[HEmanZ]

My biggest gripe with this is the reasoning for “no, AI is not going to take everyone’s jobs.”

Obviously the state of “workers and AI together” comes first. So there’s not going to be some strawman cliff where suddenly all jobs are replaced in a month.

But people like him lay out this future and then act like AI just stops there. Of course there will be an intermediate state. And then that state will be passed over as AI move further up the chain and humans are eliminated from office labor entirely.

[d3ckard]

My biggest gripe with your reasoning is a hidden assumption that everything humans do is easily encodable in what we call AI today.

I don’t think this is the case.

[tjs8rj]

AI and technology is already replacing jobs.

The way this manifests isn’t mass layoffs after an AI is implemented, it’s fewer people being hired at any given scale because you can go further with fewer people.

Companies making billions in revenue with under 10k employees, some under 5k or even under 1k.

This is absorbed by there being more and more opportunities because the cost of starting a new company and getting revenue decreases too as labor productivity increases.

Jobs that would otherwise exist get replaced. Jobs at companies that otherwise wouldn’t exist get created.

And in the long run until it’s just unprofitable to employ humans (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers (compared to AI) will still be net productive.

[jdlshore]

> AI and technology is already replacing jobs

I don’t think this is true. I think CEOs are replacing people on the assumption that AI will be able to replace their jobs. But I don’t think AIs are able to replace any jobs other than heavily scripted ones like front-line customer support… maybe.

I think AI can automate some tasks with supervision, especially if you’re okay with mediocre results and don’t need to spend a lot of time verifying its work. Stock photography, for example.

But to say AI is replacing jobs, I think you’d need to be specific about what jobs and how AI is replacing them… other than CEOs following the hype, and later backtracking.

[est31]

> (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers

This assumes that humans will be unwilling to work if their wage is below living. It depends on the social programs of the government, but if there is none, or only very bad ones, people will probably be more desperate and thus be more willing to work in even the cheapest jobs.

So in this overabundance of human labor world, the cost of human labor might be much closer to zero than living wage. It all depends on how desperate to find work government policy will make humans.

[th0ma5]

We can't prove why people are being replaced, and the people who claimed to have replaced people with AI don't have a lot of good outcomes. Now there is some success but... it is bespoke to that environment often, so, your reasons would be sound if the premise was. We need more information.

[obscurette]

I've seen AI replacing a lot of jobs already in regulatory/consultancy business making billions. A lot of people producing paperwork for regulative etc purposes have been replaced by language models. My question – should this business really exist at all?

[strus]

> because you can go further with fewer people

Can you though? From my experience this is just a wishful thinking. I am yet to see actual productivity gains from AI that would objectively justify hiring less or laying off people.

[tjs8rj]

This is pretty obvious when you know what to look for.

How many people did it take to build the pyramids? Now how many would it take today?

Look at revenue per head and how it’s trended

Look at how much AUM has flowed into asset management while headcount has flatlined

[HEmanZ]

How about a concrete example. What jobs at Bank of America will humans have?

I can not imagine a scenario other than complete model stagnation that would lead to the current workforce there of 213,000 people still having jobs to do.

[HEmanZ]

Also it’s such a strawman to assume that “absolutely everything” needs to be covered by systems to basically eliminate office jobs from humanity. In this context they only need to do enough to make hiring humans pointless at most businesses. Even if say you need some strategically important humans for a long time, I don’t see an incoming world where huge job loss doesn’t happen. David filing HR paperwork at Big Corp is not suddenly going to be doing strategy work.

Like it’s a strawman to assume I’m arguing that your nanny or the local firefighters are going to be replaced by an AI soon.

And it also seems like people expect some normative assumption when taking about job loss. I’m not making a normative claim, nor a policy one, just pointing out it seems stupid to not prepare or expect this to happen.

[beeflet]

It will be encodable in what we call AI tomorrow

[jaccola]

Except not literally tomorrow, of course. So you might as well say 1 million years from now...