[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.

[_carbyau_]

> Suppose that they can. Then all of those things will be near-free because they can be mass produced with no labor cost

I take issue with this statement. The people who have the robots will be able to set whatever price they like. They could make things super cheap but that is not the inclination of the person in power.

As we've seen in so many "collusion" cases - some deliberately negotiated but many simply naturally settled into - the price of things is determined by "what the market will bear", which I see more cynically as "what the market can extract".

[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...

[pdfernhout]

Great point on what would happen to mass-produced items like laptops if everyone moved to remote cabins in the woods to live cheaply.

And yes, a drawback to educating yourself via videos or reading (or even by taking some tests) is that it is relatively passive. A hands-on aspect is essential to a lot of skills, like learning to write by writing, learning to use machine tools by machining, learning to do chemistry by mixing chemicals, and learning to use a language by speaking it in important contexts. And setting up such contexts is one value of good educational settings (either in or out of schools).

As a parent who home-schooled from K-12, definitely the lack of easy access to some settings where various skills could be practiced was a limitation. We tried to make up for it as best we could in other ways.

Some learning can happen virtually to an extent, like virtual chemistry sets (even as they don't convey the visceral feel of working with glassware and liquids and such).

I'll be curious how using ChatGPT to learn languages works out: https://www.howtogeek.com/chatgpt-conversational-mode-to-pra...

There is also an project at RPI for people to learn Chinese in a virtual Chinese setting with characters who speak Chinese: https://research.rpi.edu/about/signature-research-thrusts/me... "Students learn to speak Chinese through the Mandarin Project’s virtual reality, synthetic intelligent characters and gamification."

It is also harder to learn a language when the people you are talking to want to learn or practice yours and so are motivated to speak your language to you. So as a consolation prize, maybe you have helped some Berliners become better English speakers? :-)

Age may also have to do something with language learning -- but not as people expect. When people are young, they are often less embarrassed by making mistakes, and are full of enthusiasm for something new, and they way they are taught is usually point and name and speak and question. Adults tend to try to avoid mistakes, may have other more interesting or important things to do, and also may end up in boring textual drill-and-practice rote learning situations. Those are some of the reasons it is harder to learn languages (especially a first foreign language) as an adult.

A related funny XKCD on simulation and learning (where Kerbal Space Program makes a seemingly difficult learning challenge fun when done in private and also has no significant consequences for mistakes so you can play around with ideas like a kid again): "Orbital Mechanics" https://xkcd.com/1356/

Some people are just also better than others at languages for whatever reasons.

Also, sometimes immersion in a context for a length of time just makes the difference. One of my German teachers in High School talked about studying abroad in Germany when younger and speaking only German where they were, and they said they felt a real turning point was when they had their first dream in German. I'm guessing maybe you must be in a situation where you can still speak English or whatever your native language is at work and at home, and so speaking German just is not that important to your daily life?

Anyway, wishing you some dreams "auf Deutsch" if you want them. :-)

[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.

[AnthonyMouse]

Right now we have a lot of jobs that are extremely low efficiency, if not outright net negatives. These are the sorts of jobs that markets tend to eliminate, because the company that gets rid of them can charge lower prices than the one that doesn't. But that doesn't work when the job exists as a result of regulatory rules, or the company is a monopoly not subject to competitive pressure.

What does work is to improve the efficiency of the regulations. For the ones that are net negative you can just get rid of them. For the ones that are net positive but still poorly constructed, you can reduce their overhead.

This doesn't increase economic output, it reduces waste. Then you can work half as many hours for the same money, or the same number of hours for twice as much, not because anything more is being created but because people are spending half as much time on useless tasks. If they then spend that time doing something productive, output would increase, but that's a personal choice. If you could work 10 hours a week and that was enough to earn a living and own a home, would everybody still want to work 40 hours just so they could also own six cars and two boats? Some people would, which is fine, but some people wouldn't.

[JoeAltmaier]

Let's not put words into my mouth.

Everybody loves to calculate worker productivity, like it's the 1800's and we're hand-making buggy whips. No, its a large industrial machine turning out goods like clockwork.

Paying people is arbitrary. We pay somebody to spend time fixing a conveyor belt, and pay them nearly nothing. Some guy sits in an office doing nothing, but he owns the factory so he gets all the profit from that factory forever, yet has little or nothing to do with it's operation.

It's arbitrary, a direct result of some choices we made about our economic system. Those choices have quit working for most of us - a tiny percent (way less than 1%) have managed to jigger the rules so they skim off of every transaction. The end result of that kind of feedback loop is, they have all the money and we continue to work hourly for peanuts.

We can just decide to change it. Doesn't require magic or even much imagination.

[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.