The longer I've been in the workforce, the more I realize most humans actually kind of suck at their jobs. LLMs being more human like is the opposite of what I want.
That could very well be because the jobs are effectively useless. By no means does that mean the people are, nor is what the income allows them to do. But most jobs sure do seem pointless.
One suggested weakness of UBI is a lack of purpose. I wonder if the "solution" is somewhat as you implied: jobs without a strict return on investment. You get your stipend, but you're keeping your block clean by sweeping and mulching. They're getting theirs in exchange for cranking out sourdough at cost for the neighbourhood. Someone else gardens for elderly residents.
Not UBI per se, but this exists in rural parts of Southern Spain in some way, and is called Rural Employment Plan (PER in its Spanish initials).
The give simple jobs, like cleaning or painting, to people on the lower bottom of earnings. Most people in that plan are people with low formation, like those who left school in their mid teens.
More like a labor subsidy, backed by taxes... Which would need a minimum wage law as well.
This seems like a great idea to me! Making it cheaper for businesses to hire people for these jobs would lower prices for everyone, improving accessibility of the services.
How would this help lower prices? The taxes have to be paid for by someone, and that cost should largely end up landing on the consumer.
It seems like we'd be changing who's hands the money moves through, but it still has to be paid for one way or another. If that's the case we'd risk higher prices since taxes have to subsidize prices and cover all the costs of running the program in the first place.
Tax the rich, and use the funds to pay a portion of the wages in targeted jobs, reducing the amount that the business has to pay to hit minimum wage. Then businesses continue competing on prices, but have substantially lower labor costs, bringing down prices for everyone.
In the end, you use money from the rich to pay for socially beneficial jobs. Exactly the sort of thing government is for: ensuring that social goods are provided.
That's an extremely complex economic change, I wouldn't be so certain we know exactly what would happen.
Taxing the rich can have unintended consequences. First you have to change the tax code so they actually get taxed and can't dodge it, those rules alone would be difficult to write effectively and would likely mean changing other parts of our tax code that impact everyone. If the rich do get taxed enough to cover a good chunk of wages, demand for luxury items would go down so too then would the jobs that make those products and services.
Once subsidized by a UBI, at best workers will continue to work at the same levels they do now. There will be an incentive for them to work less though, potentially driving up the labor costs you are trying to reduce. How do we accurately predict how many workers will reduce their hours or leave the workforce entirely? And how do we predict what that would do to prices?
The idea of taxing the rich to bail out everyone else is too often boiled down to a simple lever that, when pulled, magically fixes everything without any risk of unintended side effects.
But the idea of not changing the tax code because it might affect others, continuing to let the rich pay 0 taxes, is foolish.
There's an obvious wealth gap that's increasing and the people up top are getting even less oversight as we speak. As you say in your post, you don't know what the effects will be because it's not simple. But I see no compelling reason to continue with the oligarchy
Sure that would be foolish, my point wasn't that taxes should remain as-is forever though.
My point was that we can change taxes to a system that we think will work better today, but we can't claim to know what the actual results will be years from now.
The claim made earlier in the chains was that taxing the rich to subsidize wages would lower labor costs and lower prices. I don't think we can ever know well enough how a broad reaching change will land, and claiming to know prices will go down isn't reasonable.
That's just a cultural bias blind spot. It can be easily cured by finding a child, pointing your finger at them then say the magic words: "You must feel useless without a job!"
A much more terrible issue we suffer from already is that without participating we forget how our civilization works. Having a job gives you at least a tiny bit of insight that may partially map to other jobs.
Funny, because lack of purpose is exactly the problem with monotonous shit jobs. Compared to being able to freely choose to do something that's meaningful to you and brings you joy. Merely being able to afford food and shelter is not a purpose. It's survival.
Oh but don’t worry I’m sure all the people who imagine these schemes assume they’ll be the ones who aren’t obsolete and forced to work menial jobs.
Very similar to how ultra hard core libertarians assume they’ll be the ones at the top of the food chain calling the shots and not be just another peasant.
But it doesn’t really matter because there is no way in hell any of these LLM’s will uproot all of society. I use LLMs all the time, they are amazing, but they aren’t gonna replace many jobs at all. They just aren’t capable of that.
If we come to our senses it should be obvious that everyone needs to be physically active at least a few days per week, we need to condition brain plasticity, have to keep learning new things.
The available work offers the entire spectrum but we have to divide and plan it.
Im sure I’m overidealizing, but I’ve wanted to live off grid, or maybe in a small community.
I watch these historical farm documentary tv shows, and they show how everyone in a town had a purpose and worked together, the blacksmith, the tile maker.
And I do often think the limiting factor to a life like this is the “market” so if you could create these communities, and could be an artist/artisan/builder, without strictly having to worry about making enough to live.
I met someone recently who lived in the Galapagos islands, and she seemed to sort of live this community oriented, trading anarchocapitalist lifestyle, and I think most people would be happier if they're small capitalist or socialist community involved direct interaction with people rather than dealing with soulless corpo's all the time.
I've lived off-grid for three long summers (late spring to early fall). It's tremendous work. Most of the same systems exist it's just that one has to research, design, build, operate, maintain, and revise them instead of somebody else doing all that. Everybody has different goals, but for me, maintaining my own potable water system is not a goal or something I'm interested in. Living off-grid did change my perspective on some things. For example, I know now that I produce about a 4-gallon bucket of poop each month and yet my house has a tremendous sewer connection.
Let people choose if they want to do something, but have a concerted effort to encourage/suggest things that might give them purpose and build a community. Leave them to decide their hours and effort. Maybe someone wants to clean the gutters for their entire block at 6am and then go tinker in the shed for half the day. I'm sure that sounds really lazy, but this concept is working up from a default UBI that is pay-for-no-job.
I can imagine loads of tasks or jobs that would be quite pleasant if it weren't for stressing over efficiency or business admin.
Nobody is going to choose to be a ditch digger without a financial incentive. Most jobs worth doing are unpleasant or difficult. Thats why people pay for the labor!
I mean think about it…when was the last time you heard of charity gutter cleaning services? People would much rather enjoy their leisure time on hobbies or with family/friends.
Why would there not still be gutter cleaning or ditch digging companies? Or people cleaning their own gutters? I'm not familiar with UBI proposals that do away with traditional enterprises; it's generally suggested as raising the floor. People would have more time to clean their own gutters or use the money they receive to pay someone else.
In terms of charity cleaning services, there are people who clean hoarder's houses or landscape unruly yards for free on YouTube... ;)
I'm talking about gutters on the street, beside the kerb. I thought this was implied after I said "keeping your block clean by sweeping and mulching". You routinely see older people in Asia sweeping and raking a communal area if you get up early to walk. There's a (probably obsessive-compulsive) 60 yo guy a few houses down from me in Australia who might've retired early and now goes around raking verges and cleaning the footpath/gutters meticulously. Near my office, there's a woman who bakes bread for the joy of it and sells it at-cost via an honour-box in a sidestreet. She also turns verges and front yards (with owners' permissions) into a community vegetable garden. If others were given an opportunity equivalent to early retirement, these sorts of things might be more common.
As for why: for purpose, for praise, for community, for mental health, for trade/contribution, for skill building, etc. Loads of examples of this already. Maybe none of these things are attractive to you but I don't think that's universal.
Like I said, it's just trying to add to the default UBI, not getting everyone volunteering in their community or else.
Most retirees, early or not, do not contribute to society with their labor nearly as much as they did during their working years. What makes us think that UBI beneficiaries would be any different?
Right! So everyone would choose to pursue passions/interests/leisure. We would be going into debt with no meaningful benefit to the taxpayer. Direct malinvestment.
This is drawing a line between "us" (tax paying citizens + the government) and "them" (people on benefits). I don't think it's that simple.
I imagine just like with existing benefits, the majority of people wouldn't feel great about being on UBI doing nothing, and they would pursue something that gives them a better social standing, a better sense of purpose, a good challenge, whatever motivates an individual. It's why lots of people do volunteer work, work on important open source software, and so on. Sure, there's outliers that actually proudly slack off, but you don't address specific problems with generic solutions.
But more importantly, having the _option_ to fall back on benefits means people need to take fewer risks to pursue their talents and likely be of more value to society than if they did whatever puts food on the table today. Case in point: People born into a family that can finance them through college are more likely to become engineers than people born into poor households. On the flip side, some people do white collar jobs vs something like being a medic to uphold their standard of living from the higher salary, not out of preference.
I think it would need careful management, but I believe there's every reason to be optimistic.
UBI isn't even needed if there's just universal housing, medical care, food and education. People will find enough work to get the rest, even if it's through barter.
Okay…now that we agree that UBI won’t produce any meaningful labor. What benefit do we get out of the trillions of dollars of debt we’d be accumulating?
It’s a classic economic blunder that dictatorships love to make:
1. Create money & rack up debt.
2. Produce nothing.
3. Create inflationary crisis and exacerbate wealth inequality.
4. Highlight your good intentions and relish your new position as champion of the people.
Isn’t the investment to avoid a revolution? To avoid those that cannot find work from dismantling and tearing down everything around them so they can get what they need. Some might consider that to be a benefit to taxpayers and not a poor investment.
Free money never works. It’s been attempted countless times. In fact, it exacerbates the wealth gap as the rich own assets that scale with inflation while the poor do not.
No, you just live in a bubble of smart and really driven people.
The vast majority of people's passions are partying, sex, alcohol/drugs, watching sports, gossiping, generally wasting time. Things that mostly
This whole line of thought to me is embarrassingly clueless, naive and basically childish.
It is just mind blowing to me how smart people can't see what a bubble they live in.
I almost suspect, the higher a person's IQ, the more susceptible they are to living in a bubble that basically has nothing to do with the majority of people with an IQ of 100.
How do you make sure that enough people want to do the necessary jobs?
And why do you need money at all in that scenario, at least for the basic items the UBI intends to make affordable to all? Why not just make them free and available to everyone?
No UBI proposal I'm aware of proposes UBI replaces salaries or is high enough to satisfy everyone. The "B" is for basic. Most people are not satisfied with earning a basic salary.
I was very surprised during the pandemic response to see how many people were happy to take government checks plus unemployment rather than working.
I know a few people with small businesses in various manufacturing industries. They all had a really hard time finding enough people to work while stimulus checks were going out.
People wouldn't make quite as much, but they were happy to stay home and have the basics for "free" rather than have a job.
Historically, jobs or professions always existed around the intrinsic motivation of the person working and around the needs of the society around that person.
So you could become a poet, but if you do not write poems that people like you would starve. Or you could become a farmer and provide the best apples in your city and you will earn a more than deserve income.
That's why free economies have developed historically so much better than any centrally planned economy.
No we don't. We have too many people who -- even despite having respectable jobs -- can't afford the basic necessities for the month, let alone save for their future and family. The problem they're facing is the lack of the guaranteed basic income, not the lack of a job to collect it.
> I can not believe this was voted down. It is simply an assertion of fact. Whether true or not, seems reasonable and most people would agree with it.
If it was voted down, I'm guessing it was because to the extent that it's a fact, it's trivially true, and there's nothing insightful about the defeatist take. It's possible to do more harm than good doing pretty much anything. And the world is littered with problems that are not "fully solvable" but that we've mitigated greatly.
I wasn't here to take a stance on UBI or argue over its practicalities, I was just explaining the intended outcome was not what the parent believed it to be.
But fine, I'll bite.
> will go up roughly in line with that
Could you at least explain the logic that you believe implies this would occur with such certainty? I've thought about this before and I couldn't see this as a necessary outcome, though (depending on various factors) I do see it as a possible one.
That doesn't follow. It's a reason to believe prices will increase, not that prices will increase roughly in line with the income increase. This distinction is not a minor detail, it's pretty crucial. If you give people $3k and the prices go up by $2k... that's a very different scenario from one where the prices go up by $3k.
As long as we’re in a deficit, spending for this program would directly increase the money supply. Of course there are other factors like velocity of money and elasticity of good/services but at the end of the day we’re increasing the amount of money (aka cash + credit) with no change to supply AND we’re going into debt to do it.
Capitalism is based on, among other things, an expectation that free markets are pretty good at balancing out in the long run. If demand goes up only because access to money goes up, prices will rise.
Any increase in supply over time will eat up some of that price fluctuation, but for most products prices are more flexible than supply and a majority share of any capital increase will go towards prices rather than supply.
> a majority share of any capital increase will go towards prices rather than supply
You actually made my point, I think: that the price increase need not necessarily be "roughly in line with that", but could be less.
This distinction is absolutely critical. Like I said in [1], if you put $3k in my pocket, and my expenses increase by $2k, that's a very different situation from if my expenses grow by $3k. It would mean there is a reachable equilibrium.
When I said "in line" I didn't mean 1:1 or 100%. I may have picked a bad phrase there, I was intending to say that there would be a strong correlation between the two and that a majority of the extra Monet would go towards price increases.
I forget the general rule when it comes to companies, but there's a general percentage that is often how much a price increase on a company is passed on to consumers. If a company's tax rate goes up by 10% something like 8% of that is passed on to the consumer through price increases. I'd expect something similar with a UBI.
> When I said "in line" I didn't mean 1:1 or 100%. I may have picked a bad phrase there, I was intending to say that there would be a strong correlation between the two and that a majority of the extra Monet would go towards price increases.
If so, then explain how you're making the jump from "prices increase some" to "you would need Marx style price controls" or "otherwise UBI will fail to cover the necessities"? If you give me $X and I spend $X * r of it due to price increases, and r < 1, then don't I have (1 - r) * $X left in my pocket, meaning it could be made large enough to cover the basic necessities? This isn't complicated math.
I don't get why "prices increase" is seen as such a mic-drop phrase that shows the system would fall apart. Prices already increase for all sorts of reasons, it's not like the economy falls apart every time or we somehow add Marx style price controls every time. Sure, prices increase some here too. And then what? The sky falls?
Price increases as a mic drop in my opinion and I don't mean to use it that way. As far as I can tell its just an inevitability with anything like a UBI.
With regards to my claim that we'd need strong price controls, a UBI needs prices to the basics to remain stable. I won't go down the road of trying to define what "the basics" are here, that's a huge rabbit hole so let's just leave it at the broad category in general.
If everyone can afford the basics, there is more demand for those items. Supply will likely increase eventually and eat up part of the demand increase, but the rest goes to prices. When those prices go up, the UBI would have to increase to match. The whole cycle would go on in a loop unless there's some lever for the government to control the prices of anything deemed a basic necessity.
> When those prices go up, the UBI would have to increase to match. The whole cycle would go on in a loop unless there's some lever for the government to control the prices
No. Just because something increases forever that doesn't mean it won't stabilize. Asymptotes, limits, and convergence are also a thing. You're making strong divergence claims that don't follow from your assumptions.
Governments already provide "free income" in the form of free or subsidized services.
Say you have a fire-department even though you personally might not be paying anything for it because you are so poor that you don't pay any taxes. You have police protecting you and the army. You have free primary school at least.
So I think the question is, would it help for the government to provide more, or less, or the same amount of free services as it does currently?
Would it "increase prices" if healthcare was free? Not necessarily I think. At least not the price of healthcare. Government would be in a much better position to negotiate drug-prices with pharmaceutical companies, than individuals are.
If you have a government that runs a balanced budget, those services aren't free.
> Would it "increase prices" if healthcare was free?
That depends, who's ultimately footing the bill? If its paid for with taxes on businesses, yes most of that would be passed on to consumers in the form of price increases. If its paid for by consumer taxes, ultimately you will find consumers demanding higher wages and prices would again go up. If its paid for with tariffs, well we'll fins out soon but prices should go up there as well.
They are free for poor people. For instance, basic education must be free, so we can have a productive work-force that can read and write and pay taxes in the future, which will make us even richer.
In a UBI situation demand would shift, not just go up. If there's two hypothetical people paying the tax, a very rich person (>300.000 a year) and a poor person (<50.000 a yr), money effectively shifts from the rich person to the poor person (at least the majority). The poor person will have very different demands than the rich person.
Finally, we already do price controls and subsidies in many places, like food production. It's just that a big part of the advantage is soaked up by big companies.
We already have "Marx-style" price control and regulations in many sectors, specifically food production. It's just that the advantages are arbitraged away by corporations using cheap corn to create highly addictive foods, and lobbying and marketing with the resultant profits.
But I also disagree with your assertion. Minimum wage increases are a great example. Opponents will constantly claim they will lead to massively increasing prices, but they never do. Moreover, a higher standard of employment rights and payment in first world countries like Norway doesn't seem to correlate well with higher Big Mac prices.
> We already have "Marx-style" price control and regulations in many sectors, specifically food production.
And our food quality in the US is garbage. We can't say if there is causation there since we can't compare against a baseline US food system without subsidies, but there is a correlation in timing between the increase in food subsidies and the decrease in quality.
> Opponents will constantly claim they will lead to massively increasing prices, but they never do.
The only times that really comes up is when an increase is proposed and the whole debate is over politicized. Claims on both sides at those times are going to be exaggerated.
Prices absolutely go up with minimum wage increases. How could they not? It'd be totally reasonable to argue the timeline that matters, prices aren't going to go up immediately. You could also argue the ratio, maybe wage is increased by 30% and prices are only expected to go up by 20%.
People earning a minimum wage almost certainly have pent up demand, they would buy more if they could afford it. Increasing their wages opens that door a bit, they will spend more which means demand, and prices, will go up in response.
You could also argue the ratio, maybe wage is increased by 30% and prices are only expected to go up by 20%.
And the point is that the income percentage increase is higher for those with lower incomes. Even if prices go up by 20%, somebody making $20k/year who gets an additional $10k from UBI is going to be much better off.
Yes, I think there was a few things going on with covid, most of all the fact that shipping got halted for a year and we're still unwinding the damage from that (although, mostly smooth now).
YES, this is exactly the case and why the Twitter layoffs and now the "DOGE" purge is a terrible thing (even in cases where it was totally legitimate to eliminate "waste").
"They had useless make-work jobs and sent 4 emails a week and watched TikToks the rest of the time"
So?
There's FAR too many people and nowhere near enough jobs for a large portion of people to do something that is both "real", and provides actual economic value.
Far more important that people have some form of dignity and can pay to feed their families and live a life with some material standard.
Anyone who's been in a corporate role knows there's loads of people that have a dubious utility and value--and people with "tech skills" are NOT exceptions to this rule, at all.
We should be striving to build a world where people don't have to feel forced into meaningless jobs, not a system that encourages it.
If meaningless jobs are important because its the only way people can make money to pay for all the shit we think we need to pay for, or because they haven't yet been offered the time and freedom to find their own sense of purpose, let's focus on fixing the root cause(s) there.
> _heimdall: We should be striving to build a world where people don't have to feel forced into meaningless jobs, not a system that encourages it.
> If meaningless jobs are important because its the only way people can make money to pay for all the shit we think we need to pay for, or because they haven't yet been offered the time and freedom to find their own sense of purpose, let's focus on fixing the root cause(s) there.
And that is why the human race is truly doomed (and well deserving of it). Nobody wants to fix the root cause of any problem. Instead, let's just keep ignoring the disease and only treat the symptoms... That'll solve everything.
We don't just have "bullshit jobs" (which is an actual term these days), we have a "bullshit economy" as well - centered around advertising because without advertising most of the bullshit just wouldn't sell.
Like, if you already got a car, you can drive it for 10-20 years easily, or more if you take well care of it. But advertising makes you think you "need" a new car every few years... because that keeps the economy alive. You buy a car and sell the old one to someone else who can't afford a new car but also wants a new one, so their old car goes off to Africa or whatever to be repaired until truly unrepairable. But other than the buyer in Africa who actually needed a new car, neither you nor the guy who bought your old car would have needed a car. And cars are a massive industry that employs many millions of people worldwide - so if you'd ban advertising for cars, suddenly the bubble would pop and you'd probably have a fifth of the size remaining, and most of it from China because the people in Africa can't afford what a brand new Western made car costs.
Or Temu, Shein, Alibaba and godknowswhat other dropshipping scammers. Utter trash that gets sold there, but advertising pushes people to buy the trash, wear it two times and then toss it.
A giant fucking waste of resources because our worldwide economy is based on the dung theory of infinite growth. It has worked out for the last two, three centuries - but it is starting to show its cracks, with the planet itself being barely able to support human life any more as a result of all that resource consumption, or with the economy and the public sector being blown up by "bullshit jobs".
We need to drastically reform the entire way we want to live as a species, but unfortunately the changes would hurt too many rich and influential people, so the can gets kicked ever further down the road - until eventually, in a few decades, our kids are gonna be the ones inevitably screwed.
I agree on almost all of your points, but what makes you think it's only/primarily the "public sector" that is being blown up by bullshit jobs?
I've worked for a fair amount of private sector companies and the amount of "bosses nephew", "copy data from one form to another twice a day" and "waste everyone's time by creating pointless meetings" jobs was already more than enough to explain the status quo.
No, "bullshit jobs" are everywhere--loads in the private sector as well.
Perhaps sleepy sinecures are more prevalent in the public sector (especially post FANNAG layoffs), but not unique to it.
In addition, there's plenty of jobs that are demanding, stressful, and technically difficult but are ultimately towards useless or futile ends, and this is known by parties with a sober perspective.
When i worked as a consultant, I was on MANY projects where everything was pants-on-fire important to deliver projects to clients for POCs and/or overpriced/overengineered junk that they were incapable of maintaining long-term (and in many cases, created more problems than it ostensibly solved)
All that work was pure bullshit; I was never once in denial of that fact. Fake deadlines, fake projects, fake urgency, real stress. Bullshit comes in many forms.
> I agree on almost all of your points, but what makes you think it's only/primarily the "public sector" that is being blown up by bullshit jobs?
"the economy" = private sector / everything not government; "public sector" = government / fully government owned companies.
And both are horribly blown up due to all the bullshit and onerous bureaucracy that's mostly there because apparently you can't trust people that you do entrust a dozens-of-millions-of-euros worth train carriage to correctly deal with the cash register of the onboard restaurant.
Cars from 20 years ago emit significantly more polluting substances. OTOH they are lighter weight and thus wear the roads less. On the third hand, none of them is electric or hybrid.
Some computers from 20 years ago are still in a good shap, but...
I think this is a different argument than the disposable, single-use economy being described.
The volume of things we buy but don't need (or necessarily want) drives a huge sector of the global economy. We're working to fill our lives with unnecessary things that bring us no happiness beyond the adrenaline hit when we hit "Buy Now" and the second one when the Prime box arrives at our door.
Consumerism masks the underlying problem and it's only going to get worse as more is automated. Producers will have an incentive to convince us we still need more.
Cars are - to me - a red herring in this argument except for the people who do literally trade in for a new car every few years. I drive whatever fairly boring Honda for as long as I can (usually 8-10 years) and don't feel a ton of regret about investing in comfort. But I've been as guilty as anyone about just buying stuff because it pops up in an ad or recommended on Amazon, etc.
Just because a whole industry is bullshit doesn't mean I should force it to not exist. I don't like musicals. I don't understand or care anything about their culture. But it has a right to exist. Some people are into musicals. Their existence or non-existence isn't my problem and it isn't my business. We cannot and should not try to engineer the world around what we personally find valuable and ignore what others find valuable, even if they got their opinions form an ad, or their parents did and they inherited it.
It's kinda like online games. Most people who play a game are not too great at it, a large subset is pretty good, and then it's smaller and smaller groups as the ability increases.
At the top you get the people who are true pros, they write the books, the guides, they solve the hardest problems, and everyone looks up to them. But spin the wheel and get a random SWE to do some work? It's not gonna be far off from an random 1v1 lobby.
> And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank. But in every game I've played with a rating and/or league/tournament system, a lot of people get really upset and unhappy when they lose even when they haven't put much effort into improving. If that's the case, why not put a little bit of effort into improving and spend a little bit less time being upset?
Interesting read, but I feel like the author could've spent just one more minute on this sentence. How good you are at given activity often doesn't matter, because you're mostly going to encounter people around your own level. What I'm saying is, unless you're at the absolute top or the absolute bottom, you're going to have similar ratio of wins to loses regardless whether you're a pro or an amateur, simply because an amateur gets paired with other amateurs, while a pro gets paired with other pros. In other words, not being the worst is often everything you need, and being the best is pretty much unreachable anyway.
This can be very well extended to our discussion about SWEs. As long as you're not the worst nor the best, your skill and dedication have little correlation with your salary, job satisfaction, etc. Therefore, if you know you can't become the best, doing bare minimum not to get fired is a very sensible strategy, because beyond that point, the law of diminishing returns hits hard. This is especially important when you realize that usually in order to improve on anything (like programming), you need to use up resources that you could use for something else. In other words, every 15 minutes spent improving is 15 minutes not spent browsing TikTok, with the latter being obviously a preferable activity.
>Just for example, if you're a local table tennis hotshot who can beat every rando at a local bar, when you challenge someone to a game and they say "sure, what's your rating?" you know you're in for a shellacking by someone who can probably beat you while playing with a shoe brush (an actual feat that happened to a friend of mine, BTW). You're probably 99%-ile, but someone with no talent who's put in the time to practice the basics is going to have a serve that you can't return as well as be able to kill any shot a local bar expert is able to consitently hit.
And it's very easy to forget when you're the guy going to the club just how bad most regular players are.
I'm in a table tennis club, my rating is solidly middle of the pack, and so I see myself as an average player. But the author is correct, I would destroy any casual player. I almost never play casual players, though.
Not sure how applicable this is to software engineering.
Competitive games are complex. It's hard to be 95% percentile. There are so many mistakes one can make, even if each individual mistake is unlikely, it's likely that a mistake will be made. I participate in Dota 2, and literally everyone makes noticeable mistakes, even including tier 1 pro players and the top ranked pub players. I honestly find it amazing how good people are given how complex the domain is.
Now scale that up 10x, because reality is at least an order of magnitude more complex than a video game.
Many jobs are quite helpful and even necessary, if done for ~2 hours a day. They become "useless" in aggregate when they're forced to be minded by the same person for 8 hours (because of opportunity cost, effects on health well-being, etc., you end up "breaking even" or worse on QoL and net productivity).
Overall economic productivity is high enough that a lot of positions could be split into 2 or 3 short shifts, at full pay - IF you don't factor in the various financial boondoggles that we've gotten ourselves wrapped up in. If you made the decision to wipe out a lot of these obligations (mostly to rich people), we could get to that kind of set-up, solvently.
I imagine you're a fellow Graeberian. I feel the same way you do (and deeply so), but I don't have the confidence to give numbers, let alone such idealistic ones. How do you support your own numbers?
most jobs are absolutely not useless. They might seem useless to you, but the work has to get done.
Personally, I think that a receptionist as a building is useless, but I would be pretty pissed off if my packages kept getting stolen or I had to go get each one when it came at my place of business.
Or maybe just extremely inefficient due to the huge complexity of reality and how it hides a lot of the power dynamics and real decision making.
Big entities are such that if you take it all down, you feel the side effect of output (maybe value, maybe something else) but if you take Hugh chunks, you might not feel much because they're so extremely ineffictive and value creation doesn't correspond with value received for the individuals that created it.
Unfettered capitalism is pretty good at figuring out which is which. It’s pretty core to Elon Musk’s animating philosophy: get as many jobs as possible then see if there’s any negative impact.
Not as appropriate in a government setting where the impact goes far beyond personal profit and loss.
The problem is defining negative impact and also timing. For example, I can stop doing backups and save time and money. There is zero negative impact right up until the point I need to use the backup, then the impact is catastrophic.
This is why agentic AI will likely cause a cataclysim in white-collar labor soon. The reality is, a lot of jobs just need "OK" performers, not excellent ones, and the tipping point will be when the average AI is more useful than the average human.
I had a similar conversation with my CEO today - how does the incoming crop of college grads deal with the fact AI can do a lot of entry level jobs? This is especially timely for me as my son is about to enter college.
So I ended up posing the question to Claude and the response was “figure out how to work with me or pick a field I can’t do” which was pretty much a flex.
On some level, though this isn't quite what the person you're replying to was saying, it doesn't really matter whether AI actually can do any entry-level jobs. What matters is whether potential employers think it can.
To impact the labor market, they don't have to be correct about AI's performance, just confident enough in their high opinions of it to slow or stop their hiring.
Maybe in the long term, this will correct itself after the AI tools fail to get the job done (assuming they do fail, of course). But that doesn't help someone looking for a job today.
Customer service, entry sales, jr data/business specialist
- Ada's LLM chatbot does a good enough job to meet service expectations.
- AgentVoice lets you build voice/sms/email agents and run cold sales and follow ups (probably others better it was just the first one I found)
- Dot (getdot.ai) gives you an agent in Slack that can query and analyze internal databases, answering many entry level kinds of data questions.
Does that mean these jobs at the entry level go away? Honestly probably not. A few fewer will get hired in any company, but more companies will be able to create hybrid junior roles that look like an office manager or general operations specialist with superpowers, and entry level folks are going to step quickly up a level of abstraction.
Thank you for mentioning some cool projects, they all seem to target very specific use-cases not necessarily handed by junior roles. I guess PaaS services like Heroku/Render/Fly took away juniour DevOps roles then, but at least PaaS don't hollucinate or generate infra that is subtly wrong in non-obvious ways.
Paradoxically, the hardest jobs to automate are physical jobs it seems. A white collar worker is threatened by AI, blue collar not as much. I can totally envision AI software engineers (they’re already okay if you check their work), but as of yet there are no AI plumbers or mechanics. Maybe there won’t be, given the costs associated why producing physical machines vs software ones.
Your average white collar worker is certainly challenged, but I think the talent of neurodiverse people is going to become even more vital as average-ability people are more and more challenged. Of course, there's the saying:
"A man is his own easiest dupe, because what he wishes to be true, he will generally believe to be true." and I'm neurodivergent, so it makes sense that my assumption that shit'll probably turn out okay for me is a foregone conclusion.
It's just a matter of time. Your statement assumes AI won't help to develop robotics.
Robotics is the big unlock of AI since the world is continuous and messy; not discrete. Training a massively complex equation to handle this is actually a really good approach.
I'm not sure about that. For them to actually be economically useful is a high bar. More so than you think - it isn't just our brains but our strength, metabolisms, and more in a single package.
For example you need them to:
- High energy requirements in varied env's: Run all day (and maybe all night too which MAY be advantage against humans). In many environments this means much better power sources than current battery technology especially where power is not provisioned (e.g. many different sites) or where power lines are a hazard.
- For failure rates to be low. Unlike software failing fast and iterating are not usually options in the physical domain. Failure sometimes has permanent and far reaching costs (e.g. resource wastage, environmental contamination, loss of lives, etc)
- Be light weight and agile. This goes a little against No 1 because batteries are heavy. Many environments where blue collar workers go are tight, have only certain weight bearings, etc
- Handle "snowflake" situations. Even in house repair there is different standards over the years, hacks, potential age that means what is safe to do in one residence isn't in another, etc. The physical world is generally like this.
- Unlike software the iteration of different models of robots is expensive, slow, capital intensive and subject to laws of physics. The rate of change will be slower between models as a result allowing people time to adapt to their disruption. Think in terms of efficient manufacturing timelines.
- Anecdotally many trades people I know, after talking to many tech people, hate AI and would never let robots on their site to teach them how to do things. Given many owners are also workers (more small business) the alignment between worker and business owner in this regard is stronger than a typical large organisation. They don't want to destroy their own moat just because "its cool" unlike many tech people.
I can think of many many more reasons. Humans evolved precisely for physical, high dexterity work requiring hand-eye co-ordination much more so than white collar intelligence (i.e. Moravec's Paradox). I'm wondering whether I should move to a trade in all honesty at this stage despite liking my SWE career. Even if robots do take over it will be much slower allowing myself as a human to adapt at pace.
From a very inhuman perspective, and one I don't find appropriate to generally use: A human physical worker is a high capital and operational expense. A robot may not have such high costs in the end.
Before a human physical worker can start being productive, they need to be educated for 10-16+ years, while being fed, clothed, sheltered and entertained. Then they require ongoing income to fund their personal food, clothing and shelter, as well as many varieties of entertainment and community to maintain long-term psychological well-being.
A robot strips so much of this down to energy in, energy out. The durability and adaptability of a robot can be optimized to the kinds of work it will do, and unit economics will design a way to make accessible the capital cost of preparing a robot for service.
Emotional opinions on AI aside, we will I think see many additional high-tech support options in the coming decade for physical trades and design trades alike.
While I agree with you this cost isn't really borne by the people employing the human. Maybe the community, the taxpayer, even parents, but not the employer. As such these costs you mention are "sunk" - in the end as an employer I either take on a human ready to go or try to develop robots. That cost is subsidized effectively via community agreement not just for economics but for societal reasons. Generally as an trades employer I'm not "big tech" with billions of dollars in my back pocket to try R&D on long shots like AI/Google Deepmind/etc that most people thought would never go anywhere (i.e. the AI winter) - I'm usually a small business servicing a given area.
I'm not saying the robots aren't coming - just that it will take longer and being disrupted last gives you the most opportunity to extract higher income for longer and switch to capital vs labor for your income. I wouldn't be surprised if robots don't make any inroads into the average person's live in the coming decade for example. As intellectual fields are disrupted purchasing power will transfer to the rest of society including people not yet affected by the robots making capital accumulation for them even easier at the expense of AI disrupted fields.
It is a MUCH safer path to provide for yourself and others assuming capitalism in a field that is comparatively scarce with high demand. Scarcity and barriers to entry (i.e. moats) are rewarded through higher prices/wages/etc. Efficiency while beneficial for society as a whole (output per resource increases) tends to punish the efficient since their product comparatively is less scarce than others. This is because, given same purchasing power (money supply) this makes intelligence goods cheaper and other less disrupted goods more expensive all else being equal. I find tech people often don't have a good grasp of how efficiency and "cool tech" interacts with economics and society in general.
In the age of AI the value of education and intelligence per unit diminishes relative to other economic traits (e.g. dexterity, social skills, physical fitness, etc). Its almost ironic that the intellectuals themselves, from a capitalistic viewpoint, will be the ones that destroy their own social standing and worth comparatively to others. Nepotism, connections and skilled physical labor will have a higher advantage in the new world compared to STEM/intelligence based fields. Will be telling my kids to really think before taking on a STEM career for example - AI punishes this career path economically and socially IMO.
There's more options than those two; there's a reason that "spanner in the works" is a colloquialism. Humans become disagreeable when our status is challenged, and many people are very attached to the status of "employed".
That's easy. The CEO has authority and social connections, has done mutual beneficial deals, has the soft skills/position to command authority over others, has leverage over others, etc which is an economic asset. In an AI world this skill comparatively is MORE scarce than intelligence based skills (e.g. coding, math, physics, etc) and so will attract a greater premium. Nepotism and other economic advantages will play a bigger world in a AI world.
AI rewards the skills it does not disrupt. Trades, sales people, deal makers, hustlers, etc will do well in the future at least relatively to knowledge workers and academics. There will be the disruptors that get rich for sure (e.g. AI developers) for a period of time until they too make themselves redundant, but on average their wealth gain is more than dwarfed by the whole industry's decline.
Another case of tech workers equating worth to effort and output; when really in our capitalistic system worth is correlated to scarcity. How hard you work/produce has little to do with who gets the wealth.
Claude isn't wrong. The baseline for entry level has just risen. The problem isn't that it's risen (this happens continuously even before LLMs), but the speed at which it has increased.
They are already good at criminal activities such as phishing. That bar is rather low, especially once you scale up (hitting 100 people and successfully scamming 1 is still great ROI with cheap small models).
But I don't see what governments can really do about it. I mean, sure, they can ban the models, but enforcing such a ban is another matter - the models are already out there, it's just a large file, easy to torrent etc. The code that's needed to run it is also out there and open source. Cracking down on top-end hardware (and note that at this point it means not just GPUs but high-end PCs and Macs as well!) is easier to enforce but will piss off a lot more people.
Maybe I'm missing something, but we seem to be a long way off from the wave of AI replacing a lot of jobs, or at least my job. By title I'm a Software Engineer. But the work that I do here, that we do, well frankly, it's a mess. Maybe AI can crank out code, but that's actually not the hardest part of the job or the most time-consuming part. Maybe AI will accelerate certain aspects but overall, we will all be expected to do more. Spelling and grammar checkers are great. But when you're writing five times the amount you used to write, you barely even notice.
A surprising number of jobs could probably be done with AI right now, depressingly enough. Look at programming. Yes, AI is nowhere near as good as a decent programmer, can't handle rarer or more esoteric languages and frameworks well and struggles to fix its own issues in many circumstances. That's not good enough for a high level FAANG job or a very technical field with exact requirements.
But there are lots of 'easy' development roles that could be mostly or entirely replaced by it nonetheless. Lots of small companies that just need a boring CRUD website/web app that an AI system could probably throw together in a few days, small agency roles where 'moderately customised WordPress/Drupal/whatever' is the norm and companies that have one or two tech folks in-house to handle some basic systems.
All of these feel like they could be mostly replaced by something like Claude, with maybe a single moderately skilled dev there to fix anything that goes wrong. That's the sort of work that's at risk from AI, and it's a larger part of the industry than you'd imagine.
Heck, we've already seen a few companies replacing copywriters and designers with these systems because the low quality slop the systems pump out is 'good enough' for their needs.
There's quite a few companies (consulting companies/IT staffing) that make tons of money doing staff aug etc. for non-"tech" companies. Many of these companies have notoriously poor reputations for low-quality work/running out the clock while doing little actual work.
From experience dealing with a few of these companies, there's almost no chance that "vibe coding" whatever thing is going to be anything other than a massive improvement over what they'd otherwise deliver.
Thing is, the companies hiring these firms aren't competent to begin with, otherwise they'd never hire them in the first place. Maybe this actually disrupts those kinds of models (I won't hold my breath).
And when I find a human hallucinating at the job I absolutely
need them to do, I avoid them where possible too!
But honestly, LLMs are here to stay. I don't like them for zero verification + high trust requirements. IE when the answer HAS to be correct.
But generating viewpoints and ideas, and even code are great uses - for further discussion and work. A good rubber duck. Or like a fellow work colleague that has some funny ideas but is generally helpful.
The problem is that human beings are far more likely to know what they don't know. And we build a lot of our trusting work environments around that feature. An LLM cannot know what it doesn't know by definition.
> The problem is that human beings are far more likely to know what they don't know.
I’ve spent a career dealing with the complete opposite. People with egos who can just not bare to admit when they don’t know and will instead just dribble absolute shit just as confidently as an LLM does until you challenge them enough that they just decide to pretend the conversation never happened.
It’s why I, someone fairly mediocre have been able to excel because despite not being the smartest person in the room, I can at least sniff bullshit.
Yeah sure, some people do this. But average humans understand the limit of their knowledge. LLMs cannot do that. You can find the right person for a space where this knowledge of limitations is necessary. Can't find an LLM which does that
I will grant you that there are at least some of us capable of this, where you’ll find no LLM capable.
> average humans understand the limit of their knowledge.
We’ll have to agree to disagree here. I’d call it a minority, not the average.
Which is why we live in a world where huge numbers of people think they know significantly more than they do and why you will find them arguing that they know more than experts in their fields. IT workers are particularly susceptible to this.
People suck at intellectual tasks but for stuff like locomotion and basic planning we humans are geniuses compared to machines. There isn't a robot today that could get in a car, drive the the grocery store, pick stuff off the shelf, buy it, and bring it back home. That's so easy it's automatic for us.
Ugh... I've been in IT for over a decade now and many of the vacancies I see, I don't consider myself/my CV good enough. Then I work with the people who get hired for these jobs and see how low they set the bar, even though their CV might tick all the boxes.
I try to apply my layman's understanding of whatever law of thermodynamics states that a minimum of <x> percent of a reaction's energy is lost as waste heat; whatever you try to do in life, <x> percent of your effort is going to be spent dealing with people who are utterly incompetent. I try to apply it to myself as well; there's certainly many things I'm utterly helpless with and I want to account for the extra effort required in order to carry out a given task despite those shortcomings.
The book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach starts by talking about schools of thought on how to gauge if an agent is intelligent. I think it was mimicking human behavior vs behaving rationally which I thought was funny.
Splitting hairs, but LLMs themselves don’t search.
LLMs themselves don’t choose the top X.
That’s all regular flows written by humans run via tool calls after the intent of your message has been funneled into one of a few pre-defined intents.
It would probably be really great for web searching llms to let you calibrate how they should look for info by letting you do a small demonstration of how you would pick options yourself, then storing that preference feedback in your profile’s system prompt somehow.
Here though they're not replacing a random person, they're replacing _you_ (doing the search yourself). _You_ wouldn't look at the top X hits then assume it's the correct answer.
LLMs are truly reaching human-like behavior then