by doubtfuluser on 2/3/25, 4:56 AM with 26 comments
Interesting is the question about physical labor. The economics of pushing atoms in the physical world is nowhere near the economics of pushing electrons (bytes), so if you are not part of group 1 (entrepreneurs) or group 2 (investors), doing physical work is something that will earn you some money (I also expect care work to stay, since people will probably prefer for a long time to have humans care for them). But this means that still group 1 and 2 will be the big winners, paying some money to group 3.
Where do you disagree? Where do you see a different outcome? I’m curious to learn about your thoughts
by scarface_74 on 2/3/25, 3:00 PM
You will also see long term affects in the industry as the pre-AI generation leaves the market.
It was already hard for entry level developers to break the can’t get a job <-> don’t have experience cycle. It is even harder now.
Before there was always some simple busy work that senior developers didn’t have time to do so you would hire a junior level developer who needed to be told exactly what to do. LLMs are already as competent as a junior developer. Why hire them?
I see the next level of hallowing out to be mid level experienced “ticker takers” who just take well defined business use cases off the board and do the work. For non software companies, a lot of that work has already been outsourced to SaaS offerings where businesses hire a consulting company to do the implementation (various ERPs, EHR/EMR systems, Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc)
by Lionga on 2/3/25, 7:25 AM
People use AI a little here and there but nothing much will have changed due to it. Mostly more work for people needing to correct AI mistakes.
by mikewarot on 2/4/25, 12:44 AM
The general level of productivity will rise, and most of the benefits of that increase won't be seen by the workers. 8(
by tempeler on 2/3/25, 4:08 PM
by burrish on 2/3/25, 1:52 PM
I've read a few stories about parents questioning the over-use of AI from their child, adding to that I've seen my fair share of adult who cannot do anything without asking ChatGPT first.
by anon2549 on 2/3/25, 3:18 PM
by JCJC777 on 2/4/25, 8:28 AM
by hnthrow87123 on 2/3/25, 7:34 AM
It's not the same old boring responses which bring more uncertainty.
It's obvious but it's not that obvious that you would likely get it from current ai reasoning models.
by throwaway888abc on 2/3/25, 5:55 AM
by hnthrow8712 on 2/3/25, 7:22 AM
by _cjse on 2/3/25, 7:55 AM
A lot of smart people, including myself, find the argument convincing, and have tried all manner of approaches to avoid this outcome. My own small contribution to this literature is an essay I wrote in 2022, which uses privately paid bounties to induce a chilling effect around this technology. I sometimes describe this kind of market-first policy as "capitalism's judo throw". Unfortunately it hasn't gotten much attention even though we've seen this class of mechanisms work in fields as different as dog littering and catching international terrorists. I keep it up mostly as a curiosity these days. [1]
That future is boring; our current models basically stagnate at their current ability, we learn to use them as best we can, and life goes on. If we assume the answer to "Non-aligned ASI kills us all" to be "No", and the answer to "We keep developing AI, S or non-S" to be "Yes", then I guess you could assume it would all work out in the end for the better one way or another and stop worrying about it. But we'd do well to remember Keynes: In the long run, we're all dead. What about the short term?
Knowledge workers will likely specialize much harder, until they cross a threshold beyond which they are the only person in the world who can even properly vet whether a given LLM is spewing bullshit or not. But I'm not convinced that means knowledge work will actually go away, or even recede. There's an awful lot of profitable knowledge in the world, especially if we take the local knowledge problem seriously. You might well make a career out of being the best informed person on some niche topic that only affects your own neighborhood.
How about physical labor? Probably a long, slow decline as robotics supplants most trades, but even then you'll probably see a human in the loop for a long time. Old knob-and-tube wiring is very hard to find expertise around to distill into a model, for example, and the kinds of people who currently excel at that work probably won't be handing over the keys too quickly. Heck, half of them don't run their businesses on computers at all (much easier to get paid under the table that way).
Businesses which are already big have enormous economic advantages to scaling up AI, and we should probably expect them to continue to grow market share. So my current answer, which is a little boring, is simply: Work hard now, pile money into index funds, and wait for the day when we start to see the S&P500 start to double every week or so. Even if it never gets to that point this has been pretty solid advice for the last 50 years or so. You could call this the a16z approach - assume there is no crisis, things will just keep getting more profitable faster, and ride the wave. And the good news is if you have any disposable capital at all it's easy to get a first personal toehold on this by buying e.g. Vanguard ETFs. Your retirement accounts likely already hold a lot of this anyway. Congrats! You're already a very small part of the investor class.
[1]: [url-redacted]