The full interview this comes from is off the rails. Gawdat says we'll have AGI by 2026 at the absolute latest, and that we will have artificial super intelligence in the immediate future. He guarantees that after destroying jobs, within 15 years we will be in a "utopia" controlled by AI. It's an absurd level of confidence for an extremely bold prediction.
In his last interview from this series in 2023, Gawdat said that LLMs are "alive in every possible way," have a "very deep consciousness," are "definitely aware," and "feel emotions."
His current endeavors involve an unlaunched combination LLM relationship coach and dating site (matchmaking humans with humans, not with LLMs, as far as I can tell).
Think about what happened when we got advances in agriculture.
We have gone from something like 90% of people employed growing food to something in the single digits (I'm too lazy at the moment to get exact figures, but this is close enough for my point).
Did all those advances in agriculture create jobs? I would say yes and no.
For the specific industry the advances happened in? No, definitely not. There are way fewer jobs in agriculture now.
But what did happen is that people were freed up to do different things. Those jobs were indirectly created by the fact that people did not need to spend so much time growing food. That allowed people to do other things to create value and improve our lives. Without those agriculture advances, we wouldn't have AI right now.
I suspect AI will be similar. We aren't going to have more jobs in the technology section because of AI. But that guy who hears "Code Monkey" for the first time and marvels that someone wrote a song about his life? He won't be a code monkey anymore he will be doing something else. If he's lucky something more personally fulfilling.
Funny thing is, it wasn't agricultural advances, at least initially. It was chemistry and mechanics. Haber-Bosch process of ammonia synthesis created cheap fertilizer, mechanization dramatically increased productivity. New plant varieties with higher yields came later.
Yeah, it's not the ag-tech that created new jobs, it's that human's like to be useful and get paid so they'll come up with new things like web dev or instagram influencer. Come AGI people will still probably come up with things to do. The wages and payment bit will likely need to be modified along the UBI or to each according to their needs lines.
Interestingly, even in western countries there is basically unlimited demand for agricultural work, and it pays well. The issue is that it's hard work and to get into the higher payment tiers you must take on some risks.
Even in small rural areas the demand for locally produced sustainable and consciously produced agricultural products is largely unmet.
I think the current capabilities of AI are basically trash. But at the same time, just because something has not happened, does not mean that it cannot happen. I think AI becomes salable as a replacement for people not because it's amazing, but because there are things outsourced labor is truly bad at. So in the work units where execs have already proven they are happy to destroy jobs to gain incremental revenue, they will do so again. At the same ttime, CEOs will not replace themselves with AI simply because they will make the business decision not to.
In general, the idea with technology is it's cheaper to do things.
It's easier to start the next widget company because building widgets with the technology is cheaper.
It's easier to consume other things because goods are cheaper to make with the tech.
A third option is that the tech enables something all together new, eg television, that starts a new industry.
As far as direct job creation, the third way is the most obvious but probably not the case at the moment. So I guess we're stuck waiting for goods and services made with AI to get cheaper.
Seriously, carpenters and plumbers and maybe more electricians. All those copy writers, graphic designers and junior coders are going to have to do something else.
I'm joking, but not. I think a lot of fat is going to get trimmed of the bone of most industries. That may include myself which is a worry.
It's just basic economics; when something makes the economy more efficient, it doesn't destroy jobs forever, people get new, better jobs in a more efficient economy.
Perhaps AI will finally raise the bar so high lower-IQ individuals won't be able to find any meaningful employment, but this has never happened in before and I doubt it'll happen again. I don't think I've seen a respected economist go on a news broadcast and say AI will lead to mass unemployment.
Probably if the capital owners who have automated away the need for intellectual labor want to take advantage of their increased income and the increasingly cheap/desperate labor, they might hire back some of the fired white-collar AI-replaced folks to give them Roman villa treatment (hand-feeding grapes, performing plays and theater at their homes, ever more elaborate massage/grooming/pampering or the more illicit variety).
One team to re-do the work to double check the right answer.
The second team to reconcile the right answer with the AI result.
I'm not even joking ... I've professionally been extremely embarrassed once by an AI result. Now I check it so often that I might as well just do the work I asked it to do.
No doubt, quick questions and rough ideas, LLM is the bomb.
Anything that contains drudgery that nobody wants to do. AI is automating away all the cool creative jobs, leaving only the garbage ones. Once robotics is up there, those garbage jobs will be gone as well. Then the humanity implodes within 2 generations.
The idea that LLMs will replace us all just seems untethered from reality. Yes, they are extremely powerful and useful, with incredible potential, but I am not convinced that the cost/benefit ratio scales to the size of the entire economy.
As amazing as LLMs are, the statistical unreliability of the SOTA models means human intervention is always necessary. That's based on today's SOTA models which are already so absurdly gigantic that the DCs are disrupting civic infrastructure due to their water and power demands, and these companies still have to rate limit aggressively just to keep the service up.
Everyone knows quadratic growth doesn't scale, so I don't see how these models continue to grow in capability, while also growing in capacity to meet the demand of an "agentic economy", while still ultimately needing to pay human SMEs to verify correctness and fix mistakes. It doesn't add up.
My prediction is that we'll see increased efficiency in knowledge workers and reshaping/consolidation of certain job functions, but the structure of the economy over the next two decades won't be upended due to LLMs.
I don't understand such statement. Automation has already created more job opportunities, why should this be any different? Jobs don't go away, they just transform. And since this AI (whatever that means, nobody really knows) isn't a human-like AGI, it will most certainly not replace humans, but it will automate processes and speed things up.
If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
Software industry needs a healthy shake out anyway. Too many people came in for the money. The current shake out involves either stunting people inside vibe coding such that they are functionally retarded, or straight up leave them long-term unemployed. Honestly, the only reason anyone would stick around is because this is all they know or like. I would not fuck around with this career if you ain’t about that life.
But this goes for all, so all the project managers, and basically anyone that acted as middle-men between text editor and production, they all need to go. It’s going to be a nice trim job, better for everyone.
Historically, jobs lost to technology are eventually replaced with other jobs, though not necessarily for the displaced workers.
There's always the chance that "this time it's different". What's left after machines can think better than people? Dexterous manual work that mechanical arms can't perform?
The ideal situation would be that we reap the benefits of technological abundance and work less.
By historically you mean the one time. We went from a world where nearly everything was made by hand to one built on efficiency of scale, which turbocharged growth across the board. Moving from home made clothes to mass produced, etc. There isn't a new next level to take making clothes, nor everything else. There was a lot of low hanging fruit between 1880-today.
What happened in the past wasn't magic. It was logical progression from a very basic civilization to an optimized one. But AI advocates push the past as 'everything changed but magic made it work out so that will happen again'. The past’s transformation was a one-off fueled by obvious, unexploited gains. There is no “next level” waiting in clothes, shipping, energy, or most other mature systems.
It’s what us doomers have been saying all along: Even if we’re wrong and these LLMs can replace all or most professional jobs, it won’t create new jobs to replace the lost ones because the AI can replace most labor. For a global economy built on consumers spending money on goods and services, this is a death spiral where fewer jobs mean fewer consumers, which weakens demand, which lowers revenues (corporate and tax alike), which inflates asset prices (the sole things appreciating in value that can’t be fabricated by AI), which displaces more workers, which further decreases revenues…
You get the idea. This is bad, it’s always going to be bad, and the only fix is a fundamental reorientation of global civilization away from “profit at all costs” and towards better metrics that reflect the health and wealth of a populace than GDP. Doing that would require existing power barons cede their control and cooperate on building such a new system, which they emphatically do not want to do.
We’re fucked, basically, has been our position all along. Either AI via LLMs is the real deal and the economy collapses because corporate and political leaders are too stupid to understand macroeconomics and labor issues, or AI via LLMs is bullshit and the economy collapses because we let the rich and powerful light money on fire for years in pursuit of a boondoggle.
There is no good ending here under current incentives and motives, and not one AI company has actually bothered to challenge or change those so that AI becomes a positive force.
> He used his AI startup, Emma.love, to further drive the point home. He indicated that he was able to build the app with the help of two other software developers, a task that would have otherwise required the manpower of "over 350 developers in the past."
Looking at the product, the idea that this would take 350 developers is likely complete nonsense. It also indicates that the recent big tech layoffs and hiring reductions are simply removing bloat, not AI driven.
I think he is wrong, in a short run AI will create more jobs. We need more things to run AI and to make more things like power generation, connectivity, sensors, silicone, datacenters, monitoring, security, construction and so on. All of these things and more require massive workforce skilled or not skilled.
There are thousands of former Google execs and their mean intelligence is only slightly different than the population, with plenty of tail morons. There isn't any credibility innate to being an Ex-Google exec.
Of course it’ll create new jobs. Already has - see teams of people doing training runs and a whole bunch of AI SaaS and consulting services etc
The risk is more that the quantity is less than what is removed. And that the people losing jobs aren’t suitable to retrain. Retraining say truck drivers as data scientists is an uphill battle.
ie substantial risk of specific people getting left behind
It's important to note that the lens for a silicon valley ex-google exec is whether AI will create new jobs which remind him of Google.
There's almost no question that tech giants will have negative headcount over the next 15 years but the changes coming from AI haven't even really started to percolate into the broader economy.
Well I came here to say "...We'll need a universal basic income (UBI) in an AI-driven world".
Eventually, at some point. Most industry would have been disrupted.
There should be a working group of the major players/stake holders in the space to figure out how this is implemented.
I work in tech and I don't see that happening for another decade and half or so.
[+] [-] nerevarthelame|7 months ago|reply
In his last interview from this series in 2023, Gawdat said that LLMs are "alive in every possible way," have a "very deep consciousness," are "definitely aware," and "feel emotions."
His current endeavors involve an unlaunched combination LLM relationship coach and dating site (matchmaking humans with humans, not with LLMs, as far as I can tell).
[+] [-] drdec|7 months ago|reply
We have gone from something like 90% of people employed growing food to something in the single digits (I'm too lazy at the moment to get exact figures, but this is close enough for my point).
Did all those advances in agriculture create jobs? I would say yes and no.
For the specific industry the advances happened in? No, definitely not. There are way fewer jobs in agriculture now.
But what did happen is that people were freed up to do different things. Those jobs were indirectly created by the fact that people did not need to spend so much time growing food. That allowed people to do other things to create value and improve our lives. Without those agriculture advances, we wouldn't have AI right now.
I suspect AI will be similar. We aren't going to have more jobs in the technology section because of AI. But that guy who hears "Code Monkey" for the first time and marvels that someone wrote a song about his life? He won't be a code monkey anymore he will be doing something else. If he's lucky something more personally fulfilling.
[+] [-] Lu2025|7 months ago|reply
Funny thing is, it wasn't agricultural advances, at least initially. It was chemistry and mechanics. Haber-Bosch process of ammonia synthesis created cheap fertilizer, mechanization dramatically increased productivity. New plant varieties with higher yields came later.
[+] [-] tim333|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tcfhgj|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hattmall|7 months ago|reply
Even in small rural areas the demand for locally produced sustainable and consciously produced agricultural products is largely unmet.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|7 months ago|reply
It's very counterintuitive, but for 250 years tech has constantly eliminated jobs, while unemployment rates have stayed the same.
People have always predicted this would lead to mass unemployment, they've always been wrong, and yet they've kept predicting it.
One way to explain it is that unemployed people are an unused resource, and free market economies are very good at finding uses for those.
[+] [-] josefritzishere|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|7 months ago|reply
Two examples out of plenty others, where people had to move out as means of survival.
[+] [-] throwaway29303|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kingstnap|7 months ago|reply
Geoffrey Hinton seems to be in the headlines constantly going "godfather of AI" and giving some random obtuse warning or call for action.
Eric Schmidt also spends a lot of time yapping.
And of course people like Gary Marcus.
Simon Willison also does a lot of writing but at least his blog is actually useful information of actual tests and news.
[+] [-] jayd16|7 months ago|reply
It's easier to start the next widget company because building widgets with the technology is cheaper.
It's easier to consume other things because goods are cheaper to make with the tech.
A third option is that the tech enables something all together new, eg television, that starts a new industry.
As far as direct job creation, the third way is the most obvious but probably not the case at the moment. So I guess we're stuck waiting for goods and services made with AI to get cheaper.
[+] [-] gonzo41|7 months ago|reply
I'm joking, but not. I think a lot of fat is going to get trimmed of the bone of most industries. That may include myself which is a worry.
[+] [-] guywithahat|7 months ago|reply
Perhaps AI will finally raise the bar so high lower-IQ individuals won't be able to find any meaningful employment, but this has never happened in before and I doubt it'll happen again. I don't think I've seen a respected economist go on a news broadcast and say AI will lead to mass unemployment.
[+] [-] ninininino|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LightBug1|7 months ago|reply
One team to re-do the work to double check the right answer. The second team to reconcile the right answer with the AI result.
I'm not even joking ... I've professionally been extremely embarrassed once by an AI result. Now I check it so often that I might as well just do the work I asked it to do.
No doubt, quick questions and rough ideas, LLM is the bomb.
Professionally? Nah. Not yet.
[+] [-] storus|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tropicalfruit|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] semiinfinitely|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pacman1337|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] esarbe|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayoldie|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] root_axis|7 months ago|reply
As amazing as LLMs are, the statistical unreliability of the SOTA models means human intervention is always necessary. That's based on today's SOTA models which are already so absurdly gigantic that the DCs are disrupting civic infrastructure due to their water and power demands, and these companies still have to rate limit aggressively just to keep the service up.
Everyone knows quadratic growth doesn't scale, so I don't see how these models continue to grow in capability, while also growing in capacity to meet the demand of an "agentic economy", while still ultimately needing to pay human SMEs to verify correctness and fix mistakes. It doesn't add up.
My prediction is that we'll see increased efficiency in knowledge workers and reshaping/consolidation of certain job functions, but the structure of the economy over the next two decades won't be upended due to LLMs.
[+] [-] janitor77swe|7 months ago|reply
If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
[+] [-] ivape|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hooverd|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jqpabc123|7 months ago|reply
Seems like a current trend.
The idea that a massive tax increase (aka "tariffs") will create jobs is also 100% crap.
[+] [-] xnx|7 months ago|reply
There's always the chance that "this time it's different". What's left after machines can think better than people? Dexterous manual work that mechanical arms can't perform?
The ideal situation would be that we reap the benefits of technological abundance and work less.
[+] [-] _DeadFred_|7 months ago|reply
What happened in the past wasn't magic. It was logical progression from a very basic civilization to an optimized one. But AI advocates push the past as 'everything changed but magic made it work out so that will happen again'. The past’s transformation was a one-off fueled by obvious, unexploited gains. There is no “next level” waiting in clothes, shipping, energy, or most other mature systems.
[+] [-] stego-tech|7 months ago|reply
You get the idea. This is bad, it’s always going to be bad, and the only fix is a fundamental reorientation of global civilization away from “profit at all costs” and towards better metrics that reflect the health and wealth of a populace than GDP. Doing that would require existing power barons cede their control and cooperate on building such a new system, which they emphatically do not want to do.
We’re fucked, basically, has been our position all along. Either AI via LLMs is the real deal and the economy collapses because corporate and political leaders are too stupid to understand macroeconomics and labor issues, or AI via LLMs is bullshit and the economy collapses because we let the rich and powerful light money on fire for years in pursuit of a boondoggle.
There is no good ending here under current incentives and motives, and not one AI company has actually bothered to challenge or change those so that AI becomes a positive force.
[+] [-] schnable|7 months ago|reply
Looking at the product, the idea that this would take 350 developers is likely complete nonsense. It also indicates that the recent big tech layoffs and hiring reductions are simply removing bloat, not AI driven.
[+] [-] arctics|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|7 months ago|reply
The risk is more that the quantity is less than what is removed. And that the people losing jobs aren’t suitable to retrain. Retraining say truck drivers as data scientists is an uphill battle.
ie substantial risk of specific people getting left behind
[+] [-] gkoos|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bluefirebrand|7 months ago|reply
That's why I'm thinking about my new SAAS, revolution as a service! (Because this is HN I have to shill a product)
[+] [-] tcfhgj|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hooverd|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] somepleb|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thatguy0900|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] iambateman|7 months ago|reply
There's almost no question that tech giants will have negative headcount over the next 15 years but the changes coming from AI haven't even really started to percolate into the broader economy.
[+] [-] unknown|7 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mockingloris|7 months ago|reply
Eventually, at some point. Most industry would have been disrupted. There should be a working group of the major players/stake holders in the space to figure out how this is implemented.
I work in tech and I don't see that happening for another decade and half or so.
Where is this discussion thread?
└── Dey well