Ask HN: What happens if 99% of jobs disappear to automation?

[sharemywin]

I'm going to throw some assumptions/ ideas I've been thinking about around this:

no matter how hard I try/train I can't do some jobs. (sports athlete, etc.) So I could see how AI could eliminate jobs to the point most humans can't earn money.

AGI if possible will evolve from a company not a software program. AKA company X makes Y revenue as the number of employees tends toward 0.

LLMs are probably just a component of AGI. So, the argument LLMs can't do X doesn't really mean much when it comes to the discussion of Jobs and AI.

What if the paper clip(in the optimizer problem) is AI compute.

It's possible that the low hanging fruit of AI will stop at some point. but I'm not sure there any indication it's any time soon.

[muzani]

Gustafson's Law and Amdahl's Law.

Amdahl's says you get a diminishing effect, and we're already seeing this as we get into the GPT-4 level of performance, where it doesn't quite perform better at some tasks as 3.5.

Gustafson's says that as power increases, you'll tackle problems that were previously untacklable, and this cycles into more productivity. So CPUs lead to web to cloud computing to social networks and things like people emailing a file from mobile to PC instead of using a data cable.

Gustafson's creates a whole line of other jobs and different bottlenecks.

It's the framework paradox as well - you think frameworks would reduce the difficulty and pay of jobs, but they only go higher. It's why tech people are more eager to get into AI.

[ipaddr]

Then people are free to live without the need to work to continue society. It would free people up to seek a higher purpose. When you were a kid you would wake up and play. At some point you were forced to go to school and stopped being able to do that as freely. The older you got the less time you had. Now you have the time and that kid can keep playing.

The interesting thing is how do we get there and who is allowed to live in that society.

[shinryuu → ipaddr]

That seems to be far too idealistic. At least 98% of all people still need to pay for roof and food.

If their their breadwinning activity is rugged I'd say the majority would fare far worse.

[begeiner → ipaddr]

I guess this would require universal income for everyone in exchange for personal data that is being used to train ai and ofcourse people not giving into greed and just being satisfied when their need are met.

[hotpotamus]

There's plenty of speculative fiction on the subject, because that's all there can really be; it's hard to make predictions, particularly about the future.

Marshall Brain's novella, "Manna" on the subject is pretty popular in tech circles.

[quickthrowman]

You should read some history about the mechanization of agriculture, the vast majority of people used to work on farms, and now in the US it’s ~1.5% of workers. This time with AI might be different, but I think it’ll work along similar lines.

[sharemywin]

I guess my point is does it matter if 90%-%100 of people become unemployable, society is still pretty much ruined. also that doesn't even take into account the market inefficiencies(biases, geography etc).

[smoldesu → sharemywin]

Society is already ruined, just not as dramatically or widespread. Having grown up on the outskirts of Detroit, I can personally attest to the fact that there are already places where 10% are the "haves" and 90% are the "have nots". We ignored that though... keeping our precious economy running requires us to turn a blind eye, sometimes. Right?

This was the path society was on long before AI hit the scene. At this point, I'm kinda glad that a text generator is enough of a boogeyman to make tech workers into Luddites. If your existence feels threatened by a machine that can make money writing text, I suggest you reexamine your priorities to focus on broader impact or at least more meaningful personal fulfillment.

[sharemywin → smoldesu]

I suggest you reexamine your priorities to focus on broader impact or at least more meaningful personal fulfillment.

You me like the when farmland gets used up for solar to power AI.

or demand evaporates because all the white collar jobs disappear. Who buys all the blue collar workers and service workers stuff?

[smoldesu → sharemywin]

I'm not saying this post-capitalist hellscape is a good thing. I'm saying that this failure was preordained since the middle class was sustained entirely on the goodwill of the upper class. Of course it will shrink when profitability falls.

As you said, demand will eventually evaporate in a system without class competition. This is a good thing; basic life-sustaining commodities like food and shelter should not be sold at a markup or separated by class. These markets would "collapse" back into sustainability. A holocaust for the housing market, but a lifeline to the unhoused or those who otherwise couldn't afford housing.

It didn't take AI to set any of those wheels in motion. I didn't skip dinners before payday because my dad got priced out of overtime by a robot. The fact that we play this silly game of trade and barter is what put us here, and AI just lowers those ever-shrinking margins to nothingness. Now we're here, the capitalist apocalypse.

> when farmland gets used up for solar to power AI.

There is not enough demand, technicians, manufacturers or materials to make that a reality.

The Tragedy of the Commons is a tragedy because it is unavoidable. Polluting our planet has already happened, except not with solar panels but oil byproduct and greenhouse gases. Some lot of good all that "demand" did Mother Earth.

[fbrncci]

The automation which allowed 99% of the jobs to disappear, will be responsible for (pulling this out of my ass, to get a point across) 90-200% of the new jobs which we now can do.

[floxy]

Before it gets to 99% unemployment, you'll go through 20% -> 30% -> 40%. What is going to stop society collapsing well before 99%? Hopefully we'll have self-replicating robot farmers that drive the cost of food to near zero. And the self replicating construction robots that builds housing for almost nothing. Etc..

[Mrirazak1]

I don’t think that will be the case. It will affect every sector and industry that is for sure but the extent is variable, for example something like customer service or sales it will affect it heavily but something like manual tasks like painters or decorators it will assist rather than replace them.

[FrankWilhoit]

Some percentage of jobs were lost to the steam engine; no inferences were drawn, no actions taken. In fact, all of the grotesque political pathologies of the Long 19th Century were down to a universal effort to pretend that nothing had changed.

[gardenhedge]

Childcare, elderly care, cleaning the streets, ai/not maintenance, ai/bot designers, AI customer support support, last 100m delivery service, event organisers

[austin-cheney]

History has demonstrated that when executed properly automation creates new jobs that did not exist before, frequently high paying jobs. It’s almost impossible to imagine new necessary things that aren’t currently needed. When executed incorrectly jobs are artificially created to fill the perception of automation, which regresses economic growth.

I wouldn’t worry about any of this. Automation is only correctly achieved in small slow steps before achieving social replication.

[foobarbaz33 → austin-cheney]

With AI the technology is itself an intelligent creature that could theoretically take over any new jobs created recursively. Assuming it has agency and a physical medium to act through.

There may not be any historical context to look back on.

[austin-cheney → foobarbaz33]

Sigh... stop watching movies and come back to reality. SkyNet is not here to kill you. No matter what people wish artificial intelligence is not yet intelligent. If it were capable of self-validation or self-healing algorithms then... possibly (but even then the probably is low). Until that time its just another data combination scheme surrounded by stupid people full of wishful thinking.

If anything the current state of AI will do one thing painfully well: separate the hopelessly unoriginal people from everybody else. It a race to Dunning-Kruger where people too unaware cannot tell the difference in absolute astonishment to those who can.

[foobarbaz33 → austin-cheney]

> reality

The question is about the scenario where AI *is* a reality. AI being a reality today is not relevant to the question.

[iefbr14]

If such a thing would happen, I imagine that all those fancy datacenters will go up in flames pretty easily

[p1esk → iefbr14]

Those fancy datacenters will be guarded by robots with guns.

[retrac]

Most jobs 100 years ago no longer exist. Most jobs that exist today were created by the advancing march of the machines.

Bill Joy (of Sun Microsystems, and the vi editor) wrote an article in Wired more than 20 years ago, [1] "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". He saw the same problem. All but extremely specialized intellectual labour may be automated and no one has any services or work they can sell. The people who own the capital no longer need the masses.

There are no easy answers. Maybe we avoid this crisis through a mix of busy work programs, service work (people will always want people to wait on them with a human touch, I suspect), taxation, social programs and, indeed, new jobs created by new technology. Maybe there is a revolution coming in the not so distant future. Capitalism that eliminates labour altogether is perhaps the ultimate contradiction and the resolution leads us to fully automated luxury space communism. Maybe society collapses from the unrest. Maybe AI and semiconductors run into a brick wall and machines two hundred years from now are no more impressive than an iPhone would have been to someone in 2005.

Speculating here, obviously. All anyone can do.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/

[gwnywg → retrac]

> The people who own the capital no longer need the masses.

those masses still have needs, even if they are very basic needs like roof, food or physical security... As long as whole world does not descent into global favela (and even then people will have to coexist which means some forms of trade...?)

[analog31 → retrac]

Maybe there will be no capital worth owning.

[shortrounddev2]

UBI - Give people money

[fsflover]

Basic income and competition for the luxury.

[mikewarot]

At 99% unemployment, all economic models of capitalism collapse, and lose all predictive capabilities, and likely so does capitalism.

I think the 99% lose all political power, at which point they get fed up, eat the rich, and society breaks down. With stockpiles of nukes distributed around the world, it could get very ugly.