Rising Star
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Was having this discussion with my husband just last night.
My prediction was mass layoffs will result in a large portion of the population on benefits. Those whose jobs are niche enough to keep working will pay more taxes. High unemployment and high taxes on those working to fund those on benefits. Corporations will cut costs but sharp reduction in discretionary income for people to buy things.
What is the end game here? Demand for processing power will increase costs of deploying AI - eventually making human labour just cheaper again.
Very curious to hear what other people think
Nah, AC1, if anything, today's models are undertrained. There's still significant head room, as evidenced by the SOTA model developers putting out new models every couple months now just to keep up with all the Chinese start-ups pumping out new open weight models, each with measurable improvements in benchmarks across the board.
GPT-4o is already dwarfed by models a tenth its size and can barely hold its own against ones with 1/100th the number of parameters. Changes in training reward models since last summer have also started to significantly cut into hallucinations rates as well.
If you study economics, increased productivity has always been the driver of increasing real wages. It seems counter-intuitive, but without productivity growth you can’t have wage growth without commensurate inflation.
They worried about massive job losses when horseless carriages put the blacksmiths out of business. They worried about massive job losses when the computer put secretaries out of business. The economy always grows and expands and creates new jobs and opportunities when productivity increases.
M3 nailed it. A "study of economics" does not teach us that workers capture the value of increased productivity. Worker compensation is a result of supply and demand. Surplus value is captured by owners.
I still think that AI will empower more than it replaces. In the near term, I think there'll be a lot of churn and people will "feel" like the job market is worse than the numbers indicate. But over time, we'll find the limits of the technology and figure out where skilled humans add the most value and the market will rebalance.
That or we see a complete labor revolution with either universal basic income or massive strikes 🤷♂️
We revolt at dawn.
I rode into the sunset without yall
The flow: AI (takes white collar jobs) > Robotics expansion (takes blue collar jobs) > social programs kick in and UBI or revolution (pick one or both)
Keep in mind…Society starts unraveling at 12% unemployment; estimates for AI alone range 30-60% (great depression was 35%). For countries that don’t have social policies in place and collective mindset (ie US), it’s going to be a tough show.
Will there be 100% unemployment? Likely not, but even a conservative 30% has massive implications. For everyone saying “see every other transformation “, this one is different because it hits the aspirational white collar jobs and accelerates the loss of blue collar jobs without many replacement opportunities.
Chief
The billionaires should have a think on this
See: every tech revolution in human history.
Hearing this 2022 hot take is a lot like hearing people discuss Bitcoin as the wave of the future
We need to ask the tech overlords and see what their plan is…oh, wait they don’t care, they just want to ensure they are the ruling class and we are the wage labor because we are too stupid to make decisions for ourselves
Chief
I see you have been listening to the “All In” podcast
I think we will find an equilibrium at some point for some of these reasons. In addition, people are having less children so we are probably going to hit a state of declining population and AI will help make up for that declining population
Rising Star
Some sound reasoning. We will see a significantly lower world population by 2050. That’s not an unsubstantiated claim. Japan was one of the first countries to experience serious population decline. Have you read about what that means in Japan today??
I worry about the adjustment though because AI in two years is going to eliminate a lot of white collar and admin jobs. It can’t replace things like home repairs or things that can’t be made repetitive, but that leaves a lot that can’t be. Worries me in a serious way.
Same scenario as when electricity and the gas engine replaced manual labor.
AI leads to higher productivity in a world where Asia and Europe will have a massive drop in 18-55 population. So its a big win, potentially like steam engines or electricity.
If that cost outweighs the impact investments will stop. But from what im seeing on the power end massive investments are being made to meet those needs.
Basically we revert back to a modern version of feudalism
An interesting article:
https://fortune.com/article/what-are-the-jobs-most-exposed-to-ai-microsoft-research/