Are you saying that we can't tell people whose jobs were created by technology (cars destroying the jobs of carriage makers elsewhere) that they jobs were affected by technology?
The full interview this comes from is off the rails. Gawdat says we'll have AGI by 2026 at the absolute latest, and that we will have artificial super intelligence in the immediate future. He guarantees that after destroying jobs, within 15 years we will be in a "utopia" controlled by AI. It's an absurd level of confidence for an extremely bold prediction.
In his last interview from this series in 2023, Gawdat said that LLMs are "alive in every possible way," have a "very deep consciousness," are "definitely aware," and "feel emotions."
His current endeavors involve an unlaunched combination LLM relationship coach and dating site (matchmaking humans with humans, not with LLMs, as far as I can tell).
Think about what happened when we got advances in agriculture.
We have gone from something like 90% of people employed growing food to something in the single digits (I'm too lazy at the moment to get exact figures, but this is close enough for my point).
Did all those advances in agriculture create jobs? I would say yes and no.
For the specific industry the advances happened in? No, definitely not. There are way fewer jobs in agriculture now.
But what did happen is that people were freed up to do different things. Those jobs were indirectly created by the fact that people did not need to spend so much time growing food. That allowed people to do other things to create value and improve our lives. Without those agriculture advances, we wouldn't have AI right now.
I suspect AI will be similar. We aren't going to have more jobs in the technology section because of AI. But that guy who hears "Code Monkey" for the first time and marvels that someone wrote a song about his life? He won't be a code monkey anymore he will be doing something else. If he's lucky something more personally fulfilling.
Interestingly, even in western countries there is basically unlimited demand for agricultural work, and it pays well. The issue is that it's hard work and to get into the higher payment tiers you must take on some risks.
Even in small rural areas the demand for locally produced sustainable and consciously produced agricultural products is largely unmet.
I keep thinking of that investment disclaimer whenever people cite the - 100 year old - example of mechanization of agriculture: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results"
The next generation of children is already being conditioned for women leaving the workplace and society reverting to a pre-WW2 social structure. That's a solution. Jobs are lost forever, women are out of the workforce and the number of workers is halved. We all live in a trad-conservative paradise.
In general, the idea with technology is it's cheaper to do things.
It's easier to start the next widget company because building widgets with the technology is cheaper.
It's easier to consume other things because goods are cheaper to make with the tech.
A third option is that the tech enables something all together new, eg television, that starts a new industry.
As far as direct job creation, the third way is the most obvious but probably not the case at the moment. So I guess we're stuck waiting for goods and services made with AI to get cheaper.
It's just basic economics; when something makes the economy more efficient, it doesn't destroy jobs forever, people get new, better jobs in a more efficient economy.
Perhaps AI will finally raise the bar so high lower-IQ individuals won't be able to find any meaningful employment, but this has never happened in before and I doubt it'll happen again. I don't think I've seen a respected economist go on a news broadcast and say AI will lead to mass unemployment.
How does "ai" make "the economy" more efficient exactly ?
> people get new, better jobs
Which law dictate that these jobs are better ?
I don't see people getting better jobs personally, I see a shit load of people pushed into more and more precarious jobs, with less and less workers rights and job security, with stagnating wages despite rise in productivity, &c.
Yeah, lower IQ people can use AI too...it might even close the gap to the high IQ people depending on their talents, what they learn, what they apply it to, and so on.
So you're saying that members of Congress can finally catch up to the rest of America with technological help? Although that might be true, they're scared of computers. They only recently mastered the fax machine, but can't figure out how to stop the blinking time on their microwave.
> it doesn't destroy jobs forever, people get new, better jobs in a more efficient economy.
Still doesn’t explain how new jobs are created. Efficient economy doesn’t mean more jobs. You could displace a thousand workers and create a single new better job, but that means nothing.
For a simple model, let's say you hire programmers for three reasons:
1. Because you have (X) work to get done to run your business. Once that work is done, there is no more work to do.
2. Because they get work done that makes more money than you pay them, but with diminishing marginal returns. So the first programmer is worth 20x their salary, the 20th is worth 1.01x their salary.
3. Because you have some new idea to build, and have enough capital to gamble on it. If it succeeds before you run out of money, you'll revert to (1) or (2).
Let's assume AI comes along that means a programmer can do 4x the work. If most programmers are in the first bucket, then you only need 1/4 as many programmers and most will be fired.
If most programmers are in the second bucket, then suddenly there's _much_ more stuff that can be built (and money made) per-programmer. So businesses will be incentivized to hire many more programmers.
For programmers in the third bucket, our AI makes more likely to get built in time, thus ups the odds of success a little.
How you think the market is structured decides how you think AI will effect job creation and destruction.
> high lower-IQ individuals won't be able to find any meaningful employment, but this has never happened in before and I doubt it'll happen again
"Meaningful" is a bit weasely here. If a skilled factory worker had their job offshored in the past and wound up employed at Walmart after, they did not find "meaningful" work
Agree. Being enough for these people isn't enough, they also think we should care what they have to say.
I would not include simonw with the other 3 at all. His opinions are informed by use instead of just other thoughts. Simon also releases a lot of utility tools.
Anything that contains drudgery that nobody wants to do. AI is automating away all the cool creative jobs, leaving only the garbage ones. Once robotics is up there, those garbage jobs will be gone as well. Then the humanity implodes within 2 generations.
One team to re-do the work to double check the right answer.
The second team to reconcile the right answer with the AI result.
I'm not even joking ... I've professionally been extremely embarrassed once by an AI result. Now I check it so often that I might as well just do the work I asked it to do.
No doubt, quick questions and rough ideas, LLM is the bomb.
Probably if the capital owners who have automated away the need for intellectual labor want to take advantage of their increased income and the increasingly cheap/desperate labor, they might hire back some of the fired white-collar AI-replaced folks to give them Roman villa treatment (hand-feeding grapes, performing plays and theater at their homes, ever more elaborate massage/grooming/pampering or the more illicit variety).
Seriously, carpenters and plumbers and maybe more electricians. All those copy writers, graphic designers and junior coders are going to have to do something else.
I'm joking, but not. I think a lot of fat is going to get trimmed of the bone of most industries. That may include myself which is a worry.
With this much shoddy code out there, I'm expecting a LOT more testers are going to be needed. This is job creation but not the good kind.
Think Tesla Optimus robot grabbing popcorn. Instead of one cashier filling bags of popcorn, you now have a dedicated teleoperator + sweeper to pickup all the popcorn that's spilled. One job turned into two jobs.
In the macro sense, jobs are jobs, we're just going to see labor move to different places. And AI will hit a limit for usefulness. We're still early in this adventure. guard rails are coming, but we're going to see some big crashes yet.
I don't understand such statement. Automation has already created more job opportunities, why should this be any different? Jobs don't go away, they just transform. And since this AI (whatever that means, nobody really knows) isn't a human-like AGI, it will most certainly not replace humans, but it will automate processes and speed things up.
If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
Especially when companies lay off the workers that would normally consume license seats or purchase consumer goods with job wages.
Funny how all these boosters bragging about automating the economy seem to conveniently forget how much of the economy, in some way, is based around headcount and consumption - both of which are going down due to AI with no replacement being pitched, almost as if that were the plan all along.
What you're saying is that no matter the level of automation we have to keep working as much, and we have to consume as much as the system asks us to consume, because now we need a sucker to pay for these 6 new extra "services"
Maybe, just maybe, we could slow things down, profit from the time saved instead of trying to squeeze more out of every fucking thing we put our hands on.
Much of what was automated is physical labor which allowed workers to move into "service/intellectual" jobs. When tractors and dump trucks removed the need for masses of people to move dirt, it didn't create more jobs of moving dirt around since those jobs could also be tackled by more tractors and dump trucks. If AI is what all these "AI evangelicals" claim, then most intellectual jobs would be gone. And it won't create more service/intellectual jobs for humans because whatever new jobs are created would be tackled by AI.
> If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
If AI could automate one person's job, why would you keep him? You can offer 9 services with one less person.
Moving dirt around is an input into many other things. Because moving dirt around is now cheap, we now build a lot more and a lot better roads than we did when moving dirt had to be done with human / animal labor. That road system directly and indirectly created millions of jobs.
Similarly, software is a crucial input to pretty much everything in modern society. More / better software would create tons of new jobs.
I'm not so sure that more worse software will create those jobs though, and that seems to be the direction we're moving with AI.
> we now build a lot more and a lot better roads than we did when moving dirt had to be done with human / animal labor.
Sure, with far less human labor. That's my point.
> That road system directly and indirectly created millions of jobs.
Yes. That's my point. It created millions of service/intellectual jobs. Or are you saying the highway system created more jobs for those who own shovels?
If people moved from physical to intellectual labor in the past century. What will people move into if intellectual work is mostly done by AI. Assuming that the AI the evangelicals promise comes to fruition.
> When tractors and dump trucks removed the need for masses of people to move dirt, it didn't create more jobs of moving dirt around since those jobs could also be tackled by more tractors and dump trucks
It created dump truck driver / maintenance / engineer / safety / fuel supply / parts factoring / etc jobs. I wouldn't say that's an example of creating zero jobs.
>If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
Because cost cutting increases share-holder value. See Jack Welch at GE. Over time he destroyed the company but also raised the share price tremendously.
And lo, new companies were created to fill the void. AI will cause quite a shakeup but short term stock manipulation eventually needs to be paid off (let's call it "management debt" like "tech debt").
The simpler way to view this is that AI creates value. We can argue how much and what kind, but our economy is reliant on ever-increasing value and is pretty good at utilizing it.
Microsoft didn't get smaller when computers got better, their market got much bigger.
It’s what us doomers have been saying all along: Even if we’re wrong and these LLMs can replace all or most professional jobs, it won’t create new jobs to replace the lost ones because the AI can replace most labor. For a global economy built on consumers spending money on goods and services, this is a death spiral where fewer jobs mean fewer consumers, which weakens demand, which lowers revenues (corporate and tax alike), which inflates asset prices (the sole things appreciating in value that can’t be fabricated by AI), which displaces more workers, which further decreases revenues…
You get the idea. This is bad, it’s always going to be bad, and the only fix is a fundamental reorientation of global civilization away from “profit at all costs” and towards better metrics that reflect the health and wealth of a populace than GDP. Doing that would require existing power barons cede their control and cooperate on building such a new system, which they emphatically do not want to do.
We’re fucked, basically, has been our position all along. Either AI via LLMs is the real deal and the economy collapses because corporate and political leaders are too stupid to understand macroeconomics and labor issues, or AI via LLMs is bullshit and the economy collapses because we let the rich and powerful light money on fire for years in pursuit of a boondoggle.
There is no good ending here under current incentives and motives, and not one AI company has actually bothered to challenge or change those so that AI becomes a positive force.
This is exactly how I feel as well and doing so for a while now. I lost all motivation to work, or life in general. I just don't see a good outcome, why care at all.
Build communities. Build social connections. It’s totally valid to pull back from work given everything going on (stagnant wages, longer hours, frequent layoffs, AI threats, surveillance, etc), but you gotta put that energy somewhere else.
Make friends. Start a game night or hackathon with friends. Pick up new skills you’ve been putting off. Finding personal meaning outside of work is the key to surviving times like these.
Luckily replacement is not happening in real life scenarios. AI makes us faster, sure, replaces us? I don't see that happening any time soon. This is a pipe dream for Silicon Valley.
I can tell some companies are already done with digital agencies for asset creation and translations, now that CMS are adding AI based content generation.
I mean, I agree with you 100%, but we should still consider the consequences if we’re wrong. That’s something I don’t see from most folks (the concept they might be wrong, and what that looks like if they are). That’s what I was mainly getting at: whether we’re right or wrong, the outcome is still bad because the problem lies with the current systems (motivations, incentives, etc) and not technology itself.
Of course it’ll create new jobs. Already has - see teams of people doing training runs and a whole bunch of AI SaaS and consulting services etc
The risk is more that the quantity is less than what is removed. And that the people losing jobs aren’t suitable to retrain. Retraining say truck drivers as data scientists is an uphill battle.
ie substantial risk of specific people getting left behind
It's important to note that the lens for a silicon valley ex-google exec is whether AI will create new jobs which remind him of Google.
There's almost no question that tech giants will have negative headcount over the next 15 years but the changes coming from AI haven't even really started to percolate into the broader economy.
> He used his AI startup, Emma.love, to further drive the point home. He indicated that he was able to build the app with the help of two other software developers, a task that would have otherwise required the manpower of "over 350 developers in the past."
Looking at the product, the idea that this would take 350 developers is likely complete nonsense. It also indicates that the recent big tech layoffs and hiring reductions are simply removing bloat, not AI driven.
Yeah this app seems like a simple wrapper around an LLM.
Seems like something a senior could build a prototype in a week and a product in a month.
Perhaps the "AI matchmaking" feature would take a lot of resources not done with AI, but that goes toward the point of AI creating things not possible before, not replacing existing development
Software industry needs a healthy shake out anyway. Too many people came in for the money. The current shake out involves either stunting people inside vibe coding such that they are functionally retarded, or straight up leave them long-term unemployed. Honestly, the only reason anyone would stick around is because this is all they know or like. I would not fuck around with this career if you ain’t about that life.
But this goes for all, so all the project managers, and basically anyone that acted as middle-men between text editor and production, they all need to go. It’s going to be a nice trim job, better for everyone.
It's very counterintuitive, but for 250 years tech has constantly eliminated jobs, while unemployment rates have stayed the same.
People have always predicted this would lead to mass unemployment, they've always been wrong, and yet they've kept predicting it.
One way to explain it is that unemployed people are an unused resource, and free market economies are very good at finding uses for those.
Two examples out of plenty others, where people had to move out as means of survival.
In his last interview from this series in 2023, Gawdat said that LLMs are "alive in every possible way," have a "very deep consciousness," are "definitely aware," and "feel emotions."
His current endeavors involve an unlaunched combination LLM relationship coach and dating site (matchmaking humans with humans, not with LLMs, as far as I can tell).
We have gone from something like 90% of people employed growing food to something in the single digits (I'm too lazy at the moment to get exact figures, but this is close enough for my point).
Did all those advances in agriculture create jobs? I would say yes and no.
For the specific industry the advances happened in? No, definitely not. There are way fewer jobs in agriculture now.
But what did happen is that people were freed up to do different things. Those jobs were indirectly created by the fact that people did not need to spend so much time growing food. That allowed people to do other things to create value and improve our lives. Without those agriculture advances, we wouldn't have AI right now.
I suspect AI will be similar. We aren't going to have more jobs in the technology section because of AI. But that guy who hears "Code Monkey" for the first time and marvels that someone wrote a song about his life? He won't be a code monkey anymore he will be doing something else. If he's lucky something more personally fulfilling.
Even in small rural areas the demand for locally produced sustainable and consciously produced agricultural products is largely unmet.
Before they existed, few would have believed the disappearing jobs would be replaced by web designers, uber drivers, youtubers, drone pilots etc.
Anyways, if I put my cynnical hat on after looking at this: https://blog.waldrn.com/p/american-boys-have-become-less-sup...
The next generation of children is already being conditioned for women leaving the workplace and society reverting to a pre-WW2 social structure. That's a solution. Jobs are lost forever, women are out of the workforce and the number of workers is halved. We all live in a trad-conservative paradise.
It's easier to start the next widget company because building widgets with the technology is cheaper.
It's easier to consume other things because goods are cheaper to make with the tech.
A third option is that the tech enables something all together new, eg television, that starts a new industry.
As far as direct job creation, the third way is the most obvious but probably not the case at the moment. So I guess we're stuck waiting for goods and services made with AI to get cheaper.
Perhaps AI will finally raise the bar so high lower-IQ individuals won't be able to find any meaningful employment, but this has never happened in before and I doubt it'll happen again. I don't think I've seen a respected economist go on a news broadcast and say AI will lead to mass unemployment.
Is it ?
> when something makes the economy more efficient
How does "ai" make "the economy" more efficient exactly ?
> people get new, better jobs
Which law dictate that these jobs are better ?
I don't see people getting better jobs personally, I see a shit load of people pushed into more and more precarious jobs, with less and less workers rights and job security, with stagnating wages despite rise in productivity, &c.
Baby steps, I guess.
Still doesn’t explain how new jobs are created. Efficient economy doesn’t mean more jobs. You could displace a thousand workers and create a single new better job, but that means nothing.
For a simple model, let's say you hire programmers for three reasons:
1. Because you have (X) work to get done to run your business. Once that work is done, there is no more work to do.
2. Because they get work done that makes more money than you pay them, but with diminishing marginal returns. So the first programmer is worth 20x their salary, the 20th is worth 1.01x their salary.
3. Because you have some new idea to build, and have enough capital to gamble on it. If it succeeds before you run out of money, you'll revert to (1) or (2).
Let's assume AI comes along that means a programmer can do 4x the work. If most programmers are in the first bucket, then you only need 1/4 as many programmers and most will be fired.
If most programmers are in the second bucket, then suddenly there's _much_ more stuff that can be built (and money made) per-programmer. So businesses will be incentivized to hire many more programmers.
For programmers in the third bucket, our AI makes more likely to get built in time, thus ups the odds of success a little.
How you think the market is structured decides how you think AI will effect job creation and destruction.
"Meaningful" is a bit weasely here. If a skilled factory worker had their job offshored in the past and wound up employed at Walmart after, they did not find "meaningful" work
It has happened plenty of times
Geoffrey Hinton seems to be in the headlines constantly going "godfather of AI" and giving some random obtuse warning or call for action.
Eric Schmidt also spends a lot of time yapping.
And of course people like Gary Marcus.
Simon Willison also does a lot of writing but at least his blog is actually useful information of actual tests and news.
I would not include simonw with the other 3 at all. His opinions are informed by use instead of just other thoughts. Simon also releases a lot of utility tools.
One team to re-do the work to double check the right answer. The second team to reconcile the right answer with the AI result.
I'm not even joking ... I've professionally been extremely embarrassed once by an AI result. Now I check it so often that I might as well just do the work I asked it to do.
No doubt, quick questions and rough ideas, LLM is the bomb.
Professionally? Nah. Not yet.
I'm joking, but not. I think a lot of fat is going to get trimmed of the bone of most industries. That may include myself which is a worry.
With this much shoddy code out there, I'm expecting a LOT more testers are going to be needed. This is job creation but not the good kind.
Think Tesla Optimus robot grabbing popcorn. Instead of one cashier filling bags of popcorn, you now have a dedicated teleoperator + sweeper to pickup all the popcorn that's spilled. One job turned into two jobs.
If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
This is the "the climate has changed before" argument for economics.
> why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
Because there might not be enough demand for those 9 services.
Funny how all these boosters bragging about automating the economy seem to conveniently forget how much of the economy, in some way, is based around headcount and consumption - both of which are going down due to AI with no replacement being pitched, almost as if that were the plan all along.
I think it's a very different question to ask "how would this create jobs" and "will this create jobs...in today's market."
It's really not, you cannot cause a recession by increasing productivity, money doesn't disappear.
Maybe, just maybe, we could slow things down, profit from the time saved instead of trying to squeeze more out of every fucking thing we put our hands on.
> If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
If AI could automate one person's job, why would you keep him? You can offer 9 services with one less person.
Similarly, software is a crucial input to pretty much everything in modern society. More / better software would create tons of new jobs.
I'm not so sure that more worse software will create those jobs though, and that seems to be the direction we're moving with AI.
Sure, with far less human labor. That's my point.
> That road system directly and indirectly created millions of jobs.
Yes. That's my point. It created millions of service/intellectual jobs. Or are you saying the highway system created more jobs for those who own shovels?
If people moved from physical to intellectual labor in the past century. What will people move into if intellectual work is mostly done by AI. Assuming that the AI the evangelicals promise comes to fruition.
It created dump truck driver / maintenance / engineer / safety / fuel supply / parts factoring / etc jobs. I wouldn't say that's an example of creating zero jobs.
Those are primarily intellectual/service jobs.
> I wouldn't say that's an example of creating zero jobs.
I never said it didn't create zero jobs. Reread my comment. I said it created more intellectual/service jobs. It's the first line of my comment.
Because cost cutting increases share-holder value. See Jack Welch at GE. Over time he destroyed the company but also raised the share price tremendously.
The simpler way to view this is that AI creates value. We can argue how much and what kind, but our economy is reliant on ever-increasing value and is pretty good at utilizing it.
Microsoft didn't get smaller when computers got better, their market got much bigger.
Seems like a current trend.
The idea that a massive tax increase (aka "tariffs") will create jobs is also 100% crap.
1. Say it will protect children
2. Say it will create jobs
But now I put it like that, it's a little strange I've not heard of any politicians even implying that their policies will get people more sex…
(Especially as I did say "even implying")
You get the idea. This is bad, it’s always going to be bad, and the only fix is a fundamental reorientation of global civilization away from “profit at all costs” and towards better metrics that reflect the health and wealth of a populace than GDP. Doing that would require existing power barons cede their control and cooperate on building such a new system, which they emphatically do not want to do.
We’re fucked, basically, has been our position all along. Either AI via LLMs is the real deal and the economy collapses because corporate and political leaders are too stupid to understand macroeconomics and labor issues, or AI via LLMs is bullshit and the economy collapses because we let the rich and powerful light money on fire for years in pursuit of a boondoggle.
There is no good ending here under current incentives and motives, and not one AI company has actually bothered to challenge or change those so that AI becomes a positive force.
Make friends. Start a game night or hackathon with friends. Pick up new skills you’ve been putting off. Finding personal meaning outside of work is the key to surviving times like these.
They can stay irrational longer than we can stay above water
The risk is more that the quantity is less than what is removed. And that the people losing jobs aren’t suitable to retrain. Retraining say truck drivers as data scientists is an uphill battle.
ie substantial risk of specific people getting left behind
There's almost no question that tech giants will have negative headcount over the next 15 years but the changes coming from AI haven't even really started to percolate into the broader economy.
That's why I'm thinking about my new SAAS, revolution as a service! (Because this is HN I have to shill a product)
Looking at the product, the idea that this would take 350 developers is likely complete nonsense. It also indicates that the recent big tech layoffs and hiring reductions are simply removing bloat, not AI driven.
Seems like something a senior could build a prototype in a week and a product in a month.
Perhaps the "AI matchmaking" feature would take a lot of resources not done with AI, but that goes toward the point of AI creating things not possible before, not replacing existing development