[gruez]

>The untold promise of [tractors] is to replace labor. [...] Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment.

How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

[justonepost2]

How do people still conflate “sectoral changes in the labor market” with “humans become zoo animals”? The scale just seems fundamentally different.

[BeetleB]

> The scale just seems fundamentally different.

Not at all. I doubt LLMs will result in a 90x drop in the overall labor workforce. The agricultural shift was likely greater than the shift due to LLMs will be.

[HEmanZ]

This requires an assumption that humans have some capacity that LLMs/machines can not fundamentally match (or match cheaply, or we’ll make matching it illegal).

That’s fine, but one of those assumptions has to be the case for your statement to be true. If they meet or exceed all productive human capacities at lower cost, are not stopped by regulations or some kind of near insurmountable “exponential cost of intelligence”, then this is completely utterly different than the agriculture shift.

My generals observation about people like you is that you assume “the future form of ai is just a chat bot, like today” and that is just not the case, and it’s not what anyone is worried about. Many of us are “playing” with real agents, grafting together agentic memory systems, kicking around early experimental harnesses, seeing what kind of self learning loops we can hack, perfecting evals, wiring in eyes and ears and a heart-beat to these things. And those of us who are often take a look at the Frankenstein result and go “ya, this could completely replace us with enough iterations”.

We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital.

[BeetleB]

> We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital.

Oh, as a SW engineer, I assure you I am scared. My profession will be one of the most impacted ones.

My point is that a lot more than 10% of the labor that is done out there involves things that require physical work, and that is a tougher problem to solve than pure reasoning. I'm not saying the changes won't be drastic - just not a 90x drop.

[HEmanZ]

Robots?

I agree in some sense, I think the runway on human physical labor is measured in decades. But it’s likely not infinite, and likely not 100 years. I expect my children will at least see “the end” in their lifetimes.

Human physical labor also has a ticking clock, albeit longer than software engineering.

Of course again, this is if we don’t put up or find unknown-unknown walls on machine intelligence. I think there is a pretty high chance we just make sufficient machine intelligence illegal for a very long time, at least until labs can fine-tune models enough to be smart enough to replace humans but dumb/lobotomized enough to not make a bio-weapon.

[justonepost2]

So you don’t believe in AGI then?

[hodgesrm]

> How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

Regarding US agricultural labor displacement.

* It happened over a period of 200 years or so in the USA. [0] That's a key difference.

* Starting in the late 1800s manufacturing rose to a peak of 38% in 1944. [1] This absorbed a lot of the available labor, often at better rates of pay than farm work. It's a common pattern in industrializing nations where manufacturing absorbs labor freed up by more productive agriculture. Manufacturing labor is no longer growing, so that cannot help with employment.

That's not to say it was pleasant for all concerned. I would argue, however, that black swan events like the Dust Bowl caused more disruption and trauma than the steady displacement of farm labor by technology.

[0] https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-ag...

[1] https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work...

Edit: clarity

[strogonoff]

If comparing past industrialisation and automation events with hypothetical LLM dominance in the workforce, some of my questions would be: (0) how limited is the change to a specific industry (e.g., weaving vs. most of intellectual and creative work by everyone starting from children as soon as they can read and type to the elderly)? (1) how many people are affected—in absolute terms not just percentages that ignore population growth? (2) how quickly are they affected? (3) what can people do—where can people move to where they can keep working (e.g., operating/maintaining/manufacturing tractors and looms, intellectual/white collar work, etc.)? (4) what are the organised reskilling processes in place that facilitate said migration? (5) how competitive and diverse, vs. monopolistic and regulated, are the new industries that power the change? how concentrated is created wealth and how many new jobs do they create? (6) what laws (in letter or in spirit) are violated as the change is happening? (7) if it is shown that the current change is about similar to the past in above aspects, does that imply it’s OK that it happens all over again and we have not learned a lesson to go ahead with these things more carefully so that the majority doesn’t suffer as much?

[ndiddy]

Well the Industrial Revolution was objectively a worse deal for the average worker. The average preindustrial peasant worked 8-12 hour days, but had Sundays off and at least 120 rest days and holidays. Depending on how good wages were at the time, they may have only had to work between 120 and 180 days per year. Compare that to the 70+ hour weeks workers were made to work all year in factories during the period immediately following the Industrial Revolution. It took over 100 years of collective struggle through the labor movement, as well as technological advances, before labor conditions improved to be something along the lines of what they were in the preindustrial period (at least going by hours worked/year). If you're arguing that AI is going to be similar to this, I do not want to be a wage worker in the period where this takes place, just like I would not have liked to be a wage worker during the Industrial Revolution.

[spwa4]

No, it wasn't. And it wasn't because of government regulation. The land you require for preindustrial peasanting was, of course, tightly regulated and owned by ... well, not you. Read the whole "tragedy of the commons", especially the part about government deciding to just sell the whole thing to the highest bidder, which instead of fixing the problem, set off another wave of city migration.

If you stayed on the land you had to work, not quite like a slave, but close. And if you disagreed with this, the government had an army that convinced you ...

Factories offered a better alternative than that, and yes, mostly because the agricultural option was just not open, and just not worth it. They also offered a great density of people that made the labor movement possible in the first place.

[watwut]

Pretty much all historians writing about industrial revolution are claiming completely opposite of what you do. Industrial revolution was a catastrophe for an average worker. The child mortality went up during industrial revolution. Social problems went up. It took quite a lot of violence for things to settle.

[dofm]

Tractors and looms displaced labour. Those people got other jobs. In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work.

The pitch for AI is that it's affordable at the insane valuations because it replaces labour.

It takes work out of the labour market entirely — fewer salaries means more money can be freed up that can go to the giant intelligence tap.

Not just some sectors — really all non-manual work sectors at once. Isn't that what the e/acc guys were open about at the beginning? Learn AI or you won't have a job?

Sam Altman was so open about this that he funded a UBI study.

[gruez]

>In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work.

source?

[dofm]

Literally any history of the industrial revolution in Britain (and I imagine the USA)

Farmers went from working outside at a stable work pace (and in many cases farming a small patch of their own land as part payment, so eating at least functionally well) to being forced out of their farming work by the second agricultural revolution (leading to the Swing Riots, Tolpuddle Martyrs etc.) and to living in cramped industrial slums, working in appallingly dangerous and polluted factories, long hours, terrible food, toxic chemicals, severe health issues.

Subsequent infant mortality in industrial area families was about twice the rate in industrial areas as it was in rural areas because of appalling living conditions and poor food.

It's the underpinning story of the second agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.

An interesting link here:

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/vict...

But this is well-studied history. The industrial revolution did not liberate the poor until labour law changed to stop them being expendable; living standards took the best part of a hundred years, until as late as the early 1900s, to return to a level where people were as healthy as they were or to live as long.

[monocasa]

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

[gruez]

AFAIK that was massively flawed because it doesn't account for time spent doing various household chores or maintenance tasks. If you spent 4 hours making a shirt, that wouldn't count towards "hours worked", but if you worked a 2 hour job to buy a shirt it would.

[monocasa]

Except that kind of work would have been split up by gender. The etymology of "woman" is literally "weaving person", and those kinds of tasks were up to the mostly adult women who also wouldn't have been working in the fields, so it ends up being a wash when painting with a wide brush.

[gruez]

> The etymology of "woman" is literally "weaving person"

[citation needed]

>Except that kind of work would have been split up by gender.

It's still work. It doesn't magically have zero value because it was done by women. The methodology cited by the book counts only counts hours worked if it's farming or wage employment, but doesn't count any household labor, which means anything that's shifted from being made at home to being bought would could as extra hours worked, even if it saves time overall.

[watwut]

Women were working fields and were working with farm animals too. They did not done work that required physical strength unless they had no choice, but that does not mean they did not "worked fields".

Second, work being split by gender does not matter here. Women are, by definition, people too. And weaving, sewing, candles crafting were all literal necessity. A weaving woman would sell or exchange results of her work if she had an excess of it. They were not bored SAHM hobbies they way they would be now. This was economic activity just like any other.

[dofm]

I mean, you only have to look at actual available salary and hours data to see that factory workers worked at least as long a day and longer than a farm day can even be, and in conditions that were unambiguously worse.

But even if this were not true it’s still not a working analogy for AI, which is going to eliminate employment, not just job roles. It’s the whole pitch for AGI.

[gruez]

>I mean, you only have to look at actual available salary and hours data to see that factory workers worked at least as long a day and longer than a farm day can even be, and in conditions that were unambiguously worse.

1. Where's the hours data you're citing?

2. My whole point in the previous comment is that there's more to being a medieval peasant than just plowing the fields. If during the industrial revolution you spent more time in wage employment, but then spent less time on household tasks, that would be captured in the hours data as simply more hours worked, because the latter isn't accounted for in the hours data at all.

[vitorfblima]

We're talking about ALL labor.

[yunwal]

AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon. AI is not making my meals anytime soon. It's not organizing events, or doing anything in the real world. It's not doing my open heart surgery. Robots are still doing this in 2026

https://www.news.com.au/sport/carnage-at-start-of-robot-mara...

We might have to get off the computer, and we might have to rethink how we organize the world economically, but there is still work to be done everywhere.

[vitorfblima]

I'm on board with what you're saying, but that's not what I'm going for. Right now, "Markets" need to believe that future nannies will be robots

[dofm]

> AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon.

This is an absolutely bizarre pitch for labour replacement for the very obvious reason that the rate at which the world's hair grows is not going to increase and nor are we going to suddenly discover a great need for new high maintenance hair styles to increase the work available.

There are clearly at a first approximation enough barbers and hairdressers already to cut the world's hair at the rate it is growing.

[gruez]

Do you think the average dirt farmer in the 1800 is going to be assuaged by the prospect of almost all farm work being mechanized, because he can be a "medical and health services manager" or "data scientist" instead?

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm

[justonepost2]

In this case there is, by definition, no “medical and health services manager” or “data scientist” in the future. Nothing comes next.

[yunwal]

> "by definition"

Who's definition are we talking about here

[justonepost2]

The definition of AGI?

[dofm]

Literally Sam and Dario's.

[AnimalMuppet]

"By definition"? If you define that to be the future, yes. But that's the problem with vitorfblima's statement upthread. Are we talking about all labor? That's still a very big, unproven assumption. It's an assumption that I question. And given that I don't buy the premise, I don't buy the conclusions, either.

And the farm analogy is somewhat on point. We went from 67% of people working on farms to... I think it's more like 3% than 1%, but a very small amount. That's two thirds of labor being replaced.

[dofm]

Where does this agricultural labour point come from?

It's so common here and so obviously wobbly. That labour was displaced (and in most cases into way more gruelling and dangerous factory work).

The AI pitch is that the giant superbrain will do all the knowledge work and rapidly self-improve faster than humans (and therefore, do more future jobs we could do). That is a pitch for replacing human labour.

You can't simultaneously have a machine that is said to be likely to wipe out entire categories — not market sectors, categories of work — and then say that all those people will get jobs elsewhere. Because, where? The timescales they are talking about are short. Where's the work going to come from in time?

[justonepost2]

As far as I can tell many people, especially tech practitioners, are as a whole desperate to believe that there is an iron law of the universe that “technological progress” is always a net good. Maybe there are some bumps along the way, but you can’t make an omelette…

The next couple of years will see these people contorting themselves into increasingly complex knots to try and argue that AI is making the world a better place. The arguments will get far weirder, and far more detached from reality, than bad comparisons to agricultural labor.

[dofm]

What's a dirt farmer?

[alamortsubite]

As opposed to a moisture farmer, presumably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_Islands#History

If you're never seen Man of Aran, you're in for a treat! Far more thought provoking than the fluff Lucas made, but by which I always assumed his fictional homestead on Tatooine was inspired.

[vitorfblima]

You guessed it.

[watwut]

What I do think is that your comparison have squat zero with history, society or tech of 1800. People like to make historical comparisons based on pure fantasies and this is one of them.

[phantompeace]

Do you really think an LLM will replace a surgeon?

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Why not?

Surgeons already perform remote surgery, so physical dexterity isn't the issue.

What do you think the moat is? Computer vision? Surgical technique? Surgical knowledge? Medical knowledge?

Maybe surgeons will be smart enough not to allow AI to be trained to do what they do, but it seems that training data is the only real barrier.

[phantompeace]

Why are we believing in marketing lies? For instance, crypto is useful (in a narrow context) even if it's 99.99% scams, and has positively impacted at least some people (the unbanked), even if it fell short of replacing the world's banking system. It's good tech.

Similarly with LLMs, it's good tech, but I do not believe for a single second that these things will ever replace anyone who is remotely skilled. People will be augmented by them. They won't be fully replaced. Well, I hope not anyway.

[dieselgate]

I don't think so but it will not stop folks from trying. The panacea of AI is AGI which basically, in theory, will replace any human/thing.

[esafak]

Surgery is a regulated field with high barriers to entry. Even if surgeons did not get replaced, displaced humans in other fields would not find employment in surgery.

[montjoy]

It’s different because those were singular technological advances, each in their own niche. They spread out change between time, geography, and industries.

The fear is this will replace engineers, scientists, accountants, lawyers, service workers, etc, etc all within a small time window.

Investment types have shown repeatedly that their primary concern is money, not workers. There is no reason to believe that those currently in power are open to sharing their wealth or influence.

[estearum]

Sure, here's a direct answer:

Even after the mechanical loom was created, figuring out the next most important problem to work on was a job that humans did.

Unless you believe there's some hard limit on AI intelligence that will constrain it below the intelligence of a particular earthbound hairless ape, then eventually AI will be perfectly sufficient and probably better at figuring out the next most important problem to work on.

Ta-da, humans are completely removed from the value chain. Neither the loom nor the tractor could not do such a thing.

[tengbretson]

That assumes that a value-judgement can be optimally made with intelligence alone.

[estearum]

In every sense that economically matters (i.e. in every sense that will actually attract the resources required to realize such a determination), it can be.

[LocalH]

The problem is that the economic matters are not the only relevant issues, and I would argue they're not the most important ones either

[estearum]

When it comes to what actually gets encoded into reality, it certainly is the most salient factor

[LocalH]

That truly does speak to the problems we have in modern society.

The biggest issue we face today is the incessant nature of economists to try to reshape reality to match economic theory, and not the other way around

[hatefulheart]

Are you suggesting we can make this comparison because there are no meaningful differences in society from the early 20th century to today?

I reject this argument as bad faith from the start.

[speak_plainly]

I think the technology industry has a long track record of selling false promises, dead ends, and over-hyped solutions.

AI is an interesting experiment with some real-world applications, but it’s no tractor or mechanical loom... not yet, at least, and it’s far from clear that it ever will be.

As things stand today, AI is not the future. It’s a tool with genuine uses that is being marketed as a revolution.

[fireflash38]

Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it?

The industrial revolution came along with massive production of goods that people need and desire. Even then, there was still a huge amount of pushback (it still echoes in a lot of communities today!).

Do you see any differences compared to the AI revolution we're being sold?

[BeetleB]

> Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it?

Do you not think the ultimate outcome was worth it?

[fireflash38]

Where is the glut of food and consumer products from AI?

[BeetleB]

Where was the glut of food and consumer products 4 years into the Industrial Revolution?

[markus_zhang]

1. It is to replace humans, or at least the majority of them, especially if they can get into Robotics as well, but that's a long shot I think.

2. If 1 happens, it is foreseeable that they don't even need that many slaves to tend to the machines, so not many "new" jobs created I'm afraid.

Comparing that to the computer -- yes if you are a typist you are doomed -- but they still need someone to type -- just not on a typewriter. And there are suddenly countless new requirements (e.g. video games, CGI, etc.) getting created from thin air. I don't really see this happening for AI -- like, do you see any NEW requirements getting created? Sure we are getting endless AI slop games/videos/fictions, but are they new? People can only consume that many products and pumping 100x into the system doesn't work -- except to make profit drop to ZERO for every ordinary creator out there.

BTW I do think there will be new requirements -- robotics combined with AI (e.g. who doesn't want a handsome husband or a beautiful wife?) -- but again it is to replace humans.

3. Apparently, accountability has dropped to a new low, since the end of the Cold War. So naturally cattle and sheep (I mean, us, ordinary people) are scared. Back then at least the elites were willing to make gestures and put up facades. Nowadays they simply don't GAF.

[watwut]

I don't know how tractors were sold initially, but AI is sold with open goal of making majority of the people unemployable, "obsolete" and keep it that way. That is literal rhetoric of those companies.

Tractors are tools to make hard boring labor easier.

[greenavocado]

It's not theoretical. I am literally in corporate meetings where leadership is automating away labor by directly comparing total cost of operations against the current human operator's salary to calculate ROI. The direct purpose is to eliminate jobs (and do things more reliably, ideally, since bots don't sleep or get sick). The question is whether those people will be able to find meaningful new work.

[yunwal]

This was absolutely happening with tractors too. Not in a board room or whatever, but people were definitely getting laid off because of tractors.

[vitorfblima]

Not in the speed and scale you would imagine, luckily.

[greenavocado]

Tractors at least grant some degree of agency to their operators.

[greenavocado]

The end goal is to mechanize and automate everything to "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." They are literally telling you this; it's written in stone. Once this is achieved, everyone else can turn into compost.

[LPisGood]

Are you talking about that rock art sculpture in the southern United States? I really think you’re giving the system too much credit if you believe there is such a grand plan

[greenavocado]

If you think the freemasons who erected it aren't serious, you aren't paying attention.

Look at your c-suite executive team and you'll find it stacked with them.

[AnimalMuppet]

If you think that the freemasons who erected it are running the AI revolution, I think that you aren't serious.