The AI backlash is only getting started
economist.com76 points by andsoitis 5 hours ago
76 points by andsoitis 5 hours ago
People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming?
Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either.
Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he will be replaced by a machine fully; imagine that taxi driver thinking that there are slick graduates from top schools who wake up everyday (waymo, tesla, zoox) with one goal in mind - let's automate this taxi driver.
The anger against AI/Tech is just starting really.
I think they just don't care that the people are mad. The equation doesn't include workers. It actively excludes them.
Because no sane person would pitch a product that would put you out of work, it seems surprising to us to hear that pitch. But the pitch isn't to us; we're not part of the equation. We're passive listeners between uncaring, unfeeling parties who only value one thing, and that thing ain't us.
> The anger against AI/Tech is just starting really.
That seems like a pretty safe bet at this point.
Aside from one health insurance company CEO, why should they care that the common people are angry with them? It doesn't stop them from doing whatever the hell they want. Even if it's illegal (looking at you memphis data center gas generators)
> Aside from one health insurance company CEO, why should they care that the common people are angry with them?
Because the frustration builds up. Either we'll see a few more CEOs facing street justice, or we will see candidates getting elected in the primaries that make Sanders and Mamdani combined look like burgeoise (aka, people will actually elect legitimate full on socialists or communists) - and the latter is the actually more dangerous scenario for the ultra rich.
>Who did not see this coming?
The general vibe of the internet at least for the last 20 years has been "Work sucks, play is fun, give whatever technology minimizes my need to work and maximizes my wealth and free time"
All these same guys have also talked about the need for UBI, so they basically have been promising the dream of the liberal internet: No work, free money, do whatever you want in your life.
The viability of this dream is pretty debatable, but it definitely checks all the boxes of the internet hivemind as of ~3-4 years ago.
Are vibecoders working less? I don't think so. I've seen people with a dozen Claude windows open, and I'd rather go dig mud than working like that. There is no universe where you can call that programming despite the end product still being source code.
The people that have won are not the lazy ones. It's the preppy work-hard-not-smart guys high on ADHD medication that feel like gods having a dozen machines spew out millions of lines of code per day, instead of just sitting on a hammock and thinking the easiest way to achieve the goal, with the least amount of effort.
That said, the shift away from 'the best engineer is the lazy engineer' ethos has happened a decade+ ago.
Just because people are angry does not make it false.
> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines??
Because arms race.
Game dynamics and incentive structures don't cease to exist just because someone notices them.
All those devs and data scientists and PhDs make a choice though. They could quit and work somewhere else. Even in a tough market their skills are in demand. They choose to work on this every morning.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! (from Mario Savio)
Sure, they could do that. The outcome wouldn't change, though.
If SW devs who worked on ride sharing apps didn't leave, why would you think these folks would?
If SW devs who worked on airline ticket search engines didn't leave, why would you think these folks would?
And on and on and on. The SW industry has been heavily involved in replacing jobs since its inception.
> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either.
This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor.
The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall. You could use this argument to say we should have never invented the printing press if you only thought of the people who used to manually transcribe books and documents.
Yes, but it's trivially obvious that AI is different from previous technological automation, since with AI it's ALL jobs being automated, starting with white collar ones, not just some narrow segment.
What was true with previous automation, that some jobs disappear, but new ones are created in their place, will not be true of AI, because AI is a general purpose technology capable of doing the new jobs it creates just as well as the old ones it displaces.
I agree was going to comment that yes it does feel slightly different because in most cases technology narrowly targeted specific niches at the time, that when replaced could at least in hindsight be seen to likely benefit the majority at the cost of the existing laborers.
Whereas in this case most of the top brass of AI do push it as something more akin to "we think this will replace practically all human labor". And without the availability of human labor, at least given the current economic system its hard to see how that'd lead to anything but mass suffering.
I do think the argument still holds. If we were able to see it as a net benefit to all, it would still be worth it. Its just that with the level of replacement we're talking about the net benefit would need to be massive (however we define "benefit") The problem is there is plenty of research showing it is still net negative in many cases, especially (in my opinion) when it comes to cognitive ability and early stage development for children/youth.
The closest similarity may be the development of the personal computer or something along those lines.
> If we were able to see it as a net benefit to all, it would still be worth it. Its just that with the level of replacement we're talking about the net benefit would need to be massive (however we define "benefit")
Well, let's assume that the AI companies building and pushing this tech are right, and it WILL take your job (and every other job you may consider career pivoting to). Presumably the government isn't going to let you actually starve, as long as they have the means to do that, but it does mean your comfortable life, built on your own labor, is gone, and now you are barely surviving on government welfare.
So, what potential benefit (even hypothetical) would offset that? An AI cure for cancer perhaps? Personally I'd rather have a nice life and take my risks with cancer, which anyways human intelligence will solve in due course if it is solvable.
This "AI will take ALL the jobs" isn't just some sci-fi far distant future. It's already acknowledged that all work that can be done in front of a computer can be automated. Did you work at home during covid (not just developer - manager, teacher, a lot of jobs) - if so then your job can easily be automated in the near future.
OK, so you'll be able to retrain as a plumber or nurse perhaps, and work with your hands. We'll all be plumbers, except that doesn't scale. We'll all be self-sufficient farmers perhaps. We've seen this before, and no reason it can't happen again.. most of the power and the money in the hands of a very few, and the rest living as peasants.
Note that physical jobs being replaced by AI also isn't some sci-fi far distant future, although it will start with factory jobs, driving jobs, then move to ones requiring a greater level of physical ability (e.g. plumber), and perhaps human touch (nurse). Look at Japan to see where things are headed. Many countries have declining populations, hence declining GDP and tax receipts; most countries have turned to immigration as the solution to this, but Japan has decided to turn to technology instead - robotics and AI. Replacing human jobs with robotics and AI isn't a sci-fi dream in Japan - it is the official government policy that they are working on, and that includes things like care for the elderly.
> The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall.
That's just treating the very real, living people, who exist right now, and can read your words, as if they're already dead.
> You could use this argument to say we should have never invented the printing press
So, what displaced person will you swap your livelihood with? After all, if it's just about the general arc of progress, and the individual lives don't matter, why not sacrifice yours for that of someone else? The same could be said to those who say "there will always be inequality", life is unfair, etc... it all sounds great but it's really just more words for "fuck you, got mine" IMO.
Nowhere in my argument do I contend it may not affect myself. In fact I have basically already accepted its very likely I'll be replaced due to AI in the very near future. Thats just the unfortunate reality of things at the individual level.
So yes, I do agree it sucks for lots of people living in the moment.
I mention in some other comments that yes, AI "visionaries" make the level of replacement seem to be on a scale almost never before seen and so the "benefit" for the majority would have to be absolutely massive (however we define benefit). And currently its hard to see how it could reach that level. I was just noting we cannot "only" see it through the lens of replacement. If for example billionaires (trillionaires now?) did actually spread the benefit and we overhauled the economic systems in much of the world for humanity it _might_ actually be a benefit. Its just hard to see this ever happening given history.
I definitely have not "gotten mine" like the billionaires pushing AI. But other inventions in hindsight have very clearly benefited humanity as a whole even with the unfortunate effects on the people of the time.
> I definitely have not "gotten mine" like the billionaires pushing AI.
Yet your whole comment is about them "not being all that", with no answer for the "taxi driver facing his family knowing he will be replaced by a machine fully" (emphasis mine).
Are you in this situation? Anywhere close? "Having accepted it's very likely" is a far off from that, unless that means "so I threw all my possessions into the dumpster and started living on the street, because it's a foregone conclusion".
> If for example billionaires (trillionaires now?) did actually spread the benefit and we overhauled the economic systems in much of the world for humanity it _might_ actually be a benefit. Its just hard to see this ever happening given history.
"Okay family, we all starve to death now, but just think: if it was different, it would be different!"
No, that doesn't work either.
> other inventions in hindsight have very clearly benefited humanity as a whole even with the unfortunate effects on the people of the time
But we know that the productivity gains of the last few decades haven't gone to "humanity", already. And that was even before the raw hatred of the vulnerable we see on display now.
How many inventions and tools simply improved life as people adopted them at their own pace, without it being this situation where people get herded into giving up all direct, deterministic access to the machinery they need to communicate, work, live, with the added benefits of cheap mass surveillance, cheap mass manipulation, and displacement of labor on a scale that will require the aforementioned to keep people in check?
This is not about other inventions, it's about what this actually is, not about penicillin or the plow.
> This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor.
This argument alone works just fine. If you explicitly threaten billions of people that you will make them redundant then you better focus on building a guillotine proof neck.
>>This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor.
"throughout history" - go look at the time it took to replace those jobs. how those jobs were replaced. A trillion dollars will be put into investment this year to put AI in everything. People who's companies those money is going to are actively saying there will be 20-30% job loss.
>>The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall.
Define 'net benefit overall'. Does overall include people who's job is getting automated? How skewed the benefit is towards some b(t)illionaires?
I wrote in a separate comment elsewhere that I don't really disagree that the current top brass of AI push it as something that would replace people on a much larger degree than most other technology, but that in my opinion the argument does hold - where if we did see it as a net benefit greater than the loss it would still be worth it, and that is the measurement we should be using. But yes, given the level of replacement the net benefit would have to be absolutely massive.
And yes, "net benefit" is hard to measure for an unrealized/developing product.
So I don't disagree with you. In the current economic system where we need human labor (in the majority of the world) to make a living, its hard to see the current vision of AI by those in charge to lead to anything but mass suffering.
AI will quickly turn the world into an even greater disparity between the "haves" and the "have nots" with its current vision.
> The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall
I like this framing.
But I wish more people would acknowledge that genAI offloads thinking in ways that the printing press, the loom, the calculator, and the computer never did.
I find a net benefit to be extremely unlikely, but the devil's in the details. We'd have to define "benefit" and that's already a big kettle of worms.
We cannot talk about net benefit until we agree on the objective: net benefit for whom?
I don't care if my current job is being replaced or the whole industry I am working in vanishes. But as an individual, if the new technology says it aims to wipe out all the possibilities of my future career, it is not net benefit for me.
Just saying "net benefit" "overall" sounds like some collectivism propaganda.
>doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history
And it entailed social unrest every time.
> Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he will be replaced by a machine fully; imagine that taxi driver thinking that there are slick graduates from top schools who wake up everyday (waymo, tesla, zoox) with one goal in mind - let's automate this taxi driver.
Back when self-driving cars still seemed imminent and Musk hadn't started losing his teflon coating, I asked an actual taxi driver his thoughts about self-driving.
He was looking forward to it.
This surprised me, until I found LLMs were automating coding and found I felt not too different about my own career.
Presumably your POV depends on whether you believe the capability of AI will somehow stop at coding, so you'll still have your job with a cool new tool, or whether AI will replace your job altogether, in which case perhaps you are planning a career pivot to taxi driver?
Ironically, developers may turn out to be easier to replace than taxi drivers. We've seen technological progress replaced workers or made certain roles obsolete, and this may become another example. I hope governments and public institutions take a more active role in supporting people going through the transition.
Good to know we can maybe count on the government to send us a few 1000 dollar checks on the way to the human zoo.
I'm hoping I get assigned to the nice terrafoam housing that they build before they start drastically cutting corners.
> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines??
Say, you wouldn't happen to write software for a living, would you?
I do. developed predictive models for health monitoring of large machines and then fraud detection in health care. Why do you ask?
Does automated fraud detection not replace the work of human auditors? Do these large machines automate tasks? If you believe automating human labor is an evil, then I hate to break it to you, your in hell's chatroom. "Software is eating the world" was published 15 years ago. What did you think that meant?
>>Does automated fraud detection not replace the work of human auditors?
No. Human auditors use our product. They still make the decision whether something is fraud or not. The product is auditing things that weren't being audited before. Why you might ask. because we didn't know we were supposed to audit that stuff. Multiple investigations revealed new patterns of healthcare fraud and we baked those into our product. Zero auditors were replaced by our product. Millions of dollars of new fraud was caught with our product.
>>Do these large machines automate tasks?
Yes they do.
You are really looking at this in a zero-sum way when it's not.
Not the GP, but I used to do. And I share the sentiment even though I'm out of the game.
>Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines??
There is a lot of money to be made in the destruction of civilisation.
> People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming?
Cal Newport calls this "Doom-Trolling" — there was an NYT article, he has talked about it on his youtube channel and there was an actually really great, long discussion with Ed Zitron about it where Ed covered a lot more topic ground than he has been focussed on lately.
He makes the case that this fear-based marketing is causing real harm and unnecessary anxiety and is basically despicable.
The untold promise of IA is to replace labor. That's probably the only reason why some people are willing to spend trillions of dollars in pursuing this technology. Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. It's no surprise that people are getting angry, even though many are using AI in their everyday life.
> untold promise of IA is to replace labor
Untold? AI going for (insert your favorite) jobs has been on headlines, conferences, substacks, etc non-stop before chatgpt was able to consistently reply twice without hallucinating
This is just how productivity works. If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output.
People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.
But that's just the thing, productivity is so much higher than, say, 50 years ago, while the average worker has less of a perspective (to own a home, start a family, etc. anything stable to work towards essentially). The profits mostly don't go towards the now more productive workers and ensuring their rights and well-being and a habitable world to live in, do they.
My view is that AI's productive power will allow more individuals to be independent from powerful corporations, and that will significantly weaken those corporations.
It's been really challenging to start companies because you need to go hire and manage a lot of people to handle lots of very different tasks. But it's becoming easier and easier everyday because AI is able to do a lot of that work.
As more people start companies, more competition will drive down prices for everything, making the things people want more accessible.
I don’t think the claim is that people will be less productive, the world will be far more productive.
The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.
Yes. To sledgehammer it home, it's not desire for things that makes consumption happen. You need money. And if bots are doing the work, where's the money coming from?
The argument implies that there's some kind of balance point in there. But I'll bet it's not one where the general populace is living remotely well.
The window of uncertainty is absolutely massive. I could also equally see a world that looks mostly like ours today because it becomes illegal to use sufficiently intelligent AI (Mythos is already generating guardedness, and it’s not smart enough to replace capable humans). Eg if ai that is sufficiently intelligent to truly replace humans is as dangerous as an atom bomb (or chemical weapon, or even a machine gun) then it could just be illegal to use except for use by the governments of the world.
Or high intelligence, enough to replace all humans, becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of energy and data compared to humans that we maintain a kind of biological advantage on a large category of economically valuable tasks.
Or training sufficiently advanced ai to replace us requires judgements and training data that is essentially beyond us (eg if we can’t figure out what the right answer is, how can we train or judge an AI)
No one has any real idea what is going to happen. What we need tho is a collective promise, through our democracies and communities and governments, that we will make it right. Institutions and laws that make sure the benefits are distributed broadly, that we stay safe, that we have a better world because of it. If people get that I think everyone will be mostly excited by ai, not opposed.
People need to Google Jevons Paradox, smdh
That’s what the growing hoards of permanently unemployable people will do, sit around and google jevons paradox and the lump of labor fallacy and ponder whether economists have ever been wrong in the past about such matters, and whether AGI is really all that different from the steam engine anyway. Tech sector is just tech, like it’s always been.
I think you have no idea what Jevons Paradox is if you think it is a retort to what I just said.
> People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff.
The danger arises when people want stuff but cannot afford it as there is no more work and what remains of available work (i.e. trades and sex work) is being fought over heavily, driving down the prices.
When that "cannot afford it" extends to necessary stuff such as housing and food too much, eventually there will be a revolution once people are fed up.
The US is in a particularly bad spot here - in contrast with other countries that experience utter poverty (e.g. Afghanistan), most of the population lives in urban areas and has zero opportunity to at least engage in subsistence farming. Whoops.
Well, what if it "just" increased white collar productivity by 1.5x, what would that be worth?
>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.
How do people still conflate “sectoral changes in the labor market” with “humans become zoo animals”? The scale just seems fundamentally different.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
> After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today
And how many years did that take to happen? 3 or 4? That's what the AI companies are promising. 89% of you will be unemployed in the next couple years. All that wealth you'd be making from working will now be going to the company owners and you're out on your own. Good luck!
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?
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.
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.
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.
No they aren't. There very much was a reason during the industrial revolution why people were driven to the cities and into the factories.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Nobody said it had zero value. The point is that labor roles were extremely gender striated, and the record is mostly kept only for men's labor. So saying that they worked more because of the example task you gave doesn't make sense when societally that work was put onto others.
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.
The point is that the data we have is on men's work. No one said that women were bored SAHM hobbies. Just that pointing out extra tasks that need to be done in addition to the record we have of men working 150 days a year doesn't make much sense when that additional work wasn't done by men.
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.
>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.
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.
We're talking about ALL labor.
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.
> 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.
Ok, are there enough doctors? seems really weird that you left out the other jobs I mentioned
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
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?
In this case there is, by definition, no “medical and health services manager” or “data scientist” in the future. Nothing comes next.
> "by definition"
Who's definition are we talking about here
The definition of AGI?
Nobody has mentioned AGI in this thread until this comment. And either way, there's no evidence that AGI as you're defining it is going to be solved anytime soon. Sam Altman and Dario may claim it will to pump their incoming IPOs, but outside of la la land, OpenAI and Anthropic aren't making any big robotics plays, which leaves a huge chunk of the "G" in AGI completely unattended to.
Literally Sam and Dario's.
Ok, the 2 CEOs want investors to believe their technology is all-powerful. Is that assessment worth anything?
I wasn't saying it is or isn't.
But it unambiguously is who is leading the promise to replace labour; it is whose bullshit is provoking the backlash.
It is whose variously-confident definition of near-term AGI involves completely eliminating a large enough shar of jobs that Altman thinks he has to talk about UBI and fund pilot studies so he doesn't lose all his cool California friends.
It is who has set the tone for the entire punditsphere and everyone who emulates them.
Their definition is the one the media and governments have swallowed; they need the fear so they get regulatory capture.
I will tell you that I think though: I think Sam Altman should be nowhere near the power and proximity to power that he has, band I think Dario Amodei would be better off tucked away in a research unit where the only person who has to listen to him tolkien bollocks is his immediate boss.
I think they are manipulating truly grotesque amounts of fear that are in many ways worse than the fear we felt in the COVID pandemic, and I think they are doing it for money and power.
But I also think people have listened and the message has not got through to tech people that they aren't good people and they are fucking weird.
"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.
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?
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.
> 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.
I mean, if it delivers. So far we're only really f**ing ourselves in the face; outside the tech industry everyone else is figuring out how to push back on AI.
What's a dirt farmer?
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.
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.
Do you really think an LLM will replace a surgeon?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That assumes that a value-judgement can be optimally made with intelligence alone.
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.
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
When it comes to what actually gets encoded into reality, it certainly is the most salient factor
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
I don't think this is a problem with economists. It's a problem with incentives and the systems we use to balance those incentives.
You have it totally backwards lol. You can remove the economists or even the word "economy" and nothing would change about actual reality.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it?
Do you not think the ultimate outcome was worth it?
Where is the glut of food and consumer products from AI?
Where was the glut of food and consumer products 4 years into the Industrial Revolution?
The onus is on you to prove the claim that AI is equivalent or better.
But if you're not a troll, from the very fucking start of it there was a boom of products. Like it's practically the definition of it. Are you seriously thinking that they just burned a bunch of coal for fun?
> The onus is on you to prove the claim that AI is equivalent or better.
I never claimed it.
But if we play along, and if I claim AI is equivalent, then once again ... why ask about glut of food and consumer products only a few years in, when that wasn't the case with the Industrial Revolution?
> But if you're not a troll, from the very fucking start of it there was a boom of products.
It began in 1760 in England. Can you compare 1764 with 1760 and itemize this "boom" you speak of?
The changes the Industrial Revolution brought about was slow - it took several decades. Correspondingly, the change in labor took that long as well.
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.
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.
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.
This was absolutely happening with tractors too. Not in a board room or whatever, but people were definitely getting laid off because of tractors.
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.
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
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.
If you think that the freemasons who erected it are running the AI revolution, I think that you aren't serious.
Yeah I don't know a single normal peer who is properly happy with AI, folks are not stupid. There is like 1-2 semi-autistic high performing folks who have tunnel vision, 0 emotional intelligence/empathy and are just happy to have some powerful toys.
Every single expert I asked in our circle had at least serious doubts they will have jobs in 10 years. Doctors, lawyers, assistants, of course IT folks, various other white collar jobs. Of course managers with FIRE button are very anxious and feel like firing should have been done yesterday as long as resulting damage is manageable, quietly hoping they will not be also made redundant because at the end same logic applies to them and they often add little on top of simple yes/no decisions sucked out of a thumb.
How disconnected somebody has to be to think folks would cheer on something that will cause absolute catastrophe for them and their families. Literally everybody groks it. Nobody expects employers to have any empathy when they could be removed.
I view AI research and dev folks in similar vein as nazi bureaucrats - quietly working efficiently behind the desk, making vast machineries work, without a care in the world on impacts of such work on fellow man.
One hopefully positive aspect is - prices are rising, and when SHTF they should be on level which makes them long term sustainable, making obvious how costly such replacement would be. But I think it will still be worth it in high cost societies unless governments add regulatory & financial friction, in similar vein ie chinese cars have high import fees. If that fails, resulting situation will be a catastrophe since I don't believe in some form of UBI promise as sustainable long term situation, people are way too nasty, greedy etc.
Despite the headline, the article is largely AI-positive.
> To that end, here are four pointers for politicians and AI companies looking for policies.
Extrapolating from the past, none of these are particularly likely to happen, however.
Another notable aspect is that, unlike many other societal issues, the backlash against AI is decidedly bipartisan.
people conflate "AI is overhyped" with "AI is useless" and neither is quite right. the backlash is mostly against the hype cycle not the tech itself. give it 2 years
I think AI backlash has less to do with the tech itself and more with its broader impact on society in the current system, if it delivers a quarter of its promises. Those doing the backlashing feel that they are going to lose much more than they are going to gain.
I've spoken to a lot of people outside of software development who feel this way. It's mainly a sense of "what is this for?". It's obvious that the presence of AI means everyone has to use it, but it isn't obvious yet exactly what good it will bring to most people.
Certainly in my own life it's made some things easier. But that just means I move on to the next thing quicker - the treadmill never stops. Does AI improve my life yet? I'm not so certain. It also has huge environmental costs, pushes up energy prices, pushes up computing hardware prices and sucks attention away from other things.
Is it cool? Yes. Is it likely to be society changing. Yes. Does it make anyone's lives better? TBC.
If it delivers a quarter of its promises, we enter the likes of the great depression. But instead of everyone feeling the squeeze, you will have literal breakdowns in society because our media-corps have been using the social lives of the wealthy as a distraction for so long...
"Let them eat cake...", I wonder what the 'taken out of context' trigger will be this time around
AI also has the misfortune of coinciding with a very difficult period for young people, including limited job opportunities: the financial crash, COVID, Brexit, the political polarisation in the western world.
In some sense it's probably acting as a lightning rod for resentment, and that resentment is combined with marketing spiel from the model companies alongside well-placed concern over the impact of AI on employment.
There's another "they took our jobs" group that doesn't fit into "AI is overhyped" or "AI is useless".
They see that AI is capable and fear it.
We software engineers have a different experience with AI than most other fields. We have vast arrays of guardrails in our field, with unit testing, CI/CD, source control being relatively easy since we mostly produce textual artifacts, strong typing, compilers with decades of experience in giving targeted error messages, all sorts of things [1]. When AI takes two steps forward and then does something stupid, we have so many guardrails that our harnesses can easily get the error message, feed it back in, and the AI can pick up the pieces and carry on. We hardly even notice this process.
If you watch an AI and dig into the details of everything it is doing, you can see it repeatedly banging into these guard rails. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. As a human being, I bang into those guard rails all the time too. That's where they came from in the first place, to let humans bang into them. And we've built a lot of them.
However, in a lot of the rest of the world their experience with AI much more resembles that of the more critical voices that post here. A lawyer who uses an AI that makes two correct citations and then an incorrect one has many fewer automated guard rails to work with. It is relatively easy to imagine a system that at least verifies the citation exists (I've heard that's easier said than done due to the system depending on humans to resolve sloppy references but still it's feasible), but the task of deciding if the AI correctly used the citation, either in the abstract sense of it being correct or in the sense of it being the best way to use it to advance the current case, is a vastly harder decision than "ah, that change failed to compile, try again".
Accounting seems like another good example. Yes, it has the obvious guard rail of "do the books balance", but that's the beginning of accounting, not the end. It's difficult to put up guard rails for how the accounting is done from there. An accountant will experience an AI accountant as doing OK sometimes but making really dumb decisions that couldn't be caught by anything other than human review, and I have to imagine that the lack of learning and the way the AI will tend to make the same mistakes over and over must be incredibly aggravating.
I think there's probably more truth to "AI is useless" than we may see. I think a lot more people than we realize have had the experience of using AI a while, putting some trust in it, then having that trust grotesquely violated when it says something stupid in an email or makes boneheaded errors in a spreadsheet. We're maybe just now exiting the portion of the hype cycle where it is simply culturally unacceptable to criticize the AI and entering the part where it is culturally both acceptable and expected, and we software engineers may look on in bafflement at the other fields and their complaints because it's working for us, what's your problem?
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/
This makes me think a bit about my wife - she works in a professional field, but ends up spending a bunch of her time on clerical work because it's nearly impossible to hire and keep good assistants.
When I look at the clerical work from a software engineer's point of view, I find it nuts how few guardrails there are - clerical workers would have a far easier time producing work with a low error rate if there were some guardrails put up, but that's just not an investment/culture that the field seems to be interested in.
The two related points around AI are that 1) guardrails would make the clerical work relatively easier for AI and 2) because assistants are so error-prone anyway, the bar for AI isn't all that high.
In a lot of systems the kind of rigid guardrails we have in computers are counterproductive. It descends into a epicyclical, fractal mess of special-cased exceptions, none of which faithfully models the actual system [EDIT: an example which illustrates both this problem and how following through through can--if successful!--yield interesting results is in the preface to The Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/sicm-html/bo...].
Some problems that seem straightforward at first blush might in fact be AGI-complete--that is they require actual judgment and reasoning to solve. I'm not making the specific claim that the clerical work you're describing is one of those, but it could take a large amount of data modeling work to determine whether it is.
This is what makes finding productive AI (EDIT: I mean ML, AI == AGI and we don't have that) applications so challenging. It's why my money is firmly not on a big AI revolution anytime soon, despite the demonstrated capability of language models.
The proper backlash should be not about its capability level but how it's being used. AI is being adopted to deploy mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, and to make decisions that affect people's lives without being evaluated by a human first. Those seem worthy of lashing back against.
I think a lot of it is actually the tech for a lot of reasons:
0. No one wants a datacenter in their backyard or hooked up to the grid while the electricity burden is carried by households. People are afraid of losing their property values and being unable to move away if a DC is built nearby - effectively being trapped there. People in Memphis are breathing in gas fumes from the XAI datacenter there. There are concerns about corrosion byproducts making its way into the aquifers from DC waste water. If DC construction takes the cheap option no sound insulation is installed and people can’t sleep and some even lose their hearing: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
People are pissed that towns and cities are bypassing public approval to placate corporate builders.
1. People have been told to fear for their jobs
2. Many people believe labs have stolen vast amounts of intellectual property
3. Engineers are being pressured to use AI and told they “aren’t prompting right” if/when it doesn’t work for their use case
I can go on. But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.
> But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.
I think it exacerbates the points you make. "You mean, you want to take all the IP, immediately force the tech on us, maybe make my job redundant, and you want billions in funding for it!?"
This is exactly it.
AI companies are becoming a catch-all / symbolic lightning rod for "the ruling class".
What percentage of people do you think are affected by AI datacenters?
That argument applies better to blast furnaces than to data centers, but I don't see people complaining about steel. Data centers just don't take up much space or power in the scope of industrial manufacturing.
Your other arguments are legitimate, but "it's a waste of electricity" and "data centers make some significant difference to a nontrivial number of people" are not the same propositions.
I live in rural Wyoming and it's a huge deal here, if these projects go through many people are affected.
Some of these data centers are multiple orders of magnitude bigger than a blast furnace.
I think people are pissed that they're subsidizing the R+D cost of their own unemployment.
I don't think this article is about the backlash among software engineers, but rather society at large. What's going on among software engineers is interesting, but I think it's a different thing, not a microcosm of the mainstream backlash.
Ok thanks for the nitpick bud. It’s the last item in a priority first list but go off dude
This is being downvoted but it’s true and it’s obvious. Do people really think the backlash is against stock valuation? Thats insane and shows no theory of mind lol.
Agreed. We've been working on or with AI for 70 years. What's new is that the billionaires recently started drooling over it.
This is often repeated but not true. Ed Zitron conflates the two all the time.
OK but I already gave it 2yrs. How many 2yr grace periods do they get before it becomes clear they're simply lying?
It really doesn't help to have stuff like this in print:
> a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech.
They just take these claims completely uncritically and move on. Where is the productivity increase? Where are the cured diseases? Where are the improvements in education and green tech? So far, it's all a big fat zero. Maybe in 2yrs some of this will actually be true? Is that the hope?
This is scammer shit. If any of this was true you wouldn't have to ask for extra time.
EDIT: The fact we're all calling this "AI" is part of the problem. It's not AI yet, it's still ML. The Overton red-shift comes for us all in the end.
AI is already too useful to discard, we could automate 90% bureaucracy and government jobs and no one would feel the difference. But of course fear/angst/rage sells.
People absolutely would feel the difference if AI models started making 90% of the decisions.
You were just denied an application because some LLM decided you fit a certain statistical pattern. Where did the LLM go wrong? What were the steps taken to make that decision? Who can you appeal to? Nobody. AI bureaucracy would just keep chugging along, making decisions based on prejudices and patterns it finds but doesn't feel.
Rainer Mühlhoff makes some compelling arguments in trying to warn people of the dangers of an AI bureaucracy/state.
What do you think the government is like today? At least with LLMs you'd get your incorrect answer quickly and cheaply.
Human incompetence, or human-written algorithmic incompetence in code can still be identified, appealed to, and dealt with.
With LLMs you get incompetence cut off from human embodiment and any chance of empathy, baked into opaque black-boxes, and automated and scaled.
We should be arriving to build things that are correct, not saying "stuff sucks already, let's make more stuff that sucks."
There are theoretically appeals but for the most part they're illusionary. The original decision is given a lot of deference and the appeal is almost always denied. Plus it's gated beyond a lot of time and money. In adversarial proceedings that's a weapon for one side or the other.
I'm starting to think that when non-experts believe a job will be easy to automate with AI, it usually has hidden elements which they don't understand and which make automating it almost impossible.
Meanwhile, there are all these intellectual jobs which are hard for humans to do, so we assume they're just hard in general. Look closer, though, and many don't involve human social interaction, only require a small amount of good taste, and don't have any physical component.
"...and no one would feel the difference" does speak to the inadequcy of bureaucracy and government execution. Maybe we wouldn't notice the difference with our interactions with bureaucracy and government, but fairly certain we'd notice the jobs market being flooded with Golgafrincham's cast-offs.
> "...and no one would feel the difference" does speak to the inadequcy of bureaucracy and government execution.
Well, the attempt to claim that speaks to something, but the claim doesn't really, because it's not true.
Let's not even try to get people to think about people who are not them, people who are in need, people with disabled children, whatever. I don't know about the US because it has very few spaces where people actually live together like humans would, but for the majority of the world, at least in major cities: nevermind healthcare or pensions and whatnot, just consider garbage disposal, and maintenance of plumbing and sewer system, the electric grid, and lots of other "small" things like that. The shit we take for granted and corporations moan about because it cuts into their profits and reduces the costs they can externalize slightly. Regulations that say they can't just put saw dust and some heroin in food, that type of thing. That came to be because that's the type of shit they just could not stop doing.
If you could quicksave and experience that just for yourself, without fucking life up really badly for everyone else and for decades, you totally should. I don't think most people who talk this stuff from myopic bubbles would last even a week. Because they don't think so well, we know this from the arguments, and are not likeable, we know this from how they don't consider other people. So to me that's absolute bottom of the food chain energy talking about the Ark B. Pure, pristine, unadulterated projection.
The reason for the existence of bloated bureaucracy is political will not the technical inability to automate processes before the advent of the current wave of AI.
Still haven't seen anything we weren't able to do before. Faster maybe, but still rehashing everything humanity has achieved.
The US government employees around 3m people, I'm pretty sure 2.7m people losing their jobs would feel the difference.
> we could automate 90% bureaucracy and government jobs and no one would feel the difference.
This is really naïve in the long run, since you ultimately cannot solve social problems with technical solutions.
It's always techies that fail to realize the second / third and forth order of events when this level of disruption is measured by the number of mass layoffs you can do in each quarter.
Why would you start with literally the only thing keeping you alive?
Automate corporate bullshit. Keep your hands off the government. They are literally the only ones incentivized to not use you as toilet paper.
AI is so useful they have to subsidize it with trillions of dollars while having no near term profit. AI is so useful that you have to threaten workers in order for them to use the tools.
I'm sorry but all of this is to be determined but if the present is any indicator LLMs tend to make things distinctly worse, not better. Any areas of "potential" still rely on massive amounts of manual human labor, hardly a trillion dollar industry.
"Useful" in the sense of cheap parlor tricks, useful in the real sense that it enables mass surveillance on the cheap; but actually useless for the material lives of people around the world.
I'm sure it's great if you're a rich tech bro.
Conflating useful and profitable is a strawman you've created yourself. There are plenty of issues with AI but that's a weird hill to stand on.
Whereas randomly ranting against "bureaucracy", in light of DOGE and Epstein emails (elite = morons) and what Thiel and the Palantir CEO are on about, is totally normal, isn't projection at all, and talking about "rage" isn't a strawman either. No, that requires a serious rebuttal, being a serious argument and all.
Indeed it is so self evidently useful that you have to discover the correct way to use it.
I made one language learning app with a top end LLM backend and at first I thought it was magic. But as I and other people used it more I realized:
- This thing is very consistently lying and misleading people. Do I want to introduce more deception and confusion into the world?
- people don't actually want to use this.
- I don't actually want to use this.
- Something about this feels wrong.
I dropped it. I have another couple of big language learning projects made with 100% human blood sweat and tears, long projects over many years. Zero LLMs or voice models used for anything. Those continue to grow and are loved, and I feel great about them.
Railroads had enormous subsidies, too. This is how infrastructure is built, even in "capitalist" economies because it operates at the level of national security. Even to this day, passenger rail is not profitable, although freight is very profitable. So it wouldn't be surprising if "passenger" AI remains unprofitable, while "freight" AI becomes very profitable.
Pretty bold statement to say it's useless for most people outside of tech. Almost every "normal" person I know including my in-laws are using it regularly. It's becoming the go-to for asking questions rather than Google, Bing, etc.
And the privacy battle was lost 25 years ago. People don't really care if corporations know about their search history (Google), or their private lives (Facebook). You're beating a dead horse there.
I like your analogy on railroads because it leads us to the point that these tech companies should honestly be nationalized at this point as they are a danger to the country writ large.
Sadly, I think this is true, and it's starting to seem like my own personal political imperative is to remind people that AI can be insanely personally empowering.
Many people around me are just missing the boat, or don't care, but many are also able to finally accomplish all kinds of things they've been barred from in the past.
LLMs are best seen, I think, as an imagination amplifier. If you're in the mindset of finding ways to improve society and help other people, there is no shortage of opportunity, and increasingly, capability.
This could be true, but I think it amounts to wishful thinking. The human empowerment phase of AI is transitory and brief. Once you get into RSI and AGI the human is increasingly left out and disenfranchised. The multiplier of your personal effectiveness directly proportional to how much the AI is doing relative to you. Being 2x more effective is great - AI does half the work. 5x, 10x, 100x? When the AI does 99% of the work you maybe start to worry - the bottleneck to 'your' productivity is now you and you are going up against much faster and more powerful entities than yourself. This mindset is rooted in a short term gain that risks a long term loss.
Yes, I agree, but the relevant debate isn't "pro vs anti-AI." That's a fight only one side can win.
The relevant debate is: "human empowerment vs disempowerment".
It's still a long-shot, but at least there's a specific target that a majority may be able to agree on.
(Not saying you were specifically saying either.)
I think his point is that “human empowerment vs disempowerment”, in the long term, is itself a fight that only one side can win.
This is the exact same sentiment I felt at the dawn of the Internet. I felt it was going to empower individuals, tear down borders and barriers, and bring humanity together.
Instead we ended up with an ad fueled dopamine/outrage slot machine.
We're seeing the same thing happen with AI on a condensed timeframe. Yes, its useful. Yes, it lowers barriers and amplifies what individuals can do, just like the early internet did.
However, the same pattern will repeat itself because the exact same forces that bent the arc of the internet towards its current state haven't gone anywhere; if anything they've just become stronger.
> The backlash is only just getting started, because the technology is only just getting started, too. Britain’s flimsy prime-minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, has barely said a word about AI. Even Americans still rank it 29th out of 39 election issues. [..] That is bound to change—and battles over data centres offer a hint of the struggles to come.
Or we'll see through the bullshit (which seems to be happening already) and this will fizzle out.
I have a great face-saving exit plan for AI companies: follow anthropic's lead and pretend you're saving the world by not releasing anything to the public anymore. Then just quietly back away, go bankrupt and let us all eventually forget.
I have an anecdote I'm dying to share and will be happy to have it buried here!
I was talking to an academic friend of mine who works in a CS theory group in a top university. He told me now only 2 out of 10 members of the group work on theory anymore, the rest are doing applied/industry projects. The ratio used to inverted, but now the theory people are worried AI will replace them, so they look for ways out.
The problem is that a majority of the world sustain their living by selling their labour as a commodity, while a small minority control the economy via ownership of capital.
For the owning class of people most of us are the same thing as a bucket of paint, a car or any another commodity.
It doesn't have to be this way, but it is.
Outside of the "this will take your job" messaging, there is simply fatigue around just seeing it _everywhere_. The poor horse has been completely emulsified.
the most stupid article i've read in the economist
TFA gave me brain freeze.
> Third, measure everything. The common view that AI is already leading to lay-offs and raising electricity bills is probably wrong. But without better statistics it is hard to be sure.
Why are they syndicating high school economics papers on AI?
Remember the debate about how nuclear was stopped in the 70s because of NIMBYism? We are now wondering "how could people then be so stupid and shortsighted?". Well, there you go, here's history repeating before our eyes.
Not at all. The risks and rewards of nuclear power were extremely well know back then, and any objective analysis showed that we should build more of it.
AI is completely different. The risks are not well understood, but are plausibly catastrophic along multiple dimensions. The potential upside is also not well understood.
I remember the optimism of the early internet, when it seemed like it was going to be this incredibly free and liberating realm for everyone to learn and express themselves freely. But now nearly all of that has been reduced or destroyed by the greed of powerful people. The exact same people who are set to control super powerful AI.
Do you really think someone like Elon, who gleefully destroys lives for fun, is going to willingly cede immense amounts of power just to improve the lives of a bunch of normies he'll never meet?! That completely flies in the face of how he and his contemporaries have acted their entire lives, so count me as a little skeptical.
Not really. Nuclear power (in both the weapon and energy sense) is and always was relatively easy to manage compared to AI.
If the deployment of nuclear energy required the distribution of radioactive material to every smartphone in America and for unstable isotopes to be plugged into the core operating infrastructure of every industry, then they'd be a lot closer to analogous.
Of course. Those people back then were stupid and irrational and couldn't see they were wrong.
Today we are much more enlightened and smart, and our convoluted arguments, that sound very smart and somehow reach the same conclusion that the technology must be stopped, are totally right. We're not opposed to AI due to irrational fear and NIMBYism, like those simpletons before.
Excellent work responding to the argument put in front of you!
You are so rational!
We're not much better than our ancestors. We'd like to think we are, because we're much more intelligent and have access to more information.
But we really aren't. We're still driven by irrational sentiments and fears. We hate AI because it's new and feels icky, and will bring change and we don't like change. We would prefer the 2020s to be frozen in time forever and ever (although we're more than happy to benefit from progress that happened before our time, which upended the lives of other people long dead).
So that's it, there's no argument. The only argument is "I hate AI because fuck it", which is much more sincere. I don't need to hear about water or electricity or cognitive decline or any other made up stuff that sounds intellectual.
I don't hate AI lol. Maybe you should stop making arguments up in your head and, again, address the argument put in front of you.
It's incredibly lazy to group technologies by "were people afraid of this? Yes/No"
You can actually look a bit more closely at the specific technologies being discussed and what we know (now) and knew (then) about them.
Obviously nuclear energy and AI have at least as many differences as they have similarities.
If I'm opposed to drone-based atmospheric deployment of aerosolized anthrax, does that make this technology basically the same as nuclear energy, and therefore my concerns are stupid? Or are there relevant features of the technologies themselves that perhaps matter more than features of people's responses to those technologies?
> I don't need to hear about water or electricity or cognitive decline or any other made up stuff that sounds intellectual.
Again, you're making arguments up in your own head. I didn't talk about any of these things. But now that you mention cognitive decline...
I have a feeling that comparing a safe, sustainable energy source to large language models is disingenuous. If you support LLMs and the field, you can just state it outright, without insincere comparisons.
Obviously there are components of nuclear energy that are not intrinsically safe, which is why people freaked out about it
If you oppose LLMs and the field because of pure irrational instinct, like those people in the past, you can just state it outright, no need for complicated arguments.
Yeah, that's also fine. However I am personally willing to side with the group which's arguments for the cause are environmental and societal impact over the one which's rebuttal to that is the fact we were wrong once 40 years ago. That's just me though.
We weren't wrong just once, 40 years ago. That's just one example, but the Luddites and doomers were wrong every time something new was invented.
Check this out: https://x.com/PessimistsArc
This train of thought is hilariously rife with selection bias.
There is an infinitely long list of technologies that "Luddites and doomers" tried to block and were thankfully successful in doing so.
CFCs and ozone.
Leaded gasoline.
Thalidomide.
Offensive bioweapons.
I'm not claiming Luddites and doomers are always or usually right (they're often wrong), but your claim they were wrong every time is just total epistemological failure on your part.
Oh, sorry. 99% of the time.
Just like seatbelts are categorically stupid and can be ignored because 99% of the time they lock, you're not actually in a collision.
Luddites, the group of people which famously were concerned about societal impact of a piece of technology? Right.
You made a strawman afraid of fire
How much clown makeup do you guys put in your coffee?
If the labs weren't so aggressive with building datacenters in people's backyards, this could've been a different story. People don't like it when pipelines are built in their backyard either.
Are they built in people’s backyards? There’s a famous case in Northern Virginia that has admitted they messed up zoning which gets cited in every story to make it look like they’re all built in people’s backyards, but the vast majority of them are in industrial zones.
For a lot of folks (including near where I live), "building in my small city" is the same as "backyard". The narrative is "Use up a lot of land, pay almost no taxes, and employ almost no people."
Don't forget "drive up utility prices" and barring that, "pollute the air with gas generators".
From TFA:
>The buildings summon a vitriol well beyond conventional nimbyism. More Americans say they would be happy with a nuclear reactor next door than a data centre. Even plans to build one in the Utah desert have met with passionate opposition.
BTW, the anti-data center movement predates LLMs by a margin. Near where I live the locals were upset before COVID - they employ very few people, use a lot of land, and pay little to no taxes.
It's just that they're building them at such a large scale now that you see more and more people protesting them.
"AI promises to change the world for the better" - so far it's clear the world will be better for a few people. A promise that it will be better for everyone reads like "trust me, bro."
"Blockers need to be shown that their local area will benefit if they get out of the way." Benefit how? Will this be like when your city convinces you it's in everyone's interest to subsidize the latest billionaire-owned sports stadium?
"If America succumbs [to popular rage], it could cede the global ai frontier" ah here we go. The next generation of Too Big To Fail.
The problem is not the technology but the size and dominance of the tech sector. Current AI is a promising new technology that can do a lot great stuff, just like the internet and smartphones. But in the 90s the tech sector was tiny, and even in the late 2000s the current behemoths were like 20x smaller than they are today.
Today the tech companies dominate people's lives and attention, everything people do goes through a few companies in one way or another. The google of 2007 was a plucky underdog who promised to Do No Evil. Today they are so huge, the size itself is scary. Instead of being happy you got 2GB free email, you're slightly anxious about accidentally getting flagged by some automated recourse-less system that'll lock you out of your data and disrupt your life significantly. AI startups don't offer a respite, they small but even more scammy and slight-of-hand-y. AI industry marketing is best summed up as "You're a worthless piece of shit NPC and we'll take your job, your personal data and your attention. Buy our shit"
That is to say, people probably understand (on vibe level mostly) that this great new tech will be leveraged to the max by bad rich people to make their lives worse. Nothing innate about the tech dictates this, but it is the way things are turning out. I expect more backlash in the future.
I mean… sure! You’ve got propaganda on both sides whipping people into a frenzy. Are we pretending today that isn’t happening??
can someone paste the not-paywalled link please
The best scenario for AI companies is that they replace the human workforce with their bots and make all the money. It’s a sick, amplified version of outsourced labor.
I’ve been rereading Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of The United States’ and the US has been doing this since day zero. Build the economy on indentured servitude. Replace that with slavery. Flood cities with freed slaves when wages get too high. Flood the country with illegals for the same reason. Offshore the work to poor countries. Automate as much as possible. Now AI.
Kudos to the AI leaders for the carefully manicured publicity, claiming this will make everyone free etc., but people see right through it. It’s the never-ending class war between a tiny minority of ultra-wealthy scumbags vs. everyday people one bad day away from being homeless.
Socialism will spread across the US and the battles will continue.
Frankly, most AI is pretty meh, really only impressing AI enthusiasts, with their near religious fervor. There's a big delta there between power users and everyone else. It writes bad emails, messy code, incorrect metrics, dubious slide decks, ugly graphics... the consumer rejection of AI is only growing. At the same time, the product itself is sold wildly below cost. So it needs to be increase in price at the same time users are rejecting it. This is only ending with a huge market correction.
How do you know it's being served at wildly below cost? AFAIK API pricing across the board is actually higher than what inference would cost? Yes there are subscription plans that subsidise tokens but they exist primarily to hook people in, so as to encourage their workplace to adopt it, whereby they then have to pay for an enterprise plan with zero subsidies like the subscription plans have. Training is very expensive, but you only do that once.
I predict costs will fall.
That’s roughly it.
I don’t really have a use for it myself that I can’t solve some other way cheaper or easier without the damage and uncertainty it does.
I’m not really that impressed.
It seems by definition "below par" of whatever human activity it's training on. How can we achieve greater and greater heights of intelligence if we're just creeping closer and closer to a sub-par copy of human creative activity.
It seems by definition "below par" of whatever human activity it's training on
How many sub-par mathematicians could solve the unit distance conjecture?
Weird thing I've encountered. I've seen all the stuff you say, but not all at the same time.
The stuff I'm getting from ChatGPT this week has been absolutely garbage. Back in the very early days you might prompt 5 times and see if it was consistent with itself in the conclusion, even if not how it got there; this week it's not even been that. But back in those days the UI was also fast, today it lags massively on relatively short chat sessions.
Ugly, dubious, incorrect, it definitely feels like a regression. And its love of emoji hasn't gone away.
Claude no longer works for me on Safari, only Chrome. No lag at least, but the free message allowance has shrunk a lot.
I'm not too fussed about messy code, given the humans I've worked with, but that's about it.
Even the ChatGPT image model is… for all the improvements in the model itself, the UX isn't good enough to make up for what the model still can't do. In many cases I actively prefer running Stable Diffusion locally because that's easier to fix the last 5% than having to deal with a completely different 5% wrong each time.
But yeah, correction very possible. Was thinking so just on the basis of the % of US electrical power being called for: that can't possibly be sustainable for the broader economy.
I never understood people like you.
Factually that's just not true. Five years ago current llms would have seen like magic to even data scientists working on them and realistically their impact has been felt by many. Just taking jobs into account, imagine an average worker in an average industry; how do you think something like Fable compares? Worse? By how much?
Like even many years ago we had alphafold that had a non negligible impact on biology, who knows what's gonna happen when this technology grows up.
Sorry but it's painfully true. I now spending time daily like the "reverse-centaur" fixing things that AI has hallucinated, conflated, or just done wrong. It's miserable work. The copy/pasta part is easy.
My point is you'd be doing the same if you wrote the code or an average person did it. If you spend time for the prep work AI is solid in execution.
I'm not an AI advocate by any means, but its usefulness is not all or nothing. I use it at work a lot - scanning our documentation + data warehouse + version control system all at once saves me a lot of time. I can let it build boiler plate code (via skills) and the actual code implementation as a template/POC for me to then edit, again saving a lot of time.
Outside of my work - AI video has reached a point where creative artists are generating engaging, realistic content that is genuinely entertaining. IMO the common thread is that in the right hands it can produce amazing things. For anyone without the expertise, it defaults to slop.
This applies to simplistic use of AI, or "one-shotting", the best are using it as raw material, not final product.
Check out the work of Zack London (AKA Gossip Goblin) on YouTube. It's objectively good - I don't even care what your opinion is.
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