When no work is safe from mechanization, surely the value of labor wrt capital must fall, and the societal pressure on redistribution will rise. The ultimate outcome of technological progress is either extreme inequality or massive redistribution
I feel like by the time the societal pressure starts rising in any major way, it won't matter anymore. By that point, the people who will profit will become gods with a prepared response for every action the lower classes could take.
I feel like this subthread is full of passive acceptance of defeat.
How many years did it take for HN to go from “worker unions bad because I make a lot of money” to “Of course there is a capitalist/worker war going on and in fact the capitalists might become technology-assisted gods”? I guess we’re all vulgar marxists when we think it’s too late to fight back.
Where did the can-do hustler attitude go? Only applicable for looking out for number one?
But now that we are all, at least the non-millionaires here, in the same boat? Curious sudden onset of catatonia
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To countermand the insane negativity for a second: LLMs are brains in a vat and therefore cannot by themselves do any tasks that goes beyond simulating keyboard & mouse in front of a computer screen.
Sometimes it almost feels like there's more than one person on HN holding more than one opinion.
I'm from the younger, lower end of the job market, far from the average HN user. You could accuse me of being excessively cynical. That's what happens when the systems you assumed would be there tell you to get bent the moment it's your turn to enter the job market. There's very few people my age I know who aren't angry at something. What you can't accuse me of is hypocrisy. I was never in the ranks of the SV money-above-all billionaire-loving population that's so common here, and I never wanted to join them. All I wanted was a career in something I enjoyed doing and an ability to sustain myself. I really don't understand why I am the one person you decided to turn your snarky, enraged tirade towards.
And it doesn't matter that LLMs can't act on their own. You don't need to literally replace every worker to the last one to get to the place I was talking about. A productivity boost that leads to 20-30% of all white collar workers losing their job would be horrific, and it would only get worse from there. That seems entirely possible to me. Nothing I'm talking about is particularly insane, it's all just a continuation of what's already been happening, with the same people ruling over it.
I don’t have a problem with people being very negative and cynical. I have a problem with people being very negative and cynical and also defeatist. The things that I alluded to were examples of fighting back. Not just dreading the hypothetical future.
That I brought up things that cannot be automated right now was to demonstrate that we won’t go from the status quo—which is after all not a white collar automation wipeout, right now we just have layoffs from big firms that are arguably struggling but pinning it on the “Agentic Era”—to freaking mass employment + killer robots. And maybe that won’t last forever. So maybe we should fight back while we can.
> I have a problem with people being very negative and cynical and also defeatist.
Why? Does it honestly seem like there's a serious possibility that this will turn out well, that there's something people will do to stop it? Can you name a time in recent history when something like this had happened and the crisis was averted? I'm not saying I've given up, but I can't influence the situation and, with what has happened so far in my life, expecting things to get worse seems like a pretty safe guess to me.
> The things that I alluded to were examples of fighting back.
Can you spell them out for me? I read the comment again, but most of it was just rallying up against my perceived hypocrisy as a supposed representative of the tech elite. I honestly can't see any allusions to actions or anything of the sort.
The status quo right now isn't just mass layoffs, it's a very noticeable sag in the job market, especially the junior job market. I don't know if it has ever been this bad, even in past crises that affected this field. Large-scale unemployment seems like a reasonable possibility because even seasoned professionals who aren't AI salesmen are all saying that the tooling skyrockets their productivity, and because we know there's a good chunk of white collar workers doing relatively simple work that would be low-hanging fruit for automation. Also, where did I mention killer robots?
I’m sorry. I thought that I alluded to it but I didn’t.
The fact that I have a 40-hour workweek is because Labor (not any political party) fought for it. The Weekend also. And getting enough income to be “middle class” rather than proletarian.
What would the modern Westerner say if they uniformly had to work 12-hour days? Probably something about Orwell’s boot stomping on a face forever and then getting back to work.
> LLMs are brains in a vat and therefore cannot by themselves do any tasks that goes beyond simulating keyboard & mouse in front of a computer screen.
Meant to imply that (a bit obtuse writing style?) even if LLMs cHaNge evEryThing for white collar work... you still need embodiment in order to do many “human” jobs. Thus even with the maximalist take-our-jobs outlook, labor itself will not be wiped out in one fell swoop. Which means that those who are left can fight back. Because they have their labor as leverage.
I didn’t feel like spelling that out because replying to two-sentence defeatism with multiple paragraphs is a lot of work.
> the societal pressure on redistribution will rise.
And then we'll see if the wealthy and powerful people will just send automated killer drones after the poors, because culling us would be more preferable than sharing their wealth
This can’t be sustainable, there must be a limit in human biology as to how complex jobs we can handle. More and more people will fall under that threshold.
I think there’s probably a limit to given technologies of social organization, but not biology.
I think most people have more potential than they’re ever allowed to reach, and that capitalism is indifferent to the social structures it destroys. I don’t think neoliberal capitalism was the end of history, or that returning to feudalism is the answer, but we’re probably going to have to do something different to avoid social collapse in my lifetime.
Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.
1. People *across generations* had to skill up.
2. software being very opaque (very differently from agriculture/mechanized labour) imo is linked to having a plethora of support roles that cannot write software but "handle the human part" and help make it readable, while spreading accountability. Hopefully with a "more readable/more standardized" software development, those [product|project|people] management roles can stop being a drag/bottleneck. (code was never the bottleneck we repeat ourselves since age immemorial)
They'll all turn in to "the managerial class". That's the higher order function that requires high judgement, low frequency work (unlike developers, data entry, designers, BDRs, compliance, etc.)
The globalized economy has demonstrated that a single country and supply the majority of the world's manufacturing needs, at least for a while.
Taiwan creates most of the worlds semiconductors. China makes the majority of everything else. Silicon Valley created a majority of the tech market's value.
But there's a cap where the world has enough stuff at least in the short term, and growth slows.
Humans only need a certain amount to survive. With populations leveling out, industry will shift from servicing human needs, to the needs of corporations and other industries. Consumers will become a minority in the future economy.
What will corporations value in the future, that they're willing to spend on recurring human capital expenses? I think the answer will always be: the tasks that will help companies grow.
Why would companies want to grow if there is no more demand by consumers? I understand that "b2b" exists, but surely all production and commerce is ultimately about satisfying (or creating) demand for consumption? Why would companies want to keep growing if there is no demand for their products?
So most training data would be grey and a little bit coloured? Ok, that sounds plausible. But then maybe they tried and the current models get it already right 99.99% of the time, so observing any improvement is very hard.
They have a lot of data in the form: user input, LLM output.
Then the model learns what the previous LLM models produced, with all their flaws. The core LLM premise is that it learns from all available human text.
This hasn't been the full story for years now. All SOTA models are strongly post-trained with reinforcement learning to improve performance on specific problems and interaction patterns.
The vast majority of this training data is generated synthetically.
Interesting. The debate about whether the artist matters in perceiving a piece of art is very old. You don’t seem to consider the possibility that the artist’s intent matters when listening to music. For me it absolutely does. As the AI has no intent (agency), the AI music is void of any value to me.
At the moment, the German state is reneging on its obligations. The current workforce is expected to work harder and harder while retirement is pushed back and social benefits are threatened. A third or a fifth of the population is considering emigration already. Why would they fight for a country that is giving up on them?
over and over again, we see that governments are pretty bad at doing their job.
over and over again, they prove to us that they cant handle money, that they are corrupt, that they put the interest of their political class above that of the people.
so are you surprised?
id rather be left alone as much as possible in my pursuit of happiness. On my own terms!
"Fuck you got mine" is the attitude of the boomers expecting young people to die for a country that the boomers left economically and demographically ruined. Young Germans have the worst life prospects of any generation in the past fifty years.
But if you look at serious polls then not many young people will actually fight for this. I remember reading a number of around 15%...
And those probably don't have a high IQ.
That's a generation of people who had to never suffer the prospect of invasion and occupation of German soil by hostile armed forces. Even so, this number of willing recruits would already be much more than the Bundeswehr can possibly arm, and are unneeded as long as there is no military altercation actively involving Germany.
Unsurprisingly when people here engage in serious politics beyond a desire to enrich themselves, those politics tend to take on a distinctly libertarian bent. I’m not sure what else people expect though, this is a very sheltered group with relatively limited skills outside of specific technical areas.
Our current incentives system is absolutely amoral, there's no financial/economic benefit for being moral, it's the opposite: being moral is penalised since you'd be disadvantaged competing with others who don't care about it.
I completely agree with you, moral progress should be incentivised somehow...
This has typically been done with social processes. The community publicly condemns or celebrates things according to how they fit our morals.
The problem is, there is no public town square anymore where we can shame the people who are responsible. The billionaires/megacorps control the media through which they communicate to the public.
In other words, the immoral actors have captured the systems meant to socially control them, and are instead using them to temper the moral instincts of society.
Just to push back a little, I think if the U.S. did now what they did to Germany and Japan in WW2 it would be unconscionable. They are getting a lot of flak for bombing a school. But I think it’s fair to say there were a lot of schools in Dresden and Hiroshima.
This isn’t to excuse anything but to say there has been progress even if it’s not as fast as we’d like.
As far as the technology angle, the precision we have now and information we have now allow much more narrow targeting, but at the same time allows us to scrutinize military actions more.
a) Germany and Japan started their respective wars, with much worse atrocity records. And with aerial bombing of their own. Japan was already bombing Chongqing in 1938. And during the counterinvasion of some of the islands did things like arm a school, including providing grenades to the children so they could avoid capture.
b) The scale of WW2 is so wildly different from the present that people find it difficult to imagine. The firebombing of Tokyo caused more casualties than one of the nuclear weapons.
(Follow on point from a: the original sin of all war crimes is starting a war of choice in the first place. Which the current war with Iran definitely is.)
Small correction: there was one very publicized school bombing with a lot of casualties, but there's more than one bombed school.
The US and Israel have bombed several schools, hospitals, and civil servants' offices, and residential buildings. I read HRANA's report on the war every morning. [1] It's a quick read, they are a reliable Iranian opposition source (now based in the US).
Each day, there are multiple strikes on civilian infrastructure. No matter how precise they are, they are still war crimes.
Surely it's the precision that makes them war crimes? If the missiles weren't meter-accurate, and the intelligence didn't eg show the lines painted on the playground (even in images available to the public) then they would be able to pass it off as mistakes or enemy propaganda.
No, what makes them war crimes is the intentional targeting of non-combattants. Being lousy at aiming weapons does not absolve of any war crime.
The accuracy helps with showing intent, though, because when your 50% accuracy radius is a couple of meters and you put a couple of missiles on a target that’s a hundred of meters of anything else, it’s hard to argue they were sidetracked.
Germany and Japan were conducting pre-emptive defensive special military operations.
If Japan had managed to secure the US uranium 250,000 innocent civilians would not have been vaporised in the two greatest disturbances in the force in all humanity.
When asking for moral progress rather then technological progress, it's not an inverse.
People can build technology, or I can build technology, but we generally all get it. Its distribution requires nothing of me or others psychologically.
You can't just build and distribute morality, and adopting it is a massive personal change.
You can build and distribute morality. It's called politics. Or religion. Or culture. Or marketing. Or propaganda. Or education.
There's so many ways in which morality is distributed.
There are also many things that stand in the way of adopting technology. Cost. Personal preference. Moral preference. Availability. Lack of awareness. Lack of specialized skill.
The two are not very different at all in how they diffuse through society.
It doesn't seem like moral progress actually exists or even can exist given human nature. In every time period and era there are people killing each other, amongother crimes. It is fallacious to think that we have a monotonically increasing meter of moral progress, that we are somehow better than our ancestors. Reality shows that we are exactly the same, as the parent says.
Think of a woodworking project. Compare doing everything old-school by hand vs using modern tools to go faster. Think about the end product being just an item with a function vs it having some design value or even craftsmanship value. Does the parallel work?
IMO it does not. At least to me the meaning and value of something is in the creative human design behind it, not the tools used to build it. I don’t think AI changes much there. It’s a (very powerful) tool but still IMO the value lies with the creativity and skill of the operator.
