Yes. It removes political power. As a thought experiment, what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?
What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?
They start waving flags around, voting for someone who will promise to "make things great again" all the while languishing in poverty and dying of fentanyl overdoses
The majority of anti-tech sentiment in America has been coming out of left-leaning circles for the last five years. Go look at a video of the people protesting data centers in your nearest metropole; I guarantee you they look nothing like the caricature you have in your head.
The "Tea Party" was an astroturf operation organized by GOP operatives and funded by the Koch brothers and some other billionaire donors. Its appearance of popular support was substantially artificial and heavily amplified by supportive GOP-aligned media.
“what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?”
This is an interesting question and I’d love to come to a good answer that works for all, but can we also accept that we went from a world that had people manually light lamps around the city like 150 [1] years ago to the full electric lights. Do we then stop that progress now and keep people manually collecting garbage when a replacement tech is around the corner?
[1] mm more like 120 years. The last lamplighters strikes was close to 1907 in NYC
If you “socialized” Edison’s electricity and gave the control to the lamplighters, we’d all be living under gas lamps now. There is zero reason for the lamplighters to negotiate any progress whatsoever.
Perhaps the real answer is people’s buying power. If people can’t withhold their work, they could withhold their spending, ie boycott misbehaving entities.
>> Yes. It removes political power. As a thought experiment, what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?
>> What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?
> Perhaps the real answer is people’s buying power. If people can’t withhold their work, they could withhold their spending, ie boycott misbehaving entities.
But if they don't have work, they won't have buying power to withhold. Post AI-displacement, the economy will reorient around serving the people who still have buying power (the oligarchs and their hangers-on).
Expect demand for food to plummet and demand for dick-waving pyramids and rocket cars to skyrocket.
I came to this conclusion too and felt rather defeated, existential crisis, etc. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if we had a country of 250 million unemployed angry folks (many of them armed), I'm not so sure it'd be the wealthy in control.
> But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if we had a country of 250 million unemployed angry folks (many of them armed), I'm not so sure it'd be the wealthy in control.
It depends on how hard they'll fight, but technology just doesn't seem like it's a force for good anymore. I could imagine that, in the face of a revolt against automation, some fraction of the oligarchs will just establish a Ukraine-war like AI-drone kill-zone to protect their assets. If they do that, they'd probably win.
But it probably wouldn't get to that point, because, given the online nature of culture, AI-powered surveillance and AI-powered social interference could very likely thwart any revolt before it starts.
No it doesn't. People can still protest, block roads, boycott etc... If they get UBI/UHI, they will have more time to engage politically too (in a productive way).
You're still undershooting just how grim the optimal outcome of our system is. It's not going to be about 'refusal', like taking a bargain and making choices. If total automation is achieved, huge swaths of people will be placed into that bracket immediately, based largely on their luck, the country they live in and their wealth. An automated world doesn't need this many people to run itself, so only a chosen few will make it through. The rest will eventually be slowly destroyed in the most cruel ways possible. People will keep chanting "Adapt or die" until it turns into simply "Die".
> I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment
I say this who is voluntarily returning to university to pursue a different profession after working 10 years as a software engineer. This isn't going to work for 95% of people, people who have dependents children and partners, mortgages.
I distinctly did not get the impression that GP is happy about or approving of what he’s suggesting may be “economically rational.” It reads more as foreboding to me.
We only need look at what the computer did to many (60%) non-college educated people who have difficultly finding meaningful work which can provide for a family.
Daron Acemoglu is talking about this and Building Pro-Worker AI. His 2024 Nobel Prize lecture is quite good (as are his fellow laureates that year)
It's not the fault of computers, but they changed the fabric. It was a select few of our fellow humans, who also did deregulation, financialization, and globalization. They all started at the same time and have concentrated wealth and power the last 4-5 decades.
Computers are still a significant factor because most new tasks created were cognitive and needed university education. Or another way, the automation that computers brought eliminated jobs in labor, but we did not create new jobs for those people. The three others were instrumental in that side of the equation.
Well, we did create new jobs for them technically. It’s just that the jobs are terrible. Those disrupted in the past 20 years have been given gig-economy BS to replace their jobs.
The jobs created for the factory workers and the former professional retail workers, in the 90s, were in big-box stores.
Guilty... but also, I think about article up/downvotes an order of magnitude less than I click the links. I wonder what fraction of users do voting without clicking links.
Actually, you can't unless you meet a karma threshold. I have been on this site for 6 years and I still haven't reached it because my opinions are too controversial (apparently).
Not controversial. Just not aligned with the owners of HN.
The comments you upvote/downvote are used to calculate your "opinion similarity" to the owners. Then your upvote/downvotes are modulated by that similarity. It's a way of using other humans to amplify the opinions of the owners -- they don't have time to read all the comments, so instead they filter out those who think the same way they do and let them do it.
Of course. This has been proven again and again on the economic level. People have to let go of old skills and learn new ones to survive.
For AI though, there is a mental angle which is being discussed now (brain gyms etc.) which was an early concern of mine. When we make something, there is an tangible value created for the buyer/consumer but there is also a more subtle positive effect the on the builder/maker. e.g. even if it's it's cheaper, faster, (and in an imaginary worlds), more healthy to buy packaged food, sitting down and making it subtly changes the chef who makes the food. Sort of the motivation for a grandmother baking a cake for her grandkids.
I've been able to realise many of my abandoned projects due to AI. I can spin up a few agents and have them build things completely without intervention more or less. Many of these are programs I use daily. This is definitely huge. However, I remember the kick of struggling with problems during projects which was where most, if not all, the learning happened. All that experience is what makes me able to command and control these agents properly. It had an effect on me beyond the outcome (most of the projects are dead/abandoned anyway). Another example - I remember an old company called "Bond" which had a robot to create stationery using a calligraphic hand. Contrast that to the almost spiritual effect doing calligraphy has on a master penman. Using automation to create fine calligraphy gets you the former but the individual and society loses the latter. It's not immediately clear to me what the end result will be but I do feel that a lot is being lost.
I like that calligraphy example, I am afraid that's how a field would stagnate: the tools become advanced, but now with less and less people wanting to approach and struggle with learning the field, the human intuition, the community effort, and the mastery to push past the bleeding edge withers.
While I agree that new skills must be learnt to survive, what exactly are these new skills in the AI-age?
I see this line everywhere - whenever someone's mourning their loss of a career, there's responses telling the person to "man up" (for lack of a better phrase) and learn new skills. Nobody says what these "new skills" are?
it's unknown, because those skills and work associated with them are not yet created.
Just like how being a live streamer (or youtuber) is not a known skill until the advent of streaming platforms and their associated economies. If you asked on the internet in 1995 what kids would have done for a job in 2025, none of them would've said streamer.
Understood. Then how does one brace for the upcoming slaughter? People knew that getting into software would become the hot new thing - almost guaranteeing a source of income. Hence the "push" for everyone to get into "coding", at least in my country (India) and from what I've heard on the internet - the US too.
I don't have a clear answer myself. But there are multiple dimensions to this.
First is from an employment, livelihood perspective. I don't know the "right" answer but like with most things, it's easy to see the wrong ones - Bury your head in the sand and declare that this is just a passing phase, insist on going deeper into curmudgeon territory waxing nostalgic about the "Golden Era" of programming that's over etc. The opposites (trying out the new tools that are being released, reading up on things happening and developing a mental model of how things are moving etc.) seem to be sensible things to do.
Second, from a personal perspective. Here too, inversion is useful. Stopping to think is a bad idea. Like all our faculties, you lose what you don't use. So, actively learning things that are hard (a new "natural" language, a new phsyical skill that you wanted to) will help keep you sharp. Recreational programming is fine I guess and you can use AI to give you that you extra push when you're mired in an area that you don't care for and which you know how to do but are avoiding because of the tedium.
When the demand for work comes, it's quite clear to me that someone who's done what they can and has a some insight on what's going on has an advantage over the person who hasn't. Whether that translates into economical opportunities is beyond us to say but it's beyond our control as well so there's no point in worrying about it.
Ya fear of the unknown is not even anything uncommon for sure.
Honestly ive only read "the power of now",
Which I later learned was very mainstream popular, so I probably would have prejudged it had I knew.
While not really original ideas he packages the concepts into very good words, so it made something click, for me at least, where other books hadn't.
They’re unknown because they don’t exist. There will simply be skills that haven’t yet been automated, but nothing will remain out of reach. The idea of having a career in a single field is probably dead, unless that field is minimum wage laborer.
Yes. It removes political power. As a thought experiment, what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?
What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?
They start waving flags around, voting for someone who will promise to "make things great again" all the while languishing in poverty and dying of fentanyl overdoses
The majority of anti-tech sentiment in America has been coming out of left-leaning circles for the last five years. Go look at a video of the people protesting data centers in your nearest metropole; I guarantee you they look nothing like the caricature you have in your head.
The left tea party and left version of Trump hasn't arrived yet, but it's coming.
The "Tea Party" was an astroturf operation organized by GOP operatives and funded by the Koch brothers and some other billionaire donors. Its appearance of popular support was substantially artificial and heavily amplified by supportive GOP-aligned media.
What kind of "left" version are you imagining?
> What kind of "left" version are you imagining?
The Open Society Foundation.
You mean antifa?
“what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?”
This is an interesting question and I’d love to come to a good answer that works for all, but can we also accept that we went from a world that had people manually light lamps around the city like 150 [1] years ago to the full electric lights. Do we then stop that progress now and keep people manually collecting garbage when a replacement tech is around the corner?
[1] mm more like 120 years. The last lamplighters strikes was close to 1907 in NYC
> Do we then stop that progress now and keep people manually collecting garbage when a replacement tech is around the corner?
No we take the tech and socialize its control
That’s the same thing as stopping it.
If you “socialized” Edison’s electricity and gave the control to the lamplighters, we’d all be living under gas lamps now. There is zero reason for the lamplighters to negotiate any progress whatsoever.
> There is zero reason for the lamplighters to negotiate any progress whatsoever.
Not all change is progress. Just because you can mass-remove populations of people from the economy does not mean that doing so is "progress".
Perhaps the real answer is people’s buying power. If people can’t withhold their work, they could withhold their spending, ie boycott misbehaving entities.
>> Yes. It removes political power. As a thought experiment, what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?
>> What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?
> Perhaps the real answer is people’s buying power. If people can’t withhold their work, they could withhold their spending, ie boycott misbehaving entities.
But if they don't have work, they won't have buying power to withhold. Post AI-displacement, the economy will reorient around serving the people who still have buying power (the oligarchs and their hangers-on).
Expect demand for food to plummet and demand for dick-waving pyramids and rocket cars to skyrocket.
I came to this conclusion too and felt rather defeated, existential crisis, etc. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if we had a country of 250 million unemployed angry folks (many of them armed), I'm not so sure it'd be the wealthy in control.
> But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if we had a country of 250 million unemployed angry folks (many of them armed), I'm not so sure it'd be the wealthy in control.
It depends on how hard they'll fight, but technology just doesn't seem like it's a force for good anymore. I could imagine that, in the face of a revolt against automation, some fraction of the oligarchs will just establish a Ukraine-war like AI-drone kill-zone to protect their assets. If they do that, they'd probably win.
But it probably wouldn't get to that point, because, given the online nature of culture, AI-powered surveillance and AI-powered social interference could very likely thwart any revolt before it starts.
I used to point this out whenever UBI came up for discussion.
People got very very angry at me for pointing this out.
So I stopped doing it.
No it doesn't. People can still protest, block roads, boycott etc... If they get UBI/UHI, they will have more time to engage politically too (in a productive way).
[dead]
I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment and mass extermination of those that refuse.
Otherwise you might end up with disruptive things like protests, blockage of value creating infrastructure, etc.
Another less dramatic option would be containment in prisons or similar where minimal costs can be incurred.
The irony of comments like this is that the vast majority of people who make them would not be in the group they think they belong to.
I read it as satire :-/
I find some irony in that this hyperbolically late-stage neoliberal take is being taken as something I want in all but 2 replies
Won't anyone think of the leopards? They can't subsist on faces alone and yet people keep feeding themselves to the leopards?
You're still undershooting just how grim the optimal outcome of our system is. It's not going to be about 'refusal', like taking a bargain and making choices. If total automation is achieved, huge swaths of people will be placed into that bracket immediately, based largely on their luck, the country they live in and their wealth. An automated world doesn't need this many people to run itself, so only a chosen few will make it through. The rest will eventually be slowly destroyed in the most cruel ways possible. People will keep chanting "Adapt or die" until it turns into simply "Die".
Yeah, that for many people is a "AI must be prevented from happening at all because it will bring about this outcome" argument.
> I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment
I say this who is voluntarily returning to university to pursue a different profession after working 10 years as a software engineer. This isn't going to work for 95% of people, people who have dependents children and partners, mortgages.
> mass extermination of those that refuse
I have no words, but you sound like a dickhead.
I distinctly did not get the impression that GP is happy about or approving of what he’s suggesting may be “economically rational.” It reads more as foreboding to me.
This is how I meant it, but the replies above might have attributed this to moral values somehow
Don’t be daft. All that man power would be excellent for bolstering the army and invading neighboring countries.
I imagine a human body will still be cheaper and more agile than robots for a long while.
Russian typing detected.
there was also a report i co-authored that talked about the tax implication, at least as of 2025 [1]
[1] https://get.paid.ai/hubfs/The%20$2.7%20Billion%20Agent%20Tax...
We only need look at what the computer did to many (60%) non-college educated people who have difficultly finding meaningful work which can provide for a family.
Daron Acemoglu is talking about this and Building Pro-Worker AI. His 2024 Nobel Prize lecture is quite good (as are his fellow laureates that year)
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34854
Why would you assume that was the fault of computers? There are many social, economic, and policy changes that would have much larger effects.
It's not the fault of computers, but they changed the fabric. It was a select few of our fellow humans, who also did deregulation, financialization, and globalization. They all started at the same time and have concentrated wealth and power the last 4-5 decades.
Computers are still a significant factor because most new tasks created were cognitive and needed university education. Or another way, the automation that computers brought eliminated jobs in labor, but we did not create new jobs for those people. The three others were instrumental in that side of the equation.
Well, we did create new jobs for them technically. It’s just that the jobs are terrible. Those disrupted in the past 20 years have been given gig-economy BS to replace their jobs.
The jobs created for the factory workers and the former professional retail workers, in the 90s, were in big-box stores.
how the hell does paywalled content possibly get upvoted more than downvoted. are there really that many economist.com subscribers here?
Most people read the headlines and nothing more, the same as with any other aggregator.
Guilty... but also, I think about article up/downvotes an order of magnitude less than I click the links. I wonder what fraction of users do voting without clicking links.
Up voting or down voting without even clicking the link just seems insane to me.
I think the stats on interactions across the board are probably ridiculous though.
I wish for a HN, reddit, etc, where you have to vote and comment to even be served more content.
You can’t downvote submissions on HN.
What happens is that people flag content instead.
Actually, you can't unless you meet a karma threshold. I have been on this site for 6 years and I still haven't reached it because my opinions are too controversial (apparently).
You can't downvote submissions, regardless your karma.
Not controversial. Just not aligned with the owners of HN.
The comments you upvote/downvote are used to calculate your "opinion similarity" to the owners. Then your upvote/downvotes are modulated by that similarity. It's a way of using other humans to amplify the opinions of the owners -- they don't have time to read all the comments, so instead they filter out those who think the same way they do and let them do it.
All my AI agents know how to circumvent paywalls, silly human just cant keep up
Change hurts those who don't move with the change. Nothing has changed.
Of course. This has been proven again and again on the economic level. People have to let go of old skills and learn new ones to survive.
For AI though, there is a mental angle which is being discussed now (brain gyms etc.) which was an early concern of mine. When we make something, there is an tangible value created for the buyer/consumer but there is also a more subtle positive effect the on the builder/maker. e.g. even if it's it's cheaper, faster, (and in an imaginary worlds), more healthy to buy packaged food, sitting down and making it subtly changes the chef who makes the food. Sort of the motivation for a grandmother baking a cake for her grandkids.
I've been able to realise many of my abandoned projects due to AI. I can spin up a few agents and have them build things completely without intervention more or less. Many of these are programs I use daily. This is definitely huge. However, I remember the kick of struggling with problems during projects which was where most, if not all, the learning happened. All that experience is what makes me able to command and control these agents properly. It had an effect on me beyond the outcome (most of the projects are dead/abandoned anyway). Another example - I remember an old company called "Bond" which had a robot to create stationery using a calligraphic hand. Contrast that to the almost spiritual effect doing calligraphy has on a master penman. Using automation to create fine calligraphy gets you the former but the individual and society loses the latter. It's not immediately clear to me what the end result will be but I do feel that a lot is being lost.
This is the problem.
I like that calligraphy example, I am afraid that's how a field would stagnate: the tools become advanced, but now with less and less people wanting to approach and struggle with learning the field, the human intuition, the community effort, and the mastery to push past the bleeding edge withers.
(Unless if AGI could do something like that.)
Poignantly illustrated in this Asimov story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668168
Stuff that used to be hard is easy.
You're blind to the stuff that's easy making previously impossible things hard.
While I agree that new skills must be learnt to survive, what exactly are these new skills in the AI-age?
I see this line everywhere - whenever someone's mourning their loss of a career, there's responses telling the person to "man up" (for lack of a better phrase) and learn new skills. Nobody says what these "new skills" are?
> Nobody says what these "new skills" are?
it's unknown, because those skills and work associated with them are not yet created.
Just like how being a live streamer (or youtuber) is not a known skill until the advent of streaming platforms and their associated economies. If you asked on the internet in 1995 what kids would have done for a job in 2025, none of them would've said streamer.
Understood. Then how does one brace for the upcoming slaughter? People knew that getting into software would become the hot new thing - almost guaranteeing a source of income. Hence the "push" for everyone to get into "coding", at least in my country (India) and from what I've heard on the internet - the US too.
How do people brace for the changes AI brings?
I don't have a clear answer myself. But there are multiple dimensions to this.
First is from an employment, livelihood perspective. I don't know the "right" answer but like with most things, it's easy to see the wrong ones - Bury your head in the sand and declare that this is just a passing phase, insist on going deeper into curmudgeon territory waxing nostalgic about the "Golden Era" of programming that's over etc. The opposites (trying out the new tools that are being released, reading up on things happening and developing a mental model of how things are moving etc.) seem to be sensible things to do.
Second, from a personal perspective. Here too, inversion is useful. Stopping to think is a bad idea. Like all our faculties, you lose what you don't use. So, actively learning things that are hard (a new "natural" language, a new phsyical skill that you wanted to) will help keep you sharp. Recreational programming is fine I guess and you can use AI to give you that you extra push when you're mired in an area that you don't care for and which you know how to do but are avoiding because of the tedium.
When the demand for work comes, it's quite clear to me that someone who's done what they can and has a some insight on what's going on has an advantage over the person who hasn't. Whether that translates into economical opportunities is beyond us to say but it's beyond our control as well so there's no point in worrying about it.
That's a pretty philosophical questions when what you want is a concrete answer.
First step is to let go of the fear of it.
Sounds cheesy but reading Ekehardt Tolle helped me.
Fair enough, I am kinda scared about everything these days.
Which one of his books should I read (first)?
Ya fear of the unknown is not even anything uncommon for sure.
Honestly ive only read "the power of now",
Which I later learned was very mainstream popular, so I probably would have prejudged it had I knew. While not really original ideas he packages the concepts into very good words, so it made something click, for me at least, where other books hadn't.
They’re unknown because they don’t exist. There will simply be skills that haven’t yet been automated, but nothing will remain out of reach. The idea of having a career in a single field is probably dead, unless that field is minimum wage laborer.
This cliche keeps getting repeated, but it offers no actual insight and ignores all nuances.
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