[marcus_holmes]

I'm optimistic.

Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The cost of bank transactions came down (by a lot!), banks became more responsive and served their customers better. And the people who had to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got to do other, probably more interesting, jobs.

There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way. They're boring jobs (for most people doing them) and having humans do them makes administration slow and expensive. Automating them will be a net good for humanity. Imagine if "this meeting could have been an email" actually moves to "this meeting never happened at all because the person making the decision just told the LLM and it did it".

You are right that the danger is that most of the benefits of this automation will accrue to capital, but this didn't happen with the bank clerk automation - bank customers accrued a lot of the benefits too. I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that serve their customers better.

[reeredfdfdf]

"I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that serve their customers better."

I'm not sure most of those organizations will have many customers left, if every white collar admin job has been automated away, and all those people are sitting unemployed with whatever little income their country's social safety net provides.

Automating away all the "boring jobs" leads to an economic collapse, unless you find another way for those people to earn their living.

[marcus_holmes]

> Automating away all the "boring jobs" leads to an economic collapse, unless you find another way for those people to earn their living.

Yes, that's what happens. All those people find other jobs, do other work, and that new work is usually much less boring than the old work, because boring work is easier to automate.

Historically, economies have changed and grown because of automation, but not collapsed.

[nopinsight]

AI agents might be able to automate 80% of certain jobs in a few years but that would make the remaining 20% far more valuable. The challenge is to help people rapidly retrain for new roles.

Humans will continue to have certain desires far outstripping the supply we have for a long time to come.

We still don’t have cures for all diseases, personal robot chefs & maids, and an ideal house for everyone, for example. Not all have the time to socialize as much as they wish with their family and friends.

There will continue to be work for humans as long as humans provide value & deep connections beyond what automation can. The jobs could themselves become more desirable with machines automating the boring and dangerous parts, leaving humans to form deeper connections and be creatively human.

The transition period can be painful. There should be sufficient preparation and support to minimize the suffering.

Workers will need to have access to affordable and effective methods to retrain for new roles that will emerge.

“soft” skills such as empathetic communication and tact could surge in value.

[Covenant0028]

> The jobs could themselves become more desirable with machines automating the boring and dangerous parts

Or, as Cory Doctorow argues, the machines could become tools to extract "efficiency" by helping the employer make their workers lives miserable. An example of this is Amazon and the way it treats its drivers and warehouse workers.

[nopinsight]

That depends on the social contract we collectively decide (in a democracy at least). Many possibilities will emerge and people need to be aware and adapt much faster than most times in history.

[visarga]

An ATM is a reliable machine with a bounded risk - the money inside - while an AI agent could steer your company into bankruptcy and have no liability for it. AI has no skin and depending on application, much higher upper bound for damage. A digit read wrong in a medical transcript, patient dies.

> There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way.

Managing risks, can't automate it. Every project and task needs a responsibility sink.

[ipython]

You can bound risk on ai agents just like an atm. You just can’t rely upon the ai itself to enforce those limits, of course. You need to place limits outside the ai’s reach. But this is already documented best practice.

The point about ai not having “skin” (I assume “skin in the game”) is well taken. I say often that “if you’ve assigned an ai agent the ‘a’ in a raci matrix, you’re doing it wrong”. Very important lesson that some company will learn publicly soon enough.

[marcus_holmes]

> Every project and task needs a responsibility sink.

I don't disagree, though I'd put it more as "machines cannot take responsibility for decisions, so machines must not have authority to make decisions".

But we've all been in meetings where there are too many people in the room, and only one person's opinion really counts. Replacing those other people with an LLM capable of acting on the decision would be a net positive for everyone involved.

[sotix]

> Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. > > And the people who had to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got to do other, probably more interesting, jobs.

I don't mean to pick on your example too much. However, when I worked in financial audit, reviewing journal entries spit out from SAP was mind numbingly boring. I loved doing double-entry bookkeeping in my college courses. Modern public accounting is much, much more boring and worse work than it was before. Balancing entries is enjoyable to me. Interacting with the terrible software tools is horrific.

I guess people that would have done accounting are doing other, hopefully more interesting jobs in the sense that absolute numbers of US accountants is on a large decline due to the low pay and the highly boring work. I myself am certainly one of them as a software engineer career switcher. But the actual work for a modern accountant has not been improved in terms of interesting tasks to do. It's also become the email + meetings + spreadsheet that you mentioned because there wasn't much else for it to evolve into.

[marcus_holmes]

I did qualify it with "most people" because of people like you who enjoy that kind of work :).

I would hate that work, but luckily we have all sorts of different people in the world who enjoy different things. I hope you find something that you really enjoy doing.

[sotix]

That's fair enough! Most accountants I crossed paths with dislike the modern type of busy work. Lots of marking up spreadsheets and PDFs rather than crafting journal entries. Luckily for me, I switched into software engineering, and system design scratches that same exact itch. Now I build software for financial auditors to make their work less dreadful, and it's very popular with them because they don't have to do as much of the terrible, modern tasks that have befallen them with advances in accounting tech.

[mrwrong]

> There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way.

it's interesting how it's never your job that will be automated away in this fantasy, it's always someone else's.

[marcus_holmes]

I have absolutely had that job, and it sucked. I also worked as a farm hand, a warehouse picker, a construction site labourer, and a checkout clerk. Most of that work is either already automated or about to be, thankfully.

[gverrilla]

"benefits" = shareholder profits ++