[air7]

It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable.

The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing. [o]

What's the proper social response to that, I don't know.

[o] If and when AGI comes along, that will be all of us.

[ben_w]

The chain of logic is falsified by the Whitney cotton gin: it was a labour saving device, which saved enough labour to make cotton much more profitable, which led to the growth of the cotton plantations in southern USA, which led to increased slavery, and those slavers actively prevented their slaves from learning to read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_Unit...

That said, I would also agree with the conclusion that "a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing", but for different reasons.

I expect the abilities of AI to expand over time.

IQ is a poor measure, but suitable as a shorthand especially for a comment like this.

Imagine a general purpose AI that runs as fast as a human on 100 watt hardware; first one will be an idiot. Let's say IQ 50: only 0.1% of humans are dumber than this, nobody was employing them anyway. Version 2, say IQ 85: now about 16% are beaten by the AI, this absolutely matters, they're unemployable forever through no fault of their own, give them a basic income of some kind. Version 3, IQ 100, now half the world can't get work. Version 4, IQ 115, now it's 84% who can't get work, etc.

Reality is a lot messier than that, so nobody needs to bother picking holes in the specific details such as "that's a lot of electricity" or "AI isn't a robot" or "comparative advantage": this is a comment, not a research paper.

[AnthonyMouse]

The assumption here is that an AI with IQ 100 could do anything a human with an IQ of 100 could do, only cheaper. But that's just averages. Really it would do half the things better and half worse, and then people have jobs doing the things that it does worse.

That would continue until it doesn't do anything worse, which may or may not ever happen, but if it did and we're all still alive then the result would be post-scarcity and nobody would need a job.

[_carbyau_]

On the one hand I like to have faith in humanity. OTOH...

Anytime someone in power has no need for someone - what have they done? Provided for them for the rest of their life? Or discarded them?

The results generally lie with emotional attachment or sentiment. Take care of your aging parents as they become productively useless - sure.

Take care of the abstract thousands of people who made [thing] but are out of work now? Somebody else's problem.

[AnthonyMouse]

The point is that they don't end up out of work.

We have more automation right now than at pretty much any other point in history, and the unemployment rate is not high.

[datadrivenangel]

The point is that the unemployed end up using violence.

So you need to create employment to keep them out of trouble.

[AnthonyMouse]

You don't have to create anything. "There are no bad products, only bad prices." The demand for labor approaches infinity as its cost goes down.

Suppose that robots and AIs can't grow and distribute food, build housing, provide healthcare or produce and maintain robots. Then there will be necessary jobs for people.

Suppose that they can. Then all of those things will be near-free because they can be mass produced with no labor cost and you'll only have to make a trivial amount of money to have food, shelter and medicine. The low cost of living causes a living wage to be so easy to achieve that even extremely low value work pays more than that, creating jobs for anyone who wants one because so much work is viable at that price.

[jmilkbal]

The power structures will never allow it. The conditions for a society of leisure have theoretically existed for some time now. We will simply end up with a a planetary ruling class that lives opulently while the other 99% live in abject poverty.

[wordpad25]

That's an impossible scenario in a democracy which is ruled by majority. Wealthy class have hugely outsized influence, sure, but it's not limitless.

Consider, for example, that every politician lives and dies by his constituents employment metrics.

If population is genuinely unhappy with arrangement they DO vote for change. If they are extremely unhappy - they vote for drastic change.

[kelnos]

I think your view of our democratic institutions is a bit too rosy. I'm pessimistic that they'd withstand the social upheaval that might occur with a smart-enough AGI. Even now it seems like many people prefer authoritarian rulers -- or at least they think they'd prefer that, as long as the ruler is a part of their political tribe. They'll be in for a painful surprise later, of course.

[alfiedotwtf]

And that’s not even factoring in the automation of highly targeted yet dynamic political content (not just ads but the consumed content itself) in order to charge/persuade the target to vote for the paying party

[AnthonyMouse]

"The power structures" want people to need to work so they have to work for them. Better to keep you occupied with the rat race than have you spending time advocating for political reform.

Which is why work expands to fill all available time. They want you to have a job, because what they don't want is what you might do if your time was your own. For some subset of "they" that represents the most malicious pricks.

The thing that happens if they win is that everybody still has a job even if they're not doing anything useful. Which in a lot of ways is what's happening already.

[pdfernhout]

To support your point on non-useful jobs, see the 2018 book "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Or the 2009 essay "The Gervais Principle": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Or the more radical 1985 essay "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abolition_of_Work

[refurb]

You can live a life of leisure, as envisioned say 100 years ago right now* if you want.

Of course you'd need to be ok with 1920's level of housing (tiny farm house, no sewer or running water), education (stop at 8th grade) and healthcare (no effective antibiotics or cancer drugs).

You could replicate that sort of life today with a plot of cheap land ($3,000 per acre) and $5,000 per year (save $100,000 USD).

[pdfernhout]

You make a great point. To support your point, consider the "FIRE" movement for early retirement, and essays like: "How I live on $7,000 per year" http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-yea...

Frugality opens up a lot of lifestyle options. Although even given the $7000 a year, this person seems to have a lot of capital in a sense of goods, education, health, and relationships.

That said, there are a few nuances here.

Self-education is now cheap through the Internet (e.g. watching YouTube videos on how to do math or how to fix things). However compulsory education laws make that problematical for children (although there are homeschooling regulations in the USA that can be navigated, homeschooling is illegal in some parts of Europe). The credentialing arms race also means a lot of corporate-type or professional jobs are closed to people who skip college -- even as there are still other opportunities including subsistence production or small-scale entrepreneurship.

Many common antibiotics are cheap due to mass production. But antibiotics can have complicating side effects from wiping out healthy gut microbiota -- which may perhaps include cancer and depression because part of the immune system and part of neurotransmitter production are involved with the gut. Some other cures for things based around herbs are increasingly forgotten and also require access to a large enough area to roam in to find the herbs.

Most (not all) cancer can be avoided through a whole foods diet and active lifestyle. Such a diet and lifestyle is generally cheaper than the mainstream (especially if you have your own garden). See Dr. Joel Fuhrman's G-BOMBS approach as one example: https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/237/g-bombs-the-anti-cancer-f...

But, since it is not all, some people in such communities will, as you suggest, die of things treatable in the mainstream. Also, since the people joining such communities presumably have already been eating ultraprocessed food for most of their lives, they are at higher cancer risk than if they had grown up that way (same with other chronic health risks like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, immune dysfunction, and more that are mainly byproducts of Western lifestyle and Western medicine). So, there are these additional background risks for someone going from the mainstream to the alternative -- but the alternatives may struggle under the weight of treating an influx of chronically sick people. (Of course, many mainstream cancer treatments only prolong life for at best a few months at a great cost in suffering and money, but that is a different issue.)

For good or bad, zoning regulations and pressure from neighbors restricts much of what people can do with their land. And cheap land tends to have issues (biting insects, lack of good water, distance from jobs, distance from markets, poor soil, swampy flooding, fire dangers, distance from other people, and so on). So such "cheap" land may actually be quite expensive in health costs and travel costs and labor costs and accepting various increased risks. The book "Life After the City" explores some of these issues.

Decades ago I read an article (in Westchester Magazine?) on someone who learned "primitive" skills for living in the woods. When asked why he did not go and live by himself in the woods using his skills, he replied that it takes a village to live well in the wilderness. So, an overall issue here is that if you want to live well cheaply (which includes some healthy social interactions for most people), you ideally need to be part of a community with related values.

But communities can have problematical dynamics -- especially when surrounded by another culture that is wealthier and more exciting in various ways. That is why, say, the Pilgrims left the Netherlands. The Pilgrims were tolerated in Holland after the left England where there were discriminated against. But they saw their children and other community members starting to adopt Dutch ways, and the older members also encountered other issues fitting into Dutch society. So some of them decided to go to what was then the remote wilderness in North America -- where they could enforce their restrictive norms on their children and neighbors without being surrounded by enticing "Supernormal Stimuli" and "Pleasure Trap" alternatives (both quoted items being names of books on those topics). https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/the-pilgrims-in-leid...

Of course, many of the Pilgrims died, and the ones that did not survived in part due to the compassion of the Native Americans (as well as plundered Native graves and so on). And their original collectivist vision of land ownership fell apart in the face of massive hard work and starvation and freeloading in that context. But that is another story. "Who Were The Pilgrims? This Is The Story You Didn’t Learn In School" https://allthatsinteresting.com/pilgrims

So, if you really want to be as happy as possible with such an alternative lifestyle, a big challenge is finding a lot of other people who want to live like in the 1920s, and actually willing to do that full-time, and all go to the same place, and somehow can afford to buy the land the community needs. And that is all a big challenge, especially since many (not all) alternative communities tend to fall apart over issues of equity or exploitative social/sexual relationships and so on. Some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_utopian_commu...

While not identical in beliefs, some people have quipped the Pilgrims were essentially the Taliban of their day. And in a way, it makes sense, because to leave behind your home as a community takes some common set of core beliefs and strong social bonds which are often associated with extreme religious sects.

To an extent, the Amish are somewhat like this as far as being tight knit religious-based communities which are apart from mainstream US society. But they still emphasize hard work and related material affluence -- and also happily selling goods and services to the lazy "English" all around them. So the Amish are not quite a community of leisure -- even if many people may find happiness in that life.

So, given that, the Amish are far from what Marshal Sahlins describes in "The Original Affluent Society" of hunter/gatherers who have lots of leisure time since most of the food they need does not take that long to acquire and is done often in a way people think is fun or at least engaging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

Unfortunately, hunter/gatherers are living in a productive landscape were generally displaced by militaristic bureaucracies wielding mass-produced "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (like how the first century of the US Army was mainly about being used to displace Native populations): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

Which circles back around to why cheap land to live frugally in community is generally not desirable land.

I do think modern technological advances do make new alternatives possible. "OSCOMAK" is a project I came up with decades ago to help support communities of any size to develop whatever infrastructure they desire (but admittedly it is still more an idea than a realization): https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ "The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas."

And like with the Pilgrim/Taliban, :-) I can imagine such tools most useful for a dedicated community trying to "live off the land" in the desert, ocean, Antarctica, or outer space (Moon, Mars, Asteroids, etc.). Those are all "cheap land" (with no or low taxes) in the sense of being generally far away and generally not pleasant places right now due to lack of one thing or another --- including unfortunately other people to form a community with.

See also the book "Retrotopia" by John Michael Greer for more ideas, including how to have "zones" of infrastructure and taxation at different levels that people can choose from.

An alternative to increase leisure though extreme frugality and living apart from society is to upgrade the mainstream society we have, such as with a basic income; improved subsistence with gardening robots, 3d printers, and solar panels; better collaborative decisions making in democratic government; and a stronger gift economy (like sharing information essentially for free via the web like HackerNews for example makes possible).

[ben_w]

I'm one of the weirdos who can happily live on around €10k/year.

But I'm well aware that I can only afford to live so cheaply because the economies of scale of everyone else spending so much. My laptop could only be built because a million other people would buy one too; the factory could only be built because it also serviced several other computer manufacturers; the mines for the raw materials can only stay open because their stuff isn't only used for computers.

If everyone was like me, the roads wouldn't get paved.

> Self-education is now cheap through the Internet (e.g. watching YouTube videos on how to do math or how to fix things). However compulsory education laws make that problematical for children (although there are homeschooling regulations in the USA that can be navigated, homeschooling is illegal in some parts of Europe). The credentialing arms race also means a lot of corporate-type or professional jobs are closed to people who skip college -- even as there are still other opportunities including subsistence production or small-scale entrepreneurship.

I've just had a very visceral demonstration of how bad this free education is.

I reached a 2500 day streak in Duolingo after repeatedly completing the entire skill tree and watching the gold disappear as the tree was grown, have also been using two other apps daily and intensively for years, have been watching and listening to free podcasts and YouTube videos about the German language most days… and after 5.5 years living in Berlin still only managed to score an A2 on an official language test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...

[Ajedi32]

> The conditions for a society of leisure have theoretically existed for some time now.

Not if everyone wants to maintain their current standard of living. Imagine working 50% less hours, but also having to live off 50% of your current total compensation. Some here could probably manage that, but most would probably prefer not to.

Now if you want a whole "society of leisure", you'd have to impose that same lifestyle choice across all of society by government fiat. Its easy to see why that hasn't happened.

[JoeAltmaier]

Not really a realistic view of the western economy. Or economics.

Things like 'compensation' are fluid, fairly arbitrary and largely unrelated to the industrial complex. It's whatever we decide it is, pretty much.

Automation is in full swing, has been for twenty years and is only accelerating. Ignore that at your peril. Everybody will continue to have toasters, computers, cars even when we've automated most of us out of an industrial/manufacturing job.

How do I know? Because that already happened. Instead of tens of thousands of people on assembly lines, we have tens of engineers and managers overseeing automation. If it hasn't happened in some cherry-picked example, it will very soon.

We have to plan something for the majority of us to do, some way to participate in the resulting economy, without just throwing up our hands and saying "It's too hard!"

So much to say on this subject, that doesn't fit in an HN text field. There's a long history of thought on this subject, and the comments here indicate most folks are still on the first page in their thinking.

[Ajedi32]

Perhaps you could link to some information on this "long history of thought on this subject" because to me everything you just wrote sounds like nonsense.

The idea that we can just double people's compensation and thereby double our total economic output (because compensation is "whatever we decide it is") is so wrong headed I don't even know where to begin. Maybe that's a misunderstanding of your position, but I don't know how else to interpret what you just said.

[zeroonetwothree]

IQ is sort of useful to measure humans because we have roughly comparable skills. It’s not applicable to AI at all in terms of measuring job fitness.

If I need someone to move some furniture it might only need an IQ of 85 but that doesn’t mean AI is doing it any time soon.

[mdekkers]

> If I need someone to move some furniture it might only need an IQ of 85 but that doesn’t mean AI is doing it any time soon.

The article and discussion are literally about machines moving stuff.

[alvah]

> The article and discussion are literally about machines moving stuff.

In a warehouse, not up the stairs to somebody's apartment...

[kelnos]

Why not, though? Advancements in robotics happen all the time. If we end up with a decent AGI in 50 years, I expect the state of robotics to have advanced too, perhaps to the point where it could carry furniture up a stairway to an apartment.

[082349872349872]

> a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing

a/ My bet is that some large fraction of people are currently doing jobs that are far less demanding ("robotic") than what they are capable of doing.

b/ Also, in my experience IQ has a far bigger impact on length of training time than it does on the on-the-job performance afterwards.

[ben_w]

> My bet is that some large fraction of people are currently doing jobs that are far less demanding ("robotic") than what they are capable of doing

Agreed, hence the caveat of 100 watts when at human speed: Humans are not capable of competing against costs of 100W * $0.10/kWh = $0.01/hour even when the only expense that human has is the cheapest available calories.

[082349872349872]

Agreed. I also forgot:

c/ as far as I can tell, "jobs" have been steadily becoming less skilled over the centuries (because we expect people to switch more frequently between them?); can we accelerate that?

So might a way out be that people do regular 100 IQ people stuff (yoga instructors, community theatre, etc.) and automation does (almost) all the heavy lifting?

Bring on the Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy? If the Morlocks of the future are electronic, they won't want to eat us Eloi anyway? (burning a human for electricity is even more wasteful than giving it spin classes)

[082349872349872]

TIL there are amazingly many articles online regarding the calorie content of an adult human body; at 125 000 kcal I get USD ~15 per person, making me suspect that they can easily be put to higher NPV use than their carcass value.

(I did not go so far as to search out tanning instructions for making gloves)

[mFixman]

You are saying "IQ" and "intelligence" to explain people's career prospects, but what you actually mean is "social class".

[tristor]

No, what they mean is IQ/intelligence, just as they stated. Social class is part of the story, more so in the past than it is now, but it's not the entire story. High intelligence is a way out of upbringing and circumstances at the margins, when you can capture opportunities to escape. Tech jobs are filled with people who didn't come from higher social classes, many who suffered inequities during their childhood even from their social peers, but persevered due to having drive and intelligence.

Their argument is exactly what they stated, no hidden meaning here about social class. Not everything is class warfare.

[karaterobot]

Wait a minute. Higher skill jobs? For at least a decade, the place jobs shifted to was Amazon. If you lost your job because Amazon put your company out of business, you could get a worse, more humiliating job working at an Amazon warehouse, or as an Amazon driver. It was not higher skill jobs the market shifted to, it was Nomadland jobs. Now that Amazon is switching to robots, where are those people Amazon is putting out of work supposed to go?

[AnthonyMouse]

> For at least a decade, the place jobs shifted to was Amazon.

It wasn't so much the jobs that shifted there as the customers, and the reason for that is that Amazon had better prices. Then people complained about the jobs they did offer because they're mechanistic and exhausting, so they automate them and then people complain about that. But that too should result in lower prices -- Amazon's retail operation doesn't make any money, it's all going to competition with Walmart, who is doing the same things to lower costs.

But lowering prices creates jobs. People pay less for a dress or a phone case and then spend the money on something else. New jobs are created doing the something else.

Where this becomes a problem is for the things where the prices don't come down, like real estate. You have extra money and now you want to buy a house, but zoning laws inhibit new housing from being built, so instead if people have any money the monthly payment you need goes up or the landlord increases your rent. Or you have to buy something from some monopolist who can raise prices to eat your disposable income. Then the money goes into some corporate holding company that just keeps growing their hoard and never spends it on products and services.

The problem isn't robots, it's certificate of need laws and high tuition.

[easyThrowaway]

> But lowering prices creates jobs. People pay less for a dress or a phone case and then spend the money on something else. New jobs are created doing the something else.

Isn't this the principle supposedly behind trickle down economics just by another name?

[AnthonyMouse]

There are a lot of economic theories that are correct under a particular set of constraints and completely invalid under a different set of constraints.

So for example, if you lower property taxes, theory says that rents should go down. At the existing rents it's now more profitable to own property because the ownership costs have gone down, so more buildings will be constructed as people take advantage of the opportunity, until the increase in supply brings rents down to account for the reduction in operating costs. This theory is invalid if you prohibit new construction because then supply can't increase so rents never go down and the existing landlords just pocket the money.

The problem isn't that theory doesn't work, it's that you have to satisfy its constraints. You have to get rid of monopolies and artificial scarcity or they capture the gains that were supposed to go to ordinary people.

[alvah]

I wish I could upvote this comment more than once.

[wordpad25]

I gotcha!

[trimethylpurine]

The fact that you can now warehouse with robots lowers the barrier of entry for warehousing, which creates new companies that will host competition against Amazon, offer contract labor for Amazon, and in both ways create jobs that are superior to the previously needed entry level pick and packer. The same laborer can now be promoted at a new company to a higher pay job that requires no greater skill set, simply because there are now more of those better jobs at more companies. We can't all be managers at Amazon. But we can all be managers at 100000 different warehouses that previously didn't exist. That's where they are supposed to go.

[karaterobot]

That seems wrong. Why would robot warehouses lead to more and better warehouse jobs for humans? Fewer humans would be necessary overall in the existing warehouses, and it's not obvious to me why a lot more warehouses would be created.

Did replacing manufacturing jobs with robot assemblers in—for example—the automotive sector, lead to more auto manufacturers and better jobs for auto workers? I don't believe it did. There may be more manufacturers now, and more jobs, but they aren't high skill or highly-paid jobs, and they aren't staffed by the people who were laid off originally (because they were mostly moved to other countries, where people can work more cheaply than the countries where the jobs were lost).

For capital intense upgrades like robots, why wouldn't the advantage go to a few big players, rather than a ton of small ones?

I also don't understand why the number of new skilled workers in this new world would somehow equal the number of warehouses workers laid off. What's the connection between those two seemingly unrelated phenomena? Why wouldn't it, for example, be a lot of laid off low-skill workers, and a just a few new, high-skilled workers?

Or for that matter, why the next generation of robots wouldn't just replace those higher-skilled warehouse jobs in a few years. And so on.

[trimethylpurine]

It's the biggest cost in the distribution chain.

That means there's room for competition.

You aren't going to trust moving 100 million in product strictly to robots for a long time. And that's just a small business. And there's a lot of them.

>why wouldn't the advantage go to a few big players, rather than a ton of small ones?

Because it's still way way cheaper than labor. Maintenance means you're paying for one guy's medical benefits instead of 20 guys, for example. The labor is the cost that's difficult to overcome and gives the bigger players an advantage. When that's stripped away, it's possible to compete against the bigger guys.

Cheaper than existing labor costs, loans can overcome capital entrance, and you can afford to pay on them when there's a smaller operating cost, plus they have some fixed ROI. Existing need for more warehouses, combined, I don't see why we wouldn't see more warehouses. Of course we will.

Look at middle America. Almost every metropolitan in the country is building warehouses in and around their airports. Some indeed are Amazon's and other big suppliers, but the majority are not. They are small storage and shipping outfits. Don't forget who supplies Amazon!

Also, the push for more condensed housing means fewer people per household which means more duplicate junk per person as they won't share with another household, obviously.

Growth means warehousing. There's no way around it. Unless we will manufacture domestically, that demand isn't going anywhere.

[6510]

Let me help you with that one.

Fewer jobs & lower pay > fewer orders > fewer warehouses.

[trimethylpurine]

Because warehouse workers are the primary customers? I think you're trying to be funny.

[oblio]

That's assuming the warehousing robots are commodities, which they aren't and maybe they'll be in a few decades.

It also assumes the moat to warehousing isn't huge, which seems kind of silly for such huge capital investments.

[trimethylpurine]

The moat is definitely smaller when labor, your biggest cost, is smaller. You can finance a purchase that's much larger if you are able to make the monthly payment because you don't have high labor costs. Purchasing has an ROI, and labor doesn't.

What am I missing?

[oblio]

The fact that warehouses are huge and need a lot of supporting infrastructure?

[trimethylpurine]

What infrastructure? Whatever it is you're talking about isn't cheaper when you add more labor.

I have a warehouse that's one aisle 4 shelves high. And another that's much bigger.

They come in all sizes and costs.

Labor is by far the greatest of those.

I think you're guessing about things...

[ranger_danger]

That's the point.

[karaterobot]

Not by my reading of the original comment. Seems like they're saying that layoffs result in higher skilled jobs.

And here's my basis for that conclusion:

> The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set.

And what I'm saying is that there may not be new jobs, and if they are they may be lower skill jobs if history is any indication.

[starttoaster]

The robots replaced the frontline laborers, yes. But someone now needs to maintain, build, and engineer new robots. Hence they said the laborer's job was replaced with one that requires fewer people at a higher skill (and probably pay) level. Or at least that's what I picked out from their comment.

[pixl97]

Please note that while the robot is replacing local jobs, the people engineering, building, and maintaining robots could be ln the other side of the plant also. In a world that's seen a huge amount of consolidation we are likely to see further consolidation.

[starttoaster]

It is not uncommon to move across the United States for work. Across the planet might be a different story.

[ranger_danger]

My understanding was that they're saying it's the act of replacing the worker with a robot that requires more skilled workers to maintain/design/manufacture/etc., not that it merely resulted in a layoff.

[downrightmike]

USA stem grads are too expensive, so companies are just opening body shops in asia/south america.

So stem education was largely just a grift to get everyone they could into college.

[throwaway4220]

Your first statement doesn’t really match your second statement

[downrightmike]

Get a stem(tm) education! It'll get you a job! Wait.. you cost too much now, so we're not going to hire you, instead we'll outsource.

[snowwrestler]

> It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable.

It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time.

In addition, the nations driving the most technological growth domestically have experienced the greatest job growth over that time. With the result that many of them, like the U.S. and UK, have had to develop robust immigration programs.

Even within a single nation, like China, there is temporal correlation between technological development and job creation. As China has leaned into tech over the past few decades, job creation accelerated there.

> So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing.

Again, the evidence shows the opposite correlation: technological development results in more people working, not less.

[simonsarris]

> It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time.

200 years ago the town [severely mentally disabled person] could chop wood and carry water. What's he doing today?

There are ~9 million people on SSDI (disability) and ~5 million on SSI (considered completely unfit for work, the US version of basic income), and ~50 million retired. Retirement conceptually slowly became a thing around the late late 1800s. Many of these people are in one of these three categories because there is no job that would be a good fit for them, especially SSI, which most Americans don't even know about.

[echelon]

> It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time.

That isn't some immutable law of the universe. 200 years is a short sample size relative to geologic time.

Once we have robots doing the cooking, cleaning, heavy work, etc., what becomes of the Waffle House and Walmart worker? There will be a lower bound capability threshold, and automation will eventually exceed that.

I think a smart comparison would be to look at what job opportunities are available to the intellectually disadvantaged.

Then what happens when that lower bound inches higher?

[pixl97]

Ya, when people use this argument ask them "the population of humans always grows right?" Because up till recently that was the consensus unless something drastic or terrible happened. Then in the past few decades we see people having far fewer children then even replacement rate.

Upsetting the labor market is leading us into unpredictable territory, much like at the start of the 1900s and the automobile set off a string of events that lead to two massive world wide wars.

[coderenegade]

In principle, they could probably just buy their own robots and start their own businesses. Locality is its own quality for SMEs. Whether or not that happens in practice is anyone's guess.

[rdedev]

The key point being it's created more jobs so far but we cannot extrapolate the same thing if AGI comes up tomorrow. Like let's say open ai comes up with a new LLM that is capable of replacing a human in let's say software development. What new jobs would it create?

All technological advancement so far has created new jobs because you need someone to actually work on it, like a chip factory or doing devops. As far as I can see an AI is general enough that you don't need much effort to specialize it and with how things are currently going, only a few players have the capability of building and deploying it.

[thechao]

I'm sorry, why would an AGI be interested in programming? My kids are AGI, and they're not interested. I think there's a real moral conundrum when we say "programmer AGI" because, I think, we're implicitly talking about terminating every non-programmer AGI, to meet our labor force whims. Replace "programmer" with intellectual task of your choice.

[jrflowers]

Your kids are artificial general intelligence?

[thechao]

Fine. Artificial intelligence. I'm still waiting on the General.

[pfdietz]

Presumably the interests of an AGI could be designed into it. It could be made to have programming be the center of its existence.

Even if it couldn't be designed in, then if we accept your analogy with people, we could simply generate AGIs until we found one that was interested in programming, then clone as many copies of it as we needed.

[wordpad25]

Poor countries have with little physical or financial infrastructure have high unemployment. You'd think there would be more jobs because there is a lot more opportunity to grow, but no, it's the opposite, there few jobs and they are bad jobs. Because there is little opportunity to create actual VALUE, in economic sense.

Technology brings efficiency and brings jobs. Say entire tech sector, software developers and IT get fully automated - well, now all the VALUABLE services those companies provide are much much cheaper. All the savings are passed on to their customers (B2b and B2c) who will now spend those savings doing things they couldn't afford to before - and THOSE industries are where jobs will move to.

For a more simplistic example, imagine cost of electricity (or some raw materials) dropped 10x, would it lead to fewer jobs or more jobs? Of course more jobs, since you'll be able to do a lot more now.

[rdedev]

While I understand your point it seems to only focus on one side of things, a bit like trickle down economy.

Let's say the IT sector is completely automated. What would all those devs do? Now keep automating medicine, legal and everything else and ask what would those people do? What's remaining are probably manual labor jobs for which we don't need so many people.

[wordpad25]

As with any productivity boost - if you need 100x fewer IT jobs, it doesn't mean you will cut your IT by 100x, you will instead increase just grow your IT department 100x or however much until you hit a growth bottleneck on the business side, then some jobs will shift there.

Just like my raw materials/energy cost example before, if you something becomes cheap - you don't consume less of it, you try to do more with it. Maybe, so much more that you can now do things which were completely impossible/unaffordable before!

It's very possible we will have MORE IT jobs due to new opportunities and efficiencies.

A decent software developer costs $40/hr. Let's say you can make your small iPhone app idea in 100 hours, that's $4,000. If developer with 100x as productive, now that costs only $40. That doesn't only mean more people can afford to build their ideas, but you could build BIGGER ideas, on a $4,000 budget you could now build $400,000 worth of an application! Think of all the opportunities for everyone!

[wolverine876]

> The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing.

You might look up what economics has to say; this issue is well-addressed there. Some fundamentals:

The comment above assumes a static marketplace - the same technology, needs, etc. - and one that addresses the entirety of economic demand, rather than a dynamic market where those things change and resources are scarce (thus when resources become available, they are applied to other unfilled needs).

For example, which skills are in demand changes but there is still growing demand: If you look at the jobs performed 100 years ago, you'll see that most of them are no long needed. Yet not only are most people employed today, we have ~3-4x as many people - most of the jobs disappeared, yet, 3-4x people have jobs.

And yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but that's good because that work comes with higher pay.

[ameister14]

>yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but that's good because that work comes with higher pay.

The problem, of course, is that wages stagnated from '99 to 2014 and the job participation rate has been decreasing since 2000 while cost of living and general production increased; so no, in a dynamic market work does not necessarily come with higher pay. It actually wouldn't really make sense for all new work to come with higher pay; if you have changes in supply (which is what we are really talking about) that come with associated lower labor costs, the people that used to provide higher cost labor for the initial supply level will have to accept significantly reduced salaries in their industry.

That's what happened with the industrial revolution. Wages overall increased because people entered the workforce for the first time as skill requirements went down, but the average wage of previously employed people went way down as artisan and highly skilled labor was outcompeted by factory work.

[bamboozled]

while cost of living and general production increased

This is a major problem! Why ? Corporations chasing profits without enough competition ?

[wordpad25]

wages stagnated, not total compensation which continued to grow employee preferred form of compensation has just shifted towards other benefits

[ameister14]

Did that even keep pace with inflation? Looking at a generous measure of that in the form of ECI, I don't think it did.

[BeFlatXIII]

> employee-preferred

More like Congress-imposed (through tax incentives)

[kelnos]

> The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set.

I don't think that's necessarily true.

A taxi driver of 20 years ago had to memorize roads and routes, and become familiar with traffic patterns at different times of the day. (Many taxi drivers sucked for various reasons, but that's neither here nor there.) Today, anyone can be an adequate taxi driver, without really any knowledge of the areas they work in. Slap a smartphone on your dashboard and you're good to go. That's a lower skill job.

> You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain

Sure, and that's part of the problem. You lay off those 100 manual workers and hire 5 workers to maintain the machinery. It's not at all clear that those 100 manual workers are going to then find higher-skill jobs, especially if they need training to get them.

> What's the proper social response to [hypothetical AGI displacing more and more jobs], I don't know.

Easy: universal basic income, plus free higher education and vocational training programs for people who do want to work in a field that still needs humans in the loop. We need to drop this inhumane view that people who can't (or even simply don't want to) work somehow don't at least deserve a basic standard of living. And I think we'll find that if we remove financial, housing, and food insecurity, more people will actually want to find meaningful ways to participate in society. Some people won't, and maybe that's a shame, but for the sake of all of us, they should still be housed and fed, comfortably enough.

[exitb]

Jobs are a byproduct of capital owners needing labor to sell things and services with a profit margin, so they can buy the good stuff. I’d argue that once the capital owners possess the technology that brings the cost of labor near zero, they will have no need for an economy at all, not to mention other people - unless it’s something more akin to a zoo.

[JumpCrisscross]

> once the capital owners possess the technology that brings the cost of labor near zero

Most Americans are capital owners. You’re describing a world in which most Americans live in a utopia.

[dhosek]

A quick google says that 53% of Americans own publicly traded stock, but that means that 47% do not. There will be some fraction of that 47% who have their own businesses, but I’m guessing that these would be people at the bottom end of the business scale. Would it really be fair to call the guys driving a truck through the alleys collecting crap metal capital owners who would live in a utopia?

The same article that cites the 53% number also says that the top 10% of income earners own 70% of the stock market. That doesn’t really sound like a recipe for utopia.

[jkhanlar]

https://youtu.be/FID0BLkZXuY?t=2058s

> 34:24 "Markets are efficient because of active managers setting the prices of securities, firms like Citadel, firms like Fidel.....lity (Fidelity) [...] trying to drive the value of companies towards where we think they should be valued." - Kenneth Cordelle Griffin, Citadel Securities, November 2023

I thought Amazon was a public company, not private, and since supply and demand is dead and real price discovery is gone, that unless it becomes a private company it likely will not survive, unless there are enough retail investors to DRS directly register shares in their name so that DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) and Cede & Co do not hold all the assets for retail in street name to then bankrupt and collect all the assets leaving retail investors holding worthless securities, but I don't see that Amazon is private? Maybe I missed something that happened and it's a private company now?

[JumpCrisscross]

> thought Amazon was a public company, not private

Parks, libraries and military bases are publicly owned. Amazon is a private company whose shares are publicly traded.

> since supply and demand is dead

This is wrong.

> so that DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) and Cede & Co do not hold all the assets for retail in street name to then bankrupt and collect all the assets

This is nonsense. (For starters, not how bankruptcy works.)

> Maybe I missed something

Mankiw’s Principles of Economics is a well-regarded introductory text [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Man...

[JumpCrisscross]

> 53% of Americans own publicly traded stock, but that means that 47% do not

Does that include 401(k)s and pensions?

[dhosek]

Yes. 401(k)s but not pensions. The latter are defined benefit programs where participants are not responsible for making investment decisions.

[foolofat00k]

Very probably, yes. I'd be shocked if more than 60% of Americans even have a 401k/pension, let alone one with any meaningful sum invested.

[int_19h]

And for most Americans who own publicly traded stock, the income that is derived from it is supplemental, not primary.

You're not really a full-on capitalist unless you can stop working and still have sufficient income derived from economic rent collected from somebody else who is working to sustain you in perpetuity.

[gnz11]

> they will have no need for an economy at all

Who is going to buy all of their crap then?

[jkhanlar]

I noticed NVIDIA skyrocket from billions to trillions market cap, so wouldn't NVIDIA be able to help deploy some a.i. simulatedly autonomous homo borg genesis to engage in scripted automated consumer lives to replace traditional homosapiens/humans consumers and takeover what otherwise was economy and market for human people but now they are replaced by redefining human and people to be displaced by the automated scripted a.i. controlled ones? This is already happening, right? Or did I just give them idea to make this a reality? lol, wait, why am I getting raided by the FBI right now? What's going on? HALP!

[rcstank]

They won’t be selling anything by that point.

[acestus5]

This reminds me of the Chinese white monkey jobs.

[fragmede]

Just like the Turing test turned out to be the wrong problem, AGI is the wrong goal. As long as AI can stoichastic parrot its way to success, who cares if it's AGI? My washing machine broke and I want my robot to fix it. it doesn't need AGI to diagnose and fix the problem, it just needs to have seen that in the training data.

The real shift comes when the robots are dexterous enough to fix each other. that's when no new jobs will be created to fix them because they can do it themselves.

[waynesonfire]

> dexterous enough to fix each other.

Dexterity isn't the issue, it's the lack of training content. Also, I would be happy with a real-time feed of a robot telling ME, a dexterous being, what I should do to repair something. I don't have access to such technology.

[hanniabu]

> It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result.

That was true in the past, but as technology gets better that won't be the case. Yes new jobs will be created, but there'll be fewer and fewer.

Technology will allow for more generalized approaches that can be quickly adapted to new solutions. So new jobs will also be replaced quicker and quicker.

[hackerlight]

Comparative advantage will keep people employed for a while: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-...

There's a recent NBER paper that predicts wages will increase in the beginning of the AI revolution, even as AI displaces some jobs. Eventually there will be mass unemployment, but only when AI dominates humans (cost & capability) at almost everything.

[quaintdev]

It's time we take on bigger and harder problems to solve. Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company is working on that. We need multiple such companies tackling bigger problems. Solving climate change, dealing with plastic are other bigger problems.

I beleive there's no shortage of jobs. What if we start cleaning earth or reverse effects of human civilization on earth to make it more sustainable. The amount of people needed for that job are huge but we can't pay them at all because how our economies are structured. We need tectonic shift in how the world works today. Machines are taking human jobs, good. Now humans are free to do the work which machines can't do.

[robofanatic]

> Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company is working on that.

There’s a lot of unknowns in that and ROI can take very very long time. Not many people can or are willing to take that risk. If that one company is successful then you’ll see that space flooded with new companies.

[quaintdev]

Our generation is highly advanced but we have become very short sighted. We have made a mess of our world because of it.

I remember a story about Oxford. When it was built they planted entire forest of Oak trees so that in 500 years when Oxford will need repairing they have ample amount of wood available. In that age people were capable of thinking 500 years ahead. And we with all our advancement can't even think beyond ROI. Living on other planet should not be seen as choice but something that is necessary.

[robofanatic]

The problem is resources and money are not unlimited.

[pixl97]

And that's why 1% of us must hold on to 50% of that money and resources.

[wordpad25]

All of that money is working as part of the economy, paying salaries and such. It's not at all obvious that it's less efficient in an economic sense (although obvious not ideal from social sense)

[wolverine876]

> Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company is working on that.

There's an organization called NASA working on it.

[inglor_cz]

Does NASA have any planetary colonization program?

They do plan the Artemis mission, but AFAIK that is about establishing a tiny scientific base on the Moon, probably with regular exchange of the crew. I don't think they proclaimed an ambition to settle massive amounts of people there.

For me "living on another planet" is only really SpaceX's goal. Build a semi-independent nation on Mars, with a million or more people necessary.

That is very different from a scientific base project.

[zztop44]

Proclaiming things is very easy.

[inglor_cz]

SpaceX aren't just proclaiming things. They are building a skyscraper-sized fully reusable rocket with completely new engines to get away from the Earth cheaply.

[skissane]

The first crewed mission to Mars is very likely going to be a join SpaceX-NASA mission... to set up a crewed research station. Basically the same thing as Artemis Base Camp, except further away.

Yes, SpaceX wants to ship millions of people to Mars, but realistically they are several decades away from even starting that. You want to get a small permanent settlement on Mars (like a crewed research station), and get some experience with operating it, before you start sending heaps of people. And probably the initial focus will be just on growing that crewed research station (from 20 people to 200 people to 2000 people). And only then will you have enough information to really plan making it significantly bigger. I doubt we'll get there until some time in the second half of this century.

In the medium term, I think the Moon is a more realistic target for the private sector. The total cost per a person-year of a crewed lunar base is a lot less than a crewed Martian base, so you can pay for a much bigger lunar settlement for the same budget. You can also sell lunar surface tourism to the ultra-rich, and hope that economies of scale will gradually drive the price down; your average billionaire can spare a couple of weeks for a trip to the Moon, not the almost 3 years a Mars round trip would take. How about Hollywood filming on-location on the Moon? Reality TV shows? Professional sports competitions? All a lot more feasible given the much lower travel time (about 3 days) and light distance (a bit over 1 light second). I doubt any of these would be massive revenue sources (at least at first), but they'll be economically feasible long before their Martian equivalents become so.

[jfyi]

...and they are building it for NASA's Artemis program. SpaceX evaporates the moment the juicy billion dollar public contracts dry up.

Mars is still a pipe dream. You might as well give the credit to Edgar Rice Burroughs for as far as realizing it has come.

[genedan]

Technology can also reduce the skills needed for jobs. For example, you no longer need to have an entire city's streets memorized to be a taxi driver.

[layer8]

I don’t think there was ever a taxi driver shortage because city streets are too difficult to memorize.

[inglor_cz]

Prior to the advent of GPS, taxi drivers in many cities were tested on their orientation skills and had to memorize a lot of streets. I would be surprised if no one ever failed this part of the exam.

[genedan]

Rideshare and delivery apps have enabled more people to do those jobs than before.

[layer8]

Because of less skills required? What are you basing this on?

[bombcar]

More like because of the non-necessity of supplying a livable wage.

[pjmlp]

Until you get replaced by a robot taxi.

[hackerlight]

When intelligence becomes truly abundant and cheap, then human intelligence won't be valued by the market. You only get paid well because your intelligence is scarce, but that won't be the case in a future with ASI.

It's hard to predict what will be valued, maybe personality traits that lend themselves to jobs like social media influencer, politician or actor, because people may still value real humans in these jobs.

[BenFranklin100]

I don’t agree with this take. A more accurate and precise way to describe the effects of automation is that it creates more human-centered jobs, some of which may require higher IQ but many that do not. Your average massage therapist does not have a higher IQ than your average Amazon line factory worker, for instance.

[logicchains]

>The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set

No they don't. If AI reached the point where it was capable and willing to do all white collar work, there'd be no more need for humans to do that kind of intellectual work. What would still be needed is service jobs that rely on the "human touch", and trades that AI lacked the dexterity to do. We're already seeing that now, with AI posing a greater threat to programmers' jobs than to plumbers or electricians' jobs.

[yoyohello13]

Oh good, now instead of creating things, everyone can have a fulfilling career at Starbucks.

[chucke1992]

Neither computers nor cars, nor office nor photoshop decreased the amount of available jobs...

[chillingeffect]

But exactly as the person you replied to said, they increased the average intelligence needed to do the new jobs. That leaves so many marginal people unemployable. They could have maintained horses but working in cars is harder. I like this observation.

[ben_w]

I'm not convinced that animal husbandry is less skilled than working in cars. Different skill, and as I've never done it I can't be certain, but horses are wet and messy biology with brains that are terrified of anything they've never seen before. Production line work I did do as a summer holiday job during my A-levels aged 17 or 18, it wasn't skilled work but also that was HVAC production line not cars.

[bombcar]

The specialization has certainly taken off - people are much more specialized in their jobs now whereas “farmer” was really a jack-of-all-trades with passing capabilities in many different skill sets.

[zztop44]

Yes and it’s not at all obvious to me that being a jack-of-all-trades farmer (builder, mechanic, etc) requires less intelligence than learning Python.

[oblio]

There is a thing to say about "unnatural-ness". Handling horses up to a point had to be more intuitive and more approachable, we've been around horses and other mammals since forever. Around spreadsheets? 40 years, max.

[ameister14]

They actually resulted in a decrease in overall skills required. It takes a lot of skill to use a loom and make a napkin, the same is not needed for factory work yet you can make 100 napkins at the same time.

Similarly, we had the rise of the service industry in the US - manufacturing required a lot of skilled labor; retail and wait-staff do not require the same skill.

[wvenable]

As a software developer, I've personally eliminated many jobs. Software was eliminated entire classes of jobs. Almost all investment in technology by businesses is about cost reduction and the number one cost is labour.

I think we're past the point where technology is making new jobs -- all that low hanging fruit has been gone for decades now. Growth now is all about optimization.

[kelnos]

That's undeniably true, but not the point: obviously new technology eliminates entire classes of jobs (not much call for telephone switchboard operators these days), but ultimately if more jobs are created than are lost, we're fine.

I personally do wonder, though, if many of the new jobs that are created are worse jobs. For example, I have not yet taken any work in the "gig economy", but most of it seems pretty miserable, with shit wages.

[wvenable]

> but ultimately if more jobs are created than are lost

For people who believe more jobs are created, it seems like they rely in chaos theory or something. They can't see how or where these new jobs will be created or how automation leads to it. We automated physical labour so we increased intellectual labour. Now are automating intellectual labour too so what's being increased now?

[chucke1992]

amount of people who can do stuff that is considered "intellectual"?

It is not different from happened with guns - with introduction of guns, military has grown bigger not smaller - in comparison to knight era.

Now you will have more people who will be able to produce art, write music, songs, develop games, write stories and so on. People will be able to produce scenes without months or years of learning how to use photoshop, after effects and co. We now have more painters than in da vinci era and we have more musicians than in bach era.

Same with software engineering - ability to do stuff easier will produce more people doing that. Not less. We do not code to the metal much anymore - most of the software engineers do not use assembly anymore and higher level languages simplified stuff that required hard learning in the past - yet the amount of developers is more than ever.

[wvenable]

Software development is a bit of an exception because we have, probably by a whole order of magnitude, too few developers for the world.

However, what about all other things that are intellectual? Accountants, word processors, assistants, etc? We need fewer of those people than ever before.

As for the effect on art, the greater the unskilled people who can produce art the less it's worth. AI will eventually drive the value of art to zero. Even now 99.99999% of skilled musicians are unable to make a living doing it.

[pixl97]

You do realize that most governments run massive jobs programs to ensure this number of available jobs stays high, right? In the US we give massive tax breaks in exchange for hiring numbers.

Computers may have very well reduced job numbers but we're running a contrived system at this point.

[BenFranklin100]

Source?

[crooked-v]

> What's the proper social response to that, I don't know.

Universal basic income of some kind.

[bamboozled]

But how do you know what that future looks like? For example, What if we use AGI and make ourselves smarter and more capable as Kurzweil has argued ?

You can’t imagine what that will look like so why worry about jobs ?

[starbugs]

> You can’t imagine what that will look like so why worry about jobs?

I'd rather worry about what that would look like given the current trends in tech and society.

[pixl97]

>What if we use AGI and make ourselves smarter

I mean a large portion of people on the 'information highway' seem to use it to make themselves dumber.

[tossandthrow]

the job displacement could be in the care sector. that is what usually happened.

I don't think being a caregiver necessarily is a more complex job than the ones being displaced.

[PKop]

Eugenics

[082349872349872]

How do you intend to be any more successful than the last several thousand years of attempts at eugenics?

[oblio]

Sure, who's volunteering to be the first one? For sure I won't volunteer for it :-)

[polski-g]

The embryos I just had implanted in my surrogate are the result of eugenics. I hand picked the egg donor based on SAT. When the embryos were created, I got their 23andme reports and validated that the ones implanted had the appropriate SNPs for intelligence by cross referencing snpedia.

Almost everyone does step 1, but very few people do step 2.

[Nesco]

Hey, I would be interested in doing the same. How hard is it?

[polski-g]

Find a fertility clinic that partners or will partner with https://www.lifeview.com/

Select eggs/sperm and make embryos at fertility clinic.

Ship them all off to Genomic Prediction.

After you get their simplified test results, call and ask for the full report that is compatible with 23andme.

Search snpedia for keywords like intelligence, retardation, educational attainment and cross reference their existence/non-existence with the 23andme text file.

Have fertility doctor implant the embryo of your choosing.

If you have/are a female, the price is dramatically cheaper. Otherwise its about $200k (all post-tax). Embryo creation $45k, surrogacy agency fee $30k, surrogate $70k, baby delivery $25k, embryo testing $6k.

[Nesco]

Thanks!

[Nesco]

If it comes through rna/dna editing it will be a good evolution