Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest.
It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
Technical progress would be fantastic if the benefits didn't go mainly to the top. I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere with the help of some robots. Or have them do all your housework. In principle, this is great, but our society is not set up for a lot of people not working while the technology is progressed by a relatively small number of highly qualified people.
I am not sure where this is going but there will be some large changes to society needed if technology keeps progressing at current speed.
There's a simple litmus test for these sort of nearish future dystopias - how long before you have an 'AI plumber' or an 'AI electrician'? I'm not just listing random skilled trades, but listing jobs that are extremely complex, 100% context sensitive in a way that just doesn't generalize well, requires a mixture of high dexterity and high strength, and a million other things. To say nothing of the numerous [oft extremely expensive] task specific tools you also need.
And those are only two of the jobs for maintaining households. If those two things aren't automated, we're not having these 'robo households' - period. Instead I think the future holds mostly the present - glorified clappers [1] and ad-tech masquerading as some sort of something that mostly does a mediocre to awful job of whatever it's supposed to be, Alexa.
The availability of (mostly) accurate, in depth information snout any rabbit hole you can think of has certainly impacted some industries. There’s an entire generation of doctors who are infuriated by “Doctor Google” And another generation of doctors who embrace the ability to quickly research topics and fact check suggestions online collaboratively with their patients.
But do you actually do any DIY? And is it more than you would have done without watching hours of it on YouTube?
I have at times watched a lot of videos of people making stuff or doing DIY. I suspect like 99% of the audience of those videos, they are just entertainment.
not OP but I am forced to. Services are too expensive these days and even when you pay, the quality is usually very hit or miss. I have lost count the number of times where a mechanic does the job right but its sloppy. Even my plumber or electrician gets things done but my drive for perfection cringes at the sloppy craftsmanship. I'm not a multi millionaire so I can't get the people that supposedly made things like Apple Park. A DIYer might not be able to do every job but many of the low hanging fruit can be done well.
You need more to maintain a house, drywaller, gardener, carpenter, painter. The most important robotic help though will be cleaner and nurse. As our population ages and shrinks home help will become scarce and we'll desperately need an alternative to take care of ourselves as we age.
What houses? In Canada we stick 5 of them in every basement with no path to ownership. They’re happy to share bedrooms because it’s better than where they came from. The “underclass” of today got in early enough to own land and will be the landed gentry of tomorrow
Central BC is full of low-skill nobody boomers who happened to have affordable Vancouver starter homes. These people are driving Porsches and sipping wine thanks to their good fortune.
The most likely future is that we start standardizing infrastructure and building in a different way that’s easy for robots to use. Kind of like how cars would suck if we didn’t have roads and Benjamin Franklin couldn’t have predicted power plants and wires to every home. Then people who can’t afford the new stuff will keep paying plumbers but there’s a slow path to get rid of them. The old stuff will always be around but much less important.
I expect new “robo friendly” roads will be the first example but of course homes could do the same.
Think like how the Catholic Church never disappeared but the rest of the world moved on around it. We will never get rid of context sensitive plumbing and electrical work but it just won’t really matter
> Think like how the Catholic Church never disappeared but the rest of the world moved on around it
What does this mean? The world didn't start Catholic and gradually reduce its Catholicism over time. There are apparently about 1.4bn Catholics out there[0].
The Catholic church once decided which kings and princes could marry which queens and princesses, which alliances would be allowed and which wouldn't. Now it's nothing but a shadow of its former self.
I don't think we're that far away but I also think it looks different than humanoid robots.
I can see a drain plumbing system that maps out a new construction home and some sort of automated robot that builds out large sections of pipe. It wouldn't completely eliminate the plumber. But it'd change it from something like measuring, cutting, and gluing 100 times to walking around with a camera for 5 minutes and then gluing 10 things together.
Well, there's going to be less of those. As construction industry is further incentivised to use more efficient methods and materials for their plumbing, driven by the ever-competitive housing market (that would likely see a crash in our lifetime, you know?) making the point moot. I think nobody is delusional that there's blue ocean in plumbing, or some hidden plumbing Renaissance of human labour. Do people even want to do manual plumbing in the first place?
The unions only protect employees from the employer, not the market. The point of contention here is whether modern-day trade school could ever provide that which they say they do—career security, that is. Nobody dreams about becoming a plumber when they're little. Clue
We do, however, have computer assisted plumbers, electricians, and other technicians. With nothing more than YouTube one can fix appliances and cars, or do some DIY home improvement, and the projects that are possible are much more involved than they were in the old days. It's very hard to pick up these skills from a book, but if there's a video to walk through the process - the projects become possible.
I have four books that I got from my dad - one for construction and repairs, one for electrical, one for plumbing, and one for landscaping. They’re in simple English with excellent illustrations. Using those books, I’ve been able to fix/improve pretty much everything in my house for ten years.
Could you list the titles/author of these books? I'd actually really like to get more into DIY home improvement, and having a starting reference like this would be really valuable
The electrical and plumbing books are from a series from Home Depot called "1-2-3": "Plumbing 1-2-3" and "Wiring 1-2-3". I love them but some other posters have shared books that look even better; I plan to check them out. The construction book is "Modern Carpentry" by Willis H. Wagner. I can't find the landscaping book - haven't needed that one as much - but in my stack I noticed Reader's Digest's "Home Improvements Manual" which I've also used quite a bit.
It's still a human doing it and not an AI or robot. All of these jobs are not uniform enough for a robot or AI to be able to handle everyone's uniquely built house.
you also got standardized parts and plug-in systems that use them; standardized tools that were available for a reasonable cost; and you have basic health and mobility
Absolutely. It will be a while before AI is the absolute replacement, AI will enable the people in these professions to do faster, better (hopefully) work.
120 years ago 40% of Americans were farmers, today that number is under 2%.
That technical progress resulted in a few companies and farm conglomerates becoming incredibly wealthy. But the benefits that we all received was we didn't have to toil in a field, and we get fresh beef on every corner.
The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive.
> The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive.
The wealth gap was growing since 1980. Is the median person better today when the median person cannot afford a college education or a house?
Both of those were easily afforded in the 80s.
Also remember: the average job didn't require a college education back then either. College has become a gatekeeper due to its rising costs and diminishing returns.
That's due to the post-war boom. The book Capital in the 21st Century goes over this, that the period between 1950 - 2000 was an anomaly for the US that cannot be replicated, yet people bring up this stat as if it were normal.
The average person didn't have a college education in the 1980s. Rates of educational attainment have skyrocketed. So obviously a lot more people spend a lot more money to be university-educated than did in the 1980s. Maybe people put more value on education today?
Students expect a lot more services from universities today. They expect regular formative assessments. They expect various support services. They expect warm, air conditioned buildings without draughts. They expect healthcare, mental health support, disability services, and expensive facilities for everything: projectors and screens and computers and everything.
Could that also be part of the drive of cost? The services definitely are, theyre a big driver of the increase in admin staff at universities.
The cost of education is pretty irrelevant anyway because nobody actually pays it. You get a loan. That is paid by someone else: you, later. But young men and women heading off to university don't have a moment where they have to give up the opportunity to go because they don't have the money.
Why is “affording a house” the marker of a success? I would say just the opposite. Owning a home decreases mobility and the ability to move to where the jobs are.
That being said, the home ownership rate in the US is 65% and almost anyone who wants to go to college can via loans and scholarships.
Only around 40% of people in the US have a college education. But that doesn’t mean that the other 60% are homeless and starving.
Then cultural, as we see now, there is very much an anti-intellectual anti college bias by a major user of people in the country.
Ok, 'having that much money (or credit worthiness to borrow it) regardless of what you do with it', then?
Many people don't want to be itinerant, they want a settled home to make their own and enjoy for a long time if not life. 'Forever home' is a phrase and a positive one because that is a goal people have.
And those same people who want their “forever home” and aren’t willing to move to where the jobs are unemployed and underemployed.
I want a million dollars a year income. No one owes me that. Move to where the jobs are. I moved from my hometown in south GA the week I graduated from college because there were no jobs.
You can't both tout status-quo economic figures and then point at hypothetical alternatives. If people did as you say and took those lower-paying jobs, then the average person would be less well off -- perhaps closer to the experienced reality for many.
Well the problem, and stick with me here, is that we have people everywhere. So, as a consequence of that, having broad opportunities for everyone to earn a decent living, in more than a handful of places in the entire country, is an unambiguously good thing. And like, maybe this is pink-haired commmie-scum thought of me to say, but perhaps you shouldn't need to leave your childhood home, friends, support system, and familiar places when you finish your schooling in order to earn a living? Just because it's... really bad for you, and makes for a less stable you, which on balance over millions of times for everyone else who grew up with you, makes for a less stable society?
> I want a million dollars a year income. No one owes me that.
Why is this always where this type of conversation goes? No one has spoken about any entitlement here, but frankly, while you aren't owed a million dollars a year, I'd say you're owed something. Assuming you're working full time, I'd say you're owed at least a living wage.
What exactly does society even with a strong safety net (which I support) owe anyone? Universal healthcare? Yes. A method to enable people to have safe shelter? Yes. Even public transportation to get to jobs - Yes. I’m even in favor of affordable public college education.
But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
People today are living all across the country and not be homeless and the people who live in the poorest states repeatedly vote for politicians that want to cut government services and cut the safety nets. Right now they are cheering DOGE. Why should I feel sorry for rural America? They are getting exactly what they voted for.
We are under no obligation as a country to make sure that people who want to live the rest of there life in the MiddleOfNowhere Oklahoma can stay there for the rest of their life who don’t want to move. Besides again, these people overwhelmingly voted for politicians who don’t want to help them.
They are also cheering for the dismantling of the Education department, defunding colleges, cutting Medicaid, inflationary tariff policies, etc.
Average rent in 1980 was $243/month. Average rent in 2025 is $1397/month.
For those who cannot afford a home, life has gotten worse. For those who _can_ afford a home, their life has gotten worse. It doesn't matter where you plan to pivot this discussion, its all bad numbers for your discussion point.
Okay, so what do you propose? Rent control? That is going to decrease supply. Tariffs to encourage manufacturing in America? That’s just going to make things less affordable.
But, rural America consistently votes for politicians and people who are trying to get rid of services they need the most. They are getting exactly what they are voting for and cheering right now.
They are actively opposed to programs that would make education more affordable and cheering cutting the department of education, the post office, internet for rural America etc.
first thought is to repeat whats worked in the past - have the government comfiscate all the rental land, and charge the renters 20 bucks or so to take the deed.
It’s a “bad thing” that over half of America wants (and a majority of poorer Americans) as they cheer on two billionaires that are gutting the safety net they need the most.
But that doesn't change the argument or the truth about what is, or isn't bad for people. I recognize the political disadvantage I'm at here, but lets just stick with the truth of the matter before we get into the politics.
As I said before, I'm happy if you could just agree with me that wealth gap is a problem worth tackling.
-----
I'm not one to tackle entire problems all at once. Lets focus on things one step at a time. Lets first agree what the problems are in America. And then once we all agree on that, then we can work on them.
I swear I have said this like ten times on this website since the election, but once again, since apparently people still don't get this:
Trump won the electoral and popular votes with 312 (58%) of the former and 77,303,568 (49.81%) of the latter, which supports saying "over half" compared to Harris' 226 (42%) of the former and 75,019,230 (48.34%) of the latter. However the population of the United States is 340.1 million of which 244.6 million are voting eligible. Some quick back-of-napkin math then will tell you that while Trump took both the popular and electoral votes enough to win, that victory represents at best the will of approximately 31% of the eligible voters. And, that's strictly the popular vote, which doesn't actually win the election. Democrats struggle in every election because of decades of meddling on the part of Republicans with regard to how electoral votes are awarded and calculated, gerrymandering in every state, anti-voter, anti-minority policies that disenfranchise people on an industrial scale from the right to vote they're entitled, etc. etc. etc.
And you can say "well the Democrats should be working harder to undo it!" and I totally agree, but between the raw numbers on the ground, the well-documented Southern Strategy that has turned formerly pro-labor and progressive swathes of America into hard right strongholds via churches, and the various culture wars that have utterly melted American's brains to a great degree spearheaded by rest-in-piss Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the reactionary media sphere he helped weld into being, it is not remotely a fair statement to say that "over half of America voted for this knowing what would happen." Some did, for sure. Not half, not even fucking close.
gerrymandering is so messed up.
but speaking strictly from an outside perspective it is a gangster move.
dare i say, gangster moves back are REQUIRED.
to whoever downvoted this, you want to take the high road? when our citizens’ voting rights have been marginalized?
or are you just turned off by the word gangster?
anyway, i propose making the gerrymandering an anti—american thing. which it is.
make it the center of everything. there should be zero other issues until the ability to vote on the issues for all our people has been corrected.
i would call out every single politician that was responsible for this gerrymandering. repeatedly, over and over again until they were harassed into a retirement recluse. that is my gangster counter move proposal.
focus on the individual politicians reponsible for this and launch an all out aggressive offensive to eradicate their whole memory from America.
> What exactly does society even with a strong safety net (which I support) owe anyone? Universal healthcare? Yes. A method to enable people to have safe shelter? Yes. Even public transportation to get to jobs - Yes. I’m even in favor of affordable public college education.
Cosigned all above.
> But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
I think insofar as property is treated as an investment vehicle, everyone should be able to own something. Like, the difference between a mortgage and a rental contract in terms of personal economics couldn't be further from one another. One creates wealth, one transfers wealth and concentrates it.
"Can you afford to buy a home" as an economic metric doesn't mean necessarily that you should buy a home and you are a poor if you haven't or simply choose not to. That's fine. However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment to make that requires access to okay credit, and that once done, benefits the homeowner financially decades into the future. When I got a mortgage, an insured one with no money down even, my credit immediately went down to account for having a loan, but then right afterwards jumped almost 20% in a 3 month period, even though I did nothing differently apart from paying into a mortgage instead of paying rent.
Alternatively, reform the housing market so it functions as... well, a market. A house shouldn't necessarily appreciate in value over time, and the fact that it's expected to is... strange. One could argue that if nothing has appreciably changed in your neighborhood since you bought your house, it should sell for ballpark about the same price as what you paid for it, unless you did some substantial renovations or something. And even then... if you're just making it more suited to your tastes, probably not?
In other words make houses... well, houses. Not investment vehicles.
> People today are living all across the country and not be homeless and the people who live in the poorest states repeatedly vote for politicians that want to cut government services and cut the safety nets. Right now they are cheering DOGE. Why should I feel sorry for rural America? They are getting exactly what they voted for.
Well, a lot of them are poorly educated for starters, and insanely propagandized. They've been the singular target for Republican messaging for decades now, and as you state, they've voted for those people too who have in turn damaged their schools and pillaged their industries. And that's not even going into things like offshoring and cheap international goods that have obliterated small town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's markets out of existence.
And yes it's tremendously frustrating to talk to these people since they're seemingly ready to blame anything and everyone who isn't them, their ideology, and their own choices for the fact that their home is dying, but it's still their home, and it's still dying. And like, even if their children all do what you're telling them to do, that means millions upon millions of people about to immigrate to cities from these rural areas. So like, you gotta deal with them one way or another. They're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence.
> However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment to make that requires access to okay credit
You would be surprised at how low the credit rating you have to have to get an FHA mortgage. It only needs to be 580 to qualify for 3.5% down.
> However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment
And then later you said
> A house shouldn't necessarily appreciate in value over time, and the fact that it's expected to is... strange.
So exactly how do you keep a property from appreciating in an area that people want to be in? My parent bought their home in 1978 in South GA for $50K. According to Zillow it’s now worth $180K. Inflation adjusted it should be worth $245K (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/).
> And that's not even going into things like offshoring and cheap international goods that have obliterated small town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's markets out of existence.
So you support Trump’s inflationary policies about tariffs that will make goods more expensive in an effort to bring jobs back to the US (which won’t happen).
The world where every other country was demolished by wars and allowing the US not to have to compete with other developed nations is gone. Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back to the US. Would you be in favor of taxing those in the 90th percentile in wealthy (which you only have to make around $160K to be in) enough to support all of the other people so they can buy houses?
I think a lot of people here have absolutely no idea how “rich” they are compared to the average American and aren’t willing to give up enough of their income for “equality”.
> So like, you gotta deal with them one way or another. They're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence.
Let them suffer. They would rather vote for politicians who hate the same people they hate - non Christians (except for Jews for some reason), minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, college educated, etc. They aren’t voting against their own interest because they are “uneducated”.
They see the country eventually becoming more diverse and minority/majority and are doing everything they can to fight the inevitable.
They themselves would rather not have universal healthcare because it might help the “illegals”.
Of course other cohorts are the middle class evangelicals who think they are going to burn in hell if gay people have equal rights and Jesus won’t have any place to come back to if Israel isn’t protected. I’m not exaggerating at all to make a point.
Then you have people with money who like the status quo and don’t care about inequality.
Well inability to own a house was a major prelude to the 1930s economic and later conflict issues, particularly in western Europe (where it was more expensive in places like Britain to buy a house than even today, about 10-14x salary vs 8x today). House prices have been how they are now before: in the 1920s... (America is a bit of an exception because of all the expansion into California etc in the early 1900s).
Male crime rates correlate with economic opportunity too, so even if you don't care about the 1930s and the economic reset of WW2 and its rebuilding (and WW1, but to a lesser extent), you should care about the possibility of crimes rates continuing to regress. Serious crimes don't get solved at a much higher rate than in the past, even if they have decreased since the 90s.
Home ownership is a lagging indicator and doesn't show the whole picture: If people used to buy a home at 25 and move into it, but today they wait and live in their parents house until 30 before moving into a home, the stats might appear the same. The quality of life won't be. Home ownership rate needs context too, in some countries rent is low and house prices are high(er than the US), where many people rent through retirement, and where the implication of rising house prices is not as bad unless rent also raises.
And what exactly is wrong with living with their parents longer like most other countries do and is still prevalent among first and second generation Americans?
As I asked before, what do you propose? Rent control? Affordable higher education? I agree with that. But half of America as seen by the support of DOGE and the lack of support for student loan forgiveness of any kind don’t. America is getting exactly what they voted for - especially in the poorest, least educated states that vote Republican.
> mobility and the ability to move to where the jobs are.
This is a sign of low class status and lack of success. Rich people change the world to fit their needs. Poor people change themselves to fit the world. Leaving your entire family and social network behind for work is extremely middle class behaviour
People who own a home in 2025 have to pay $350,000ish on a wage of only $66k.
Home prices have gone up dramatically more than wages.
> In which way is the average person worse?
The amount of debt needed to own a home. Which is related to income vs cost-of-home. This ignores the fact that to reach $66k+/year salaries to begin with, you needed tens-of-thousands in student loan debt as well (which the average person in 1980 didn't need).
----------
1. Costs of education have gone up. It costs more money to be able to get a comfortable salary to begin with in today's world.
2. Younger folk are entering a very high-priced housing market, despite being already saddled with student loan debt (and thus starting off with no savings).
3. The bulk of "starting a new life" costs are car, house, and education. While yes computers and food have gotten cheaper, I would argue that car/house/education costs are the primary gatekeeper into income and/or class mobility.
-----------
For the 40%ish who cannot afford a house, it gets even worse. Rental prices in 1980 were $243/month. Do you want me to run the numbers on how screwed they've gotten? Or do you have the gist yet?
Also remember: 1980 was a recession year with high unemployment and incredible inflation. We're comparing ourselves to the WORST time of stagflation and some of the worst geopolitical crisis of that era.
The average student loan debt is around $40K in the US.
Even still, somehow, some way, the homeownership rate is the same, people aren’t going homeless and people’s needs are being met. How is that? If people are worse off meeting their Maslow hierarchy of needs?
So you ignore the literal prices of these things we're discussing.
Gotcha. I'm glad that I've forced you to ignore my argument rather than addressing the elephant in the room.
The average student loan debt in 1980 was zero because the vast majority of people could get by on free and public high school education btw. Especially if we assume that we're talking about the median income household.
To achieve this equivalent to 1980s lifestyle, we're talking what? $200k extra debt burdens on every average / median person? $40k in student debt and $150k++ in extra housing debt? Plus 4 years lost in education (as 1980s folk could work those 4 years instead). How is this a better or even equivalent life?
student loan debt is out of control. college is a money pit that will hopefully be dissolved within our lifetime. the social aspect is not worth the money.
all knowledge is on the internet. we do not need college at all. that will come to be more evident. but colleges got lots o’ money from donors to prolong their livelihoods.
Yeah the thing is there were better jobs that ex-farmers (or at least their children) could go to. I'm unconvinced that's the case this time round. Especially for unskilled people.
Is that really true 120 years ago? We have a lot of hindsight bias, but things really weren’t amazing for the average person in the US even one hundred years ago.
Today, the average person has affordable access to a lot of things that may have been luxuries, or simply didn’t exist, 100-200 years ago. Running water, electricity, internet, mobile phones, modern sanitation & infrastructure, and any number of tiny cheap devices that improve QoL.
And yes, we also have huge problems with wealth disparity and late stage capitalism.
The problem is, we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Like, we do not have widespread food scarcity problems today. Extremely advanced medical technology is available, if too expensive.
Our tech bubble is only one small part of actual technology. There is still very cool research going on in other fields. Big tech is all about personal computing & social media, and yeah, AI in this area is dubious and hard to get excited about.
At the same time, there are SO MANY other areas of technology which can have huge impacts on humanity. For example, the tech behind modern AI models has already produced breakthrough research in the field of protein folding. (https://youtu.be/P_fHJIYENdI) This will have a big impact on our ability to solve biological problems.
All that to say… let’s stop being so closed-minded about tech. Yes, the big tech social media, app, and SaaS companies are not going to give us a utopian future. But technology is way more than that. It includes robotics advances for cheap manufacturing, cheap energy from small scale hydro or even nuclear installations, advances in our ability to fight diseases and viruses (the COVID vaccine would not have been possible as quickly without modern technology), more clever & efficient construction techniques, and the list goes on and on. Tech is absolutely solving tons of real problems that we face. We can be excited for that and also not care about the next knock-off AI wrapper SaaS company.
> Is that really true 120 years ago? We have a lot of hindsight bias, but things really weren’t amazing for the average person in the US even one hundred years ago.
I didn't say they were. I said they had better jobs to go to than working in the fields. I'm not saying their lives were better than ours are now. Obviously not.
Nobody’s arguing things aren’t better in some ways than the past. But your argument amounts to what is essentially trickle down economics. The median American is getting a marginal improvement - the top .1% American has gotten an astronomical improvement.
The wealth gap increasing is a moral failure of our billionaires. They should take pride in building a better tomorrow for their fellow countrymen. And what we have now is the exact opposite of that.
It's not just a moral failure of the billionaires. Many of us live in democracies, so we are choosing (through our elected officials) that creating a few billionaires is more important than building a better tomorrow. The sorry state of things could be undone in a single election if people didn't explicitly want and vote for the sorry state of things.
We have a limited choice of who to vote for. Here in the UK that is the big parties think, and most of the smaller ones too. The same is true in many democracies.
Douglas Adams described it well:
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
96 years ago we there was a massive financial crisis and depression that killed a lot of people and is directly related to the (lack of) national policies of the time.
USA recovered remarkably well, but only because there was a big pivot away from crony capitalism and towards "socialism" under FDR. Big investments in The People, unions, education, infrastructure.
Causal relationships can be hard to discern. Some say that FDR's policies extended the downturn to 10 years whereas recovery from previous downturns was much quicker.
(Also, it is not clear to me how any of this is relevant to "The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive".)
For example, Murray Rothbard argued in America’s Great Depression (1963) that both Herbert Hoover and FDR worsened the economic downturn through interventionist policies. He believed FDR’s price and wage controls, massive public spending, and business regulations stifled economic recovery.
My point is not that the person I was replying to is definitely wrong about FDR's policies, but rather that the effects of FDR's policies are uncertain enough that the fact that FDR imposed them in the 1930s cannot credibly used to lend strong support to any argument for any economic policy to be imposed today. The post-WWII economic boom for example happened after most of FDR's policies had been repealed.
Thanks for the reference. I generally agree that, from a very high-altitude, it's difficult to know whether New Deal policies shortened the depression given that WWII shook up the US so much. However, there are many things introduced during that time that have had a visceral effect on the average American's quality of life, saved lives, and would be terrible to abandon: the FDIC, the construction of a massive amount of infrastructure, social security, etc.
I don't think your comment adds clarity to the line of questioning and reasoning.
I think it's damaging to clear thinking by muddying the waters.
I give you an example of returning the favor to you:
"Causual relationships can be hard to discern. Some say when people spout a spurious claim without evidence nor citations that falls in line with the entrenched structural power interests it simply shuts down critical thinking and causes people to not advocate for themselves and their own self interests which lets deep systemic issues fester and rot and leading to mass violence."
Of course libertarian ideologues will argue FDR was the Big Bad. They are arguing from ideology, not science.
FDR committed the grave sin of making a lot of rich people slightly less rich, in the short term. Deregulation is the answer to everything, including the problems caused directly by lack of regulation and governance. Hilarious.
> I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere with the help of some robots.
If John Deere can help it, those Deerebots will be sealed shut, TPM'd & DRM'd to hell. You'd pay a subscription and have to take them into a service center to get them serviced and have the firmware updated. They basic subscription tier will only work with genuine Monsanto(TM) seedPods(R)
From what I've seen, the small low-HP tractors without particulate filters have a minimum of electronics. It's the computerized emissions controls where they start creeping in. And I assume the big farmers put up with digital restrictions because they want to have their shiny new gear serviced by professionals anyway, whereas homesteads there is going to be a lot more DIY.
The real problem is that farming is fucking hard. I bought a vertical tiller somewhat as a hedge against societal collapse from the political movement to destroy America, but I'm under no illusions of that being a straightforward food supply. The main aim is to be able to do food plots for neighbors in trade.
Honestly I've got to wonder if we're going this far, why do you even need to live off the land? As in, why turn soil just to get free sun and water? Why not just indoor hydroponics? Or even still using soil, but inside in a much more controlled fashion.
I bet anything that any robots capable of performing any kind of service will be subscription based. It will also purposely be out of reach for anyone not wealthy.
Society has to change before humanity has any further technological progress that will benefit everyone. We're simply in the "how to min max wealth growth" stage.
Pretty much every piece of technology we have known so far which had creator restrictions has been jailbroken. Sure the future might be Elon & Bezos androids, but what’s stopping us from jailbreaking them and using them off grid?
Police forces protecting the interests of capital first, citizens second, e.g. private police forces (Pinkertons) and strikebreaking.
Militaries being used by Governments to protect the interests of capital at the expense of citizens, e.g. the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Government legislation enshrining the rights of capital and profit over the rights of citizens, e.g. copyright laws and DRM protections.
Centralization of systems and dependency of products on remote compute, e.g. public cloud service providers, social media networks, shifting from wired to wireless home ISPs and networks to reduce stability of private hosting.
They made it illegal to break DRM on their devices, send the police to protect their property, leverage the military to annihilate opposition, and now use modern technologies to prohibit end user control by requiring remote dependencies for operation.
Ah, yes, I will take my $3000 of savings and start a company that can compete with triple-digit billionaire venture capital firms for prime farmland....
First, and most obviously, I'm pointing out that any individual without massive wealth attempting to tackle such a thing on their own is inevitably doomed to fail.
But more importantly, I'm pointing out that suggesting personal solutions to systemic problems is not only inevitably doomed to fail, but is promulgating the wrongheaded thinking that has created and sustained the crisis that brought us to this point.
"I don't want all the land to be held by neofeudal corporations that exercise control over every aspect of our lives" cannot be solved by "so become a neofeudal overlord yourself!" Not only is it effectively impossible to achieve, at the very best it only solves the problem for you.
I don't want to just have a better life for myself. I want a better life for everyone.
if you want to have a better life for everyone then what is your solution? you do not provide one.
my solution is if enough people with the right thinking also become neofeudal overlords then we can exercise the change you’re talking about.
do you think some day everything is just going to magically snap into place and everyone will just be fair?
it has been fought for and died over for thousands of years to get where we are. and we are lucky that much less of us have to die in order to stand up for what we believe in.
now we can just make money and use that to effect change. pretty cool evolution of civilization if you ask me.
in addition, what’s wrong with solving the problem for me first? then taking care of others? that’s exactly the right approach.
others can then follow the same approach. now we have a lot of feudal overlords.
diversified micro feudalism is the term that this conversation has spurred. i like it!
The solution is to keep fighting, not give up and decide that we can only ever have corruption and despotism, with the only choice being whether we are the oppressed or the oppressors.
A better world is possible, whether you believe in it or not.
i agree with everything you say. i just think the first step is what i’m laying out.
gotta show them we’re not afraid to play their game and win it as well.
we should be able to play any game, any time. But based on that direct the game to be of higher moral ground.
editing this comment as apparently we’ve reached our thread comment limit.
yes, bargaining from a position of power. that would allow to direct it to a more suitable place. banding together with individuals of power to produce combined power. you say it’s impossible and then say exactly how we’re going to do it. :)
i hope you know this has been a very enjoyable conversation for me.
I don't see how "become the oppressors" can possibly be read as having the "moral high ground."
At best it's "bargaining from a position of strength."
But, again, I apparently need to emphasize that what you suggest is, for any given individual, effectively impossible. The only way to achieve it would be to band together in such numbers that we could, instead, work to influence politics toward the ultimate goal of equality with much more success.
i absolutely hear you on that. it just seems too hard to do that.
my solution is to make companies that are cool, fun to work at, push good values and make some money.
then use that money to push for appropriate political moves like you are saying.
how would you propose to reform the government? through voting? good effing luck. it will take $$$.
additionally, i get really annoyed with all the complaining that is done about politics. did you vote? neat, that’s the system we have. want to do something about it? make some money. that’s the system we have.
these people complaining about things instead of doing something will die complaining.
coming from a liberal that is more in the center and annoyed with my overally liberal parents.
Sometimes there just isn’t a solution or it’s not the right time. That’s what bitching is good for. Imagine being the world’s most dedicated republican in 1750s France. You could analyze the state of the world and everything required to fix it but no matter what you do there’s still decades of feudalism left and feudalism fucking sucks. That’s where we are today and these bandaid solutions like making “better” companies are like asking the King to be nicer. It changes nothing fundamentally..
Maybe your lord is a great guy and he does everything right but tomorrow his son comes into power and he could whip you. That’s what a good company is like. My new manager is an asshole who ruined my great job.
that sucks. i just quit my job cuz i was pissed about a lot.
but we can move to new feudal leaders or literally become a feudal leader ourself.
America baby!
Is it easy? nope. neither was getting a tech job or rising and surviving in it. but some of us do and some of us don’t.
anyone interested in some cold blooded american history from the mid-1800s should check out American Primeval on netflix. i really enjoyed it. it is a bit graphic.
I love history. It’s a great cope to see how people can live fulfilling lives under completely different conditions from the standard 2025 life path. Maybe I will check it out :)
the complexity and expense and necessity for expertise of today's farming machines aren't what the OP is talking about, which sounds more like something from Asimov's Caves of Steel
Yes actually robotics is still in its infancy, it needs machine learning advances to become anything like the generalized problem solving worker that farms need, especially small family farms.
Source: I have worked on both robots and small farms.
Agreed. But I expect huge progress in the next years/decades. It feels like a lot of things are finally coming together. The same happened in the 90s with the internet or the 2000s with cell phones. People are doing research in a lot of different areas and you see some not so great products that implement them. But then you have a point where all components come together in one really compelling product.
But why would individuals own farms instead of big agriculture just using the robots to make food production even cheaper and more efficient? Of course some people will, but most people will live in urban areas and shop at grocery stores. That's been the trend since farming started being automated.
Because there's a very strong strain of (particularly American) thought that the Ideal Life is living off the land in a single-family house, far away from any cities and probably from most other people.
And even the people who recognize that this ideal is utterly impractical can still be strongly influenced by it, such that when a set of technological advances promises the prospect of actually being able to realize it, they jump toward it with stars in their eyes.
Unfortunately, it's not just impractical because of the lack of technology to support it (other obvious problems include the degree to which humans need social interaction to be healthy, the limited amount of land available, the number of things taken for granted in modern life that cannot be either grown or crafted alone, even with robotic help...). It's a fantasy, and always has been.
Those robots want to be all your tools, with subscription and expensive maintenance that you can no longer do it yourself. And with the obvious kill switch. From tractors to other things
I think this is the part that classic sci-fi didn't get right. It assumed that we would own the robots instead of them being owned by corporations that would rent them out.
Having a robot that I don't control that's stronger than me and smarter than me in my house does not sound at all comforting.
> Technical progress would be fantastic if the benefits didn't go mainly to the top
They don't. You live better than Henry VIII in almost all ways (other than you can't establish a new state religion). You have access to painkillers, dentistry, sight correction, and information on a daily basis, along with more chicken than he did. The fact that that's true for hundreds of millions of people is incredible.
You can live off the land today with no help from robots. I know a couple of folks who had enough of corporate America and now live on a farm in Florida. It's been almost 10 years, they're doing all right. It's not even that much work unless you grow stuff commercially.
But I hear what you're saying. More "humane" progress would certainly be very welcome. In fact if neo-feudalism wins, most of us will have to "live off the land", whether we want to or not.
Robots will be doing that. There will also be a small workforce to repair the robots. The rest of us will have to learn to grow and preserve food. That is assuming the feudals leave us alone and don't exterminate us instead.
I can think of one technology that could easily solve this problem: an ability to “freeze” people into some kind of hibernation indefinitely until they are needed. Potentially, this could even mean going to sleep on Earth and then waking up on some distant planet colony where they need people. Jarring, but somehow people can find a good life this way I bet.
Yea. Watch a sci-fi film - nifty gadgets, robots taking care of chores, and widespread spaceflight. Real life is some unreliable chat bots.
Then there's the depressing practical stuff. AI being forced down our throats. AI as an excuse lay people off. AI as an excuse for massive data hoarding. AI flooding the internet, making it harder to find good content.
Nobody sane and smart I know is advocating for AI now. All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. Our megacorp very effectively blocked all of this and we don't have anything internal yet, but we are in specific market.
And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start building trust. Sure assistants are nice but thats about it.
Its just too flawed now to be dependable and reliable, it feels like typical 80/20 or 90/10 situation where inexperienced juniors are all over their head how future is now, and seniors just meh and go and do some work.
Advocate or not, it’s here to stay. And if you’re not adjusting to it, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call, write tests. With “the robot” once the framework was largely in place, you just paste API docs for the endpoint you need, and it’s done in a minute. With tests and everything.
Now, you could argue that this is not “senior level work”. Sure, maybe. But the thing is, you need to use it to learn how to use it effectively, and more importantly to get the intuition about what it can help with best.
So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.
> Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call, write tests. With “the robot” once the framework was largely in place, you just paste API docs for the endpoint you need, and it’s done in a minute. With tests and everything.
That just points to an inefficiency. Could be tackled in other ways than involving an LLM to produce essentially what's being done elsewhere every day over and over again. A framework automating and hiding all this would be just as effective. Perhaps even cleaner than all that duplication that the LLM created for you.
In other words, that month of busywork that you just saved is inherently unnecessary to do. But progress is not linear in the number of lines of code that you produce. If you think hard about a good architecture and design, coming up with that after 2 weeks of hard thinking, that could be 90% of the work. The remaining 10% are writing all that down. That could take 3 more months, and it taking more than 10% of the time points to the existing inefficiency in tooling / framework / ... But making that more efficient isn't necessarily achieved the best by using an LLM and writing it all out. There are still huge redundancies, which is what made the LLM possible. Once you boil these down in some common frameworks or tools, the LLM will also just produce the same few lines that you'd need to produce to get those 10% done in then just 10% of the total time.
> So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.
Work(ed) for a company super big on a force of agents. Brought them into my workflows early on, before the company even pivoted. Ran them at home on private hardware (that 3090 had to do something), at work when access was opened up. Provided valuable feedback on hallucinations (e.g., fabricating the existence of a MongoDB CLI module wholesale, documentation and all) and barriers to adoption. Pitched an integration of four disparate systems across ~20 data points to create tenancy in a core product line from scratch, with said AI at the center of it for customer service and workload creation, reducing engineers to approvals only for ~20 tickets a week averaging ~40hrs of work, freeing up said engineers for actually valuable work instead of handholding customers through routine tasks. Got great feedback and enthusiasm on it.
RIFed this year.
Doesn't matter whether you're bullish or bearish on it, the only thing that ever really matters is if scrubbing your line item from a spreadsheet will net someone higher up than you a bonus. That's what's driving this AI mania, and what needs to be addressed via policy before these employers gut themselves and the economy in the process.
Oh, 100%, and I knew that going in. Still, I'm the type of worker (sucker? sap?) that will go down with the ship if it helps the rest of the folks get into lifeboats. I know I can take care of myself when stuff hits the fan, and I'm never one to half-ass my output because of my own cynicism.
I'm hoping that pays off for me someday. Thus far, it's just been a lot of burnout/layoff cycles.
> Still, I'm the type of worker (sucker? sap?) that will go down with the ship if it helps the rest of the folks get into lifeboats
> engineers to approvals only for ~20 tickets a week averaging ~40hrs of work, freeing up said engineers for actually valuable work instead of handholding customers through routine tasks
Not trying to be too judgy here but to me it sounds more like you are the one helping sink the ship than help everyone to life boats
Something to think about. Agreeing to bring AI into our workflows is actually digging out the foundation beneath our own feet (and our coworkers feet)
The situation was way more complex than that - we were on borrowed time anyway, and this was our attempt to pivot away from a single on-prem private cloud group into the team overseeing both the enterprise pipeline and multi-cloud work. It would’ve freed us from busywork babysitting other teams’ own stuff while we were gradually chipped away via a war of attrition so we could actually build useful stuff to justify our long term existence and make us indispensable, a strategy that had buy-in at the time.
Ah well. At least seeing me get RIFed hopefully sent up signal flares with the rest of the team to GTFO while they can, and I had a lot of good accomplishments towards the end in particular. Take the good where I can find it, I suppose.
Sure, but what choice do you have as an individual? Try and adjust to the new reality and maybe get RIFed anyway, or not adjust to it and get RIFed with 90% certainty. Power looms won.
Totally agree with you on the line-item point. My point there was that if a 50% RIF is in the works, the people who haven’t figured out how to become more efficient using AI would be more likely to be affected. Statistically.
But again, hope you’re doing well and everything has worked out for you!
I’m a month in, and it’s rough as hell. But I at least have a runway for the first time in my career, so I’m profoundly grateful for that.
Still optimistic that my generalist skillset and adaptability to new technologies (like AI) will make me an asset for IT teams who can’t afford multiple specialists in rough economic times like these.
But a solution that takes an OpenAPI spec and generates all of those things from templates would be much more reliably correct than letting an AI do it, and has already existed for years.
I think AI is a game changer but not for things that can already be automated rigirously without AI.
Eventually only the arquitect will be required, no need for seniors, the offshoring team is the cloud instead of some folks on the other side of the planet.
This is the future to prepare, not AI generating a couple of files.
Maybe. But that future is definitely not yet here. Generating a couple of files though is here. And that compounds. So people who’re still typing those files by hand… yeah.
Can you give some examples where “architect, no coders” is here already? Asking, because I’d rather try and adjust to the new world, than pretend it’s not happening!
Not yet on that front, rather voice actors, artists producing digital assets on games, iconography for applications, decorating motives for clothing and furniture.
On IT industry specially, I think LLMs generating code are going to become as transformative as compilers were to Assembly developers.
Yes, currently they still go through "generate language XYZ" as intermediary step, however they eventually will improve to the point, that intermediary step will no longer be needed.
And like the Assembly developers that deemed to manually assess the machine code generated by compilers and scoffed at the generated output, eventually had to cope with optimising compilers turning their knowledge into a niche field, same will happen with common programming languages.
Yeah sure, there will be some Compiler Explorer kind of way to see how the AI maps its decisions to e.g. RISC-V Assembly, but only those in the know will bother looking into it, either by curiosity or need.
Some current examples ongoing trends, more specifically IT, in enterprise consulting, we have evolved to less coding, more plumbing, where existing SaaS products get integrated with each other, mostly via configuration, or integration scripts.
Well turns out, some of those common patterns can be used to teach AIs, and let them automate integrations, instead of manually write them by hand.
Not yet, those optimising compilers also took a couple of decades to get right, still miss some stuff like auto-vectorization, however the job of Assembly programmer is for all practical purposes gone.
The assembly programmers gave way to many more higher level programmers, as it became possible for more people to program, and more kinds of programs to be written.
You have to balance this time savings with all the times the LLM is just making shit up. I can't the number of times I ask "how do I do X?", and says "call function Y" or "Use command line argument Z". Turns out Y doesn't exist and CLI doesn't take argument "Z". The frustration from that lying is immense. I'd rather take a little longer on some tasks and never deal with this lying.
I see what you mean. The way I approach this is that I think of it as a very (very, very) elaborate auto-complete. Something that takes some text, and continues with the most likely continuation. Which is what it basically is, right?
But that means that whatever rather impressive internal representation of knowledge it has encoded, that knowledge itself can’t be trusted on a “factual” basis.
This is where you have stopped, but you shouldn’t. Because you’re missing what it’s great at. And it’s great at “continuing” text in a longer context. So just use it with a longer context. Use the Search functionality in ChatGPT when asking it things such that you see where it got it from. Use it in a codebase context where you point it to the relevant parts. Give it examples it should follow, etc.
For every task I have I try using AI in some way and form first. Because the downside is limited - I waste 5-7 minutes figuring out that it’s not going to work, and this is something I definitely need to do myself. But the upside is unlimited - the task is done in minutes.
If I waste 5-7 minutes multiple times every day, that quickly adds up. It's easy to waste an hour or more fiddle farting with these unreliable tools. It's easier to just do it myself.
Why do you think the managers/business owners need an excuse to lay people off? If it's legal and economically beneficial to them, they'll fire people. Having AI won't help them as an excuse. In fact, I would say it sounds like a much worse excuse than "the economy is on a rough spot" or something like that
> If it's legal and economically beneficial to them, they'll fire people.
More importantly, if they can imagine some economic benefit. Very plausible an executive might think a chatbot is as capable as an engineer when they don't know how to evaluate either.
Are you serious? The obvious benefit is they get to lay a bunch of people off and pretend it’s because they’re forward thinking innovators instead of poor managers that are having difficulty growing their business. There’s a huge incentive to present this fiction to stockholders, which is the only opinion they care about.
I personally think it's polarized, and either the Pentti Linkola/Ted K way of thinking that the industrial revolution (or maybe even the agricultural revolution) were a detriment to humanity is correct and there is no turning it around within that framework, or all tech progress will reach an ultimately good equilibrium, though will be unstable and have mistakes along the way. I definitely lean towards the latter. What I do not think at all is we should purposely delay tech progress through the use of violence (which is what laws/regulations effectively are) while doing some type of wait and think about it exercise. I definitely don't think anything (good or bad) that does not break the laws of physics is unlikely to manifest, quite the opposite, most things we imagine now will come to fruition in our lifetimes and many others we haven't even imagined yet both good and bad.
Regulation is violence? sorry for putting my socialist hat on, but free market is efficient, so efficient that without regulation it’ll optimise away human happiness and find a way to turn tears into profits.
Regulation is basically saying that you can make money in ways that benefits the humanity also, at least in theory. Lobbying and corrupt regulators muddy the waters
Of course, laws/regulations are enforced by the party in a country that has a monopoly on violence, and use the threat of violence to enforce (either imprisonment or a monetary fine, monetary fines are a derivative of kidnapping as money takes time to accumulate). Of course I'm not arguing against these functions in general, they should be used in ways that prevent an even worse act of violence (ex. a corporation wasting the time and money of millions of people by selling them a dangerous product). The application layer is where I believe laws and regulations are appropriate though, not preventing the development of the technology (ex. trying to limit who, how, and when someone/some company can do a large training run for an AI video model, because AI video models will be leveraged by scammers down the line).
A policeman standing on a public square threatening to incarcerate anybody who is violent results in no violence actually happening at that square. Take away that regulation (in form of the policeman) and watch the actual violence start.
That’s a very narrow view of humanity and morality. Only psychopaths (in a clinical sense, not derogatory) model their actions strictly by what’s legal.
Many things are moral, but have no legal coverage, some things are moral but illegal, and some immoral but legal.
Another way to view it is that valid regulations (which in this context includes statute) are about handling externalities, structuring things so that the market must react to them.
One of the most fundamental limits on the market is the criminalization of killing other people, giving it a prohibitive extra "cost". This kind of restriction on the choices of participants is so incredibly well-accepted that we simply take it for granted, and seldom think about it as a "regulation" even though it is.
That regulation prevents CEOs from "rationally" deciding it costs less to assassinate rivals' employees than it costs to improve their product.
Only when looking at this through our common understanding of how societies work.
Broad automation of tasks can be great for society if and only if the product of that automation is not treated as some kind of private property.
I’m not hyped on an automated future because I find it quite unlikely but if it were to happen it has the potential to be transforming beyond expectations.
Do we have the choice? It feels like the market makes such decisions and regulation is not only a taboo but impossible with competition between states.
In Europe we already have the technology for everyone to live and retire comfortably. What we don’t have is the governments whose goal is for everyone to do so. I don’t see how more technology would solve a political issue.
What I see is companies failing behind implementing existing well known technologies.
It is people who want to keep doing whatever they were doing for years that later will be angry, because whatever they were doing stopped making sense but they don’t understand it. They will not want to understand things that put them out of job…
yes, automation is necessary and from what I see most non-IT companies are far behind what's possible. Something which is not necessary and imho pretty stupid is replacing idiotic workflow components designed to wash-out responsibility with LLMs and now let the bots run amok (which probably is totally ok with the bureaucrats who designed these workflows in the first place). Most of the AI automation crowd supposedly thinks this is a high value activity - while looking down on the bureaucrats. Which is pretty funny to me...
Techno-optimism is the ___domain of people who're confident that they'll be part of the managerial class that gets alerted when other workers are going over their bathroom break allotments.
Has the last 70 years of productivity increases led to a reduction in weekly work hours? No.
Some jobs will be automated away. Good thing. Braindead stuff that a machine can do should be done by a machine. Doesn't mean we'll all soon be just picking our noses. There will be other work to be done, and if unregulated capitalism has its say then it can easily lead to even more worker exploitation.
Of course, the effects aren't equally distributed across all countries. For example, annual work hours per worker have almost halved in Germany since 1950, but only seen a more modest decrease in the US. So political factors still play a role in how the benefits of increased productivity are used by society.
But it's a strong effect. And those numbers don't even consider other factors such as how increased life expectancy combined with mostly unchanged retirement age, and being older when we first start working, give people an extra decade or two of not being part of the workforce at all.
The 40-hour workweek was introduced in Germany in the mid-1960s. 60 years later, it's still standard. A few 39-, 38- or 37.5-hour weeks here and there, but even those are by and large 40-hour weeks.
The number of vacation week and public holidays has increased, which explains the majority of the difference in "annual work hours".
The 10x in productivity is in no way reflected by the number of work hours.
Well: though we are not particularly likely to I do think that replacing people with machines would be fantastic if we actually just let people relax and work less, and so rather than lament the state of things I tend to focus on the need to promote the value of social systems which support human thriving. On the second point, I guess I would say that most of the marketing talk we see is unlikely to manifest but the future will in fact bring fantastic and fanciful advances in technology - it just won’t be what the marketers are trying to tell us.
I’m not saying technology makes our lives easier. I’m saying technology makes it more possible than ever to build a world where everyone thrives. But it takes human social systems to make that happen. Understanding just how much good we could do with modern technology underscores the value in fighting for the right human social systems.
Huh? 40 hr work weeks are a recent thing, many people in history worked 12 hr days 6 days a week. Technology and social progress definitely leads to fewer work hours.
I’m not so sure. Unions (social progress) brought us the 40 hour work week more so than technology. Factory workers could potentially work more hours than farmers who had very busy periods mixed with slower times. I suppose they exist, maybe you have seen them, but I’ve not seen a real study of the hours worked by subsistence farmers in history. Though technology brings many other benefits, it’s not clear to me how it plays in to work hours.
Before the machines there were guilds of cloth-makers and weavers that would work less than five days a week and at less strict hours, but they lost their jobs to automation.
I can really recommend the book Blood in the machine if anyone is interested in how automation early on affected workers.
>Technology and social progress definitely leads to fewer work hours.
Do they? Seems more like developed countries just outsourced the sweatshop factory work to other countries. "Out of sight, out of mind" as they say, I guess.
We've had a long history of technological improvements being widespread distributed to the people. There's not a particularly bleak reason to believe the latest AI automation won't be too. Look around your desk or your house and just count all the effort-saving devices that have made their way down to you. Look at the price of TVs cratering. Tech that can be recreated easily spreads far and wide. AI can too. It's dropped 1000x in costs the last 2 years. This stuff will be running on old tech everywhere - and speedier and cheaper new chips, bots and other hardware are on their way.
Unless there's a new world war or draconian regulation, we're good. It's pretty much locked in.
I'm struggling to think of any technological advancement in the past 20 years that's saved me time. The only real change has been a shift to WFH, but that happened independently of technological change in that era. Even things like screen sharing and remote desktop were possible before that time.
25 years ago, sure: online shopping/banking, email and chat -- these are all things my Blackberry or Nokia could handle. The touchscreen smartphone hasn't really moved the needle much in that regard.
This is the core of my original beef, techno-optimism seems divorced from the exact things I think it’s ideologically trying to promote, and instead is just “AI will fix everything”.
And I basically agree about sort of time saving, we got smart phones, which I think was of questionable benefit compared to the invention of computers, the internet, and cell phones in the first place.
No, I haven't. I live in a city, a cab took 15 mins to arrive after calling the dispatch service. Uber can take just as long, because the request bounces around different drivers in the area, the time to arrive is dependent on which driver accepts the offered rate and how far away they are. I've had to request rides more than once because the Uber-set price was rejected by all nearby drivers.
When I lived rurally (in college) cabs had to be booked in advance, that's just common sense.
You sayin you were capable of ordering any product on earth from your couch and having it delivered within 2 days? Or building an interactive video (modern website) accessible anywhere on earth instantly (all used just to display people's resume and contact details lol)? Or navigate anywhere within minutes from the optimal pathway, without thinking about it? Or research and answer any question you have about anything in the world within a minute? Or hold daily conversations with all your friends in group chats despite vast geographical gaps? Or play games with them in - again - interactive cinematic masterpiece movies accessible anywhere on the planet?
So much time was saved you don't even realize it because most of the above was just practically impossible to do before - and frankly beyond the scope of what any human actually needs. But the scope crept anyway and now they're all normal parts of modern life taken for granted. As for where that time went - capabilities exploded, but any spare time also got eaten by tighter work hours from a more competitive market. That's capitalism for ya baybeeeee
> We've had a long history of technological improvements being widespread distributed to the people. There's not a particularly bleak reason to believe the latest AI automation won't be too.
the difference this time is that humans just moved to other activities where they were useful, and with super-AI(if it will happen) this is not the case anymore.
Humanity has been around in basically the same form for 2 million years (and the same form for probably 200 000 years) yet life for the average person on the planet really started improving circa 1950.
2 million years is a long time. It’s quite a stretch to say life only started improving in the last 50. An asteroid could hit today and nearly all evidence of our existence would be gone in 10k years.
Life expectancy skyrocketed once we discovered and applied hygiene, plus improved sanitation, and also antibiotics. More or less, modern medicine.
The industrial era did a lot of things but it also made cities, famous for being horrible places to live in, even worse. It took the realization of that fact and action against pollution to improve that.
Worker's rights movement also had to spring up for 40 hour work weeks, 2 day weekends, sick leave, unemployment benefits, pensions, disability benefits.
Slavery was barely abolished 150 years ago, and it's still present in some places. Ditto for serfdom.
Hunter gatherers had healthier diets that settled populations thousands of years after the invention of agriculture.
MANY things were better for society and neutral or worst for the average person.
Replacing human labor with technology is usually a wonderful thing if the gains are generally realized. It means less time spent in 'toil' and more time to pursue one's true interests and desires.
The reason it feels depressing is that if recent history is any guide, 0.0001% of the human race will receive almost all the benefit. A tiny number of richer-than-rich will get even richer and everyone else will stay the same or get poorer.
Recent history is a poor guide that will give you a highly skewed view and won't really help you anticipate and plan for the future. You need to look at real history to get perspective. You don't even have to go back very far to see an tiny group of richer-than-rich people that didn't retain their power, an economic loop where this all happened before.
Agreed,only the super rich will get cars err electricity err I mean refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean mobile devices
To be fair I think there's a lot of truth in your statement in the short term (and arguably in the long). But in the 'long' term , it sure does look like revolutionary technology makes everyday peoples life better (I didn't even go into transportation or health care/life expectency)
Let's be careful not to conflate (A) general technological-progress with (B) changes in economic organization and wealth distribution.
The nice things from (A) don't necessarily require what co-occurred with (B). There is nothing in the physics or materials of a refrigerator which requires the assembler to have been paid less than the CEO.
Sure, we have more consumer goods available to us, but I don’t know if that’s a great measure of a better life. We have supercomputers in our pockets but can’t talk to our neighbors, AI with a warming planet, etc. It’s all tradeoffs. A flourishing human life is independent of technology.
There will be soon new type of stuff only for rich - clean air, safe healthy food, beautiful nature, stable climate ___location, safe from warfare... we are not heading for a rosy future.
Sure everybody can be addicted to some crappy social service on their phones, but that's not a mark of progress in 2025 nor definition of life fulfillment/happiness, some would say in contrary. Obesity was also for a long time mark of wealth (and in some 3rd world countries it still is), and now its a sign of low social status and failure for various reasons.
Btw life expectancy i starting to decline again in developed countries, its just 3rd world that has so much gap to cross that they still go up.
When I said recent history I meant the last roughly 20 years, when the trend has been for gains to go to a smaller and smaller number of people.
Of course historically this does seem to be a cycle. Usually it goes gilded age, revolution, broad-based growth, emergence of a new elite, repeat cycle. Unfortunately the revolution period is often very chaotic and destructive.
How will you pay for the cars err electricity err I mean refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean mobile devices when you have no income?
People don't buy houses by writing checks for the purchase price. They get a mortgage and pay monthly which is dependent on both housing price and interest. With a lot of hand waving that number isn't much worse than the 70s/80s because interest rates were high then.
However, that's cyclical and we're in a really crappy local minima for affordability due to a rapid increase in interest rates.
I was referring to the economic benefits being concentrated.
AI and other automation allows more to be done with less labor which increases corporate profits, and all that is pocketed by a very small number of people. Meanwhile everyone else is unemployed. There is no mechanism to distribute these benefits to anyone.
The money goes to inflate stock and other financial bubbles and asset prices, including housing, which makes living even more unaffordable.
Long term this eventually collapses since the economy doesn’t work with no customers.
Feels like early industrial revolution vibes. Some of the hype turned real, just not how and a lot later than anyone expected. Same thing happened in the post-atomic age. But the gaps between revolutions are getting shorter.
We should also be displacing hierarchies. Why does it only benefit the very few? Because they get to somehow keep their moats. So how can we displace those moats?
> It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society
Your definition of "society" implies that it means "everyone".
If you circumscribe the definition more narrowly to the owners of wealth/capital, the benefits to them (and the thin managerial class just below them) are pretty clear.
LLMs are often worse, yes, but there are decision tree based machine learning models that can learn to be deterministic for classification if your training data accurately reflects the actual problem data.
Completely agree. I look at all these predictions, good and bad, but then I look at the global temperature and it feels watching someone in complete denial after a terminal cancer diagnoses talking about their plans for the future, a switch in careers, investments etc.
In terms of AI particularly I can only focus on the here and now, and the real world effects that I'm seeing are split between enabling creepy men to produce deepfakes of women they're stalking and enabling bad faith actors with the ability to erode faith in our democratic systems. Om both counts I repeatedly see the "techbros" who develop the tech waving their hands or actively supporting it.
All of the benefits right now like being able to code marginally faster or bounce ideas off of aan LLM feel like playing with firecrackers while watching dangerous men develop guns after we got a hold of gunpowder.
I think one of the sad things is that when software went mainstream the culture went mainstream too so now that everyone wants to be “oh woe is me the world sucks” software people have to do the same too instead of being optimists.
The degrowther culture of the mainstream comes to push out all nerds eventually.
My last two roles have involved automating detection of cancers and other disease in biopsies (eliminating pathologists’ jobs in hospitals), and now automating invoice payment and statement settlement in the global freight sector (eliminating accountants’/operators’ jobs in these companies).
I’m honestly very excited about this type of work. The benefits to society - better healthcare for less money, humans with their beautiful, creative brains not spending 40 hours a week looking at documents unnecessarily - are incredibly obvious.
The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have to overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in place. We’re able to do this work in spite of that wasteful, inefficient system, not because of it.
I think the only thing that will actually push people to overthrow it is exactly the type of work I’m doing. Much like the first industrial revolution begat our first efforts at creating a more socialist, just, and democratic society (eg, like Fiorello La Guardia for instance). The benefits to this the first time were extremely tangible.
> humans with their beautiful, creative brains not spending 40 hours a week looking at documents unnecessarily
What should they be doing once all the meaningful jobs are automated away?
> The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have to overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in place.
> I think the only thing that will actually push people to overthrow it is exactly the type of work I’m doing.
Stripping people of their livelihoods is one way to encourage them to overthrow the system, yes. Make no mistake though: the revolution will not be kind to you.
> What should they be doing once all the meaningful jobs are automated away?
My point is that looking at patient's biopsy slides or invoices, for 40-80 hours a week, to find known cancers/viruses, or to make sure numbers match up with statements, is not meaningful work. In fact, I'd argue that any work that can be automated without performance degradation isn't meaningful work for humans.
For the case of pathologists, this frees them up to look more carefully at cases where patients are experiencing symptoms and the cause can't be automatically. That means better patient care for both common and exceptional cases. And, perhaps, when put into use globally, it frees some pathologists up to take other roles in medical or scientific fields, doing something that isn't easily automated.
For accountants, it frees them up to only look at cases where things mismatch, or, well... science, teaching, art, local farming, carpentry, really anything that isn't staring at invoices and statements 40 hours a week. It seems particularly silly to me that anyone would argue "comparing numbers on documents" is "meaningful work."
A pretty popular quote by Stephen Jay Gould: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." I'd assert that many of our world's pathologists and accountants are doing the equivalent of living and dying in those cotton fields and sweatshops, if they're doing work that could be automated.
> Stripping people of their livelihoods is one way to encourage them to overthrow the system, yes. Make no mistake though: the revolution will not be kind to you.
Chill, dude. It's not like I'm making millions building these things. It's all just SaaS software, a sector where profit margins generally always trend downwards as the market for the product matures. Put another way, these companies are nowhere near as profitable as companies that extract our psychological profiles, target content and ads to make us feel miserable, and then use that to sell us stuff (Meta, Google, et al). I could easily go to Meta and make twice what I do now.
Plus, I contribute time and labor to organizations like the DSA, JVP, and local nonprofits, volunteer at my local food bank and for other local organizations, choose to shop at local co-ops and farmer's markets, and more to build the type of economy that can support actual meaningful, not-easily-automated work for humans to do.
I think a lot of cool shit will happen in the next hundred years, but the “end of scarcity unlimited money/tech points hack” is unlikely to happen in the next 100 years.
And this is the core of my argument, let’s talk more about the cool shit.
The depressing bit is it’s a corporate dystopia where you are a constant cash cow driven on hype and hope that never materialises.
Like fuck me someone was trying to sell my company an AI todo list the other day. What problem does it even solve?!?!?
Go out, buy a new iPhone. AI will come tomorrow and tell you when your mother gets to the airport and add it to your calendar and hire you a robotaxi to shovel your obsolete meat corpse into the worker ant distribution hub to escort her back to your techno-panopticon.
I don't think Amish/Luddites would make quite the nuanced point I'm trying to make, but also, I don't have any particular beef with the Amish or the Luddites, in fact the older I get maybe the more I side with them, but again, that's aside from the particular point I'm making now.
They don't, though, they consistently want the cheaper machine made products rather than the artisinal human made versions. Sure it might align with their "values" but when they see the value difference at the cash register their minds will quickly change. It's already happening with AI designed products.
I'm really surprised out of current nearly 300 comments and counting, nobody really is mentioning constraint programming or CP, a seemingly forgotten deterministic sibling of the stochastic data-driven AI [1],[2],[3].
"Out of these 14 tasks, we guessed that only 6 require abstract reasoning alone to perform. Strikingly, we classified only one of the top five most important tasks for medical scientists as relying solely on abstract reasoning. Overall, the most critical aspects of the job appear to require hands-on technical skills, sophisticated coordination with others, specialized equipment use, long-context abilities, and complex multimodal understanding."
Almost all of 14 R&D tasks listed in the table including that are not suited for data-driven AI with abstract reasoning can be solved by CP. Provided that we are allocating enough compute resources with at least similar to that we're currently providing data-driven AI with the crazy amount cloud networks of massively parallel compute CPU/GPU/TPU/etc.
Fun facts, the modern founder of Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming is George Boole, the grandfather of Geoffrey Everest Hinton, the "Godfather of AI" and "Godfather of Deep Learning".
I've always wondered if it would work out well for an LLM to evaluate a constraint program/script when it encountered a problem involving constraints / logic. like or-tools with python or evaluating a minizinc program.
Yes, that's very plausible and I've thought similarly but not exactly the same approach for the diagramming limitations of LLM [1].
Fun facts, the presenter John Hooker was asked about how to determine the suitability of a particular heuristic solver for specific problems in his presentation. He casually answered that if he knows the solutions to that he will probably win a Nobel Prize. But perhaps AI/LLM can help in a way to recommend the solver based on the type of applications or problems.
If I'm not mistaken there's also Donald Knuth (TAOCP) asking questions after the JH's presentation, how often you see that?
> ...this means that only 20% of labor productivity growth in the US since 1988 has been driven by R&D spending! Capital deepening accounts for around half of labor productivity growth in this period...
This is like saying that Jeff Dean's net worth is attributable not to his programming skills, but to the capital deepening of his bank account. The authors are working with concepts at a level of abstraction where they've lost contact with what they're saying.
You know how office workers are more productive because of computers? This didn't just happen because various companies did R&D investments in building (better) computers, but also because companies actually spent money buying computers for their office workers and because those office workers spent time learning how to use computers.
B requires A. C requires both A and B. But also, A has a cost and B has a cost, and spending more on A or B can maybe get you more C.
Maybe spending more on developing better computers won't actually help anything (because they've already got 640k memory, which is enough for anyone). But only half of the people who can benefit from them have actually bought one so far, so collectively spending twice as much on buying computers can make them collectively twice as beneficial.
Bizarre way to describe capital deepening. Jeff's programming skills probably got a lot more relevant because of things like the proliferation of internet access and utility computing. Seems like a pretty simple statement to me but maybe that's too abstract for you.
Very typical SV argument that R&D is "complex" and everything else is "simple".
Would it blow your mind if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI that can do math/code better than 99% of humans but ordering a hotdog on doordash would be cutting edge and barely doable?
I don't disagree that "common" tasks are more valuable. I only argue that the argument these are easily automatable is a viewpoint based on ignorance. RPA has been around for over a decade and is not used in many tasks. AI is largely the same, until we get massive unrestriced access to the data for it we will not automate it.
> if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI that can do math/code better than 99% of humans
This not even remotely close to true. Like not even a little bit. I use Cursor and Gemini for work daily and I'd be hard pressed to think AI is a "better" programmer than any professional software engineer. Sure it makes writing code faster and more efficient, because you just click tab and three lines are written for you. It absolutely isn't better than me at coding though.
The claim about math is even more unbelievable than the claim about coding. We still don't have a single theorem proved and published by a LLM without human aid. LLMs barely follow a discussion in basic topology. It's incredibly ridiculous to state they're better than 99% of people. More like 0% of mathematicians and maybe 50% of college freshman.
> We still don't have a single theorem proved and published by a LLM without human aid.
I'm pretty sure that by "do math" the parent was referring to applying math, as one would do in the course of other tasks, and not mathematical research, just as by "code" they likely referred to writing code to solve a problem and not to algorithmic research.
And from my experience teaching & tutoring both math and programming at various levels, I would absolutely agree with the claim that AIs like Claude 3.7 Sonnet surpass over 99% of humans at typical short tasks.
It'll probably take some more time until context, memory and tool-use are improved sufficiently to allow AIs to tackle longer-term tasks effectively, but I'm sure it'll get there. And just as an example of progress, there was recently a post about the first "fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review without human edits or interventions" [0].
I realized today while coding with cursor that AI seems to operate exactly the way I intuit it does, which is it acts like a junior engineer who works by copying existing code but doesn’t understand why. For a lot of tasks that works great, I do this a lot as a senior engineer, but I know when not to. you can’t let it run wild, because it doesn’t know when not too.
Doordash is not the same as traditional online ordering. DD and all delivery apps are 3rd party middlemen that set their own menu prices and operate separately from the restaurant.
Through this kind of obfuscation, they incentivize the growth of things like ghost kitchens, which are basically faceless factories. Nobody would order from them if they drove by one. but on the apps, they are displayed as standalone restaurants.
While I know there have been some issues with working conditions at ghost kitchens, I've also heard tons of horrible stories from regular kitchens, so it's not clearly to me that there's a significant difference on that front.
As for referring to them as "faceless factories", I can't even start to imagine what sentiment that should evoke in me. I don't have an issue buying food products made at actual factories, and have visited quite a few. As such I don't have any issue ordering from a ghost kitchen located in an industrial area that may look like a factory on the outside.
The code that AI is good at currently is exactly common tasks.
Good luck getting it to write a competitive video card driver for Nvidia hardware or anything else that requires actual creative problem solving that isn’t github boilerplate.
It's only common among trained experts. For most people, even simple code is astonishingly difficult.
I personally get more value from AI when coding more complex and novel things. Not fully automated, but English has become the most valuable language for me when coding.
So they are arguing which one will get more benefits first - r&d or general automation? What is the point in arguing around it?
Disconnect between progress being done (ie. alphafold) and trying to infer answer from some historic stats on r&d investment, ratios, their past estimated impact etc. is... just weird.
It's also funny that the whole ai itself together with constant breakthroughs is r&d.
I hate these people that try to argue we don't need R&D. It's extremely short sighted and equivalent to pretending that the ground you stand on is worthless. Without the ground, you literally have nothing to stand on... Talk about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps...
It's the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions all over again. Broad automation of labor will not result in societal uplift, but Capital uplift, absent worker action to enforce equal distribution of gains (like how Unions brought us the 40hr work week and the end of Child Labor w/ the Industrial Revolution). Worse yet, the irrationality of these techbro arguments shows their complete lack of long-term thinking or systems analysis.
They cite "societal disruption" through the wholesale (or significant) replacement of labor via AI, but then shrug off the problem as one for government to solve - governments they own, control, and/or influence. Yet if we take them at their word and they get rid of labor - who the heck do they expect to buy their stuff, and with what income? Capital's plan is very much (Eliminate Labor) + (Continued Sales of Products) = (We Keep All The Money), and I'd like to believe the HN community at the very least can see how that math does not work.
Capital would have to concede to a complete rework of civilization away from consumption and towards a higher goal, but that would entail tearing down the power and wealth structures they benefit from now with no guarantee of a brighter future tomorrow. Plowing ahead with AI while prohibiting any attempts at systemic revolution isn't just irresponsible, it's insane, and I'm tired of having pretend it's not for the sake of a stock price somewhere.
Present systems are incompatible with an AI-dominated future, full stop.
One danger is that, from a macroeconomics view, GDP growth can be attained without any regard for natural unemployment rates. When technology, controlled by capital, drives up markup on wages by displacing human labor and killing competition, then natural unemployment will rise, but the economy can still "thrive," from a statistical perspective. But it is individual persons being ignored by statistics. Indeed a grim future.
Your entire argument is why I reject GDP as a reliable measure of economic health (that is to say, I agree with you 100%). It can be a component of it, sure, but as the standalone metric it's relied upon as-is, it's awful. Doesn't capture inflation, doesn't capture real productivity growth, doesn't capture employment rates or labor compensation or income distribution. Heck, GDP is literally an ideal expression of Goodhart's Law: we have built entire systems designed to game a single number that was proposed as a metric of economic health, which no longer makes it a good metric of economic health!
If someone's sole defense is "GDP Up = Good", I do not take their argument seriously - because it isn't.
It’s a matter of the relative value of types of production factors. Will AI increase or decrease the relative value of human labor compared to machinery, raw materials, and land? Beyond Adam Smith: What about Social, cultural, and Symbolic capital (Pierre Bourdieu). My gut feeling: median relative value of labor down, especially for knowlege worker, Other factors up, including social, symbolic, cultural capital. Being in an in-group protects, eg. in regulated professions. I expect regulations and group-thinking to go up as a protective measure.
This is exactly correct technically and perfectly on the existing “paved path” of technology determinism.
My company is actively in the process of demonstrating the “Learning machine” which is a Weiner style cybernetic system of systems
It’s unquestionable at this point that machines will displace all human labor where labor efficiency is the key factor for investment/use. Start with transfer learning from existing human machine interfaces and then expand to onpolicy with human feedback to SARSA.
The only remaining question is the persistent one “who benefits”
I think plenty of people are working on that, some unaware :P
Games for status will continue.
Consuming experiences will continue (experiences that require humans will be premium).
And in a good case, we will still have plenty of work to do to decide what to do (going to space, making earth sustainable, merging with machines, ...).
One interesting possibility is that this is not something humans need to work on at all - because, as Nick Land famously put it, "Tomorrow can take care of itself." [0]
Absolutely agree with this article, also there is an astronomical amount of low hanging fruit out there. Areas where the cost/reward calculation have not made sense in the past.
One only has to think of the ubiquity of excel VBA still, and that'd probably still be regarded as fancy for most.
The techo-optimistic people really need to answer the question on the middle classes and on the poor’s minds.
How can anyone be techno-optimistic about the future where AI is mass replacing their jobs to the point they cannot pay their rent?
How would anyone pay their rent or taxes when they get mass laid off by AI in this age and where job postings get less and less, where businesses push for efficiency. Here, I see businesses and startups will try to copy Elon’s style of layoffs and try to get away with it.
I don't think UBI works here either especially with rent increases, rent, childcare, taxes, etc and it sounds too unfeasible and utopian.
Also there is a narrative of “There will be new jobs created in the AI era” but I just don’t see this happening since AI will replace jobs faster than they are created. Case in point with prompt engineering.
Seems like those who are techno optimistic are the rich, investor class invested in the very things that push their narrative and where money isn’t a problem at all.
This class of people haven’t thought about this nor that they care when AI job replacement happens since they are already invested in it.
I find the entire wasted resources thing silly. For $1 Trillion you could give every person on Earth clean water. The world will spend more than that trying to improve the AI models this year.
> To be clear, we agree that AIs will eventually outperform humans at nearly all economically valuable activities, and this will lead to a significant acceleration in economic growth.
The (literal) trillion-dollar question, though, is who benefits from this significant acceleration in economic growth? Every major technological revolution, from the Agricultural through the Industrial and into the Digital Revolution, has produced further and further stratification of society. Will this one be the exception?
I can see four ways this can go:
1. We repeat our mistakes, with power concentrating into ever-fewer hands while everyone else enjoys less and less autonomy (at best, in exchange for the bare minimum token quality-of-life improvements to prevent revolts)
2. We learn from our mistakes and achieve the fully-automated luxury gay space communist utopia that techno-optimism has promised us
3. We riot and conduct an anti-automation purge, Butlerian Jihad style
4. We discover that AI wasn't all it's hyped up to be and any AI-driven technological revolution is still a long ways off
I'm hoping for #2. I'm expecting #1 or #4. Society is trending toward #1 or #3.
If you're able to define a clear metric to objectively differentiate between "bullshit jobs" and "real productivity", you'll probably nab a Nobel in Economics.
If people could speak truth to power and bosses and didn't just suck anything up for the paycheck, we wouldn't need "a clear metric to objectively differentiate between bullshit jobs and real productivity".
Our intuitive understanding of bullshit jobs would be enough.
That's the easy part. The hard part is getting people to admit that the metric has been discovered already. Most problems with automation are organizational problems not technical ones.
This is a bit silly. It is equivalent to saying "most food will come from tractors, not land." There is some truth to this, but you really can't have one without the other. The whole system is interconnected.
The problem with all these jabs at R&D and science is not recognizing that R&D and science produce the very foundations that lead to the ability to do production in the first place. I'm certainly not saying we should dump all our money into R&D, but I do find it weird that others talk as if the ground you stand on doesn't matter. You literally cannot stand without it. The truth is that you need both. I suspect why we shy away from R&D is for 2 big reasons.
First, it has a lot of failure. The hardest thing about doing research is being able to stick with it when 90% of what you do doesn't work. It's fucking hard. But of course it is. If it was easy it would have already been done. So returns on the work can take a lot of time and the visibility of the failure is emotionally draining to those without enough resilience.
Second, we do not accurately capture nor ascribe the value nor of research. People who create ground breaking scientific revolutions that create the capacity for trillion dollar markets never end up with 1% of the result of their work. You don't see Tim Berners-Lee being a billionaire, nor Linus Torvald. You didn't see it in Einstein and cases like Turing are quite common through history. Certainly this is an alignment issue as we as a society should be encouraging such pursuits as their benefits vastly outweigh anything that has been done by Apple or Google. Not to diminish their achievements, they have both done fantastic and incredible things, but do they not sit on the foundations created by Turing, Burners-Lee, Hopper, and others. Or look even today, the work done by LeCun, Sutskever, Karpathy, Fei-Fei Li, Hinton, and yes, even Schmidhuber has created more than a few dozen multi-billion dollar enterprises. Yet as far as I am aware, not a single one of them is a billionaire. I do not believe (I could be TOTALLY wrong) their combined net worth is a billion. Even if it was, that would be a far cry from what many of the mogul we see today. Do we really think Zuckerberg has created more value than these people? Certainly this is entirely dependent upon your definition of value and I think most of use could agree that it would be incredibly naive to believe this exclusively means the money in their pockets. If you really do believe that, I will say that you're part of a problem. Money is a proxy, sometimes we need to stop and think "a proxy for what?"
If we discovered a civilization of moderately smart pandas living on a remote planet and dropped the AI technology onto them, what would happen to their civilization? And what's our motivation?
It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.