How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.
Not at all. I doubt LLMs will result in a 90x drop in the overall labor workforce. The agricultural shift was likely greater than the shift due to LLMs will be.
Regarding US agricultural labor displacement.
* It happened over a period of 200 years or so in the USA. [0] That's a key difference.
* Starting in the late 1800s manufacturing rose to a peak of 38% in 1944. [1] This absorbed a lot of the available labor, often at better rates of pay than farm work. It's a common pattern in industrializing nations where manufacturing absorbs labor freed up by more productive agriculture. Manufacturing labor is no longer growing, so that cannot help with employment.
That's not to say it was pleasant for all concerned. I would argue, however, that black swan events like the Dust Bowl caused more disruption and trauma than the steady displacement of farm labor by technology.
[0] https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-ag...
[1] https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work...
Edit: clarity
The pitch for AI is that it's affordable at the insane valuations because it replaces labour.
It takes work out of the labour market entirely — fewer salaries means more money can be freed up that can go to the giant intelligence tap.
Not just some sectors — really all non-manual work sectors at once. Isn't that what the e/acc guys were open about at the beginning? Learn AI or you won't have a job?
Sam Altman was so open about this that he funded a UBI study.
source?
Tractors are tools to make hard boring labor easier.
Even after the mechanical loom was created, figuring out the next most important problem to work on was a job that humans did.
Unless you believe there's some hard limit on AI intelligence that will constrain it below the intelligence of a particular earthbound hairless ape, then eventually AI will be perfectly sufficient and probably better at figuring out the next most important problem to work on.
Ta-da, humans are completely removed from the value chain. Neither the loom nor the tractor could not do such a thing.
The fear is this will replace engineers, scientists, accountants, lawyers, service workers, etc, etc all within a small time window.
Investment types have shown repeatedly that their primary concern is money, not workers. There is no reason to believe that those currently in power are open to sharing their wealth or influence.
If you stayed on the land you had to work, not quite like a slave, but close. And if you disagreed with this, the government had an army that convinced you ...
Factories offered a better alternative than that, and yes, mostly because the agricultural option was just not open, and just not worth it. They also offered a great density of people that made the labor movement possible in the first place.
https://www.news.com.au/sport/carnage-at-start-of-robot-mara...
We might have to get off the computer, and we might have to rethink how we organize the world economically, but there is still work to be done everywhere.
I reject this argument as bad faith from the start.
And how many years did that take to happen? 3 or 4? That's what the AI companies are promising. 89% of you will be unemployed in the next couple years. All that wealth you'd be making from working will now be going to the company owners and you're out on your own. Good luck!
AI is an interesting experiment with some real-world applications, but it’s no tractor or mechanical loom... not yet, at least, and it’s far from clear that it ever will be.
As things stand today, AI is not the future. It’s a tool with genuine uses that is being marketed as a revolution.
The industrial revolution came along with massive production of goods that people need and desire. Even then, there was still a huge amount of pushback (it still echoes in a lot of communities today!).
Do you see any differences compared to the AI revolution we're being sold?
Do you not think the ultimate outcome was worth it?
2. If 1 happens, it is foreseeable that they don't even need that many slaves to tend to the machines, so not many "new" jobs created I'm afraid.
Comparing that to the computer -- yes if you are a typist you are doomed -- but they still need someone to type -- just not on a typewriter. And there are suddenly countless new requirements (e.g. video games, CGI, etc.) getting created from thin air. I don't really see this happening for AI -- like, do you see any NEW requirements getting created? Sure we are getting endless AI slop games/videos/fictions, but are they new? People can only consume that many products and pumping 100x into the system doesn't work -- except to make profit drop to ZERO for every ordinary creator out there.
BTW I do think there will be new requirements -- robotics combined with AI (e.g. who doesn't want a handsome husband or a beautiful wife?) -- but again it is to replace humans.
3. Apparently, accountability has dropped to a new low, since the end of the Cold War. So naturally cattle and sheep (I mean, us, ordinary people) are scared. Back then at least the elites were willing to make gestures and put up facades. Nowadays they simply don't GAF.
The 90% of workers in agriculture found jobs in industry and services.
Those industry and services will soon largely be performed by AI, with the exception of the lowest paying jobs that are hard or expensive to replace with robots (construction, plumbing, hair styling) or for which demand for actual humans is a key ingredient (prostitution, live entertainment).
So the 90% of workers in today's industry and services will find jobs in ... (fill in the blank)
The problem is, I have not read a single reasonably logical prediction of what _blank_ might be.
People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.
It's been really challenging to start companies because you need to go hire and manage a lot of people to handle lots of very different tasks. But it's becoming easier and easier everyday because AI is able to do a lot of that work.
As more people start companies, more competition will drive down prices for everything, making the things people want more accessible.
The danger arises when people want stuff but cannot afford it as there is no more work and what remains of available work (i.e. trades and sex work) is being fought over heavily, driving down the prices.
When that "cannot afford it" extends to necessary stuff such as housing and food too much, eventually there will be a revolution once people are fed up.
The US is in a particularly bad spot here - in contrast with other countries that experience utter poverty (e.g. Afghanistan), most of the population lives in urban areas and has zero opportunity to at least engage in subsistence farming. Whoops.
The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.
The argument implies that there's some kind of balance point in there. But I'll bet it's not one where the general populace is living remotely well.
Right now, the world is making all the stuff people need and then some. Poverty and hunger, in the 21st century, are distribution problems. (And, inevitably, politics problems.)
Now, it's true that what people want exceeds what they need (almost by definition). But it doesn't exceed it by so many orders of magnitude that we're that far off from being able to produce it with what we have today.
> If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output.
there isn't infinite demand for the output. unless they're in an industry with infinity growing demand (which would be ...?), companies are not going to retain their staff and 5x their output, they are going to cut their staff by 80% and 5x their profits. we're already seeing this (not 80% but things are just getting started).
> People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff.
wanting stuff and being able to afford stuff are two very different things. if people don't have jobs, they can't buy that much stuff. This is why we will end up with a few very large and profitable providers.
> Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want.
Completely false.
> As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.
No. As long as there is continued consumption, there will be a demand for output of companies most of which will (if the promise of AI holds true) not be fulfilled by humans.
Every single expert I asked in our circle had at least serious doubts they will have jobs in 10 years. Doctors, lawyers, assistants, of course IT folks, various other white collar jobs. Of course managers with FIRE button are very anxious and feel like firing should have been done yesterday as long as resulting damage is manageable, quietly hoping they will not be also made redundant because at the end same logic applies to them and they often add little on top of simple yes/no decisions sucked out of a thumb.
How disconnected somebody has to be to think folks would cheer on something that will cause absolute catastrophe for them and their families. Literally everybody groks it. Nobody expects employers to have any empathy when they could be removed.
I view AI research and dev folks in similar vein as nazi bureaucrats - quietly working efficiently behind the desk, making vast machineries work, without a care in the world on impacts of such work on fellow man.
One hopefully positive aspect is - prices are rising, and when SHTF they should be on level which makes them long term sustainable, making obvious how costly such replacement would be. But I think it will still be worth it in high cost societies unless governments add regulatory & financial friction, in similar vein ie chinese cars have high import fees. If that fails, resulting situation will be a catastrophe since I don't believe in some form of UBI promise as sustainable long term situation, people are way too nasty, greedy etc.
