend over time has been that the results from prompting AI to do things have gotten better. I used to prompt it to build me dashboards and it would fail spectacularly. Now it one-shots them. Maybe the code is terrible (though doesn't matter for me, I'm the only one using it and I can verify the dashboard content is correct), but if the trend continues, it'll get better. Maybe the trend won't continue, but I've yet to come across a good explanation of why AI capabilities will just top out and cease improving forever.
It's not about "this time's different" but rather "the recovery will take too long to an individual" if AI is indeed replacing humans as currently hyped by the model companies.
There's no evidence that AI is replacing human jobs to any real extent. We're just seeing AI being blamed for ordinary layoffs that have more to do with broad economic instability.
Yes they have. They cost more. Why keep the senior curmudgeon employee around when the Jr who costs half as much is deemed sufficiently competent? And the Jr isn't going to quit in solidarity either, they're just happy to have not gotten cut.
This seems a bit like a corollary to "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". On the timescales that matter to an individual it won't matter if the eventual conclusion is that AI can't fully replace workers, because companies are going to do their damnedest to try.
I mean you could have written this article for mechanization word for word, I think the difference is that its coming for the white collar folks this time, who also are the folks writing the think pieces and media.
You couldn't have. Mechanical machines couldn't organise themselves into human-free supply chains that are economically productive for the owners of capital. AIs could.
Any machine with an on-off switch is functionally an organized and automated work flow.
If I understand correctly youre talking about reactive adjustments, but thats not completely accurate either. There is a lot of projection that this MAY happen, but currently, the capital owner/stewards are going to constantly watch outputs and adjust to them based on the results. You're probably correct in that they will spend far less time doing so, but anyone with a vested outcome is going to have to adjust these things as the responsiblity for the outcome will always land on the owner not the machine.
I just meant that if I value, say, the security afforded by land that's been cleared of humans, and between them my owned AIs can deliver this as a 'surplus' outcome, just by processing resources available at low or no cost (sunlight, atmospheric gases, processed carcasses, etc.) then letting them run amuck is still 'economically valuable' to me, but doesn't require any human input, or a human counterparty. Very reductive example, but you can imagine a much more complex economy where a multitude of similar arrangements interact/compete to deliver outcomes of this type.
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand.
IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop. Should I hire every mechanic that walks in the door, forever? No, absolutely not; there is an optimal number of mechanics to hire for the demand for services.
If somehow a tool comes to exist that doubles the productivity of mechanics then laying off half the mechanics is next.
The most productive places in the world are also those with the highest incomes and wealth generation. "Excess productivity" is either temporary or a sector-specific phenomenon, it doesn't apply to society as a whole.
This is true; and in time it's entirely possible that AI makes us an overall wealthier and more productive society. However, from the article:
> “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
The redundant professionals will need to find other ways of generating wealth from their productivity, and that may not be possible in a reasonable amount of time. Not in the scope of their remaining lifetime.
We will most likely redefine what we mean by human "productivity". A plumber might be considered a highly productive worker, whereas many intellectual professions will partially refocus on effectively prompting AI and assessing/revising its output.
Temporary excess productivity can linger a very long time and sector-specific excess productivity can still be broadly damaging. Detroit and southeastern Michigan were devastated by the collapse of American automotive industry in the '00s, taking something like 10-15 years before starting to recover.
Michigan was doing okay until around the late 1990s. The real downslide started out after that; Detroit became the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2013.
You can aim to expand your addressable markets. A small town is a small market. Open a second location in a nearby town. Lower profit margins to undercut competition.
Well, it's the same problem with all sorts of free-market capitalism and derivatives. They all believe there's infinite "somewhere else" that resources can come from, or the customers, or the funding etc. But reality is very much finite. And so instead of the theoretical equilibrium we get monopolies and collusion to manipulate markets.
The article, actually, addresses your claims:
> The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two. The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
So, the author believes that the problem with your reasoning that it will take a long time for the niches you are talking about to be filled (lifetime, maybe more), meanwhile things will look quite bad for most those involved.
I am even less optimistic than the author. The new aspect of this workforce displacement is the centralization. Of course, previous advances in automation also caused a degree of centralization, but AI is posed to become super-centralized if you will. There will be just a handful of suppliers and nobody will be able to challenge them, similar to situation we have with microprocessors today. Needless to say this is absolutely not a healthy situation for the world's economy.
Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced.
I can’t imagine what claim this sentence is intending to describe.
Obviously individual workers can’t “recover” their wages: 70 years later they’re no longer working.
It also can’t make sense as a recovery of labor in displaced industries, since those are largely gone once they’re supplanted by labor-saving technology.
It means it took 70 years for the average income and employment rate of socio-economic class of people who used to work those jobs (presumably formulated as some percentile of society by income) to rise back to the the same level.
Employment rates are weird bags of demographics and culture (think women’s rate of workforce participation) as well as economics, so I’m not sure how you extract that particular signal.
70 years to restore income levels across any strata is still not plausible: Even godawful economic growth would compound way too much. Maybe relative share of income for some decile? But now we’re back to asking why we should care about that if absolute real incomes are rising.
I read it, but I don't think it's compelling. "the short run can be a lifetime" is kind of a throw away phrase not backed by evidence.
We've seen rapid growth of knowledge work at the same time as increased productivity, and there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason that greater productivity will reverse this persistent trend.
the number of functioning machine shop in the US in large urban areas has been plummeting for decades. where there were 50 there are now 3. the customers for machine shops are large production facilities with a need for custom parts. they're all gone. now its little bits of rnd work and some custom architectural design kind of stuff. and the margins are punishing.
ok, so machine shops aren't really central to the argument, but the collapse of demand is.
They're all gone completely, or gone as in moved to where they don't have to suffer ridiculous real estate costs? There are approximately 50 machine shops within a stone's throw of my place out in the middle of nowhere. I haven't been around long enough to truly know if that is more or less than the historical norm, but best I can tell it is a growing sector locally.
Kinda. What's the lead time on my high precision metal part that needs to be cut on a 6-axis lathe? Or a metal 3d print? Neither of those machines are cheap, so not only is lead time astronomical, profit on them is also pretty great for the machine shop, which implies there's room for more machine shops. There's a lot of red tape for the orders I see, (CMMI etc) so maybe AI will help machine shops get that and be competitive.
that last point doesn't really follow. yes, you can do you ok if you have the kind of expertise to actually make that high end part and the position in the market to get the kind of work, but I think you overstate the margins and its certainly not the 'are you going to drop people or just increase your volume' argument that gp was making.
Well yeah, I'm not gp. My point is that, sure, machine shop count has gone down, but machine shop capacity, with conditions, currently has a 16 week lead time and high prices. If the argument is "there is enough machine shop output that everyone is going to get fired after the robots come" I'm saying there's a long way to go. And the same argument for writing software applies to machine shops. There's more to programming than writing code itself. There's room to grow upwards and meet the customer more where they're at so the machine shop isn't an extension of a robot that does cut x at point y and bends at z, but with the design process of the part before it gets to that.
fair enough, I don't participate really in the high end market, so I don't have any real insight. does seem like something of a market failure. the two things that stand out to me though is the very high capital cost that probably adds friction to investment, but probably more the people skills. there are tens of thousands of banger low precision machinists like me out of work, but outside of Europe where do the high-precision machinists actually come from? particularly one that shade over into material science and would be effective design partners. are those mechanical engineers that just specialized?
>It is possible to have excess productivity?
Isn't this what happened with the tech hiring during Covid? And also many of the big tech companies were hiring people just to make sure their competitors didn't have them?
You're assuming that the free market will do what it's meant to do. But there is also a reality that there are plenty of structural market failures in the economy that arise from existing capital endowments, regulatory capture, and just the permanent movement of equilibrium in the social system. The point is that the state of the economy as a whole is path-dependent. The article, in my reading, is a warning that the inertia accumulated from this current AI hype cycle might push us into the watershed of an undesirable steady state, where there simply is no capital available for new entrants.
I guess it becomes different if instead of hiring more people to do more - all investment goes into more AI credits.
Then again, as long as there is more demand and there's a limited supply of compute you can still continue to hire people as well. If we assume that the market has infinite demand for whatever AI + humans can produce together both will have jobs.
If demand is limited and compute is plentiful it should make sense for a company to try to have AI do as much of the work as possible.
Does every business scale that way? Sure video games for example have only required more people and resources to develop games as the ability to create larger scale games have increased. But does that really apply to accounting? Not a rhetorical question.
99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't.
Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing...
Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing...
We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and crying that's it's still falling every day since.
If AI actually succeeds at its promise, it won't be 99% of engineers and accountants, it will be 99% of nearly every profession that doesn't require physical labor. And if the AIs figure out how to cheaply build reliable human-like robots, that's it for the physical labor jobs too.
Our society is not set up to function with 99% unemployment (even 99% unemployment in "only" non-physical-labor jobs), even in an optimistic post-scarcity environment.
I remember sitting is a business class in school. The professor gave a story of how computerized spreadsheets changed the nature of accounting. Spreadsheets used to be done by hand on boards/paper. If a mistake was discovered, cascading recalculations needed to be done by hand. It was perfectly normal for large companies to have multiple teams duplicating work, then reconciling differences.
When computerized spreadsheets came about, mistakes could easily be fixed and cascading recalculations were almost instantly done. This was a game changer. Over the short term, accounting departments shrank or stagnated until the industry caught up and more sophisticated accounting started to grow the industry again. It's not coincidental that the 1980s brought in huge change to the financial industry when it did. Deregulation played a role, but so did the fact that computers exploded the productivity of the industry.
I'm not saying AI will do the same with developers, but there will always still be developers with a different set of skills, much like the way accountants don't necessarily need to be able to count in there head anymore.
I'm just pointing out that even with mobile phones becoming dramatically better over the past decade, that hasn't really led to the transformation of mobile apps (outside of games) that take advantage of those resources. If anything, developers have arguably become more lazy and we are seeing lower quality software being deployed because people now have enough RAM even for your 500mb static webpage. Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?
The odd thing about games is that there are quite literally a handful that push the envelope (Genshin Impact stands almost alone, a few other Chinese and Korean titles come close) in terms of graphics, art, gameplay and story complexity and then there are thousands and thousands of slop games that you can hardly call "games".
Also, this entire analysis comes from thinking that software is like manufacturing. Its not, its like music publishing. That's where this entire tower of logic comes crashing down. More software isn't necessarily better, many cases, its worse. What we (most people) want is better quality software, not more.
> Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?
But which skill is atrophying? As a programmer I'm really bad at converting human readable code into machine code because we have compilers to do that for us. I can't remember the last time I had to run "ld" by hand. That skill totally atrophied. But at the same time, AI has made me more ambitious. I'm trying projects I wouldn't have before and even completing some of them! I can't talk for "people", broadly, but I believe most people want to be their best and do good and do things.
I can run the same compiler (or assembler) with the same options on the same source code 100 times, and I will get bit-for-bit identical output 100 times (well, aside from the compiler/linker inserting time/date stamps into metadata). Most people will not need to care about judging the output of the compiler. Only rarely will the compiler or assembler do something incorrect, which will require someone with specialized skills to debug and fix.
If I give the same LLM the same prompt 100 times, I will get 100 different programs written. Some of them will not work at all. Some of them will work, but will have major bugs or performance issues. Some of them will work well, but have subtle issues or edge cases that aren't handled properly. A few of them will work perfectly, or at least adequately enough for the task at hand.
Every single time you give the LLM instructions to do something, you need someone qualified and capable of reviewing the output to make sure it works properly. And while I would say you need someone reviewing the source code, even if you're just vibe-coding, you still need someone to test the program and make sure it works, and even that requires some specialized skill.
Maybe LLMs (or their next-gen replacements) will eventually become good enough that you'll get the same output every time for those 100 prompts, or at least close enough and functional enough for it not to matter. But we're not there yet, and I think that's a big huge "maybe". In the meantime, skill atrophy among programmers is a real, reported phenomenon with the current crop of LLMs. That is worrying.
But your last sentence is talking about something completely different: the current reality, which most of the tech CEOs and AI boosters refuse to engage with.
For those of us in the fact-based world, the idea that AI will replace most human jobs is still just a talking point. It's a future possibility (not a future certainty).
But it's enough of a possibility that we need to be talking about it, and not just airily dismissing the concern as something that will obviously work itself out without any real problem.
Even if 99% of the current programmers go the way of 99% of people who were farming in 1750, you have to remember that a huge percentage of the farmers who were made redundant by industrialization and modern farming methods fell into destitution; many died penniless. That's not something that seems either wise or compassionate to just handwave away!
Farmers prior to this time, in particular, would have passed their lands on to their children, and that would have been a vital source of livelihood for them.
In every agricultural->industrial transition I’m aware of, the kids are desperate to get out of farming and into the higher paying, less arduous industrial jobs.
> can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired
How much of the current tech world is actually about competing based on innovation/quality/merit? I'd wager not much. The circular big AI deals we're used to seeing now are not a new thing - that shit has been the standard playbook for VCs and their startups for a long time. That being said, I don't see why a bunch of these swampy tech companies could not be easily outcompeted on the tech/product quality side.
>Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
The market is probably already at the limits of its size in most industries.
Great, you can ship app updates faster. Does that get you more customers? Nope. Is there now more money in the pot for everyone who is more productive to also make more money? Hell no. The pie we are competing for is finite.
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people?
I think this is directionally right, but I think there might be a scaling/organization problem for companies, and that the more likely outcome is that _small companies_ are going to start punching way over their weight class.
I suspect the opposite. Products don't win because they are better. They win because monopolies control the sales/regulators. Bit occasionally the big companies fucked up the actual product development so badly an upstart could emerge. With ai they will quickly just copy any success and all the other big orgs will just buy the AI ripoff version.
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
For starters, because productivity is already consuming the planet multiple times over. I think there is also indication the human mind is at its limits in terms of consumption and alienation from evolutionary legacy. And the economy seems quite broken due to centralization and wealth distribution.
I mean, nobody is arguing that there won't be some sort of "ecological" balance... People are concerned about the nature of that balance and if it's serving humanity.
Because AI now can do what only humans could do previously: analyze open ended problems and make decisions.
There's the horse argument the author touches upon: eventually, technology got to the point where there weren't any profitable reasons to keep a horse.
I'm just articulating the argument, not saying it's a done deal.
AI can actually make decisions based on open ended information, and if it gets good enough it can fully replace humans.
Will that happen? I don't know. But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance.
"But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance."
Right, but doing that is slower and more expensive than just doing it by hand according to independent research. Even weirder, the average perception is that it makes coding 20% faster while at the same time making it 20% slower. And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
Could that change, though? It's 20% slower now, but could it be 10% faster than the human in the future? 20% faster? Or even 50% or 80% faster? I really don't know, but it's plausible.
Even today, consider that the GP's quote is trading human time/energy for external time/energy (even if the latter is greater). Manually doing a complex refactoring can be a tedious, annoying, draining, error-prone process. I don't enjoy it, and after doing it, I'll be annoyed and prickly and not feeling a bit intellectually dulled. If it takes me "only" 2 hours to do it myself, but takes the LLM 2 hours and 24 minutes, I might logically make that trade if it meant I could keep myself sharp and un-annoyed, and also perhaps get in some light reading while the LLM is doing its thing.
(In fact I am literally doing that exact thing right now, having an LLM do a refactoring while I write this comment. Maybe dicking around on HN isn't the best use of my time, but it's better than tediously shuffling existing code around, even if I can do that faster than the LLM.)
> And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
I see you've found a way to speculatively insult me to save time. (You'll be glad to know that I'm not in that camp -- again, articulating an argument.)
Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer?
In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic.
US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?