"air traffic controllers were paid a median annual salary of $132,250
in 2022, or nearly four times the $33,380 median annual pay of crossing guards"
It's not quite "expertise" that justifies the wage gap, it's supply and demand. Almost anyone can be a crossing guard--not everyone can be an air traffic controller. If AI theoretically could make anyone an air traffic controller, one would expect the salary to collapse as well.
Additionally, the notion of a middle class relies on a wage differential. If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes.
Likewise I think the author makes the same error elsewhere. TFA states:
>The contemporary challenge is the high and rising price of essential services like healthcare, higher education and law, that are monopolized by guilds of highly educated experts.
The rising cost of education and healthcare are not exactly going to the "guilds of highly educated experts" as much as they are ballooned by second-order effects from an overly complicated system. For example, the higher cost of education is not going to professors as much as it's going to the administrative costs as colleges continue to compete for a growing supply of students willing to pay (in part because the mass availability of student loans allows them an extensive line of credit and also because the labor market makes it seem like they must get a degree to be competitive).
> If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes
We can study this by looking at examples!
Slovenia (where I'm from) has the 3rd lowest gini index in the world[1]. Meaning we are the 3rd most egalitarian country in the world with close to zero income inequality.
You would think this is fantastic, but in practice it means everyone's equally poor-ish. There's a lot of talent drain. Everyone in my millenial generation that's great at their job has either moved out of the country, works remotely for foreign companies, or has built a business that primarily targets foreign markets. They're starting to build a proper middle class, but there's nowhere for their money to go.
There aren't enough higher middle class folk to support all the services they'd want. So the extra money goes to foreign companies or into inflated real estate that has become unaffordable to anyone employed locally.
And there are no rich people to tax or ask for philanthropy to break the status quo. A net worth of ~$20mil puts you on the list of top 100 richest Slovenians as of 2023. Most of them made their money abroad and have also moved their wealth out of the country to avoid high taxation.
The concept of "upwards mobility" is barely worth talking about.
Right. Instead of many people in a business (ie, accountants, lawyers, product owners, software engineers). The “workforce” can theoretically be reduced to specialists within a field:
- “prompt engineer - accounting” who has vast history of accounting practices
- “prompt engineer - lawyer”. No more farming out writing up complicated EULAs to Skadden. Have your general counsel do all of this for you with the help of “AI”. Or maybe have an IPO prepared without the help of a middleman such as “JPM” or “Goldman Sachs”. Billable hours drop significantly.
- “prompt engineer - swe”. Instead of multiple teams of engineers. Have “Devin” scaffold out the basic application while you focus on architecting an end to end solution.
All of those “middle class jobs” once held by mid tier specialists have evaporated.
You see this all the time. Like college degrees for example. They did studies that showed if you got a university degree you would earn X times more than someone who didn't. But that was only the case because a relatively small percentage of people did go to college. Once EVERYONE has a college degree, this doesn't work anymore.
> Additionally, the notion of a middle class relies on a wage differential. If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes.
Yup, and that is going to be the defining problem of the next decade - IMHO even more than climate change and most other environmental issues.
The lower classes aren't going to be threatened by AI, not for a looong time until we get "I, Robot"/Star Trek TNG Data-like robots with precision dexterity comparable to a human. The jobs they do aren't automatable at all, have been automated long ago so it's not an issue any more (most of manufacturing, mining) or human labor will be cheaper than a robot replacing it (which is sad enough - shouldn't automation actually free the masses from toiling in hard and rewardless jobs?).
The higher classes (depending on definition, usually the 1-10 top % of wealth) aren't going to be threatened by AI either. Those who have the money have the power after all, and almost everyone with a fully paid off home and a second one to rent out should be set even for the worst cases.
But the wide masses? Realistically, as you said most of them will fall to lower classes in income and lifestyle, and a very few luckshotters (="AI prompt engineers") manage to raise up. We've seen in the last decade or so just how powerful and reactionary the search of these masses for a scapegoat for their externally-caused misfortune can be, and it can take on a lot of different forms: nationalism to far-right xenophobia, antisemitism, anti-muslim, anti-intellectual ("antivaxxers", a ton of "homeschoolers")... that's a lot to take on even for a stable society, and external influence (enemy nation propaganda, financially motivated propaganda such as the Macedonian troll farms hunting for ad placements, domestic media moguls) makes it even worse.
Honestly I have zero idea how the fuck humanity is supposed to continue to exist as a civilization longer than 10-20 years. Even the best of our democracies are falling apart not just at the fringes (you always had and will have loons) but in the center.
Well, we can also say that we expect air traffic controllers generate at least their $132k/ year in value. Crossing guards seem to have a similar role and in theory could be generating the same value, but at the margin they're probably not - you'd expect hiring another one would be worth some significant fraction of the $132k to railway companies, but they're not competing to hire more of them.
So if AI enables every unskilled worker to produce $132k of value instead of $33k, who gets the $99k surplus? Marxist economics teaches us that in a capitalist society, without additional state intervention, the employer gets all of it. Too bad for the worker.
The good news, though, is that most labour economists wouldn't go as far as Marx. In modern societies the working man seems to get at least some benefit from productivity gains that don't come directly from him working harder. And even if you do believe Marx, note the caveat about "without state intervention". The modern state has many tools to intervene and is not afraid to use them: taxes, minimum wage laws, mandating bullshit jobs. In this scenario, doubling minimum wage wouldn't hurt economic productivity - the workers are all producing $132k of value, so not a single one will be laid off if they need to be paid $66k each.
Of course, there are some coordination problems to solve...
Yes. Most people will be seen as unneeded occupants by the rich elite. A world with only a few million is desired by them. Workers are no longer needed. Low and middle class people are waste.
"Recall that the advent of pre-AI computing made the expert judgment of professional decision-
makers more consequential and more valuable by speeding the task of acquiring and organizing
information. Simultaneously, computerization devalued and displaced the procedural expertise
that was the stock-in-trade of many middle-skill workers.
But imagine a technology that could invert this process: what would it look like? It would support and supplement judgment, thus enabling a larger set of non-elite workers to engage in high-stakes decision-making. It would simultaneously temper the monopoly power that doctors hold over medical care, lawyers over document production, software engineers over computer code, professors over undergraduate education, etc."
"Artificial Intelligence is this inversion technology. By providing decision support in the form of real-time guidance and guardrails, AI could enable a larger set of workers possessing complementary knowledge to perform some of the higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts like doctors, lawyers, coders and educators. This would improve the quality of jobs for workers without college degrees, moderate earnings inequality, and — akin to what the Industrial Revolution did for consumer goods — lower the cost of key services such as healthcare, education and legal expertise."
"Moderate earnings inequality" means "fewer high-paying jobs", as someone pointed out in another comment. From where does the pressure come to raise incomes across the board?
That's what unions were for. In the US, the unions were crushed. The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement, is almost forgotten. Yet that's what this paper assumes will happen. Somehow.
This is "trickle-down" economics with an "AI" label pasted on it.
The author has better papers. His "Why are there still so many jobs" (2014) [1] is worth a read. He makes predictions one can now check.
>The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement
No, it wasn't. A company can't survive long paying all its employees more than they're worth. The goal of unions was, at least as far as pay is concerned, only to reduce the margin that was skimmed off of employee value by employers.
The problem with the concept of a middle class job (one where you can comfortably afford living, fun, saving, etc I think is most people's interpretations), is that it represents an unstable equilibrium state. Incentives of most businesses are the opposite of someone in the middle class. Businesses don't think in terms how they can take so little such as to perpetuate some idyllic lifestyle unimpinged, they think in terms of how much can they possibly take off the table for our own gain without bleeding the beast dry. This is why over time, middle class lifestyles get clawed away into more desperate paycheck to paycheck ones. So even if AI used well restores some middle class jobs tomorrow, what about next week lets say when companies realize they can charge more for goods and services, and people are back to paycheck to paycheck? Short of a planned economy with price controls I don't know how you prevent these incentives from emerging.
There's a whole range of options. We can make the state stronger without going full planned economy.
To pick a few things we could do:
-> criminal liability for white collar crime
-> muscular antitrust
-> roll back citizen's united
-> public option for health insurance
-> taxes on real estate as investment
I don't understand why people think this is all or nothing. Plenty of countries are doing much better than the US on these fronts.
> one where you can comfortably afford living, fun, saving, etc I think is most people's interpretations
My understanding is that most people's understanding of "middle class" is "about 20% richer than me", and that this remains true regardless of how rich one is.
Most people, for most of the years since Joseph Marie Jacquard realised he could control a loom with punched cards, the Red Queen race of automation has given us more stuff and experiences per hour of labour — if you wanted to live the 1820s idea of a middle class life, you can retire as soon as you get around €$£ 25-50k of savings (just don't start a family, the rest of society considers this standard to be unacceptable for that, what with no electricity).
If this improvement in living standards is despite, or because of, each business trying to maximise revenue, is basically the entire disagreement between Adam Smith and Karl Marx; though it's worth also noting that neither liked rent-seeking, and if you have a completely efficient market then nobody can extract any profits because competition drives margins to zero… but also since then we've had research show that complex markets aren't and can't be efficient: https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284
I'd like to see that math expanded because I'm not sure I follow. Just because some (even if all) companies want to bleed the world dry, they aren't all colluding. If Tesco put up their prices it's not going to derail my middle class lifestyle, I'll just go shop at lidl instead. If my employer cuts pay in real terms then that's certainly a tougher situation which is why we have a union, but though it may be hassle, middle class people have been known to change jobs.
> The problem with the concept of a middle class job (one where you can comfortably afford living, fun, saving, etc I think is most people's interpretations), is that it represents an unstable equilibrium state. Incentives of most businesses are the opposite of someone in the middle class.
Ok, and I claim that the problem with the current model of capitalism, as opposed to the post-WWII model, is that it's oppositional to a middle class - the incentives are opposed.
Now the question is about the societal outcomes we expect from the systems people create. Why should we prefer greater inequity and an even more complete loss of the middle class? These things are all being imposed by human-manufactured systems - we can control them.
We don't even need to throw AI or human desperation or planned economies on this bonfire of ideas to recognize that, as initially posed, the problem is itself incorrect.
Institute law that give employees greater than 50% shares of any large company they were work for. So, the capitalist class can't actually extract wealth away from the worker class.
This person assumes AI is going to stay in its current form: a technology that requires an expert operator to help accomplish tasks.
Most people are afraid of “next-level” AI, where no operator is required. If trucks can be moved without anyone at the wheel, truck driving is a job that won’t exist anymore. As simple as that.
Whether trucks can be 100% autonomous remains to see.
People aren't even 100% autonomous so I wouldn't exactly be holding my breath here. Personally, I don't expect the expect operators to just go away given how terrible even professionals are at asking for and specifying what they want. I'm not sure if it that would be called optimism or pessimism but specifying stuff properly to anyone or anything is hard, and AI won't spare you from the burden of clarifying your ideas any more than outsourcing did.
On the other hand, offshoring of manufacturing and the emergence of computers should have reduced the workforce but we saw the opposite happen. There might not be truck drivers in the future but maybe those people will just be working different jobs, like how I am not a blacksmith making horseshoes today.
Productivity has been gaining for years while the number of working hours per week have remained the same and wages have stagnated or even declined. Why should I believe more productivity on the lower end will restore the middle class?
Because if you do believe this, Marc Andreessen's personal net worth increases by the annual economic output of a rural Midwestern county in the next week.
You're right to be skeptical. Don't believe them. Demand a greater slice of the created value for yourself, and until you get it (and it manages to have a positive impact on your finances - see inflation), tell these people to shove their whitepapers where the sun doesn't shine.
> Because of AI’s capacity to weave information and rules with acquired experience to support decision-making, it can be applied to enable a larger set of workers possessing complementary knowledge to perform some of the higher-stakes decision-making tasks that are currently arrogated to elite experts, e.g., medical care to doctors, document production to lawyers, software coding to computer engineers, and undergraduate education to professors.
Note that in this analysis, if you are a software engineer, you are not the "middle class" as most signs point to. Rather you are a member of an elite that the middle class must wrest power from.
The identity of the middle class is another question. You might assume that it's made of the people you know, but more likely it's underpaid workers from developing countries.
If AI truly does take over most jobs of today (low to mid tier level SWEs replaced with a couple of “prompt engineers”). I would be okay, but only if there were proper support pillars in place.
Healthcare should be free for all. UBI. And of course continued education provided to train workforce into something else.
UBI means everyone is poor and on welfare. I don’t see why this is the ideal solution everyone points to. I guess better than everyone jobless and no net whatsoever, but I wouldn’t call it something to strive for.
It's an interesting point, but in our society and current economic system I have a hard time imagining it will be anything so different as to what we have now to "restore the middle class".
We have people and companies with so much power that it rivals governments, and in the US we also have a large segment of the population who has been conditioned to believe that the government is bad and having less of it will make it better, but it seems to me like better government that actually supports the needs/desires of the populace at large is required to make our society better for everyone.
Thanks for this. Listening to an author on a podcast is great hack for getting a good summary of a researcher’s or book author’s views. (Especially business books)
Everyone seems to be asking how AI is going to fit in the current paradigm - creating or destroying jobs and so forth - but I don't see a ton of folks talking about something I feel is patently obvious; that the most relevant applications of this stuff are going to exist outside the "company hire people to make product / give service and sell service" cycle.
Yes, AI will lower the barrier for entry level positions (IMO a good thing; more chances for smart creative people to get in the game who may have been failed by more traditional systems). But it will also allow the creation of projects by much smaller teams, who no longer need to stress the details and have a focus on making a thing just to try it out.
Individuals will be able to get much more experimental and iterate way faster; if the amount of investment to build an MVP is less than the investment to research and assess all that crap that usually has to go into a commercial product (market fit, funding, marketing, sales, etc.) then you can just make the damn thing and see if the pasta sticks to the wall. This could be a really great environment for testing out weird ideas, some of which might be completely novel and break the mold in ways that are simply not feasible if you have to manage all that other stuff.
I'm also excited to see what new stuff pops into the OSS space as a result of devs-with-jobs being able to hack out a proof of concept in a couple hours and smacking some stuff together over weekends.
Yes, let's hope that AI won't remove the need for drudgery!
I knew a very comfortably well-off lady who made a fine point of how she never used the automatic machines in the supermarket, because she wanted to ensure that those poor cashiers didn't lose their jobs.
One new job which I believe will be high paying and lot of people will be able to do, in the post-AI world => Content verification and moderation. With so many bots and fake content, I don't want to waste my time on low quality stuff. I want other humans to verify it, test it, validate it etc. and then only it should see my eyes. Those platforms which will employ this approach will have better content coming to timelines and will attract more users.
It won't, and that's a good thing. Workplace deaths will plummet, people will have more free time, and the environment will improve from less people commuting. I don't see any reason why replacing certain jobs with AI is bad, so long as this is paired with UBI.
> My thesis is not a forecast but an argument about what is possible: AI, if used well, can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the US labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.
> The unique opportunity that AI offers humanity is to push back against the process started by computerization
Yes. More automation and computers will clearly solve the problems created by automation and computers.
I can't find where he probably says something like "outsourcing of these jobs will also improve middle class outcomes" but I assume it's in there through some kind of weasel-wording.
So long as the dominant theology in this country is extractive capitalism, nothing that tilts the cost balance towards capital and away from labor will be good for the middle class or the average person.
All of this analysis is based on inaccurate assumptions. Primarily that some rules of supply and demand will dictate how the tech is deployed.
Let's look at history. The industrial revolution was predicted to create copious leasure time for the working class. How did that turn out?
The steam engine, the cotton gin, the automobile, the computer...
Every single technological advance that was predicted to improve the lives of the working class due to massive increases in productivity, was used instead to almost exclusivly bennefit ownership.
This is exactly what will happen with current LLM tech (please don't call the bullshit generators "AI")
If the tech cannot be deployed so as to exclusively bennefit ownership, it won't be deployed at all...
fny|1 year ago
It's not quite "expertise" that justifies the wage gap, it's supply and demand. Almost anyone can be a crossing guard--not everyone can be an air traffic controller. If AI theoretically could make anyone an air traffic controller, one would expect the salary to collapse as well.
Additionally, the notion of a middle class relies on a wage differential. If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes.
bumby|1 year ago
>The contemporary challenge is the high and rising price of essential services like healthcare, higher education and law, that are monopolized by guilds of highly educated experts.
The rising cost of education and healthcare are not exactly going to the "guilds of highly educated experts" as much as they are ballooned by second-order effects from an overly complicated system. For example, the higher cost of education is not going to professors as much as it's going to the administrative costs as colleges continue to compete for a growing supply of students willing to pay (in part because the mass availability of student loans allows them an extensive line of credit and also because the labor market makes it seem like they must get a degree to be competitive).
Swizec|1 year ago
We can study this by looking at examples!
Slovenia (where I'm from) has the 3rd lowest gini index in the world[1]. Meaning we are the 3rd most egalitarian country in the world with close to zero income inequality.
You would think this is fantastic, but in practice it means everyone's equally poor-ish. There's a lot of talent drain. Everyone in my millenial generation that's great at their job has either moved out of the country, works remotely for foreign companies, or has built a business that primarily targets foreign markets. They're starting to build a proper middle class, but there's nowhere for their money to go.
There aren't enough higher middle class folk to support all the services they'd want. So the extra money goes to foreign companies or into inflated real estate that has become unaffordable to anyone employed locally.
And there are no rich people to tax or ask for philanthropy to break the status quo. A net worth of ~$20mil puts you on the list of top 100 richest Slovenians as of 2023. Most of them made their money abroad and have also moved their wealth out of the country to avoid high taxation.
The concept of "upwards mobility" is barely worth talking about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
xyst|1 year ago
- “prompt engineer - accounting” who has vast history of accounting practices
- “prompt engineer - lawyer”. No more farming out writing up complicated EULAs to Skadden. Have your general counsel do all of this for you with the help of “AI”. Or maybe have an IPO prepared without the help of a middleman such as “JPM” or “Goldman Sachs”. Billable hours drop significantly.
- “prompt engineer - swe”. Instead of multiple teams of engineers. Have “Devin” scaffold out the basic application while you focus on architecting an end to end solution.
All of those “middle class jobs” once held by mid tier specialists have evaporated.
Eddy_Viscosity2|1 year ago
mhh__|1 year ago
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
cyanydeez|1 year ago
We choose yo ignore wealth ineqaulty for delusional reasons
mschuster91|1 year ago
Yup, and that is going to be the defining problem of the next decade - IMHO even more than climate change and most other environmental issues.
The lower classes aren't going to be threatened by AI, not for a looong time until we get "I, Robot"/Star Trek TNG Data-like robots with precision dexterity comparable to a human. The jobs they do aren't automatable at all, have been automated long ago so it's not an issue any more (most of manufacturing, mining) or human labor will be cheaper than a robot replacing it (which is sad enough - shouldn't automation actually free the masses from toiling in hard and rewardless jobs?).
The higher classes (depending on definition, usually the 1-10 top % of wealth) aren't going to be threatened by AI either. Those who have the money have the power after all, and almost everyone with a fully paid off home and a second one to rent out should be set even for the worst cases.
But the wide masses? Realistically, as you said most of them will fall to lower classes in income and lifestyle, and a very few luckshotters (="AI prompt engineers") manage to raise up. We've seen in the last decade or so just how powerful and reactionary the search of these masses for a scapegoat for their externally-caused misfortune can be, and it can take on a lot of different forms: nationalism to far-right xenophobia, antisemitism, anti-muslim, anti-intellectual ("antivaxxers", a ton of "homeschoolers")... that's a lot to take on even for a stable society, and external influence (enemy nation propaganda, financially motivated propaganda such as the Macedonian troll farms hunting for ad placements, domestic media moguls) makes it even worse.
Honestly I have zero idea how the fuck humanity is supposed to continue to exist as a civilization longer than 10-20 years. Even the best of our democracies are falling apart not just at the fringes (you always had and will have loons) but in the center.
dmurray|1 year ago
So if AI enables every unskilled worker to produce $132k of value instead of $33k, who gets the $99k surplus? Marxist economics teaches us that in a capitalist society, without additional state intervention, the employer gets all of it. Too bad for the worker.
The good news, though, is that most labour economists wouldn't go as far as Marx. In modern societies the working man seems to get at least some benefit from productivity gains that don't come directly from him working harder. And even if you do believe Marx, note the caveat about "without state intervention". The modern state has many tools to intervene and is not afraid to use them: taxes, minimum wage laws, mandating bullshit jobs. In this scenario, doubling minimum wage wouldn't hurt economic productivity - the workers are all producing $132k of value, so not a single one will be laid off if they need to be paid $66k each.
Of course, there are some coordination problems to solve...
holoduke|1 year ago
Animats|1 year ago
"Recall that the advent of pre-AI computing made the expert judgment of professional decision- makers more consequential and more valuable by speeding the task of acquiring and organizing information. Simultaneously, computerization devalued and displaced the procedural expertise that was the stock-in-trade of many middle-skill workers. But imagine a technology that could invert this process: what would it look like? It would support and supplement judgment, thus enabling a larger set of non-elite workers to engage in high-stakes decision-making. It would simultaneously temper the monopoly power that doctors hold over medical care, lawyers over document production, software engineers over computer code, professors over undergraduate education, etc."
"Artificial Intelligence is this inversion technology. By providing decision support in the form of real-time guidance and guardrails, AI could enable a larger set of workers possessing complementary knowledge to perform some of the higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts like doctors, lawyers, coders and educators. This would improve the quality of jobs for workers without college degrees, moderate earnings inequality, and — akin to what the Industrial Revolution did for consumer goods — lower the cost of key services such as healthcare, education and legal expertise."
"Moderate earnings inequality" means "fewer high-paying jobs", as someone pointed out in another comment. From where does the pressure come to raise incomes across the board? That's what unions were for. In the US, the unions were crushed. The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement, is almost forgotten. Yet that's what this paper assumes will happen. Somehow.
This is "trickle-down" economics with an "AI" label pasted on it.
The author has better papers. His "Why are there still so many jobs" (2014) [1] is worth a read. He makes predictions one can now check.
[1] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/w...
thfuran|1 year ago
No, it wasn't. A company can't survive long paying all its employees more than they're worth. The goal of unions was, at least as far as pay is concerned, only to reduce the margin that was skimmed off of employee value by employers.
asdff|1 year ago
hiddencost|1 year ago
To pick a few things we could do: -> criminal liability for white collar crime -> muscular antitrust -> roll back citizen's united -> public option for health insurance -> taxes on real estate as investment
I don't understand why people think this is all or nothing. Plenty of countries are doing much better than the US on these fronts.
ben_w|1 year ago
My understanding is that most people's understanding of "middle class" is "about 20% richer than me", and that this remains true regardless of how rich one is.
Most people, for most of the years since Joseph Marie Jacquard realised he could control a loom with punched cards, the Red Queen race of automation has given us more stuff and experiences per hour of labour — if you wanted to live the 1820s idea of a middle class life, you can retire as soon as you get around €$£ 25-50k of savings (just don't start a family, the rest of society considers this standard to be unacceptable for that, what with no electricity).
If this improvement in living standards is despite, or because of, each business trying to maximise revenue, is basically the entire disagreement between Adam Smith and Karl Marx; though it's worth also noting that neither liked rent-seeking, and if you have a completely efficient market then nobody can extract any profits because competition drives margins to zero… but also since then we've had research show that complex markets aren't and can't be efficient: https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284
sideshowb|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
drewcoo|1 year ago
Ok, and I claim that the problem with the current model of capitalism, as opposed to the post-WWII model, is that it's oppositional to a middle class - the incentives are opposed.
Now the question is about the societal outcomes we expect from the systems people create. Why should we prefer greater inequity and an even more complete loss of the middle class? These things are all being imposed by human-manufactured systems - we can control them.
We don't even need to throw AI or human desperation or planned economies on this bonfire of ideas to recognize that, as initially posed, the problem is itself incorrect.
aerhardt|1 year ago
abdullahkhalids|1 year ago
teekert|1 year ago
[deleted]
d--b|1 year ago
Most people are afraid of “next-level” AI, where no operator is required. If trucks can be moved without anyone at the wheel, truck driving is a job that won’t exist anymore. As simple as that.
Whether trucks can be 100% autonomous remains to see.
Nasrudith|1 year ago
asdff|1 year ago
hscontinuity|1 year ago
gcheong|1 year ago
lenerdenator|1 year ago
You're right to be skeptical. Don't believe them. Demand a greater slice of the created value for yourself, and until you get it (and it manages to have a positive impact on your finances - see inflation), tell these people to shove their whitepapers where the sun doesn't shine.
qntty|1 year ago
Note that in this analysis, if you are a software engineer, you are not the "middle class" as most signs point to. Rather you are a member of an elite that the middle class must wrest power from.
The identity of the middle class is another question. You might assume that it's made of the people you know, but more likely it's underpaid workers from developing countries.
xyst|1 year ago
Healthcare should be free for all. UBI. And of course continued education provided to train workforce into something else.
azinman2|1 year ago
chrishare|1 year ago
NegativeLatency|1 year ago
We have people and companies with so much power that it rivals governments, and in the US we also have a large segment of the population who has been conditioned to believe that the government is bad and having less of it will make it better, but it seems to me like better government that actually supports the needs/desires of the populace at large is required to make our society better for everyone.
dw_arthur|1 year ago
ianand|1 year ago
pksebben|1 year ago
Yes, AI will lower the barrier for entry level positions (IMO a good thing; more chances for smart creative people to get in the game who may have been failed by more traditional systems). But it will also allow the creation of projects by much smaller teams, who no longer need to stress the details and have a focus on making a thing just to try it out.
Individuals will be able to get much more experimental and iterate way faster; if the amount of investment to build an MVP is less than the investment to research and assess all that crap that usually has to go into a commercial product (market fit, funding, marketing, sales, etc.) then you can just make the damn thing and see if the pasta sticks to the wall. This could be a really great environment for testing out weird ideas, some of which might be completely novel and break the mold in ways that are simply not feasible if you have to manage all that other stuff.
I'm also excited to see what new stuff pops into the OSS space as a result of devs-with-jobs being able to hack out a proof of concept in a couple hours and smacking some stuff together over weekends.
2devnull|1 year ago
No. Empirically, has it?
It will do the opposite. It removes trust, therefore making existing powers more powerful. Ain’t going to democratize anything but cybercrime.
sourcepluck|1 year ago
I knew a very comfortably well-off lady who made a fine point of how she never used the automatic machines in the supermarket, because she wanted to ensure that those poor cashiers didn't lose their jobs.
How noble!
badrunaway|1 year ago
Workaccount2|1 year ago
Generally speaking, this is an oxymoron.
freitzkriesler2|1 year ago
Sorry, I've become very pessimistic these days. If something can be used to permanantly reduce FTEs, it will be done.
agentultra|1 year ago
azinman2|1 year ago
matteoraso|1 year ago
2devnull|1 year ago
liveoneggs|1 year ago
> The unique opportunity that AI offers humanity is to push back against the process started by computerization
Yes. More automation and computers will clearly solve the problems created by automation and computers.
I can't find where he probably says something like "outsourcing of these jobs will also improve middle class outcomes" but I assume it's in there through some kind of weasel-wording.
roughly|1 year ago
https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-...
So long as the dominant theology in this country is extractive capitalism, nothing that tilts the cost balance towards capital and away from labor will be good for the middle class or the average person.
1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago
Actual title of PDF: "Applying AI to Rebuild Middle Class Jobs"
johnea|1 year ago
Let's look at history. The industrial revolution was predicted to create copious leasure time for the working class. How did that turn out?
The steam engine, the cotton gin, the automobile, the computer...
Every single technological advance that was predicted to improve the lives of the working class due to massive increases in productivity, was used instead to almost exclusivly bennefit ownership.
This is exactly what will happen with current LLM tech (please don't call the bullshit generators "AI")
If the tech cannot be deployed so as to exclusively bennefit ownership, it won't be deployed at all...