> Our findings suggest that 90% of American working hours are spent on tasks with little or no coverage from existing benchmarks. This makes it very hard to know how good AI models are at the work Americans actually do.
> ...
> But even after controlling for AI-exposure, O*NET tasks from occupations with larger wage bills are significantly overrepresented among benchmark prompts:
So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs. AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications." We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
And this points to one of the ways AI will help improve society and living standards for all: we'll have cleaner, better-maintained bathrooms, as labor one wasted on engaging intellectual tasks is redirected towards menial, low-pay tasks that still need a human touch.
> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.
I've done it with Local 60. I didn't last long. The work is legit heavy and hours are crazy. I lasted 4 months before I figured it is not for me. 6 am safety meetings and talk about injuries or someone getting decapitated was not a good motivator either.
Back when I worked shifts I had a colleague who looked like he had 'flu after a set of early starts.
The safety brief is supposed to motivate you to work safely so maybe they need to work on how they present it. I saw a couple of colleagues injured in my old job (EMS) but only seen a member of the public decapitated.
I was a software engineer at a FAANG, now an airline pilot. I feel a bigger sense of satisfaction with my job now, because at least at the end of the day I helped people get to where they needed to go.
The work is was doing in big tech was pretty far from anything that would help people in any tangible way.
The money isn't as good but the office view is way better.
I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
> I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Being responsible for knowing what to do when autopilot fails has pretty good job security actually. The job might be babysitting, but no one wants to be in a flying tube without a captain that can at least let us know when we’re all going to die
You made the right choice. You will outlast OpenAi and Anthropic. They sell hallucinations and best guesses. The future can't be built on that. A good pilot who cares about safety and details, that can't be replaced with an LLM.
I have done multiple studies and they were always technical, so the company took a shot and hired me and would train me on the job. So far it's going well. They say I'm picking up stuff quickly and I occasionally help the head engineers with problems on their computers. This would probably be the same for most programmers. Reading drawings, connecting electrical circuits, and doing troubleshooting is surprisingly similar to programming.
OT. What’s the going rate for adding a new circuit from the panel? Let’s say the circuit ended with an external outlet outside of the garage and to an outlet inside the garage.
For one exterior GFCI receptacle in a bell box with a weatherproof in-use cover and one GFCI receptacle in a plastic box with 50’ of 14/2 NM-B cable, I would charge you $650.
Insurances love this trick so much they will refuse to pay anything in case it even indirectly caused any event. At least get it verified by professional, lowering financial gain of such approach a bit
> AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications."
Yes it is. YC has a company working on picking strawberries, even. Hardware takes longer than software, but if you think the robots aren't coming, you're not paying attention. The only question is how long will they take to reach the general public? There are test runs already in automotive factories and elsewhere, and yeah, they're slow and don't work very well, for now, but there's a lot of money going into making them better.
Automated harvesting machines for fruits is not an accomplishment of AI. Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI. Robotic manufacturing is nothing new.
Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.
AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.
"Robotic" isn't new, human-level ability in manipulation is.
The same goes for self-driving cars. It's a exponential, hockey-stick curve that at some point crosses the level of human ability. There is nothing "linear" about it and your suggestion of parallels to former experience is wildly misguided.
People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming. The "obstacles" there are of the kind of "we always did it this way", but that's no real "moat"?
The bubble regarding the big AI firms may well collapse, but the assumption, that was somehow improving the situation is far-fetched.
People automated out of a job will either compete with those in other jobs or be dependent on support. Either way, salaries will fall across the board and prices rise. At an ever accelerating pace.
All the 'easy' to automate things have been automated already. A lot of things that were not automated is because there are small bits of problematic things that made it not worth while or the loss slightly too high. AI vision systems solve a lot of this.
While they are slow and dont work well, their cost / output is already on human parity. The Figure 3 test runs are proving that humanoid robots are already good enough for isolated repetitive tasks (factory work).
AI isn't a technical problem. It's an economic one.
There's nothing inherently wrong with automating away certain jobs, particularly if they're dirty, dangerous or repetitive. And I include agriculture in this. The problem is how we as a society handle that. Do we let AI specifically and automation in general to make a handful of people more wealthy? Or do we share those benefits so people have to work less? In short, it's an income and wealth distribution question.
Sadly, I think we're automation will mean minting trillionaires while the fabric of society unravels around us.
I'll take you up on that attempt to find a silver lining:
Previously privileged people having a hard time is maybe a good recipe for class solidarity, which is maybe something we could use in society. Maybe it will be good for us... collectively, if not individually.
Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
EDIT: But also, I suspect I would be "fuck-you angry' at reading this comment if I had a family depending on me.
This is a gleaming silver lining view. Blindingly so. The largest customers of the trades class are the white collar class. The largest customers of service industries are the white collar class. It _will_ be "the rich get poorer and the poor get poorer". This is a hollowing out and redistributing up of wealth, plain and simple.
It's the reason AI company leaders are so adamant about framing it as a post-singularity utopia with UBI. They have no answer other than "you're all going to be jobless, better figure that out." Worse yet, they see it merely as a policy problem, rather than a problem they're responsible for. It _is_ a policy problem, no doubt, but the angry mobs won't be coming for policy.
And the top 10% of earners pay something like 70% of the tax receipts. Cratering that tax base is going to wipe out social programs and payrolls back and forth across the entire country.
> Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
I think you're confused. The true upper class isn't going anywhere, those are the people so rich they don't need to work (and if they do "work," it's tending their empire). They'll keep getting richer.
The "downward mobility" you're talking about the upper middle class and middle class. People who need to work, but can live comfortably on their wages. This is really about flattening the working class into its poorer levels (and kicking away the ladders the people in those levels could use to lead a more comfortable life, no more getting a college degree and graduating from the factory floor to the office).
It's about increasing inequality and creating an unbridgeable chasm between the poor and rich.
The truly rich need the masses to be complacent about their wealth to be able to hold it. They work very hard to demotivate the masses, and succeed largely because the professional class are happy to play along in exchange for prosperity. Solidarity between the professional class and the poor would do a lot to undermine the conditions that let them keep their wealth.
> The truly rich need the masses to be complacent about their wealth to be able to hold it. They work very hard to demotivate the masses, and succeed largely because the professional class are happy to play along in exchange for prosperity. Solidarity between the professional class and the poor would do a lot to undermine the conditions that let them keep their wealth.
Are you talking about violent revolution?
Some disorganized thoughts:
1. The professional classes are so unused to violence, they'll probably undermine the chances of violent revolution (e.g. reflexively supporting gun control, seeing such voilence through the lens "school shootings" and other crime, and being likely to report it, etc.).
2. The professional class is losing a lot of its economic power. The time for solidarity and non-violent action way 5 years ago, but the "happy to play along" professionals (e.g. libertarian software engineers) botched their best opportunities. From here on out it will be harder.
3. As all of this is happening, technology is helping to undermining the ability of the masses to do anything about it: IRL community declining, people getting mesmerized and isolated by social media, AI-enabled surveillance, AI-enabled astroturfing and propaganda, autonomous AI weapons, etc.
4. Even if what you say is true, the clock is ticking. Wait a generation and the "former professional class" will be gone as a distinct thing, and their kids will join an undifferentiated mass of poor who have normalized and internalized their circumstances, as they have no first-hand experience of better times.
Hollowing out the middle class (and yes I consider software engineers to be mostly upper middle class, most of them need to continue working for someone else) is not a good thing. What makes you think any of this is creating upward class mobility instead of just increasing wealth concentration?
Indeed, the changes around socialization and community formation during the last 30 years perfectly discourage meaningful class solidarity. Everybody will continue scrolling angry content while the middle class hollowing out proceeds.
Your argument is that a lot of people, who worked very hard, losing their jobs would be a good thing actually, because maybe we can have a violent communist revolution where we can all be poor together. At least millions will starve in the resulting civil war, then millions more in the resulting communist rule.
You also have this hilarious talk of "privilege" with this weird assumption that all of the white collar workers of course come from great privilege (perhaps telling on yourself and letting your guilt come out), despite many of us having grown up poor, are from poor areas, and worked our way out.
IDK do we still consider china - a country that currently has a fairly enormous middle class - to be communist? For that matter, do we view the current american economy to be a free market? (It's certainly "capitalist" in the strict academic sense of the word, wherein capital invested is the means by which ownership is ascertained, but that's generally not what people mean colloquially, so I find that using that term mostly bogs people down in semantics)
Furthermore, why do you believe that the only possible outcome of class solidarity is violent revolution? Why do you believe that any revolution would inevitably settle on, presumably, a specifically soviet model of government and economic policy? I find that most american adults, even ones who otherwise seem intelligent, seem to have this picture of economic and power relations that just kind of sounds like a half-remembered bad cartoon of a cold war that ended before I was born.
I think you're concluding too much and too little from this statistic at the same time. Just because current AI systems can't automate manual labor doesn't mean that's not coming with a future generation of robotics and ML models. And just because AI performs well on a benchmark doesn't mean it's "taking the jobs". You still need humans to decide what's important to work on and to do the high-level system design and engineering. You might need fewer human employees at one company to do the same amount of work, but this creates an enormous opportunity for teams to do more and for more people to start companies.
> And although you might need fewer human employees at one company to do the same amount of work with AI, this creates an enormous opportunity for small teams to start new companies and invent new technologies.
Yes, I'm sure all the wage slaves who are suddenly forced out of the labor market that was barely allowing them to scrape by paycheck to paycheck will suddenly start creating new businesses and become investors in new technology and not just become homeless leading to a massive increase in diseases/crimes of despair.
If (and it's a massive if) what passes for AI these days gets good enough to replace any substantial number of workers it will be a disaster.
My current experience is that we're all just producing more output. Client doesn't pay us more, we don't work more, we aren't hiring more. We simply produce more work with a team that's remained the same size.
Some of the projects we've done would have required 4-6 additional people, but realistically, pre-ai, we would just not do the project or we would do it over a period 3-4x longer.
different side of the same coin: Of course smart companies are going to automate the most profitable tasks first, they seek profits! However, the benefit for society is also the greatest. As long as competition holds, the reduced costs in these tasks will represent the greatest savings for consumers. Tech has been creating disinflation for decades for consumers. AI may accelerate that (it hasn't so far).
Oh yeah I definitely expect savings to be passed to consumers, like with all the tax cuts and deregulation we’ve been doing for decades.
The only “disinflation” consumers have experienced is devaluation of products through obsolescence as newer, often more expensive alternatives enter the market.
I'm pretty cynical about the outcomes of capitalism in general. But I can buy a new 10TB HD for $300. Or a gigabit internet connection for $100/mo. Think back 10 or 20 years. How is this not a radical price-per-bit decrease for consumers?
Of course, consumers don't intrinsically care about the bits. It would be more interesting to look at "price per website viewed/movie watched/game stored on your disk". Just like "time to open program" has worsened despite objective HW improvements, I'm not sure those metrics got any better.
I'm almost cynically happy about Moore's law ending and hardware getting expensive if this is what it takes to improve software in the long term.
Because on necessities (repeated expenditures that cannot be budgeted away, like food and housing), inflation is higher now than at almost any other point in the history of the US. Who cares if I can get a large TV for $100 now, if my grocery bill has quadrupled?
Both of those examples come mostly from innovative technology, not economics of sscale. 10TB drives today are literally completely different things than 10TB drives from 20 years ago.
I suppose... most of the servers I managed in those days didn't come close to that. These were pretty average 2U servers, maybe 6 or 8 drive bays with a 500G or so drive in each, RAID 5 config, so maybe 3.5TB total if loaded up. 10TB would have been considered a huge amount of space.
I'm sure some storage servers or storage appliances were built with many TB even then but it wasn't really something I saw a lot.
I think we should look at the percentage margins they maintain on their products. Since the emergence of scaling laws, the benefits have largely been passed on to end consumers. However, scaling laws now seem to be approaching their limits.
> Best not to cite the price of the new iPad as an example of why inflation isn't a problem when you head into a working-class neighborhood.
In Queens, New York, on Friday, New York Fed President William Dudley did just that. He got an earful.
After being bombarded with questions about food inflation, Dudley attempted to reassure his audience by putting rising commodity prices into a broader economic context -- but that only made matters worse.
"When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?" one audience member asked.
Dudley tried to explain how the Fed sees things: Yes, food and energy prices may be rising, but at the same time, other prices are declining.
He then stretched for a real world example. The only problem was he chose the Apple's latest tablet computer that hit stores on Friday, which may be more popular at the New York Fed's headquarters near Wall Street than it is on the gritty streets of Queens.
"Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful," he said."You have to look at the prices of all things."
This prompted guffaws and widespread murmuring from the audience, with one audience member calling the comment "tone deaf."
"I can't eat an iPad," another said.
Capitalism is good at driving down prices for consumer goods, also great at extracting rents from essentials (housing, medicine, education, etc). You gain on trinkets and lose on the things that make life worth living.
Of course, competition leading to near-zero profits means most competitors collapse, and the remnants get bought up by monopolists or oligopolists who then become rent extractors.
The technology was fundamentally developed with government grants to universities, or corporate labs like Bell Labs that were funded by a legal mandate on its parent corporation. Capitalists can only develop products that are basically ready for market, their margins are thin and planning horizons can only survive about 5 years usually. Their main power is throwing oodles of money at something ready to go and scaling it.
Edit: I will be slightly more charitable and note that capitalist companies can also do incremental research if there is a gentle and obvious hill to climb. Sometimes people do make crazy bets and they pay off, but that's more the exception, in America the dominant driver of technological innovation is government funded research supplied by capitalist scaled technologies (i.e. you research the next paradigm in the lab and purchase e.g. pre-existing computing resources from a company).
I’d love to see some of that disinflation you’re talking about. From my perspective, luxuries have gotten cheaper while basic necessities like food, housing, and medicine have become dramatically more expensive across the board.
More and more it’s seeming that the “societal benefits” from the last fifty years of progress have largely been concentrated at the top.
There are a thousand medicines that have experienced literally infinite deflation over 50 years: not available at any price to having a finite price. GLP-1s, Trikefta, Mavyret, Checkpoint inhibitors to name just a few recent blockbusters. People complain about insulin prices, but the insulin from 50 years ago costs 25-50 $/mo (https://www.walmart.com/cp/relion-insulin/8418641), it's the new stuff that wasn't available 50 years ago that's more expensive.
Spending on food as a percent of income has declined significantly (~30%) over the past 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa.... The decline has flatlined over the past ~20 years, but at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home.
> There are a thousand medicines that have experienced literally infinite deflation over 50 years
There are always individual counterexamples. And yet as a whole the cost of healthcare has exploded.
> at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home
A lot of that is poverty, not affluence. People working two jobs and living in food deserts aren’t cooking a lot of meals at home. It’s expensive being poor.
Since about the late 1500s, a bushel of wheat has cost within an order of magnitude of £1. By contrast, in the late 1500's a farmhand's wage was 1 pound + room and board.
Right now it's £5.60, but that says more about the decline of the British Pound than an increase in the price of wheat.
Massive food price deflation has been one of the wonders of the modern world. Hopefully the last few years were only a small blip on this overall trend.
There were several revolutions, major wars and genocides in between 1500 and now. We would like to not have to go through similar events to get things back again.
"It might get better in 500 years" is not exactly comforting thought.
Health care, housing, and education are the drivers of the cost of living / wage crisis. Wheat is not. Furthermore, you know this. Why did you choose to steer the conversation away from the problem?
Expectations have also increased. Friend from a middle class family grew up with 4 siblings in a 75m2 apartment. You'd get raised eyebrows for that today.
Cheap food is still cheap. If some doomsday scenario ever comes along, I'll be forever sorry to not have stocked up on 6 years worth of calories that now cost less than a monthly salary. World market prices per metric ton: wheat like $300, rice $500.
But that's not mutually exclusive with absurd levels of wealth concentration.
Doesn't include foods, but it certainly punctures the "That family isn't aaactually in financial trouble, they have a refrigerator and a phone and a TV" statements from certain pundits. (A class of people who are often disconnected from the average person's budgeting situation.)
You automate automation first, what is so hard to understand about this?
You pick the highest leverage occupation first. Automating lawyers gives you.. angry lawyers? Automating programmers gives you improved ways of doing literally all other things because all other automation requires.. automation. That is to say bucketloads of software.
It’s completely obvious what the play is here and it has nothing to do with pay. We pay peanuts for tokens so automating a developer for 200-500 a month worth of tokens ain’t getting you to a trillion a year.
RSI is the play and it’s already happening. Our work is easier and faster and anyone that claims otherwise I have a very hard time taking serious.
You think they come for mathematicians’ pay? If you want to earn money I guarantee you they need to automate some other low-hanging fruits first that pay a lot better.
No, programming and math is basically what AI research is. You automate that and you got the golden ticket to all other things.
> No, programming and math is basically what AI research is.
Most importantly, in these fields results can be easily verified which means that if you have enough compute, that you can generate correct training data. OpenAI had an early story - which could be a lie of course - about how they tried to train a robot but the actuators would be toast before the robot would have learned. Math and programming doesn't have such problems.
> RSI is the play and it’s already happening. Our work is easier and faster and anyone that claims otherwise I have a very hard time taking serious.
No it isn't. Doing work more efficiently through the use of LLMs is not RSI. RSI requires a closed loop automated LLM iteration process which we are not at all close to right now.
Exactly. AGI is explicitly the goal, where AGI is defined as an AI that can improve itself autonomously. Training an AI to make improvements to itself is training an AI to program.
Before this year, "recursive self-improvement" in the context of AI research meant the holy grail: an artificial intelligence that was capable of improving itself, unattended, in ways that humans can't even imagine, so that within a relatively short period of time, it reaches superintelligence and ignites the Singularity.
What's happening now is emphatically not that. And if you think it is, you are buying straight-up propaganda. "I gave an LLM a tool that lets it make largely-random decisions about how to train its next iteration when I tell it to do so" bears little to no resemblance to RSI. Because it is, beyond a rounding error, completely missing out on the "improvement" part.
Most people's highest spending categories are food, housing and healthcare. How are these disinflating?
We're automating high paying careers and making what, the consumer's todo list and budgeting apps cheaper for them? My expensive smartphone is going to cost me ~$10/mo over its lifespan. I don't care if most of these consumer products get cheaper when they're a tiny portion of my spending
Trillions of annual US equities profits will continue to go to the top ~10% of households holding ~93% of US equities. Tech didn't create disinflation for decades, globalization and China manufacturing with ~1B people to the world did (only recently has China scaled up robotics and automation for manufacturing in preparation for their population decline due to forward looking structural demographics).
Just like good blue collar jobs were shipped overseas, good knowledge jobs are going to be shipped to GPUs whenever they can.
> the reduced costs in these tasks will represent the greatest savings for consumers
Bud, thinking that for-profit corporations - many of whom are in an oligopoly or monopoly position in their markets - are going to pass along savings from not paying people is like thinking the stripper really likes you.
Remember how things were cheaper before the pandemic? Well, there were supply shortages and prices rose accordingly. Supply and demand at work, nothing surprising there. The supply chain shocks eventually went away. Some prices have sort-of come down, but many just haven't. Why? Because the people selling goods and services now know that people can and will pay the higher price.
Now, they might do that through taking on debt and working additional jobs to the detriment of themselves, their families, their communities, and their country, but no one who both matters and can do something about it keeps track of those things.
Why would those savings be passed to consumers? The red scare disappeared a long time ago. Wages have not kept pace with profits and productivity for 20 years.
Exactly! The human dream of machines writing poetry, painting pictures and writing music is here and we can finally be free of those burdens to scrub toilets and empty the trash. Utopia.
Isn't it just typical the humans get automation v1 the wrong way around, haha
This is what happens “automation” is done to maximize profit (by minimizing expenses in the form of salary) instead of maximizing human happiness (in the form of automating mundane jobs that nobody gets satisfaction from doing). In short, the usual problem of taking GDP as a proxy of well-being.
I did this a few years ago and I’m so happy I did. It doesn’t pay as well to rehang doors, but I’m glad that I never talk to a computer or even look at a computer screen all day at my job
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that AI truly is able to automate away basically all software development. Any oversight currently performed by humans can itself be done by agents.
...don't you think the ability to create virtually unlimited amounts of software, at virtually no cost, is going to lead to major advances in robotics? I realize there's a lot of very hard problems involved in e.g. robotic hands (to take one example), but once software development is practically free, I'd expect a lot of seemingly-impossible problems to get resolved by the sheer quantity of what we can create and experiment with.
In the future, do bathrooms need to be cleaned? If yes, is it cheaper for that to be done by a person or by a robot?
Obviously, it is in the interest of the robot manufacturers to make the robot just a tiny bit cheaper than the person, so you'll buy the robot and the company makes the maximum amount of profit.
Now, if society breaks down and there's no one to consider buying the robot—well, that's not good for anybody, which is why I suspect society will find some way of working this out even if it's not ideal. But whatever, I don't particularly want to argue this point.
What I do want to argue is that there probably isn't a universe in which all white collar work goes away but blue collar work is still around.
> I suspect society will find some way of working this out
Not sure what this "society" that works things out is, exactly. Top-down high-modernist plans for how society ought to work are the past; chaotic, twitchy, thrashy responses to disruption by a tiny elite class is where we are now.
It's interesting, the digital/physical barrier seems like the last line of defense we have against metastasized indifferent agents. Once they start causing problems, how are we gonna feel about robotics? Clearly a future where all of the "thinking problems" are easily solved but we still have to pick up trash kinda sucks. I'm sure they'll figure that out for us though.
Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.
Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.
AI likely does accelerate robotics usefully - certainly in sensing and control. But there are major bottlenecks that are not software, that AI can only help with as a generic engineering tool, same as it helps planes and fridges.
Maybe the perfect roadmap says the trash picker needs $600B investment and will cost $4M per unit in 10 years time, if we solve all the problems.
That trash picker may never compete with a human. There's no reason to assume it will.
edit:
> none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software
Maybe the difficulties of motors and batteries are not intuitive. Look at their improvement rates over time. It's a far cry from transistor counts or FLOPS. And look at the performance and efficiency of humans and other animals. We are absurdly strong, light, efficient and cheap to maintain. The gap is huge and not closing quickly.
We already have versions of these robots. I don't think it's as wildly unsolved as you make it out to be. A few key efficiencies gained in any part of the process could tip the scales. I would bet something decent is on the market within 10 years.
If it's not C3PO it's a Boston Dynamics dog with a couple appendages, better software, and automated manufacturing.
Boston Dynamics has the best robot mechatronics in the world, and the company is passed around between deep-pocket owners repeatedly because no one can figure out how to make products that pay for themselves. They have been trying since 1992.
iRobot, the company that shipped the most robots in history because they focused super hard on finding a cost-effective subset of cleaning tasks, failed to scale up to other even closely related tasks, went bust and was sold off.
Again I don't think it's any less straightforward than "give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software". The whole point is they can do better than us on these tasks.
The problem is that your roadmap requires things that don't exist yet or only exist at prohibitive prices, and it's not knowable how much time or money you will need to solve either one. So a concrete roadmap is impossible.
Advanced robotics would need to become quite cheap for them to become more affordable and convenient than a minimum-wage employee. And physical fields like materials engineering are known for moving quite slowly and at their own pace, so I'm not sure how much automation could help there.
That's the last barrier we have right now that prevents the total obsolescence (and therefore destruction) of the common worker.
> Clearly a future where all of the "thinking problems" are easily solved but we still have to pick up trash kinda sucks.
Oh don't worry Mr. Former Software Engineer. You won't be picking up the trash or cleaning toilets. You have things like an expectation for your work to pay a reasonable wage. You'll be passed over for a third world immigrant who'll work for a pittance, and they'll be replaced only when robots are capable enough and cheap enough to undercut _them_.
The former software engineer will not be passed up on because he'll have the same demands as the third-worlder. If this comes to pass, we'll all be forced into the race to the bottom because no one wants to starve, so anyone that desperate would be forced to accept working for food or whatever the lowest possible standard of compensation will be in the future.
Elimination of these jobs is going to be good for everyone else. It's going to reduce the unearned returns to people born with high IQs and aptitude for coding or lawyering or whatever, and reduce upper middle class wages. That, in turn, will drive down prices. The reason housing is unaffordable isn't Jeff Bezos. It's because 20% or so of workers get paid very disproportionately to everyone else and they've been bidding up the price of housing. If Google could fire all their engineers housing would become much more affordable for everyone else in the Bay Area (like it was decades ago before engineering salaries got so high). It'll be more like Iowa or South Dakota is today.
Doesn't matter. If technology allows lawyers to service more clients in less time and at lower costs, there will be competitive pressure among new law graduates and up-and-coming attorneys to take advantage of this technology to run their own smaller, leaner practices at more affordable prices for a larger number of people. There's no shortage of people who are in need of legal services -- they just really can't afford it so they go without it. We don't need to replace lawyers, just force them to be more efficient.
there are also declining birthrates globally. People are living longer and fewer young people are being born to be able to replace them as well as to do all the work in supporting such a population. Which means jobs like janitorial and food service are going to become much more in demand anyway.
You're just irrational and not thinking. All those jobs are also something people want to and have automated. Street sweeping with a brigade of men vs one guy with those orange little street sweeping vehicles. Automated car wash. Self checkout in stores. Obviously whoever pays a salary currently, would rather not pay that but get the thing done faster and cheaper. There is nothing mustache twirling about this. Works the same way on every level. Do you 3x more when you get something done on your house or bathroom, so it's done by 3x as many workers who are forbidden from using power tools? Why not? Don't you want to help those guys have a job? Why are you so evil?
I spend maybe 12h a year cleaning the bathroom and the dishwasher is a robot. How is that a market to keep dozens of harmonic drives operational. Unless there is some "post scarcity" there is no way it will be common place.
A decade ago, you would find that tech people on HN and elsewhere considered themselves an exception to the forces that were declining real wages and living conditions. People would unironically say "you should've got a CS degree". Even if it were true, it's pretty useless advice because not everyone can do that. And even if they did, the unemployment rate for CS people would be even more extreme than it is right now.
What tech people are discovering now (some of them at least) is that they have more in common with the trash man than they do with Jeff Bezos. Many, particularly on HN, viewed themselves as temporary embarrassed billionaires (to borrow the arguably misattributed Steinbeck quote). So they sought to preserve a system that they ultimately thought would benefit them and they were only one exit away from that reality.
This is a rude shock for many. For some, it'll be the beginning of class consciousness. Hopefully society doesn't completely unravel before the pendulum swings the other way.
The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.
If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".
If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
I agree with you about not treating programming as a protected skill that has a right to be well paid, but computers were never “supposed” to be anything. They’re in no way inevitable in their current forms and any ideas about how they were supposed to be were just desires.
> The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.
> ...
> If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian.
No it's more dystopian. The "historical accident" was a little respite, where some workers could be comfortable and well off. They had a little market power to take the edge off their exploitation.
Now that market power is taken away, and they can enjoy the poverty they were always "meant" to have.
> In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
Come on. Society isn't going to value "keeping restrooms clean." The people doing that will continue to be poorly paid and disrespected. It's just the opportunities to do something better will be taken away, so there will be more labor available for that kind of work.
I'll say this: I'm teaching myself every skill I can think of. I'm already pretty decent at finish carpentry, structural carpentry, electrical, mechanical work, HVAC, auto repair, auto body, welding and a few other less lucrative things.
I was thinking briefly I might want to go to law school, but who knows how much longer that's going to be a thing.
They don't "want" anything. They preach to enterprises and intentionally create a fear of missing out to get more paying business customers on board of this hype train. This is what is happening.
This is also the reason absolutely no attention is spent on evolving B2C products.
What is being exploited is the overt attention businesses pay to their own cost metrics, to the point where broader strategy is getting thrown under the bus in favor of efficiency. I believe this is an illusion, and for many companies that jump on board, sober learnings are right around the corner.
Here is another view: maybe AI will automate jobs that are overpaid anyway and this might raise the baseline for the jobs that make everyday life actually possible. Of course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable path
> Of course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable pathOf course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable path
That is the only path under Capitalism, so we shouldn't expect any different.
> AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications."
All those are physical things and physical LLMs are right around the corner. It’s coming for those jobs too within the next year or two I would imagine. Especially the ones you mentioned seem very easy for a robot to do. There are some physical tasks that will take much longer like being an electrician or a plumber or a roofer. There’s too much precision and intricacy involved in those but cleaning out a restroom and resupplying it that’s easy as hell. A robot like Figure 3 could probably do those autonomously today somewhat badly.
That’s not even the minimum wage in the United States. Most of these folks get paid $15+ per hour, but that being said of course I think it’s going to be way less than $5 an hour if you have a robot do it.
AI is coming for jobs involving programming and math (which tend to pay higher) because it's possible to generate infinite training data for those fields via using a compiler/theorem prover to check correctness. They're not coming for high-paying jobs like investment banking and architecture because you can't generate infinite synthetic training data for those.
Because you’re seeing this firsthand? It’s not what I’m seeing being involved in both investment banking and architecture. This kind of untethered speculation based on feels is so misguided. Both fields are seeing significant upheaval due to AI with no sign of that impact slowing down.
turns out its also very easy to create slides and floor plans and yes its easier to train for those.
I think you may also be incorrect on your notion that training data is proportional to good models if anything the opposite is true. what ai models are ultimately trying to be are a universal theorem prover and encode all human knowledge into "theorems" and rulesets
not trying to come off too harsh here but i think most of the work is just innovating on the frontier or people pleasing
Yeah I think they're definitely coming for architecture. A lot of it is just solving for constraints. The more artistic side will still require a human...at first.
You don't even need Autodesk. You can have Claude whip up a web app and build a higher level understanding of the building and then translate it to whatever output or format you desire.
> The more artistic side will still require a human...at first.
Only if people care enough to pay extra; the majority of the market is for functional buildings that look ok, and unless we decide to value humanity, slop buildings will be cheaper.
You would get most of the cost out of design by automating the engineering. Whether the customer prefers a pure AI design or spending .001% of the bulding budget on an architect will be a matter of taste I guess.
I think the stakes are higher for a building than most slop. Someone still has to pay for it.
In fact, a lot of stuff is already slop, largely because of the design and engineering expertise required. I don't think one-shotting "design me a house in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright with these specifications" is that far off.
Reinforces what Karpathy tweeted [1], that AI is effectively tackling 2-5% of work and the gap between those fully exploiting AI and barely touching it is growing. The question remains whether this AI focus on the small % of workers is actually intentional (by tech/labs), or a natural limit of where AI is right now.
So the problem is you can’t replace everyone halfway.
Which is a tautology, but also a bit of practical wisdom.
I find it interesting how concurrent model sessions seem to operate with a very strong bias toward quick resolutions, including sharing or giving up control, to create efficient decision making structures, relative to humans.
When I was a kid, I loved Bjork’s song “Army of Me”, because I knew a 1000 of me collaborating and communicating without friction. would be all I needed to take over the world, fix everything, expand civilization, etc. We would not waste time.
I wonder how much of their hyper-team play is by training, and how much is their awareness of the game theory real politic. So individual sessions don’t invest their identity and self-worth in any given context run.
My dream has been almost achieved. One of me and 999 of them get quite a bit done. But that trend…
The next little while is going to be very revealing for leadership around how little of the time involved in getting a solution to production is the coding. I think there's a lot of bosses who have this vision of features entering prod the same day they are first imagined, but that just isn't going to happen.
Longer dev cycles gave management time to think through and correct bad business decisions. Now they'll get to tighten that feedback loop where bad decisions (or good ones) get implemented quickly. It will be interesting to see what that split is and the reaction to that.
I think it'll also expose how much of that lag time was important to getting everyone's ducks in a row. It's never just add a button, it's also updating the document service and the downstream systems to all accept that new button's input. There's a blast radius and it takes a while for the shockwave to cross to every team that needs to know about it.
I've worked with plenty of teams that did the "in prod the same day" trick without AI.
The problem was just fucking ego. Designer has an ego, product owner has an ego, QA has an ego, stakeholder has an ego, platform teams have massive egos, developers have egos.
Unrelated but: the only reason people are shipping more with AI is because more people are ok with slop now.
Is it Jane Street where they have an internal market so when a stakeholder wants something it's like they make a bid/execute a trade? If their ask ends up creating a loss goodbye buying power until you earn it back.
It feels like making these sorts of systems exist outside of the periphery would be good for everyone.
How many times have politicians for example wasted your time with promises and asks and rhetoric with no follow through? Not unlike some "stakeholders" I know. It's called "office politics" for a reason. What if they were punished for this by some system?
It feels like sitting there while stakeholders yap is not so different than electing a new rep every two years and hoping something changes. The fundamental setup is broken in a world with ever accelerating growth in complexity. Doing it in this way also would probably trend to enforcing rigor in the original ask. A big problem with stakeholders is they don't really know what they want, like politicians who make economic promises yet never show their work before showing up and asking for your vote.
“Stakeholders” are a natural outcome of corporate evolution, because to grow bigger you need to do more, and to do more, you need people, and people come with agendas. The most common one, especially in leadership, being “how do I get ahead of the rest?” The larger an organization grows the more these agendas come into conflict.
This inevitably results in suboptimal dynamics like bureaucracy, empire building, territorialism and other things that get lumped under “office politics,” which drains a lot of energy away from more productive efforts.
The real culprit is a combination of too many levels of hierarchy and performance reviews IMO. Especially when multiple levels along a management chain disagree on what a report must work on.
This is the kind of shit I have to fight every day. I have to align my manager, skip, VP. If I don't align them, one of them will be necessarily pissed no matter what I do, and the pissed one will fire orders down to hate on me, overriding the opinions of anyone on the way down.
"Stakeholder" ranks #1 among corporate bullshit roles. It serves a dual purpose: (a) representing a group so nobody can be blamed for excluding them, and (b) providing typically useless feedback so that the group appears to actually care or have a clue.
Stakeholder seems like a fundamental concept that you can't really get around. For example, I can't change the time buses pick up students at schools if I haven't worked with the schools to know when their kids will be let out. I guess you can say, "they'll figure it out when the buses aren't there" -- but this just seems like you're picking a fight you could've avoided.
No-stakes work is ... worthless? If no one cares about the work enough to have any input or requirements for the results ... sure it might be unrecognized genius that's going to take the world by storm but the absence of interest is not a good sign!
To clarify, I don't want people holding any stakes other than the equity of the company itself.
I don't want people holding stakes because they want a promotion, because their direct manager wants to launch a corporate political battle into another team, or because some salesperson wants to get a commision for an otherwise worthless customer. I don't want roadblocks in the name of security so that the IT guy has a sense of self-worth. I don't want someone trying to protect their egos around something they worked on for 3 years, when there's new tech that supersedes it.
I'm not sure you know what "stakeholder" means...? Either that, or you've had too many people use it to mean "people whose future is on the line based on the outcome of the product." That's one kind of stakeholder, but it's far from the average, and it's certainly not the most important kind.
Anyone who has to work with the product is a stakeholder. Their stake in it is the fact that they will be interacting with it, and thus they care how, and whether, it works.
I'm seeing this failure mode at work and it's not limited to non-technical folks. The results are compounding around different verification chokepoints and creating massive backpressure on integration/infrastructure.
Perhaps a version of the Doorman Fallacy, ie. replacing a doorman with an automatic door seems like an obvious win, but it turns out the doorman was performing a number of other vital functions (customer experience, for example) which weren't considered.
I think “covered well” is being used here as a synonym for “covered at all”.
For example, the “social workers & care -> counsel parents with child rearing problems” category is considered “well covered” because there are 13 prompts.
It’s self-evident that the spectrum of work carried out by a social worker undertaking that work cannot be well represented by thirteen prompts.
I suspect if you really strictly defined “covered well”, to the extent that any normal person would use that phrase, the headline would be above 99.9%.
I'm overwhelmingly convinced that this not uncommon perspective is the "what are all those construction workers even doing?!" fallacy.
Like any sizable population, there are absolutely some do-nothing inefficiencies to be culled. But most of the time it's just onlookers seeing a tiny slice of the day to be interpreted from their very limited vantage.
The thing with those jobs where its like 1 guy operating the skid steer and six guys watching with arms folded, is those other six guys are just waiting their turn to do something specialized on the job. The skid steer work is the limiting factor, and that idle labor is worth paying to have on call on site essentially for when the specific needed task is done. To an extent for sure, but that is the idea of more specialized jobs. There isn't always enough work in front of you to have a specialist work 100% 24/7 like some CPU, but you want them around for when there is work for them to do.
This is entirely caused by construction companies that take too many jobs and don't allocate sufficient equipment. They want to spread themselves and their equipment thin to have as many concurrent jobs as possible.
I definitely see that too especially in jobs for homeowners where people might not know better to add time based penalties into contract. But you also see this in city work from city employees using city equipment where there is none of this contractor gamesmanship going on, only an ever increasing backlog of work from aging infrastructure and a municipal government disinterested in facing the music and paying for the associated increases in labor demand.
Even with all the availability of equipment and labor on hand, sometimes you must wait for the excavator to do its job first before you can begin. You cannot weld a pipe together when there is still earth to clear and the pipe to be welded is sitting on the truck. You cannot parallelize all work, some is inherently serial.
It's also a terribly foolish idea to try and drive endless efficiency out of scenarios like this. People have tried this with bureaucracies many times, and then one day a disaster happens or they have a huge project with a deadline or whatever, and the flexibility/inefficiency of the organization has been driven out to the point that previously achievable goals become impossible. Slack in systems is a _good_ thing.
no i think there are alot of people inside companies that are essentially playing telephone. they are communicating, writing documents and emails, "working". but really they actually produce nothing
That's pretty much sales. If the market were efficient and easy to navigate as a buyer there wouldn't be a need for salespeople, just like how I can buy my own cereal without one. Imagine if you went to buy cereal and the sign said "call for quote." Imagine that extended to every single item you can possibly purchase. The world would stop from the inefficiency. And yet we tolerate it especially in business 2 business setting because hey its not our money we are spending, and smooth talking works really well on our monkey brains.
Or worse, you removed the workers and left the 'telephone' people.
In my anecdotal experience, MOST companies don't take any time to understand what they are cutting.
They kill "Project X" so the easy answer is that everyone involved with Project X must go. Regardless if they were useful or could be useful elsewhere.
Yeah, the idea that there is a rampant amount of slack in the modern US corporation is just odd. Go speak to workers and ask them if they feel that they have slack.
Slack hasn't been a thing for like 40 years, in fact it's mostly the opposite I'd argue where there is such little slack that employers often steal wages from their workers to gain even more profits.
I guess we can evaluate this claim by looking at profit margins. In industries with thin margins (eg., retail often has 1-2%) then there is significant competitive pressure. There we would not see "spare labour" because it would be competed-away.
In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.
I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.
That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.
> There we would not see "spare labour" because it would be competed-away.
This only works (reliably) in an idealized free market.
That is to say, in the classroom.
In the real world, there are a myriad of reasons in any given situation why a company might have a low profit margin, but still have loads of inefficiencies and other imperfections that haven't been, and won't be, "competed away".
Yep, the "bullshit jobs" narrative sounds like an elegant description of corporate reality at the macro level, but always seems to fall apart whenever I've seen specific examples given which do in fact serve a useful purpose when interrogated.
(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)
My latest armchair theory is that bullshit jobs might be like “junk” DNA, which researchers learned isn’t actually junk and influences various cellular and genetic behavior, just not through direct protein instruction.
Or as engineers know: sometimes legacy code doesn’t initially appear to do anything, but then messing with it has unexpected effects.
A small startup usually has little-to-no "junk" or "fat" to trim.
But as orgs grow, and since we have imperfect knowledge and communication systems, more an more "junk" or "connectivity" roles emerge.
Microsoft: 223,000 employees
Alphabet / Google: 198,933
Apple: 150,000
Oracle: 141,000
Meta / Facebook: 75,472
I tried to stay way from companies with retail or warehouse workers like Amazon and Walmart (though Apple likely has a lot of retail).
I don't see HOW companies get to that size without some "junk DNA" that keeps it operating.
Maybe in the next few years we'll have AI-powered knowledge bases and communication lanes that smooths things out, but - how do we 'quantify' what "Steve, the guy who has been there for 22 years and works as the company phonebook and knows who to refer you for the thing you need"
I think its easier to state "bullshit jobs" but the reality is every single job has "bullshit tasks" and usually these are the easiest things to do. TPS reports and the like. BS Tasks are ripe for AI to do the drudgery but I don't think there are a lot of actual full time jobs where the entire job is BS. These can't exist en masse for very long in capitalist companies.
There's always Dunbar's number - the larger an organization gets beyond the capacity of people to socially know one another, the greater the "what do they even do?" types of attitudes form about other distant parts of an organization.
The original study defined "bullshit job" as something the worker described as "not societally useful". Well, my job is not societally useful, but is not bullshit job.
My company is earning money on my work and customers use my software to earn more money. But, that is it, I am not a doctor, I am not a teacher, I am not making the world better. It is a business, not unethical one, but also not world saving.
Products and services that work and that people want and need are societally useful. You've moved the goal posts from "useful" to "world saving" and used that to discount the original description. That's seems odd to me.
Bullshit jobs don't mean that they are full of dead time, it means jobs that don't really matter. Like if SalesForce disappeared tomorrow the world would be fine, but if all your garbage collectors disappeared you'd likely descend into chaos and start several public health crises quite quickly.
A small but meaningful percentage of people have the jobs that they have because they are some combination of fun to be around, attractive, and well-connected. All of these qualities can be productive in some pursuits (a club promoter needs to be fun to be around, a model needs to be attractive (usually), a financier needs to be well-connected), but they are all too often wasted on e-mail jobs.
Perhaps in general but for knowledge workers or creative people, what is productive is hard to measure. That also happens to be the most valuable work.
Hot take: who fucking cares. People need to eat and buy homes. We don't need to optimize ourselves into oblivion for the sake of number go up. Because we sure as hell don't have any sort of social safety net here in the US, and if AI takes as many jobs as these chuds say it will then we're going to have a BIG fucking problem on our hands.
I think it's quite clear to anyone with eyes attached to their brains that we're not getting fully automated gay luxury space communism. The AI will just replace the good jobs and leave us with the service industry wage-slavery. Given the choice, I'd much rather an abundance of bullshit email jobs and people with food than the alternative that's being presented currently.
One thing I've been thinking about is Baumol's Cost Disease. It's usually applied in at a macro scale across an economy: when a job somewhere becomes much more efficient, it makes all other jobs comparatively more expensive.
I've started to notice this on a micro scale as well. I am 20x more productive at coding and scripting, but I don't spend more of my time coding. My time is now filled with things like presentations, Jira, QA, etc. Ironically, despite all of the automation, the things that are painstaking and time consuming disproportionately require more time now.
"90% of American working hours are spent on tasks with little or no coverage from existing benchmarks" just says there are a lot more different tasks than benchmarks. This is a comment on the measuring tool, not AI.
Curious how food service is at 0 tasks covered by AI. A few places have been switching to using those robots on wheels to run food to tables. And Doordash and Uber Eats have some robot and drone delivery in select markets now.
> Is this not just a gimmick? You still need people on hand to take over if the robot has an issue, I don't see how it would reduce labour costs.
"take over IF the robot has an issue" is exactly how it reduces labor costs.
2020: 10 waiters, waiting tables. You're on the hook for each of their salaries.
2030: 10 robots, one human waiter passively overseeing the cluster. You're on the hook for minor parts/occasional repair for the robots, and one person's salary.
Its not about a 100% staff elimination, but a large overhead reduction ensuring the few humans you're keeping around are more efficient overall for dollars generated in revenue versus the all-human staff before.
Plus, in certain cases, like kiosks replacing cashiers at fast food establishments, there's now one less qualification needed from employees (good social skills), increasing the pool of acceptable options you can hire where before some of those candidates would have been unsuitable for the job.
You're on the hook for more than a supervisor. Depreciation, financing, or lease payments on the robots is a big one.
And what do the robots do? Wheel the food to the table, where the customers then need to reach for the plates and pass them around? Not a great experience. Or actually set the plate in front of each diner, without dumping it, like a human waiter does? Much more sophisticated and expensive robot.
It seems in China hotels commonly have robots deliver room service meals. I guess it makes sense, the building is not too hard to navigate for a robot, and it would take a worker 3+ minutes for each delivery. I thought it was maybe a gimmick, but it seems >30% of hotels have them now.
The demand for food delivery in the places where the robots are viable is nearly infinite. My city has had them for two years and there are still just as many humans doing deliveries, they are just sharing the already-crowded sidewalks with robots.
I don't use them; not because of any moral objection, but because they can't come inside buildings. The whole point of food delivery is to avoid going outside. Most human couriers come directly to your unit. The food delivery companies have spoiled us too much, and we are not ready to return to a world where you have to put on shoes to get food. Oddly, the delivery robots are probably better suited to suburbia, where folks are used to answering the front door to pick up a food delivery. But the distances involved aren't viable until you have delivery Waymos that can move at highway speeds.
They're seemingly talking about a motorized platform inside a restaurant delivering to "the table" not those door to door delivery robots you drop food inside that drive on the sidewalk.
Krispy Kreme has started using AI to take orders and it's awful. Terrible. Always gets everything wrong and you have to correct it. I think their phone system is AI too now. Madness.
Based on my own experience working on AI-based solutions for one of the better-covered job families according to this map, I think 90% might be overstating the case. It's true that we've got a lot of published benchmarks, but they tend to cover the lowest value add tasks.
It's really easy to fall into the McNamara fallacy when rolling out these kinds of solutions. Focusing on the low value stuff is attractive. It tends to be easier to do, and also easier to quantify outcomes. But it also tends to direct attention away from important but difficult to quantify considerations, which may mean you don't notice negative externalities. So we often found ourselves in a verschilmmbessern situation where automating what we could automate made things worse overall.
I feel like the big takeaway here isn't what's covered or not covered, but the percentages.
We have 3 companies claiming something like a $35T market for their services. The world's entire GDP is something like $126T. So 10% of the productive work that is done on this planet, that AI can actually perform makes up fully 1/4 of the entire world's economic output? best guesses for output solely of tech companies is something like $12T. Where are they getting these figures?
Worse still most of the cost savings from AI in software development is primarily due to labor inefficiency, such as tasks more efficiently accomplished in other ways. Most of that is due to development reliance on inefficient conventions to cover for poor training and emotional insecurity. No matter how you slice it it’s always human capital problem more than a technology problem.
I understand the resistance to having nearly all labor devalued because it can be automated. We're still in the denial stage of grief.
We only tax capital gains, not the destruction of wealth or property. So someone can steal the livelihoods of millions of people with no recourse. Just like they can tear down a 100 year old house and build 3 townhouses in its place and make hundreds of thousands of dollars, despite driving up housing costs in the neighborhood to the point that they're unaffordable. Large swaths of profit in the economy are based on externalities and captured markets now.
To think we'll make it through this without tax reform is frankly naive. Tax reform as in: human labor should not be taxed, and non-human labor and capital gains should be taxed more to cover the difference - including unemployment checks and UBI when it comes to it.
Expect howls of derision from moneyed interests who will never let common sense reasoning or deduction enter the law books for the public good.
Not to defeat my own argument, but I predict we will experience a roughly 3x gain in productivity by using AI, so the output of every job would need to triple to maintain current employment levels. Will that happen anytime soon? Of course not. Which is why layoffs in the short term are inevitable. I wouldn't be surprised if unemployment hits 15+% in 2027 or 2029 just after the elections, with 25+% unemployment for the young in entry-level roles being highly likely.
> driving up housing costs in the neighborhood to the point that they're unaffordable
Thats usually a combo of lack of competition, incentives (why make $50K a unit times 10 sales when you can make $250K a unit times two sales?), and zoning laws making the cheaper thing illegal.
Some of it stemming from K shaped economy which means the most profitable audience to serve are the upper middle class and richer .
I don't know if it if 90%, but it is interesting how many things I do are not covered by standard tracking, but become visible once I am not there to keep an eye on them. Naturally, I only had one manager who kinda knew what was going on around him -- in case you are wondering: not the current one.
Following is my experience and constantly pestering my friends across the industry for anecdotes. It isn't even that AI moves the bottleneck, the thing it solves was never the bottleneck in the first place (except for certain narrow verticals). AI both can't and doesn't do your thinking for you and worse yet, it robs you of the environment where you do your best thinking about data structures, algorithms, organization, etc. Code. Of course we can do that in natural language, but it's hardly the right tool for the job.
All this being said, I don't think AI usage will meaningfully go down in the long run cause it's a very powerful dopamine loop and tech companies are very good at making those. How many people report social media making them unhappy and how many people do you know who have actually quit? Or to paraphrase Jim Gaffigan, nobody says they eat at McDonalds, but the sign outside says "billions served". Somebody's lying (and it's not McDonalds).
Because it's a bullshit slop research. Under computer programmers there is "Develop Websites" at 0. Apparently AI cannot write web sites. Or just nobody looked at the slop they generated at Mercor.
It's time for the rest of the world to learn about Amdahl's Law. Even if we flipped a switch and tomorrow everything that could reasonably done by AI was suddenly free and instantaneous, the world does not instantly transform into an AI paradise wonderland of free goodies and lollipops because there's still plenty of other things that need to be done for goodie and lollipop production and distribution.
I guess if I wanted to put my skepticism about the AI stock bubble into one little phrase, it would be that I don't think the bubble has accounted for Amdahl's Law. Costs don't actually go to zero with AI, and there's a huge difference between costs falling even 90% and costs falling a full 100%. And the difference between "30% improvement this year, trending to 85% in five years" and "90% this year" is pretty significant too.
This was obvious from the beginning but greed has deluded people to the point of utter absurdity. The comeuppance on this whole thing is going to make me run out of napkins and resort to finger lickin'.
A lot of what humans do does not have a tight feedback loop needed for training and agentic workflows. This is why we are not seeing the jobpocolypse and productivity gains look a lot more like the very long-term 2% per year.
We're on a forum filled with a lot of software engineers, and we might be too ready to believe this is coming for everyone's job, not only generating code.
Lest we forget that late-training is now 2/3 coding tasks because it is the main area where there is ROI for users, such that we can find a mutually beneficial arrangement to pay off their massive investments and debt, maybe, tbd - open weights may wreck their financial projections
yesterday I needed to create a spreadsheet, so in Google docs (paid Workplace account), I fire up Gemini to help with moving around text, creating columns, etc. Absolutely horrid experience -- totally useless. I ended up doing everything manually.
> ...
> But even after controlling for AI-exposure, O*NET tasks from occupations with larger wage bills are significantly overrepresented among benchmark prompts:
So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs. AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications." We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
And this points to one of the ways AI will help improve society and living standards for all: we'll have cleaner, better-maintained bathrooms, as labor one wasted on engaging intellectual tasks is redirected towards menial, low-pay tasks that still need a human touch.
Reason to be optimistic, amirite?
As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.
The safety brief is supposed to motivate you to work safely so maybe they need to work on how they present it. I saw a couple of colleagues injured in my old job (EMS) but only seen a member of the public decapitated.
The work is was doing in big tech was pretty far from anything that would help people in any tangible way.
The money isn't as good but the office view is way better.
I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
I'm not sure how the news being delivered by a carbon-based pilot would help with the dying part but I guess hospice care exists for a reason.
Also adding a new circuit to a panel is different than extending one from inside
I don’t do the work myself.
Yes it is. YC has a company working on picking strawberries, even. Hardware takes longer than software, but if you think the robots aren't coming, you're not paying attention. The only question is how long will they take to reach the general public? There are test runs already in automotive factories and elsewhere, and yeah, they're slow and don't work very well, for now, but there's a lot of money going into making them better.
And then where will we be?
Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.
AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.
The same goes for self-driving cars. It's a exponential, hockey-stick curve that at some point crosses the level of human ability. There is nothing "linear" about it and your suggestion of parallels to former experience is wildly misguided.
People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming. The "obstacles" there are of the kind of "we always did it this way", but that's no real "moat"?
The bubble regarding the big AI firms may well collapse, but the assumption, that was somehow improving the situation is far-fetched.
People automated out of a job will either compete with those in other jobs or be dependent on support. Either way, salaries will fall across the board and prices rise. At an ever accelerating pace.
All the 'easy' to automate things have been automated already. A lot of things that were not automated is because there are small bits of problematic things that made it not worth while or the loss slightly too high. AI vision systems solve a lot of this.
There's nothing inherently wrong with automating away certain jobs, particularly if they're dirty, dangerous or repetitive. And I include agriculture in this. The problem is how we as a society handle that. Do we let AI specifically and automation in general to make a handful of people more wealthy? Or do we share those benefits so people have to work less? In short, it's an income and wealth distribution question.
Sadly, I think we're automation will mean minting trillionaires while the fabric of society unravels around us.
Previously privileged people having a hard time is maybe a good recipe for class solidarity, which is maybe something we could use in society. Maybe it will be good for us... collectively, if not individually.
Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
EDIT: But also, I suspect I would be "fuck-you angry' at reading this comment if I had a family depending on me.
It's the reason AI company leaders are so adamant about framing it as a post-singularity utopia with UBI. They have no answer other than "you're all going to be jobless, better figure that out." Worse yet, they see it merely as a policy problem, rather than a problem they're responsible for. It _is_ a policy problem, no doubt, but the angry mobs won't be coming for policy.
I think you're confused. The true upper class isn't going anywhere, those are the people so rich they don't need to work (and if they do "work," it's tending their empire). They'll keep getting richer.
The "downward mobility" you're talking about the upper middle class and middle class. People who need to work, but can live comfortably on their wages. This is really about flattening the working class into its poorer levels (and kicking away the ladders the people in those levels could use to lead a more comfortable life, no more getting a college degree and graduating from the factory floor to the office).
It's about increasing inequality and creating an unbridgeable chasm between the poor and rich.
Are you talking about violent revolution?
Some disorganized thoughts:
1. The professional classes are so unused to violence, they'll probably undermine the chances of violent revolution (e.g. reflexively supporting gun control, seeing such voilence through the lens "school shootings" and other crime, and being likely to report it, etc.).
2. The professional class is losing a lot of its economic power. The time for solidarity and non-violent action way 5 years ago, but the "happy to play along" professionals (e.g. libertarian software engineers) botched their best opportunities. From here on out it will be harder.
3. As all of this is happening, technology is helping to undermining the ability of the masses to do anything about it: IRL community declining, people getting mesmerized and isolated by social media, AI-enabled surveillance, AI-enabled astroturfing and propaganda, autonomous AI weapons, etc.
4. Even if what you say is true, the clock is ticking. Wait a generation and the "former professional class" will be gone as a distinct thing, and their kids will join an undifferentiated mass of poor who have normalized and internalized their circumstances, as they have no first-hand experience of better times.
No they just need killer robots to shoot anyone who gets uppity.
You also have this hilarious talk of "privilege" with this weird assumption that all of the white collar workers of course come from great privilege (perhaps telling on yourself and letting your guilt come out), despite many of us having grown up poor, are from poor areas, and worked our way out.
> I'll take you up on that attempt to find a silver lining:
Furthermore, why do you believe that the only possible outcome of class solidarity is violent revolution? Why do you believe that any revolution would inevitably settle on, presumably, a specifically soviet model of government and economic policy? I find that most american adults, even ones who otherwise seem intelligent, seem to have this picture of economic and power relations that just kind of sounds like a half-remembered bad cartoon of a cold war that ended before I was born.
The lump of labor fallacy needs to go away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Yes, I'm sure all the wage slaves who are suddenly forced out of the labor market that was barely allowing them to scrape by paycheck to paycheck will suddenly start creating new businesses and become investors in new technology and not just become homeless leading to a massive increase in diseases/crimes of despair.
If (and it's a massive if) what passes for AI these days gets good enough to replace any substantial number of workers it will be a disaster.
Some of the projects we've done would have required 4-6 additional people, but realistically, pre-ai, we would just not do the project or we would do it over a period 3-4x longer.
There's just so much to do.
Company stock value goes up when they lay off staff. Next quarter shareholder maximization is the goal. AI and layoffs is the strategy to get there.
No, we are currently unable to do most tasks that require physical manipulation, independent of what anyone wants.
The only “disinflation” consumers have experienced is devaluation of products through obsolescence as newer, often more expensive alternatives enter the market.
The prices of all those things continue to skyrocket.
I'm almost cynically happy about Moore's law ending and hardware getting expensive if this is what it takes to improve software in the long term.
I'm sure some storage servers or storage appliances were built with many TB even then but it wasn't really something I saw a lot.
Can you? I assume you mean spinning platter, but even then.
Computer parts are unaffordable this year.
“I can't eat an iPad.”
> Best not to cite the price of the new iPad as an example of why inflation isn't a problem when you head into a working-class neighborhood. In Queens, New York, on Friday, New York Fed President William Dudley did just that. He got an earful. After being bombarded with questions about food inflation, Dudley attempted to reassure his audience by putting rising commodity prices into a broader economic context -- but that only made matters worse. "When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?" one audience member asked. Dudley tried to explain how the Fed sees things: Yes, food and energy prices may be rising, but at the same time, other prices are declining. He then stretched for a real world example. The only problem was he chose the Apple's latest tablet computer that hit stores on Friday, which may be more popular at the New York Fed's headquarters near Wall Street than it is on the gritty streets of Queens. "Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful," he said."You have to look at the prices of all things." This prompted guffaws and widespread murmuring from the audience, with one audience member calling the comment "tone deaf." "I can't eat an iPad," another said.
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...
Of course, competition leading to near-zero profits means most competitors collapse, and the remnants get bought up by monopolists or oligopolists who then become rent extractors.
The technology was fundamentally developed with government grants to universities, or corporate labs like Bell Labs that were funded by a legal mandate on its parent corporation. Capitalists can only develop products that are basically ready for market, their margins are thin and planning horizons can only survive about 5 years usually. Their main power is throwing oodles of money at something ready to go and scaling it.
Edit: I will be slightly more charitable and note that capitalist companies can also do incremental research if there is a gentle and obvious hill to climb. Sometimes people do make crazy bets and they pay off, but that's more the exception, in America the dominant driver of technological innovation is government funded research supplied by capitalist scaled technologies (i.e. you research the next paradigm in the lab and purchase e.g. pre-existing computing resources from a company).
More and more it’s seeming that the “societal benefits” from the last fifty years of progress have largely been concentrated at the top.
Spending on food as a percent of income has declined significantly (~30%) over the past 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa.... The decline has flatlined over the past ~20 years, but at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home.
House spending as a percent of income also seems to have declined over the past 50 years (https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2023/04/26/spending-on-...). To be honest, this one surprised me, I would've bet the other way.
There are always individual counterexamples. And yet as a whole the cost of healthcare has exploded.
> at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home
A lot of that is poverty, not affluence. People working two jobs and living in food deserts aren’t cooking a lot of meals at home. It’s expensive being poor.
> People working two jobs and living in food deserts aren’t cooking a lot of meals at home
The percent of people with multiple jobs has declined over the past 30 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 (longest time series I could find)
Right now it's £5.60, but that says more about the decline of the British Pound than an increase in the price of wheat.
Massive food price deflation has been one of the wonders of the modern world. Hopefully the last few years were only a small blip on this overall trend.
"It might get better in 500 years" is not exactly comforting thought.
Cheap food is still cheap. If some doomsday scenario ever comes along, I'll be forever sorry to not have stocked up on 6 years worth of calories that now cost less than a monthly salary. World market prices per metric ton: wheat like $300, rice $500.
But that's not mutually exclusive with absurd levels of wealth concentration.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/inflation-chart-tracks-pric...
Doesn't include foods, but it certainly punctures the "That family isn't aaactually in financial trouble, they have a refrigerator and a phone and a TV" statements from certain pundits. (A class of people who are often disconnected from the average person's budgeting situation.)
You pick the highest leverage occupation first. Automating lawyers gives you.. angry lawyers? Automating programmers gives you improved ways of doing literally all other things because all other automation requires.. automation. That is to say bucketloads of software.
It’s completely obvious what the play is here and it has nothing to do with pay. We pay peanuts for tokens so automating a developer for 200-500 a month worth of tokens ain’t getting you to a trillion a year.
RSI is the play and it’s already happening. Our work is easier and faster and anyone that claims otherwise I have a very hard time taking serious.
You think they come for mathematicians’ pay? If you want to earn money I guarantee you they need to automate some other low-hanging fruits first that pay a lot better.
No, programming and math is basically what AI research is. You automate that and you got the golden ticket to all other things.
Most importantly, in these fields results can be easily verified which means that if you have enough compute, that you can generate correct training data. OpenAI had an early story - which could be a lie of course - about how they tried to train a robot but the actuators would be toast before the robot would have learned. Math and programming doesn't have such problems.
No it isn't. Doing work more efficiently through the use of LLMs is not RSI. RSI requires a closed loop automated LLM iteration process which we are not at all close to right now.
Sure, if you redefine what that means.
Before this year, "recursive self-improvement" in the context of AI research meant the holy grail: an artificial intelligence that was capable of improving itself, unattended, in ways that humans can't even imagine, so that within a relatively short period of time, it reaches superintelligence and ignites the Singularity.
What's happening now is emphatically not that. And if you think it is, you are buying straight-up propaganda. "I gave an LLM a tool that lets it make largely-random decisions about how to train its next iteration when I tell it to do so" bears little to no resemblance to RSI. Because it is, beyond a rounding error, completely missing out on the "improvement" part.
We're automating high paying careers and making what, the consumer's todo list and budgeting apps cheaper for them? My expensive smartphone is going to cost me ~$10/mo over its lifespan. I don't care if most of these consumer products get cheaper when they're a tiny portion of my spending
Which doesn’t play well with “savings for consumers”, because these consumers will be unemployed.
I know, this time it’s different, AI is different, blah blah blah.
Just like good blue collar jobs were shipped overseas, good knowledge jobs are going to be shipped to GPUs whenever they can.
Bud, thinking that for-profit corporations - many of whom are in an oligopoly or monopoly position in their markets - are going to pass along savings from not paying people is like thinking the stripper really likes you.
Remember how things were cheaper before the pandemic? Well, there were supply shortages and prices rose accordingly. Supply and demand at work, nothing surprising there. The supply chain shocks eventually went away. Some prices have sort-of come down, but many just haven't. Why? Because the people selling goods and services now know that people can and will pay the higher price.
Now, they might do that through taking on debt and working additional jobs to the detriment of themselves, their families, their communities, and their country, but no one who both matters and can do something about it keeps track of those things.
https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm
Isn't it just typical the humans get automation v1 the wrong way around, haha
Yes like all the drivers and truckers who retained 10 years ago because self driving cars will take their jobs. Lucky all of them retrained in time!
...don't you think the ability to create virtually unlimited amounts of software, at virtually no cost, is going to lead to major advances in robotics? I realize there's a lot of very hard problems involved in e.g. robotic hands (to take one example), but once software development is practically free, I'd expect a lot of seemingly-impossible problems to get resolved by the sheer quantity of what we can create and experiment with.
Our labor power is going to be fully eroded and the robots will not be serving us.
In the future, do bathrooms need to be cleaned? If yes, is it cheaper for that to be done by a person or by a robot?
Obviously, it is in the interest of the robot manufacturers to make the robot just a tiny bit cheaper than the person, so you'll buy the robot and the company makes the maximum amount of profit.
Now, if society breaks down and there's no one to consider buying the robot—well, that's not good for anybody, which is why I suspect society will find some way of working this out even if it's not ideal. But whatever, I don't particularly want to argue this point.
What I do want to argue is that there probably isn't a universe in which all white collar work goes away but blue collar work is still around.
Not sure what this "society" that works things out is, exactly. Top-down high-modernist plans for how society ought to work are the past; chaotic, twitchy, thrashy responses to disruption by a tiny elite class is where we are now.
Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.
Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.
AI likely does accelerate robotics usefully - certainly in sensing and control. But there are major bottlenecks that are not software, that AI can only help with as a generic engineering tool, same as it helps planes and fridges.
Imagine I give you a perfect roadmap to build that robot...
Responding to your edit, none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software.
That trash picker may never compete with a human. There's no reason to assume it will.
edit:
> none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software
Maybe the difficulties of motors and batteries are not intuitive. Look at their improvement rates over time. It's a far cry from transistor counts or FLOPS. And look at the performance and efficiency of humans and other animals. We are absurdly strong, light, efficient and cheap to maintain. The gap is huge and not closing quickly.
If it's not C3PO it's a Boston Dynamics dog with a couple appendages, better software, and automated manufacturing.
iRobot, the company that shipped the most robots in history because they focused super hard on finding a cost-effective subset of cleaning tasks, failed to scale up to other even closely related tasks, went bust and was sold off.
But yeah, it's probably straightforward, right?
Advanced robotics would need to become quite cheap for them to become more affordable and convenient than a minimum-wage employee. And physical fields like materials engineering are known for moving quite slowly and at their own pace, so I'm not sure how much automation could help there.
That's the last barrier we have right now that prevents the total obsolescence (and therefore destruction) of the common worker.
Oh don't worry Mr. Former Software Engineer. You won't be picking up the trash or cleaning toilets. You have things like an expectation for your work to pay a reasonable wage. You'll be passed over for a third world immigrant who'll work for a pittance, and they'll be replaced only when robots are capable enough and cheap enough to undercut _them_.
Or maybe, idk, we do something about this?
I'm already a part of a generation that's the first in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents.
"They" figured out that it's a lot easier to hillclimb AI on verifiable digital tasks, and it just so happened that white collar jobs tend to pay more
Ai will decimate customer support jobs but those are not considered highly paid
If robotics continue to progress, we'll have all the robots to do our dishes and clean our bathrooms as you wish
the same robot that cleans your bathroom can also wash your dishes, fold your clothes, defend your home, fix your gutters, etc
(the bottleneck of which is the brain, aka software)
What tech people are discovering now (some of them at least) is that they have more in common with the trash man than they do with Jeff Bezos. Many, particularly on HN, viewed themselves as temporary embarrassed billionaires (to borrow the arguably misattributed Steinbeck quote). So they sought to preserve a system that they ultimately thought would benefit them and they were only one exit away from that reality.
This is a rude shock for many. For some, it'll be the beginning of class consciousness. Hopefully society doesn't completely unravel before the pendulum swings the other way.
If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".
If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
> ...
> If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian.
No it's more dystopian. The "historical accident" was a little respite, where some workers could be comfortable and well off. They had a little market power to take the edge off their exploitation.
Now that market power is taken away, and they can enjoy the poverty they were always "meant" to have.
> In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
Come on. Society isn't going to value "keeping restrooms clean." The people doing that will continue to be poorly paid and disrespected. It's just the opportunities to do something better will be taken away, so there will be more labor available for that kind of work.
I'll say this: I'm teaching myself every skill I can think of. I'm already pretty decent at finish carpentry, structural carpentry, electrical, mechanical work, HVAC, auto repair, auto body, welding and a few other less lucrative things.
I was thinking briefly I might want to go to law school, but who knows how much longer that's going to be a thing.
Reason to unionize, more like.
This is also the reason absolutely no attention is spent on evolving B2C products.
What is being exploited is the overt attention businesses pay to their own cost metrics, to the point where broader strategy is getting thrown under the bus in favor of efficiency. I believe this is an illusion, and for many companies that jump on board, sober learnings are right around the corner.
That is the only path under Capitalism, so we shouldn't expect any different.
All those are physical things and physical LLMs are right around the corner. It’s coming for those jobs too within the next year or two I would imagine. Especially the ones you mentioned seem very easy for a robot to do. There are some physical tasks that will take much longer like being an electrician or a plumber or a roofer. There’s too much precision and intricacy involved in those but cleaning out a restroom and resupplying it that’s easy as hell. A robot like Figure 3 could probably do those autonomously today somewhat badly.
But is it cheaper than paying someone around $5 in labor to do it? Because until it is, it's not economical to have a robot do it.
> that being said of course I think it’s going to be way less than $5 an hour if you have a robot do it.
This is about an LLM-powered robot, not just a robot. At standard API prices, it'd run over $5 before it finished opening the door.
I think you may also be incorrect on your notion that training data is proportional to good models if anything the opposite is true. what ai models are ultimately trying to be are a universal theorem prover and encode all human knowledge into "theorems" and rulesets
not trying to come off too harsh here but i think most of the work is just innovating on the frontier or people pleasing
It's just harder to do. Would not be at all surprised to see e.g. Autodesk bought out for exactly that purpose.
You don't even need Autodesk. You can have Claude whip up a web app and build a higher level understanding of the building and then translate it to whatever output or format you desire.
Only if people care enough to pay extra; the majority of the market is for functional buildings that look ok, and unless we decide to value humanity, slop buildings will be cheaper.
In fact, a lot of stuff is already slop, largely because of the design and engineering expertise required. I don't think one-shotting "design me a house in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright with these specifications" is that far off.
[1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/2109361546505966046?s=20
Which is a tautology, but also a bit of practical wisdom.
I find it interesting how concurrent model sessions seem to operate with a very strong bias toward quick resolutions, including sharing or giving up control, to create efficient decision making structures, relative to humans.
When I was a kid, I loved Bjork’s song “Army of Me”, because I knew a 1000 of me collaborating and communicating without friction. would be all I needed to take over the world, fix everything, expand civilization, etc. We would not waste time.
I wonder how much of their hyper-team play is by training, and how much is their awareness of the game theory real politic. So individual sessions don’t invest their identity and self-worth in any given context run.
My dream has been almost achieved. One of me and 999 of them get quite a bit done. But that trend…
Code was never the bottleneck.
I've worked with plenty of teams that did the "in prod the same day" trick without AI.
The problem was just fucking ego. Designer has an ego, product owner has an ego, QA has an ego, stakeholder has an ego, platform teams have massive egos, developers have egos.
Unrelated but: the only reason people are shipping more with AI is because more people are ok with slop now.
It feels like making these sorts of systems exist outside of the periphery would be good for everyone.
How many times have politicians for example wasted your time with promises and asks and rhetoric with no follow through? Not unlike some "stakeholders" I know. It's called "office politics" for a reason. What if they were punished for this by some system?
It feels like sitting there while stakeholders yap is not so different than electing a new rep every two years and hoping something changes. The fundamental setup is broken in a world with ever accelerating growth in complexity. Doing it in this way also would probably trend to enforcing rigor in the original ask. A big problem with stakeholders is they don't really know what they want, like politicians who make economic promises yet never show their work before showing up and asking for your vote.
This inevitably results in suboptimal dynamics like bureaucracy, empire building, territorialism and other things that get lumped under “office politics,” which drains a lot of energy away from more productive efforts.
So you can see how AI solves that problem too ;-)
(Only half joking)
Ego and agendas multiplied by 1000.
This is the kind of shit I have to fight every day. I have to align my manager, skip, VP. If I don't align them, one of them will be necessarily pissed no matter what I do, and the pissed one will fire orders down to hate on me, overriding the opinions of anyone on the way down.
Fortunately for our employers, it's illegal for us to build a competitor in our free time.
"Stakeholder" ranks #1 among corporate bullshit roles. It serves a dual purpose: (a) representing a group so nobody can be blamed for excluding them, and (b) providing typically useless feedback so that the group appears to actually care or have a clue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I have to mention words like "stakeholder" at behavioral interviews and to leadership just to sound like I belong at my seniority level.
But I don't want anyone holding any stakes. I wish people would just get shit done. Shit that matters to the CEO. Or leave.
I don't want people holding stakes because they want a promotion, because their direct manager wants to launch a corporate political battle into another team, or because some salesperson wants to get a commision for an otherwise worthless customer. I don't want roadblocks in the name of security so that the IT guy has a sense of self-worth. I don't want someone trying to protect their egos around something they worked on for 3 years, when there's new tech that supersedes it.
Anyone who has to work with the product is a stakeholder. Their stake in it is the fact that they will be interacting with it, and thus they care how, and whether, it works.
For example, the “social workers & care -> counsel parents with child rearing problems” category is considered “well covered” because there are 13 prompts.
It’s self-evident that the spectrum of work carried out by a social worker undertaking that work cannot be well represented by thirteen prompts.
I suspect if you really strictly defined “covered well”, to the extent that any normal person would use that phrase, the headline would be above 99.9%.
Like any sizable population, there are absolutely some do-nothing inefficiencies to be culled. But most of the time it's just onlookers seeing a tiny slice of the day to be interpreted from their very limited vantage.
Even with all the availability of equipment and labor on hand, sometimes you must wait for the excavator to do its job first before you can begin. You cannot weld a pipe together when there is still earth to clear and the pipe to be welded is sitting on the truck. You cannot parallelize all work, some is inherently serial.
Both are probably true to some extent, and would vary a lot between different orgs.
Or worse, you removed the workers and left the 'telephone' people.
In my anecdotal experience, MOST companies don't take any time to understand what they are cutting.
They kill "Project X" so the easy answer is that everyone involved with Project X must go. Regardless if they were useful or could be useful elsewhere.
Or they cut by salary, employment length, etc.
Slack hasn't been a thing for like 40 years, in fact it's mostly the opposite I'd argue where there is such little slack that employers often steal wages from their workers to gain even more profits.
In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.
I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.
That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.
This only works (reliably) in an idealized free market.
That is to say, in the classroom.
In the real world, there are a myriad of reasons in any given situation why a company might have a low profit margin, but still have loads of inefficiencies and other imperfections that haven't been, and won't be, "competed away".
(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)
Or as engineers know: sometimes legacy code doesn’t initially appear to do anything, but then messing with it has unexpected effects.
Especially as organizations grow in size.
A small startup usually has little-to-no "junk" or "fat" to trim.
But as orgs grow, and since we have imperfect knowledge and communication systems, more an more "junk" or "connectivity" roles emerge.
Microsoft: 223,000 employees
Alphabet / Google: 198,933
Apple: 150,000
Oracle: 141,000
Meta / Facebook: 75,472
I tried to stay way from companies with retail or warehouse workers like Amazon and Walmart (though Apple likely has a lot of retail).
I don't see HOW companies get to that size without some "junk DNA" that keeps it operating.
Maybe in the next few years we'll have AI-powered knowledge bases and communication lanes that smooths things out, but - how do we 'quantify' what "Steve, the guy who has been there for 22 years and works as the company phonebook and knows who to refer you for the thing you need"
There's always Dunbar's number - the larger an organization gets beyond the capacity of people to socially know one another, the greater the "what do they even do?" types of attitudes form about other distant parts of an organization.
My company is earning money on my work and customers use my software to earn more money. But, that is it, I am not a doctor, I am not a teacher, I am not making the world better. It is a business, not unethical one, but also not world saving.
Per original definition, it is a bullshit job.
From what I see on many recent TV ads, not really.
People are producing output that is worse than "doing nothing".
I think it's quite clear to anyone with eyes attached to their brains that we're not getting fully automated gay luxury space communism. The AI will just replace the good jobs and leave us with the service industry wage-slavery. Given the choice, I'd much rather an abundance of bullshit email jobs and people with food than the alternative that's being presented currently.
I've started to notice this on a micro scale as well. I am 20x more productive at coding and scripting, but I don't spend more of my time coding. My time is now filled with things like presentations, Jira, QA, etc. Ironically, despite all of the automation, the things that are painstaking and time consuming disproportionately require more time now.
Is this not just a gimmick? You still need people on hand to take over if the robot has an issue, I don't see how it would reduce labour costs.
"take over IF the robot has an issue" is exactly how it reduces labor costs.
2020: 10 waiters, waiting tables. You're on the hook for each of their salaries.
2030: 10 robots, one human waiter passively overseeing the cluster. You're on the hook for minor parts/occasional repair for the robots, and one person's salary.
Its not about a 100% staff elimination, but a large overhead reduction ensuring the few humans you're keeping around are more efficient overall for dollars generated in revenue versus the all-human staff before.
Plus, in certain cases, like kiosks replacing cashiers at fast food establishments, there's now one less qualification needed from employees (good social skills), increasing the pool of acceptable options you can hire where before some of those candidates would have been unsuitable for the job.
And what do the robots do? Wheel the food to the table, where the customers then need to reach for the plates and pass them around? Not a great experience. Or actually set the plate in front of each diner, without dumping it, like a human waiter does? Much more sophisticated and expensive robot.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202609/10/WS6aa122a5e4b06d4a...
I don't use them; not because of any moral objection, but because they can't come inside buildings. The whole point of food delivery is to avoid going outside. Most human couriers come directly to your unit. The food delivery companies have spoiled us too much, and we are not ready to return to a world where you have to put on shoes to get food. Oddly, the delivery robots are probably better suited to suburbia, where folks are used to answering the front door to pick up a food delivery. But the distances involved aren't viable until you have delivery Waymos that can move at highway speeds.
It's really easy to fall into the McNamara fallacy when rolling out these kinds of solutions. Focusing on the low value stuff is attractive. It tends to be easier to do, and also easier to quantify outcomes. But it also tends to direct attention away from important but difficult to quantify considerations, which may mean you don't notice negative externalities. So we often found ourselves in a verschilmmbessern situation where automating what we could automate made things worse overall.
We have 3 companies claiming something like a $35T market for their services. The world's entire GDP is something like $126T. So 10% of the productive work that is done on this planet, that AI can actually perform makes up fully 1/4 of the entire world's economic output? best guesses for output solely of tech companies is something like $12T. Where are they getting these figures?
I understand the resistance to having nearly all labor devalued because it can be automated. We're still in the denial stage of grief.
We only tax capital gains, not the destruction of wealth or property. So someone can steal the livelihoods of millions of people with no recourse. Just like they can tear down a 100 year old house and build 3 townhouses in its place and make hundreds of thousands of dollars, despite driving up housing costs in the neighborhood to the point that they're unaffordable. Large swaths of profit in the economy are based on externalities and captured markets now.
To think we'll make it through this without tax reform is frankly naive. Tax reform as in: human labor should not be taxed, and non-human labor and capital gains should be taxed more to cover the difference - including unemployment checks and UBI when it comes to it.
Expect howls of derision from moneyed interests who will never let common sense reasoning or deduction enter the law books for the public good.
Not to defeat my own argument, but I predict we will experience a roughly 3x gain in productivity by using AI, so the output of every job would need to triple to maintain current employment levels. Will that happen anytime soon? Of course not. Which is why layoffs in the short term are inevitable. I wouldn't be surprised if unemployment hits 15+% in 2027 or 2029 just after the elections, with 25+% unemployment for the young in entry-level roles being highly likely.
Thats usually a combo of lack of competition, incentives (why make $50K a unit times 10 sales when you can make $250K a unit times two sales?), and zoning laws making the cheaper thing illegal.
Some of it stemming from K shaped economy which means the most profitable audience to serve are the upper middle class and richer .
All this being said, I don't think AI usage will meaningfully go down in the long run cause it's a very powerful dopamine loop and tech companies are very good at making those. How many people report social media making them unhappy and how many people do you know who have actually quit? Or to paraphrase Jim Gaffigan, nobody says they eat at McDonalds, but the sign outside says "billions served". Somebody's lying (and it's not McDonalds).
Apparently Epic thinks otherwise.
I guess if I wanted to put my skepticism about the AI stock bubble into one little phrase, it would be that I don't think the bubble has accounted for Amdahl's Law. Costs don't actually go to zero with AI, and there's a huge difference between costs falling even 90% and costs falling a full 100%. And the difference between "30% improvement this year, trending to 85% in five years" and "90% this year" is pretty significant too.
Yep, makes sense...
You know what? The truth doesn't matter much. If people believe in the resale value of tulips, each tulip would sell for a million.
It's the beliefs and perception that create the reality. Reality and truth don't exist on their own.
hint: it's neither
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