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Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either.
Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he will be replaced by a machine fully; imagine that taxi driver thinking that there are slick graduates from top schools who wake up everyday (waymo, tesla, zoox) with one goal in mind - let's automate this taxi driver.
The anger against AI/Tech is just starting really.
This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor.
The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall. You could use this argument to say we should have never invented the printing press if you only thought of the people who used to manually transcribe books and documents.
What was true with previous automation, that some jobs disappear, but new ones are created in their place, will not be true of AI, because AI is a general purpose technology capable of doing the new jobs it creates just as well as the old ones it displaces.
Whereas in this case most of the top brass of AI do push it as something more akin to "we think this will replace practically all human labor". And without the availability of human labor, at least given the current economic system its hard to see how that'd lead to anything but mass suffering.
I do think the argument still holds. If we were able to see it as a net benefit to all, it would still be worth it. Its just that with the level of replacement we're talking about the net benefit would need to be massive (however we define "benefit") The problem is there is plenty of research showing it is still net negative in many cases, especially (in my opinion) when it comes to cognitive ability and early stage development for children/youth.
The closest similarity may be the development of the personal computer or something along those lines.
This argument alone works just fine. If you explicitly threaten billions of people that you will make them redundant then you better focus on building a guillotine proof neck.
"throughout history" - go look at the time it took to replace those jobs. how those jobs were replaced. A trillion dollars will be put into investment this year to put AI in everything. People who's companies those money is going to are actively saying there will be 20-30% job loss.
>>The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall.
Define 'net benefit overall'. Does overall include people who's job is getting automated? How skewed the benefit is towards some b(t)illionaires?
And yes, "net benefit" is hard to measure for an unrealized/developing product.
So I don't disagree with you. In the current economic system where we need human labor (in the majority of the world) to make a living, its hard to see the current vision of AI by those in charge to lead to anything but mass suffering.
AI will quickly turn the world into an even greater disparity between the "haves" and the "have nots" with its current vision.
That's just treating the very real, living people, who exist right now, and can read your words, as if they're already dead.
> You could use this argument to say we should have never invented the printing press
So, what displaced person will you swap your livelihood with? After all, if it's just about the general arc of progress, and the individual lives don't matter, why not sacrifice yours for that of someone else? The same could be said to those who say "there will always be inequality", life is unfair, etc... it all sounds great but it's really just more words for "fuck you, got mine" IMO.
So yes, I do agree it sucks for lots of people living in the moment.
I mention in some other comments that yes, AI "visionaries" make the level of replacement seem to be on a scale almost never before seen and so the "benefit" for the majority would have to be absolutely massive (however we define benefit). And currently its hard to see how it could reach that level. I was just noting we cannot "only" see it through the lens of replacement. If for example billionaires (trillionaires now?) did actually spread the benefit and we overhauled the economic systems in much of the world for humanity it _might_ actually be a benefit. Its just hard to see this ever happening given history.
I definitely have not "gotten mine" like the billionaires pushing AI. But other inventions in hindsight have very clearly benefited humanity as a whole even with the unfortunate effects on the people of the time.
I like this framing.
But I wish more people would acknowledge that genAI offloads thinking in ways that the printing press, the loom, the calculator, and the computer never did.
I find a net benefit to be extremely unlikely, but the devil's in the details. We'd have to define "benefit" and that's already a big kettle of worms.
I don't care if my current job is being replaced or the whole industry I am working in vanishes. But as an individual, if the new technology says it aims to wipe out all the possibilities of my future career, it is not net benefit for me.
Just saying "net benefit" "overall" sounds like some collectivism propaganda.
And it entailed social unrest every time.
Because no sane person would pitch a product that would put you out of work, it seems surprising to us to hear that pitch. But the pitch isn't to us; we're not part of the equation. We're passive listeners between uncaring, unfeeling parties who only value one thing, and that thing ain't us.
> The anger against AI/Tech is just starting really.
That seems like a pretty safe bet at this point.
> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines??
Because arms race.
Game dynamics and incentive structures don't cease to exist just because someone notices them.
If SW devs who worked on ride sharing apps didn't leave, why would you think these folks would?
If SW devs who worked on airline ticket search engines didn't leave, why would you think these folks would?
And on and on and on. The SW industry has been heavily involved in replacing jobs since its inception.
The general vibe of the internet at least for the last 20 years has been "Work sucks, play is fun, give whatever technology minimizes my need to work and maximizes my wealth and free time"
All these same guys have also talked about the need for UBI, so they basically have been promising the dream of the liberal internet: No work, free money, do whatever you want in your life.
The viability of this dream is pretty debatable, but it definitely checks all the boxes of the internet hivemind as of ~3-4 years ago.
The people that have won are not the lazy ones. It's the preppy work-hard-not-smart guys high on ADHD medication that feel like gods having a dozen machines spew out millions of lines of code per day, instead of just sitting on a hammock and thinking the easiest way to achieve the goal, with the least amount of effort.
That said, the shift away from 'the best engineer is the lazy engineer' ethos has happened a decade+ ago.
Say, you wouldn't happen to write software for a living, would you?
There is a lot of money to be made in the destruction of civilisation.
Cal Newport calls this "Doom-Trolling" — there was an NYT article, he has talked about it on his youtube channel and there was an actually really great, long discussion with Ed Zitron about it where Ed covered a lot more topic ground than he has been focussed on lately.
He makes the case that this fear-based marketing is causing real harm and unnecessary anxiety and is basically despicable.
People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.
It's been really challenging to start companies because you need to go hire and manage a lot of people to handle lots of very different tasks. But it's becoming easier and easier everyday because AI is able to do a lot of that work.
As more people start companies, more competition will drive down prices for everything, making the things people want more accessible.
The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.
The argument implies that there's some kind of balance point in there. But I'll bet it's not one where the general populace is living remotely well.
How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.
Not at all. I doubt LLMs will result in a 90x drop in the overall labor workforce. The agricultural shift was likely greater than the shift due to LLMs will be.
Regarding US agricultural labor displacement.
* It happened over a period of 200 years or so in the USA. [0] That's a key difference.
* Starting in the late 1800s manufacturing rose to a peak of 38% in 1944. [1] This absorbed a lot of the available labor, often at better rates of pay than farm work. It's a common pattern in industrializing nations where manufacturing absorbs labor freed up by more productive agriculture. Manufacturing labor is no longer growing, so that cannot help with employment.
That's not to say it was pleasant for all concerned. I would argue, however, that black swan events like the Dust Bowl caused more disruption and trauma than the steady displacement of farm labor by technology.
[0] https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-ag...
[1] https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work...
Edit: clarity
If you stayed on the land you had to work, not quite like a slave, but close. And if you disagreed with this, the government had an army that convinced you ...
Factories offered a better alternative than that, and yes, mostly because the agricultural option was just not open, and just not worth it. They also offered a great density of people that made the labor movement possible in the first place.
The pitch for AI is that it's affordable at the insane valuations because it replaces labour.
It takes work out of the labour market entirely — fewer salaries means more money can be freed up that can go to the giant intelligence tap.
Not just some sectors — really all non-manual work sectors at once. Isn't that what the e/acc guys were open about at the beginning? Learn AI or you won't have a job?
Sam Altman was so open about this that he funded a UBI study.
source?
The fear is this will replace engineers, scientists, accountants, lawyers, service workers, etc, etc all within a small time window.
Investment types have shown repeatedly that their primary concern is money, not workers. There is no reason to believe that those currently in power are open to sharing their wealth or influence.
https://www.news.com.au/sport/carnage-at-start-of-robot-mara...
We might have to get off the computer, and we might have to rethink how we organize the world economically, but there is still work to be done everywhere.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm
Even after the mechanical loom was created, figuring out the next most important problem to work on was a job that humans did.
Unless you believe there's some hard limit on AI intelligence that will constrain it below the intelligence of a particular earthbound hairless ape, then eventually AI will be perfectly sufficient and probably better at figuring out the next most important problem to work on.
Ta-da, humans are completely removed from the value chain. Neither the loom nor the tractor could not do such a thing.
I reject this argument as bad faith from the start.
AI is an interesting experiment with some real-world applications, but it’s no tractor or mechanical loom... not yet, at least, and it’s far from clear that it ever will be.
As things stand today, AI is not the future. It’s a tool with genuine uses that is being marketed as a revolution.
The industrial revolution came along with massive production of goods that people need and desire. Even then, there was still a huge amount of pushback (it still echoes in a lot of communities today!).
Do you see any differences compared to the AI revolution we're being sold?
Do you not think the ultimate outcome was worth it?
2. If 1 happens, it is foreseeable that they don't even need that many slaves to tend to the machines, so not many "new" jobs created I'm afraid.
Comparing that to the computer -- yes if you are a typist you are doomed -- but they still need someone to type -- just not on a typewriter. And there are suddenly countless new requirements (e.g. video games, CGI, etc.) getting created from thin air. I don't really see this happening for AI -- like, do you see any NEW requirements getting created? Sure we are getting endless AI slop games/videos/fictions, but are they new? People can only consume that many products and pumping 100x into the system doesn't work -- except to make profit drop to ZERO for every ordinary creator out there.
BTW I do think there will be new requirements -- robotics combined with AI (e.g. who doesn't want a handsome husband or a beautiful wife?) -- but again it is to replace humans.
3. Apparently, accountability has dropped to a new low, since the end of the Cold War. So naturally cattle and sheep (I mean, us, ordinary people) are scared. Back then at least the elites were willing to make gestures and put up facades. Nowadays they simply don't GAF.
Tractors are tools to make hard boring labor easier.
Every single expert I asked in our circle had at least serious doubts they will have jobs in 10 years. Doctors, lawyers, assistants, of course IT folks, various other white collar jobs. Of course managers with FIRE button are very anxious and feel like firing should have been done yesterday as long as resulting damage is manageable, quietly hoping they will not be also made redundant because at the end same logic applies to them and they often add little on top of simple yes/no decisions sucked out of a thumb.
How disconnected somebody has to be to think folks would cheer on something that will cause absolute catastrophe for them and their families. Literally everybody groks it. Nobody expects employers to have any empathy when they could be removed.
I view AI research and dev folks in similar vein as nazi bureaucrats - quietly working efficiently behind the desk, making vast machineries work, without a care in the world on impacts of such work on fellow man.
One hopefully positive aspect is - prices are rising, and when SHTF they should be on level which makes them long term sustainable, making obvious how costly such replacement would be. But I think it will still be worth it in high cost societies unless governments add regulatory & financial friction, in similar vein ie chinese cars have high import fees. If that fails, resulting situation will be a catastrophe since I don't believe in some form of UBI promise as sustainable long term situation, people are way too nasty, greedy etc.
> To that end, here are four pointers for politicians and AI companies looking for policies.
Extrapolating from the past, none of these are particularly likely to happen, however.
Another notable aspect is that, unlike many other societal issues, the backlash against AI is decidedly bipartisan.
Certainly in my own life it's made some things easier. But that just means I move on to the next thing quicker - the treadmill never stops. Does AI improve my life yet? I'm not so certain. It also has huge environmental costs, pushes up energy prices, pushes up computing hardware prices and sucks attention away from other things.
Is it cool? Yes. Is it likely to be society changing. Yes. Does it make anyone's lives better? TBC.
"Let them eat cake...", I wonder what the 'taken out of context' trigger will be this time around
In some sense it's probably acting as a lightning rod for resentment, and that resentment is combined with marketing spiel from the model companies alongside well-placed concern over the impact of AI on employment.
They see that AI is capable and fear it.
If you watch an AI and dig into the details of everything it is doing, you can see it repeatedly banging into these guard rails. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. As a human being, I bang into those guard rails all the time too. That's where they came from in the first place, to let humans bang into them. And we've built a lot of them.
However, in a lot of the rest of the world their experience with AI much more resembles that of the more critical voices that post here. A lawyer who uses an AI that makes two correct citations and then an incorrect one has many fewer automated guard rails to work with. It is relatively easy to imagine a system that at least verifies the citation exists (I've heard that's easier said than done due to the system depending on humans to resolve sloppy references but still it's feasible), but the task of deciding if the AI correctly used the citation, either in the abstract sense of it being correct or in the sense of it being the best way to use it to advance the current case, is a vastly harder decision than "ah, that change failed to compile, try again".
Accounting seems like another good example. Yes, it has the obvious guard rail of "do the books balance", but that's the beginning of accounting, not the end. It's difficult to put up guard rails for how the accounting is done from there. An accountant will experience an AI accountant as doing OK sometimes but making really dumb decisions that couldn't be caught by anything other than human review, and I have to imagine that the lack of learning and the way the AI will tend to make the same mistakes over and over must be incredibly aggravating.
I think there's probably more truth to "AI is useless" than we may see. I think a lot more people than we realize have had the experience of using AI a while, putting some trust in it, then having that trust grotesquely violated when it says something stupid in an email or makes boneheaded errors in a spreadsheet. We're maybe just now exiting the portion of the hype cycle where it is simply culturally unacceptable to criticize the AI and entering the part where it is culturally both acceptable and expected, and we software engineers may look on in bafflement at the other fields and their complaints because it's working for us, what's your problem?
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/
When I look at the clerical work from a software engineer's point of view, I find it nuts how few guardrails there are - clerical workers would have a far easier time producing work with a low error rate if there were some guardrails put up, but that's just not an investment/culture that the field seems to be interested in.
The two related points around AI are that 1) guardrails would make the clerical work relatively easier for AI and 2) because assistants are so error-prone anyway, the bar for AI isn't all that high.
Some problems that seem straightforward at first blush might in fact be AGI-complete--that is they require actual judgment and reasoning to solve. I'm not making the specific claim that the clerical work you're describing is one of those, but it could take a large amount of data modeling work to determine whether it is.
This is what makes finding productive AI (EDIT: I mean ML, AI == AGI and we don't have that) applications so challenging. It's why my money is firmly not on a big AI revolution anytime soon, despite the demonstrated capability of language models.
0. No one wants a datacenter in their backyard or hooked up to the grid while the electricity burden is carried by households. People are afraid of losing their property values and being unable to move away if a DC is built nearby - effectively being trapped there. People in Memphis are breathing in gas fumes from the XAI datacenter there. There are concerns about corrosion byproducts making its way into the aquifers from DC waste water. If DC construction takes the cheap option no sound insulation is installed and people can’t sleep and some even lose their hearing: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
People are pissed that towns and cities are bypassing public approval to placate corporate builders.
1. People have been told to fear for their jobs
2. Many people believe labs have stolen vast amounts of intellectual property
3. Engineers are being pressured to use AI and told they “aren’t prompting right” if/when it doesn’t work for their use case
I can go on. But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.
I think it exacerbates the points you make. "You mean, you want to take all the IP, immediately force the tech on us, maybe make my job redundant, and you want billions in funding for it!?"
AI companies are becoming a catch-all / symbolic lightning rod for "the ruling class".
That argument applies better to blast furnaces than to data centers, but I don't see people complaining about steel. Data centers just don't take up much space or power in the scope of industrial manufacturing.
Your other arguments are legitimate, but "it's a waste of electricity" and "data centers make some significant difference to a nontrivial number of people" are not the same propositions.
Some of these data centers are multiple orders of magnitude bigger than a blast furnace.
I think people are pissed that they're subsidizing the R+D cost of their own unemployment.
It really doesn't help to have stuff like this in print:
> a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech.
They just take these claims completely uncritically and move on. Where is the productivity increase? Where are the cured diseases? Where are the improvements in education and green tech? So far, it's all a big fat zero. Maybe in 2yrs some of this will actually be true? Is that the hope?
This is scammer shit. If any of this was true you wouldn't have to ask for extra time.
EDIT: The fact we're all calling this "AI" is part of the problem. It's not AI yet, it's still ML. The Overton red-shift comes for us all in the end.
You were just denied an application because some LLM decided you fit a certain statistical pattern. Where did the LLM go wrong? What were the steps taken to make that decision? Who can you appeal to? Nobody. AI bureaucracy would just keep chugging along, making decisions based on prejudices and patterns it finds but doesn't feel.
Rainer Mühlhoff makes some compelling arguments in trying to warn people of the dangers of an AI bureaucracy/state.
Meanwhile, there are all these intellectual jobs which are hard for humans to do, so we assume they're just hard in general. Look closer, though, and many don't involve human social interaction, only require a small amount of good taste, and don't have any physical component.
Well, the attempt to claim that speaks to something, but the claim doesn't really, because it's not true.
Let's not even try to get people to think about people who are not them, people who are in need, people with disabled children, whatever. I don't know about the US because it has very few spaces where people actually live together like humans would, but for the majority of the world, at least in major cities: nevermind healthcare or pensions and whatnot, just consider garbage disposal, and maintenance of plumbing and sewer system, the electric grid, and lots of other "small" things like that. The shit we take for granted and corporations moan about because it cuts into their profits and reduces the costs they can externalize slightly. Regulations that say they can't just put saw dust and some heroin in food, that type of thing. That came to be because that's the type of shit they just could not stop doing.
If you could quicksave and experience that just for yourself, without fucking life up really badly for everyone else and for decades, you totally should. I don't think most people who talk this stuff from myopic bubbles would last even a week. Because they don't think so well, we know this from the arguments, and are not likeable, we know this from how they don't consider other people. So to me that's absolute bottom of the food chain energy talking about the Ark B. Pure, pristine, unadulterated projection.
This is really naïve in the long run, since you ultimately cannot solve social problems with technical solutions.
It's always techies that fail to realize the second / third and forth order of events when this level of disruption is measured by the number of mass layoffs you can do in each quarter.
Automate corporate bullshit. Keep your hands off the government. They are literally the only ones incentivized to not use you as toilet paper.
I'm sorry but all of this is to be determined but if the present is any indicator LLMs tend to make things distinctly worse, not better. Any areas of "potential" still rely on massive amounts of manual human labor, hardly a trillion dollar industry.
"Useful" in the sense of cheap parlor tricks, useful in the real sense that it enables mass surveillance on the cheap; but actually useless for the material lives of people around the world.
I'm sure it's great if you're a rich tech bro.
- This thing is very consistently lying and misleading people. Do I want to introduce more deception and confusion into the world?
- people don't actually want to use this.
- I don't actually want to use this.
- Something about this feels wrong.
I dropped it. I have another couple of big language learning projects made with 100% human blood sweat and tears, long projects over many years. Zero LLMs or voice models used for anything. Those continue to grow and are loved, and I feel great about them.
Pretty bold statement to say it's useless for most people outside of tech. Almost every "normal" person I know including my in-laws are using it regularly. It's becoming the go-to for asking questions rather than Google, Bing, etc.
And the privacy battle was lost 25 years ago. People don't really care if corporations know about their search history (Google), or their private lives (Facebook). You're beating a dead horse there.
If the deployment of nuclear energy required the distribution of radioactive material to every smartphone in America and for unstable isotopes to be plugged into the core operating infrastructure of every industry, then they'd be a lot closer to analogous.
Today we are much more enlightened and smart, and our convoluted arguments, that sound very smart and somehow reach the same conclusion that the technology must be stopped, are totally right. We're not opposed to AI due to irrational fear and NIMBYism, like those simpletons before.
You are so rational!
Many people around me are just missing the boat, or don't care, but many are also able to finally accomplish all kinds of things they've been barred from in the past.
LLMs are best seen, I think, as an imagination amplifier. If you're in the mindset of finding ways to improve society and help other people, there is no shortage of opportunity, and increasingly, capability.
The relevant debate is: "human empowerment vs disempowerment".
It's still a long-shot, but at least there's a specific target that a majority may be able to agree on.
(Not saying you were specifically saying either.)
I was talking to an academic friend of mine who works in a CS theory group in a top university. He told me now only 2 out of 10 members of the group work on theory anymore, the rest are doing applied/industry projects. The ratio used to inverted, but now the theory people are worried AI will replace them, so they look for ways out.
Or we'll see through the bullshit (which seems to be happening already) and this will fizzle out.
I have a great face-saving exit plan for AI companies: follow anthropic's lead and pretend you're saving the world by not releasing anything to the public anymore. Then just quietly back away, go bankrupt and let us all eventually forget.
> Third, measure everything. The common view that AI is already leading to lay-offs and raising electricity bills is probably wrong. But without better statistics it is hard to be sure.
Why are they syndicating high school economics papers on AI?
>The buildings summon a vitriol well beyond conventional nimbyism. More Americans say they would be happy with a nuclear reactor next door than a data centre. Even plans to build one in the Utah desert have met with passionate opposition.
It's just that they're building them at such a large scale now that you see more and more people protesting them.
Today the tech companies dominate people's lives and attention, everything people do goes through a few companies in one way or another. The google of 2007 was a plucky underdog who promised to Do No Evil. Today they are so huge, the size itself is scary. Instead of being happy you got 2GB free email, you're slightly anxious about accidentally getting flagged by some automated recourse-less system that'll lock you out of your data and disrupt your life significantly. AI startups don't offer a respite, they small but even more scammy and slight-of-hand-y. AI industry marketing is best summed up as "You're a worthless piece of shit NPC and we'll take your job, your personal data and your attention. Buy our shit"
That is to say, people probably understand (on vibe level mostly) that this great new tech will be leveraged to the max by bad rich people to make their lives worse. Nothing innate about the tech dictates this, but it is the way things are turning out. I expect more backlash in the future.
"Blockers need to be shown that their local area will benefit if they get out of the way." Benefit how? Will this be like when your city convinces you it's in everyone's interest to subsidize the latest billionaire-owned sports stadium?
"If America succumbs [to popular rage], it could cede the global ai frontier" ah here we go. The next generation of Too Big To Fail.
I’ve been rereading Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of The United States’ and the US has been doing this since day zero. Build the economy on indentured servitude. Replace that with slavery. Flood cities with freed slaves when wages get too high. Flood the country with illegals for the same reason. Offshore the work to poor countries. Automate as much as possible. Now AI.
Kudos to the AI leaders for the carefully manicured publicity, claiming this will make everyone free etc., but people see right through it. It’s the never-ending class war between a tiny minority of ultra-wealthy scumbags vs. everyday people one bad day away from being homeless.
Socialism will spread across the US and the battles will continue.
I predict costs will fall.
I don’t really have a use for it myself that I can’t solve some other way cheaper or easier without the damage and uncertainty it does.
I’m not really that impressed.
How many sub-par mathematicians could solve the unit distance conjecture?
Factually that's just not true. Five years ago current llms would have seen like magic to even data scientists working on them and realistically their impact has been felt by many. Just taking jobs into account, imagine an average worker in an average industry; how do you think something like Fable compares? Worse? By how much?
Like even many years ago we had alphafold that had a non negligible impact on biology, who knows what's gonna happen when this technology grows up.
Outside of my work - AI video has reached a point where creative artists are generating engaging, realistic content that is genuinely entertaining. IMO the common thread is that in the right hands it can produce amazing things. For anyone without the expertise, it defaults to slop.
Check out the work of Zack London (AKA Gossip Goblin) on YouTube. It's objectively good - I don't even care what your opinion is.