What unique selling point do individuals operating AI still have if it's AI doing the heavy lifting and specialized work? I mean I don't believe that people in general will need to work less (no automation has done that), but I'm convinced many people will need to find new employment at lower wages in a society where cost of living only increases.
I can't afford a pay cut, and AI isn't making my job worth more.
" will need to find new employment at lower wages "
Why at lower wages? Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages. Utility works get paid 10x more than lamplighters. Why would that change here? Your job will have a bigger impact, affect more people, and you'll be doing more with less.
I am not saying all employers will immediately start paying people more, but economically it doesn't make sense that pay will go down.
>>What about artisanal cobblers vs Southeast Asia Nike sweatshop workers?
No technology involved? Other than I guess tangentially, containerized shipping. I don't see how that analogy applies here at all, every AI workflow I've seen has been either:
a) Totally new thing that was never done before that is possible now and is therefore creating a new class of work
b) Worst case scenario: a whole spate of jobs being consolidated under one person, but its still a human in the end.
So everything I'm seeing is pointing to this being a lamplighter/utility worker situation.
Well, for example, a metric ass-ton of shoes and shoe components are made in Bosnia. But hardly anyone still makes the traditional opanci in the traditional way; there's one guy left in the whole Hercegovina that does. And they are required for the national costume, so they are still important. But the economics just don't work out.
To me this just reads like how I imagine people and the Luddites thought about automated looms. At first they were excited, thinking about the cheap and abundant cloth they put in plenty of work to make automated looms work flawlessly, until they start getting replaced. But they made excuses that they always need someone who knows more than "put cloth on spool, press button" to run these factories and that skilled people will always be needed. But slowly and surely the factory went towards quantity and not quality, and since quantity was done regardless why pay for the skilled and knowledgeable workers? And soon nobody made good money making cloth except the factory owner, the cloth was shit, and the people who built it all left with nothing but memories of once being valuable.
>>people who built it all left with nothing but memories of once being valuable.
But, the story doesn't end there does it? Most loom workers left their jobs and became factory workers (part of the same technology revolution) and critically: made MORE money. They were wealthier. And the loom machine operators left had a better job. There are very good sources for this, not just vibes [1].
I don't deny that the transition process is traumatic, and there is much we should be doing this time around to assuage the process. But all the evidence points to a general rise in pay, material conditions and standard of living.
people who spout the trite “everything will be better at some nondescript future point in time” are essentially screaming “the ends justify the means and screw everyone else, i’m going to get my bag / be ok”.
As anyone in the Rust Belt can tell you, the average worker might experience higher wages over time, but the average worker is a statistical fiction, not a flesh and blood person.
Individuals and entire communities can live out the rest of their lives destitute and hopeless in the wake of changes that leave them behind. Things might be brighter for those who come after, but let's not pretend we're not doing real violence to those left behind.
The "average worker" ends up getting more wealthy because younger, newer employees who grow up native to the new technology often capture its upsides at the expense of older workers who were unable to. The Rust Belt is a great example of this because most kids ended up migrating out to cities for work while their parents or the less successful ones end up stuck.
There's a lot of questions right now.
1. Will there be a net-new creation of jobs? Is positive-sum knowledge work a real thing, or have we run out of new jobs to create?
2. How quickly will workers transition to an AI version of their jobs?
3. Will AI even succeed in a broad way across knowledge work or will the frontier of AI remain jagged and only impact some jobs (coding) while leaving others alone?
4. For workers left behind in this transition, what will their lives be like? We know from looking at previous technology transitions (industrial revolution, factory automation, computer revolution, now maybe AI revolution) that many workers really do end up in bad places. It's perfectly reasonable to demand that in today's world in our advanced societies that even if those workers are unable to adapt that they are able to lead lives with dignity.
There's a lot of interesting conversations and investigations to be had but my biggest fear is just that nobody is really willing to listen to the other side with empathy. This entire conversation thread is just people snipping at each other, hitting the vote buttons based on where they want to steer their favorite opinion. If you want to do social and economic science in this space but people are so polarized, the work will be thwarted. In general offline spaces are less polarized (not to be mistaken for pro or anti AI disruption) than online spaces, but my fear is that we continue to polarize, making understanding the fabric of our social change challenging and letting down everyone in the process.
From what I've been able to find, that book does not make the argument that the people actually displaced from their jobs ended up better off. It is certainly possible for some workers to end up better off while those who were displaced do not.
I don't think the analogy holds. AI isn't automating one job, it's automating _knowledge work_. There's no factory work to flee to, literally and figuratively.
Try to come up with a job that both doesn't produce anything physical, and can't be done by AI.
This is vague marketing speak and simply not the reality on the ground. As someone implementing all new workflows, most of the time I’m create new product classes wholesale. sometimes I see people upskilling tasks so the same human can do more.
I can’t think of a single knowledge job where they are removing humans from the loop completely.
Random news headlines of struggling companies doing “AI layoffs” don’t count. No amount of AI can save bad leadership.
Easy. Name one profession within the North American context that makes less money (inflation adjusted) now than say a farmer, loom weaver or laborer of yore.
A grub hub delivery man is wealthier today than a farmer 100 years ago and that's purely because of two reasons: Technology and Unions :)
This argument only works if you have a career (and lifespan) that spans 100+ years. I'd venture a guess that 0% of Grubhub delivery drivers were farmers a hundred years ago.
Have you talked to a delivery driver in most large cities? Most of them come from countries where they would be a farmer or day laborer.
This ball is going through even your ever-moving goal posts. My statement never claimed people's careers would stay the same and they'd just make more money.
But you didn't provide any support for saying that the specific people who were automated away would make more money. That's what people are objecting to.
> Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages.
No, what you mean to say is that automation has eventually (decades later) led to higher purchasing power in the system as a whole. The outlook for people that were directly automated away was pretty bleak, actually. The hundreds of thousands of lamplighters did not largely become the thousands of electricians that were needed in this new industry.
This tracks for all industries. Automation literally means far fewer people will be employed to do the same job (otherwise what's the point of it?). That dumps these workers out at the low end of the general job market, where they have to compete with an increasing number of people. Because of the desperation to get any job, the wages fall. It's only decades later that societies settled into a new place and created enough brand new jobs to make up the shortfall, or applied regulation to reign in the crazy power imbalance. That's the stuff you miss out on if you only look at statistics that span centuries and treat the population as one homogeneous mass. The people who are directly targeted by automation are very likely to have their lives messed up for a very long time.
Recent news from China about how better AI capabilities changed what Chinese specialists can earn with microdramas are not confirming this point. Some historical analogies to reassure people things will turn out nice in the end are nice but are not very convincing if you have so many more recent counterexamples with the gig economy and the huge inflation that was not a problem in the early 20th century.
The economy now is very different, no gold or silver standard, less isolation and more globalised product chains and processes, and 7-times as many people.
There is a good chance that a large enough number of people will suffer from this transformation, and they will have to fight with whatever they have, because if they don't, they will risk being left on the roadside and not getting any raise.
People having some direction over how jobs are automated should keep that in mind, otherwise it will be too late to convince the masses of people fearing automation that it is their fault not seeing the positive angles of automation.
The job is to automate the enterprise, keep things safe and reliable, and make money for the company.
It was never about software. That was just the means.
Even in the software era, fads developed and tech stacks changed frequently. Now it's just moving a hundred times faster.
You need smart systems thinkers to do this. That's the role. Be smart in managing processes and complexity.
I'm not going to give coding interviews anymore, but I am going to give architecture, systems design, and SRE interviews. People still need to know how not to fuck up a database and how to design scalable and resilient systems.
The number of people who never seem to have understood what software and IT is in most companies is eye opening to me. Your job was never really to "write code" - you were always automating things.
That the field got somewhat stuck for a couple decades seems to have made many people forget this.
The vast majority of programmers who started in the 80's and 90's are basically directly responsible for massive waves of job losses in certain categories. Lots of cases of entire departments of secretarial level paper-pushing work being replaced with a small team of programmers. Same will happen with AI tooling. The difference is programmers are no longer the "winning" party here.
Computers and software in the end are the most configurable and complex automation system society has ever created. They are simply a continuation of industrial automation, and AI is a continuation upon that.
