[socalgal2]

Greed does not take your jobs, progress does. People don’t hand wash clothing for money because we have machines to do that now. We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally. AI is no different. “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large

Note: the above is not claiming AI or LLM can do these jobs. it’s claiming “IF” they can then they will. No greed required

[kiba]

This is ignoring the people who capture the rent.

If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated. Since that is not happening, it implies something deeply wrong about how we structure our society.

[zozbot234]

> If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated.

It depends. Sometimes automating a job just means wiping out the institutional knowledge that came with the job - which I take to be the OP's broader point. It's not clear that AI agents will be able to replace that role to any useful extent, even though it's nice that we can read their accumulated knowledge as a set of .md files written in plain English.

[endanke]

These two things can be true at the same time.

[amelius]

The entire comment is true.

[nickpp]

> This is ignoring the people who capture the rent.

So my grandma shouldn't have been be deliriously happy with the new washing machine that saved her hands from bleeding weekly because the evil capitalist laundromat owners charged a few quarters per load?!

[kiba]

It's not really the laundromat capitalist, but the landowner the capitalist paying rent to.

[nickpp]

It still doesn't bother me as a consumer in the slightest. On the contrary, I am happy that laundromat exists in the first place.

[wavemode]

> People don’t hand wash clothing for money because we have machines to do that now. We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally.

Those jobs aren't creative knowledge work.

The advent of digital audio workstations didn't reduce the number of musicians - it increased the amount of music.

Now that we can write code with AI, we (as a civilization) will simply write more code than we used to.

[stevenlangbroek]

What you're describing is akin to Jevon's paradox. Let's see. The Industrial Revolution, I think a good analogy, caused years of death & suffering before raising standards of living, and even then only so because of mass organizing & uprising.

[emmelaich]

That's disputed. Progress was uneven and lagged a little, but by many standards (height, mortality) quality of life increased for many from the start of the industrial revolution.

[wavemode]

I don't think most software engineers have to worry about dying of industrial accidents and black lung...

Long hours? Sure, but that's not new (or universal), and AI definitely didn't cause it.

[stevenlangbroek]

That's not what I mean. You can't just retrain and get a job in a new field and maintain your mortgage, rent or your kid or partner's needs, and downward social mobility is incredibly painful (think personal bankruptcies, pretty grim mental health outcomes).

[Bendy]

It is greed; LLMs are progress but their cost, and the lies told about them wildly exceed their utility for most of the tasks that they’re otherwise expected to perform. The claims are fraudulent, fraud is a crime, and crime does not benefit society.

[wiseowise]

> We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally.

That’s where your idea breaks. There’s a big swathe of people who prefer the feel and simplicity of newspapers over digital hellscape. There’s also a reason why people prefer quality books like Folio Society over books printer on a toilet paper.

> “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large

You can automate away 80% of CEOs by Markov chains, and it would be a benefit to society at large. Yet it doesn’t happen, why?

[pdpi]

> You can automate away 80% of CEOs by Markov chains, and it would be a benefit to society at large. Yet it doesn’t happen, why?

Because, at some level, people understand that a CEO’s job is largely about the human interaction part, so the real value of a human CEO is that last 20%.

The real value of a software engineer is also their own “last 20%”, but non-technical people (and many frustrated technical people) don’t really appreciate how much non-technical work is involved in being a good SWE.

[krackers]

Note that as I understand the main claim of Marx is that the efficiency and productivity gains from automation don't actually go to the laborer, they're captured by the "capital owner". Example being how despite all the automation we're all still working 8 hr days, 5 days a week just to get by.

Now of course there's also jevon's "paradox" here, and the automation does allow us to support a larger population so in that sense not all the increased productivity is just "skimmed off the top" as profit. But on the flipside the crux of the other recent [1] HN post is that the wealth disparity is increasing. And if all the increased productivity directly translated to more "physical resources" in the world, that wouldn't be the case.

So something must be getting skimmed of the top, and intuitively you can feel the "rent seeking" layers in society have increased. Gains in efficiency are no longer resulting in surplus of physical products and decrease in prices.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038307

[CRConrad]

Yes, logically / mathematically it seems it must be: Those additional people also contribute their 40h/wk, so more work gets done in total. That should be sufficient to support even more more people, not just more people, if they're all also more productive.

Or, IOW, "productivity" is a per-capita measure, so the total number of people doesn't factor in. (Or perhaps rather, gets factored out?) Anyway: People becoming "more productive" means each one producing more per hour — or per 40 hours — than before, so it's weird that they still need to work just as much as before, only to maintain the standard of living they had before.

(Running faster and faster, just to stay where they are... Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.)

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> Note: the above is not claiming AI or LLM can do these jobs. it’s claiming “IF” they can then they will. No greed required

"No greed required" doesn't seem accurate. One would not use an AI to do the job instead of a human, except for the motivation that they would have more at the end of the day.

[alaaalawi]

it is that not that they will take, as they do not have will of their own. greed does put them to work

[simgt]

> it’s a benefit to society at large

That remains to be determined. Most of the examples you'll likely come up with are made at the expense of the environment. We've never consumed as much oil and other limited natural resources as now, in spite of massive gains in productivity.

So far it also looks like digital media is fast tracking us back into fascism, helped by the large concentration of capital that occurred during the transition.

Change and automation are not always societal progress, sadly.

[majorbugger]

Yes it does. Typical example - layoffs to make to stock perform better.