People have objected to training their replacements since forever. Younger people, foreigners, now machines. What else is new?
I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement. But I don't think the decision makes much of a difference one way or another in the grand scheme of things.
> You may ask: Why would anyone agree to train an AI model in the very skills they took years to acquire?
If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
They could, but will they get the chance to?
My most commercially valuable skills - software wrangling, figuring out what went wrong, explaining how to do things in software - are rapidly getting obsoleted by agents. But I'm not too sad about it, because honestly? I hated a lot of that work. Endless frustration with finding out what went wrong, sometimes in an architecture you argued strongly against, etc. Watching the AI agent "thinking" scroll by and seeing it get "frustrated" instead of me, is honestly a relief. But what is it going to do for my career, middle-term?
I have a few years of head start on most people on using many forms of AI, but who knows what's that going to be worth?
My belief is that humans need to struggle through the process of learning to code, learning maths etc. in order to actually build the neural pathways to do the hard things AI can’t do yet. I feel some skills atrophying for me, and I worry even more for the younger people who will never get the chance to think without AI.
Another concern I have is that computers don’t need to be “generally superhuman” to replace 90%+ of office jobs. Computers have always been superhuman at some things, and LLMs have massively jumped the number of tasks that can now be automated to human-level quality or better. I’m not sure it matters if they scale to true AGI.
What are the hard things AI can't do yet, then? Are you sure we shouldn't rather spend time getting better at, say, playing the piano?
Assuming we're allowed to prioritize that in a world where the rich have all the money.
(Looking at the local flow of money, I can't avoid the conclusion that my wages come indirectly mostly from the building of an extreme luxury product for an extremely rich person.)
Honest answer, building and maintaining a large complex project over many years. We have plenty of examples of one-shots like the 1000x slower gcc, but those don't see updates after they achieved their advertisement goal.
Maybe a little more philosophical, novelty. You can ask an LLM to write in the style of <famous author> but afaik the results are bad when you ask it to write in a novel style no-one has seen before.
Fair enough, but I don't think that's something fundamental. Agentic AI hasn't been around for many years, and many of its most enthusiastic adopters have, shall we say, attention issues, so I don't think it's odd that we don't have long term maintained wholly AI-coded projects yet.
Lack of novelty in creative tasks is largely a product of how we deliberately train them to not surprise us. AIs from a few years ago, of the sort Janelle Shane wrote about, were puny compared to today's. But they weren't instruction tuned, so they had plenty of chaotic creative energy.
> Are you sure we shouldn't rather spend time getting better at, say, playing the piano?
Honesty, even if I could somehow make a decent living by doing that (you really can't), no I wouldn't.
Point is if humans need to struggle with something to build neural pathways, character etc. then getting better at playing an instrument is as good at that as anything, even if it has very little economic utility (I thought that part was obvious). Programming might soon have equally little utility.
Just like how the car gave us back so many more hours to spend actually living instead of working. And the washing machine. And the computer. And the Internet.
I don't think cars gave back many hours for the majority of people, they just increased the distance people travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant
The washing machine and dishwasher definitely did.
I don't own a car, so I can't comment on that.
There are 4 differences between my home and that of my grandparents from one century ago, which indeed have reduced significantly the time spent with household chores:
1. Washing machine
2. Vacuum cleaner
3. Microwave oven
4. Electric refrigerator (but they had a cold underground cellar, while I no longer have such luxuries)
There are also various modern tools that are not used in the normal day-to-day life, but only when incidents happen, which require repairs, for example an electric drill or reciprocating saw, or a soldering iron, or an electric sewing machine (but my grandparents had a mechanical Singer sewing machine, which did the same job, only with more effort) and sometimes, but not often, I prepare some kind of food for which an electric mixer accelerates enough the preparation to compensate for the time spent with assembling, disassembling and washing the mixer.
While other modern inventions, like computers, are very important to me, none of them has reduced the amount of work that must be done in my home (I never felt the need for an automatic dishwasher, because I never let them accumulate, I wash them instantly after use, even while cooking, because I eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients).
The mechanical sewing machine would definitely be on the same kind of list, if you had asked your grandparents to prepare one.
> (I never felt the need for an automatic dishwasher, because I never let them accumulate, I wash them instantly after use, even while cooking, because I eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients).
Batching usually lowers the total amount of work you have to do. In any case, the dishwasher becomes more useful (for most people) as the household gets larger.
I find that when we cook and bake, we need the dishwasher more. If you only eat out or eat take-away, there's barely any washing up to do.
I thought of a fourth modern machine for your list: the elevator. But it only applies for some people.
They release women from housekeeping... to workplaces.
You should ask a working woman if she'd rather be at home doing dishes and laundry by hand without pay
Unless the husband was a jerk, he would have understood that this is a division of work, so the spouse who worked at home had actually earned a half of the pay received at the payed job of their husband.
Moreover, in many past societies where the wives were supposed to work at home and only the husbands were expected to do a job for a salary, it was not at all unusual for the wives to handle most of the finances, so they actually handled most of the money earned by the family, even if their husbands were on the payroll.
What was bad in the past, was not what happened in typical cases, but what happened in the worst cases. Because a fair treatment of the wife depended on the goodwill of the husband, not being codified in laws, as it should have been, that enabled a lot of abuses.
> Unless the husband was a jerk, he would have understood that this is a division of work, so the spouse who worked at home had actually earned a half of the pay received at the payed job of their husband.
This is probably the best division to keep the wife happy, but from a certain point of view, housework should be paid at whatever rate you'd have to pay a maid to do the same.
> Moreover, in many past societies where the wives were supposed to work at home and only the husbands were expected to do a job for a salary, [...]
Where are you getting your 'many past societies' like that from? You know that salaried out-of-the-home work isn't all that old, and wasn't all that common (until recently) even where it existed?
Sounds tempting
Why would you put yourself in a jail 9 to 5 every day even if you get paid, if it can be spared?
Only works if breadwinner is relatively rich. If it’s a struggle the home is likely to be unpleasant to struggle in.
some in this thread call out the author for doing what he did without principle. while i dont agree with the argument applied there, i do apply it here. which is to say that feminism did enable some avenues of freedom to women, therefore i wonder how that act benefitted the system, and whether such freedom has culminated in net benefit for the common man & woman
All of these things have been marvelous. The washing machine in particular is such a marvel that almost all Amish use one.
While our time working at home has definitely gone down, our time at work hasn’t though. The point is our employers just expect more, and the benefits of whatever new efficiency is gained, if any, are not passed onto those at the bottom or middle.
Without a doubt, I cannot imagine the world would have been made better if my mother was not an eye surgeon even if it meant my father, a different kind of surgeon, made half of what he would otherwise. Besides the obvious fulfillment of self my mother had, there is the reality that many eyes were operated on that would not otherwise have been. That is a story repeated across almost every profession (not all, certainly women make worse bouncers).
Twice the labour force is just far too much of a power amplifier. Many things that would otherwise lie undone simply get done. Not 2x perhaps because housework etc needs to be done one way or the other but I suspect some large fraction of growth is just better labor participation and labor allocation.
Hours spent at work have also gone down over the decades and leisure time has gone up. Even if that stat wasn't true and we all spent the same amount of time working more productively then that would still be good for society at large.
This attitude of unwillingness to do anything except for direct personal gain isn't good for the world and isn't good for yourself.
Hours spent working haven't noticeably declined for people in Northern Europe for fifty years. I worked 40 hours a week in the UK in 1978, the usual working week in Norway now is 37.5 hours.
I very much doubt that most people are greatly more productive, if you can even measure that for most jobs, than they were fifty years ago. Most jobs now are office jobs and service jobs. Much of the purported gains in productivity are soaked up in increased communication effort and in shifting ever more tat.
> I very much doubt that most people are greatly more productive, if you can even measure that for most jobs, than they were fifty years ago. Most jobs now are office jobs and service jobs. Much of the purported gains in productivity are soaked up in increased communication effort and in shifting ever more tat.
The old jobs are a lot more productive. We just decided to consume a lot more, and also a lot more of things that are harder to make more productive, instead of taking extra leisure.
If you were willing to live a 1950s life (and it were legal), you could mostly do that on very little money today.
This is the fault of the distribution of the benefits, not of the technologies themselves, at least in so far as they don't actively accelerate the shift of value from labor to capital. Washing machines reduce drudgery no matter who owns them.
> that almost all Amish use one.
There are small pedal powered ones. I am sure you can rig a horse driven washing machine...
Increased productivity is nothing to sneeze at even if you work the same amount of hours. The real problem with AI is that the productivity benefits are focused with the owners and not the workers.
> The real problem with AI is that the productivity benefits are focused with the owners and not the workers.
What makes you think so? What evidence do we have one way or another?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006173
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
The labour share of GDP has been roughly within a narrow 50% to 65%-ish bound throughout. It's moving up and down a bit, yes, but still within that bound.
Btw, if you are looking for a villain, look at the land share of GDP. The capital share has been fairly steady.
We are seeing workers get laid off to free up more money for AI and only the AI techies are making more money? It could be temporary, but the way AI is currently owned and structured, the owners and investors are positioned to reap almost all of the financial benefits whereas workers will just be expected to do more with AI for the same pay and hours worked.
Workers are getting hired and fired in all kinds of economic situations all the time. At the moment, overall (US) unemployment at 4.1% hasn't moved all that much since the end of the pandemic, and is on the lower end of average overall by historic standards. We don't see any impact from AI so far.
As far as I can tell so far, the benefits from AI seem to flow mostly into customer surplus, not towards owners and investors. There's just so much competition between AI providers for anyone but customers to capture the benefits.
I hope you are right, but it definitely feels like everything is turning against workers. They might have jobs, but prices are such that they are still getting by or not at all.
People are almost always complaining about the economy, even when it's going great.
Pick your favourite years when you think the economy was going great for workers, and look at some archived newspapers (or even just the headlines).
I’m not sure about the car. I seem to remember reading that commute time has been remarkably consistent even going back to Roman times. All the car allowed us to do is build homes further away from our workplace.
>actually living...
Watching TV...Or consuming social media..
Who am I to judge what other people decide to do with their freetime. It's not like lurking on HN is morally superior.
But you made that judgement already when you decided that people be better off not working...
My judgement is that all else being equal, I defer to people's wishes to decide what they want to do with their time.
Even in AI times, you can still spend years acquiring obsolete skills. Just like people still run for fun, even though the bicycle has already been invented. Or they make their own music by hand, instead of turning on the radio.
If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
Isn't the question - how are we going to feed ourselves? What is this "something else" that will put food on your table?
> they can do something else with their lives.
Let them eat cake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
That phrase was born as a straw man.
The argument against "they can do something else with their lives" is not a strawman though.
In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.
> In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.
AI will bring about a post-scarcity society, just not for you, worker.
I understand the article's dilemma and I don't want to dismiss the difficulty of the situation.
That said, I'd love to train AI to do my personal projects. While I enjoy coding, it's way too slow. I do my projects for the design journey and the final result. It would be great to get calls from AI for direction and assistance, if needed, while it does all the raw coding work for me.
> I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement.
Depending on where you live, there might not even be a legal obligation.
Details likely depend on whatever contract you are signing.
I don't want to attack your good faith in humanity, so I will ask another way - if a system was reliant on workers, what reason would there be for those workers to exist , after their work became automated?
Why do humans need to work to exist?
We just need a new model for existing that isn’t based on labor. We should have started working on these problems in 2016 when it was obvious they were coming, but we elected a regressive twice to help us go backwards instead.
> Why do humans need to work to exist?
What make life worth living? Is it love? Is it beauty? Is it the sense of having agency?
Sadly, we are not smart enough to know until it is taken away.....
Look at ye old timey aristocrats or trust fund kids to see that people can and do have meaningful lives even without work.
Lets first have actual problem instead of trying to stop data center buildout or squatting on data.
Let’s build abundance first and solve inequality later. Instead people are keen to prevent abundance and keep everyone level by keeping everyone poor.
Workers are humans. Humans don't need any system's permission or reasoning to exist.
If you've ever been laid off or fired, you might have noticed that you don't cease to exist when your contract ends.
You may however notice that your existence might be cut short if you don't have access to food, shelter, medical treatments, because "the system" eventually has no incentive to provide for you anymore, because your labor is now worthless to capital.
You do cease to exist once you don't get access to food, water or health care long enough.
Think just a little past the most direct consequence - let me rephrase GP's question: What reason would the ownership class have to provide these necessities to workers when they no longer require their work?
Most people's existence are very strongly tied to their job. Not being able to pay basic utilities and food just the first examples.
Obviously, nobody is going to blip out of existence when their layoff notice is signed, everyone knows this and nobody claimed that. If you stepped down from your philosophical post humanist highchair a bit, you would realize that.
well i brought up the system for a reason, human existence is relative to the system in which humans exist. are there any examples of humans being systematically supported when their class of labor ceased to exist on a widespread scale? if so, did those supportive aspects spontaneously manifest? all in all, would such insights apply to a more widespread scenario, where the affected labor classes are all those involving human computer interaction?
Presumably the stress one endures when their way of life is challenged significantly is life changing. Not that you’d care though, by the sounds of it.
[dead]
True, but those skills should be in an open-source model, not in a pseudo-open AI. That's a significant condition for me.
> If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
In theory, yes. In practice, no. Not until we replace our entire socioeconomic system. As-is, the only reason most people can extract an existence from capital is capital's dependence on labor.
Break that dependence and the entire thing breaks, capital becomes a self-sustaining flywheel towards feudalism and everyone who currently depends on labor for their survival loses the foundation of their existence.
Only once we fundamentally change ownership structures can we work towards your vision. Until then, it is a false piper to dystopia.