Greed does not take your jobs, progress does. People don’t hand wash clothing for money because we have machines to do that now. We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally. AI is no different. “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large
Note: the above is not claiming AI or LLM can do these jobs. it’s claiming “IF” they can then they will. No greed required
This is ignoring the people who capture the rent.
If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated. Since that is not happening, it implies something deeply wrong about how we structure our society.
> If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated.
It depends. Sometimes automating a job just means wiping out the institutional knowledge that came with the job - which I take to be the OP's broader point. It's not clear that AI agents will be able to replace that role to any useful extent, even though it's nice that we can read their accumulated knowledge as a set of .md files written in plain English.
These two things can be true at the same time.
The entire comment is true.
> This is ignoring the people who capture the rent.
So my grandma shouldn't have been be deliriously happy with the new washing machine that saved her hands from bleeding weekly because the evil capitalist laundromat owners charged a few quarters per load?!
It's not really the laundromat capitalist, but the landowner the capitalist paying rent to.
> People don’t hand wash clothing for money because we have machines to do that now. We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally.
Those jobs aren't creative knowledge work.
The advent of digital audio workstations didn't reduce the number of musicians - it increased the amount of music.
Now that we can write code with AI, we (as a civilization) will simply write more code than we used to.
What you're describing is akin to Jevon's paradox. Let's see. The Industrial Revolution, I think a good analogy, caused years of death & suffering before raising standards of living, and even then only so because of mass organizing & uprising.
> We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally.
That’s where your idea breaks. There’s a big swathe of people who prefer the feel and simplicity of newspapers over digital hellscape. There’s also a reason why people prefer quality books like Folio Society over books printer on a toilet paper.
> “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large
You can automate away 80% of CEOs by Markov chains, and it would be a benefit to society at large. Yet it doesn’t happen, why?
> You can automate away 80% of CEOs by Markov chains, and it would be a benefit to society at large. Yet it doesn’t happen, why?
Because, at some level, people understand that a CEO’s job is largely about the human interaction part, so the real value of a human CEO is that last 20%.
The real value of a software engineer is also their own “last 20%”, but non-technical people (and many frustrated technical people) don’t really appreciate how much non-technical work is involved in being a good SWE.
it is that not that they will take, as they do not have will of their own. greed does put them to work
> it’s a benefit to society at large
That remains to be determined. Most of the examples you'll likely come up with are made at the expense of the environment. We've never consumed as much oil and other limited natural resources as now, in spite of massive gains in productivity.
So far it also looks like digital media is fast tracking us back into fascism, helped by the large concentration of capital that occurred during the transition.
Change and automation are not always societal progress, sadly.
> Note: the above is not claiming AI or LLM can do these jobs. it’s claiming “IF” they can then they will. No greed required
"No greed required" doesn't seem accurate. One would not use an AI to do the job instead of a human, except for the motivation that they would have more at the end of the day.
It is greed; LLMs are progress but their cost, and the lies told about them wildly exceed their utility for most of the tasks that they’re otherwise expected to perform. The claims are fraudulent, fraud is a crime, and crime does not benefit society.
Yes it does. Typical example - layoffs to make to stock perform better.