This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
> Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs are created.
It doesn't mean the opposite, either.
> 2) Chaudry ignores that you need a human in the loop to check an AI's work. You don't know that an AI's answer is always right. Even if it's perfect in 99% of cases, the answer could be jaw-droppingly destructive in that 1% of cases and make errors that even the dumbest human wouldn't make. Being grossly wrong even a small percentage of the time is far worse than a human making minor errors sometimes, and being slow all of the time.
Companies have shown time and time again that they're willing to make this trade-off.
if you'd like the standard of living of a few centuries ago, you can probably fund that by programming for a couple hours a week. instead you want entertainments, medicines and foods that take correspondingly more effort to produce.
A lot has improved but in the last 20/25 years, the inequality and increasing centralisation has worsened.
And if you don't realize this it probably means your safety net was too cozy for you to notice.
With that said, my comments don't relate to GPT4 which i find interesting and hope that people can be instructed how to make the most of these LLMs for themselves and not just as a tool for a company.
But, I've made a choice: I'll pay for eggs at the market rather than have chickens, because I don't want to have to deal with chickensitters when we got on a trip. This is the sort of choice that the person you're replying to is talking about.
if we round up and say a dozen eggs costs $5 right now, and then use CPI to go backwards to 1913, what we're getting would've cost $0.16 then. the first website i found says that a dozen eggs cost $0.37 in 1913. i realize there's some circularity in there with eggs being part of the CPI calculation, sorry.
Not to be that guy, but income inequality in the US has continued to increase [0], so it's not that automation isn't making people richer, it's just that it isn't being distributed fairly. If it were, then perhaps we'd be closer to our two hour work days.
I think the automation of grocery store check-out is a great example of this sort of thing. Grocery store cashiers are busy spending their time worrying about their shifts getting cut in favour of self-checkout while grocery stores are profiteering (esp. in Canada) [1]. A more equitable system would have those profits lining the pockets of the same people who are now on reduced hours. Turns out that, like most people have realised by now, trick-down economics isn't really enough.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/galen-weston-l...
And over and over again, we've underestimated and then normalized the capacity of our institutions, made of otherwise decent people, to achieve outcomes that we would call abhorrent if they were carried out by an individual. So the door closes on that opportunity because we fail to act.
If we're ever going to walk through that door, companies need to fear us, because they sure as hell aren't going to share with us out of the goodness of their hearts.
I'm not sure what the right move would be re: Priya. Maybe it's a strike for retraining benefits. Maybe it's a wave of resignation letters that mention her. Maybe it's an act of sabotage. But whatever it is, it has to be an existential threat because that's the only language besides money that our institutions understand.
You know you can buy stock, right? And, as a shareholder, those companies will give you the profit?
And that's a problem for you and me because our system has shown to be very effective at concentrating wealth at the top. Most likely it'll later find a different way to transition us from have to have-not, but even if it doesnt we'll end up retiring into a world mostly populated by people who have more to gain by turning their back on our system than participating in it.
Squabbling over ownership of abstractions is a lose-lose scenario without some degree of solidarity keeping the zero sum games in check.
The extra value has gone to enrich the oligarchs rather than to the people. Maybe that should change.
You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war.
If you thought the people at the top had power now boy you'd really hate feudalism.
I think a lot of modern society's wealth goes into unexpected places, which is one of the things you see if you try living in places with different national GDPs. I'm in a well off European country right now, and the biggest differences I see compared to the US are things like older cars and worse appliances. The technology is older, and cheaper. Everyone having the latest SUV and pickup truck is actually a HUGE investment in wealth!
If you spend some time in lat am countries with even lower per person GDP you see older, simpler buildings, cheaper clothing, simpler food, etc etc.
If you wanted to live in the united states with a 1950s car, in an old house, with appliances from the 80s and shitty healthcare, you could live pretty cheap as well. The advances in productivity has brought us SOMEWHERE it's just not always obvious where.
The system we have today is the single greatest driver of human prosperity the world has ever seen.
I think most humans today massively underestimate just how absolutely shitty the life of a medieval peasant was. You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war.
You don’t have to go to medieval times for that. The first half of the 20th century was like that for a lot of people in what is considered rich counties today.
In the cities many large families (or multiple families) shared a tenement and TB and polio ran rampage. Outside the cities many families lived inn1 or 2 room homes with dirt floors and no plumbing in many cases. This was common in Appalachia and parts of the south into the 1960s.
Millions fled many parts of Europe for these conditions in part because it was better than what was going on over there.
We are all seriously lucky to be alive today with what we have. And although these things are relative there’s no guarantee our societies continue to have such plentiful access to food, comfortable shelter, and basic medicines like antibiotics and vaccinations.
The problem is those oligarchs are using their outsized accumulation to lobby for and purchase a worsening world for their benefit. Sure, things got better for some people for a while. Now they're getting worse from what flows out of the discretionary spending of those oligarchs.
Also ignoring climate change, and how disproportionately it affects those less well off while overwhelmingly caused by the rich. Your quality of life may be better than in the 1950s, but this is going to be reverse really quickly over the next 50 years when we are hitting 2-3 degrees of warming, unless you are part of the 1% that can buy your self out of the crisis.
I'd love to see that change but we have a populace that directs its energy at attacking itself instead of the people in power
But hey, that's radical talk,sentiment analysis suggests we should disable this kind of speech and keep our head down, lest we be denied more rights...
No work? No money. No rent payment? Eviction (with violence). Stealing food? Arrest and imprisonment (with violence). It's violence all the way down. It always was. It's just a question of how it's organized and rhetorically justified.
As dumb as it sounds I genuinely think it's a concerted effort to change people's minds - specifically those people who want to become capital class or otherwise are on the way to the capital class.
If we can 1. Prevent new billionaires from being created and 2. then create structures to allow the capital class to feel like they are important to the process of reducing their own power and democratizing the economy, there might be a chance.
In the “Sad Irons” chapter of Caro’s LBJ biography, he talks about the pre-electrification lives of Texas farmers. In comparison with that, our whole day is leisure.
Similarly: As late as 1900, the poor in Europe were so severely malnourished that growth stunting was common. Look at Our World in Data’s charts of height over time. Or Robert Fogel’s “The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death.”
Etc. Etc.
You are working the same number of hours as before (40 ish) because companies are producing 10x as much goods in the same amount of time. If they produced only the same amount, ie 1x, you'd have your 2 hour work day (or more likely be out of a job). It is because companies are producing more stuff that you have a job at all currently. You are complaining about the very thing you benefit from now.
It's dubious that anyone except the most wealthy benefits from this. Even though productivity has exploded, wages hasn't followed and the rewards of productivity has gone to a small few. I don't know how anyone can look at wealth inequality today and think most people should be "grateful". It's more likely to me that rest of America will start to look like San Francisco.
You don’t have a smartphone, don’t use wireless networking and telecom, have no flat screen TV, don’t use the internet, and so on?
None of those things would exist if productivity was at the same level as the 1800’s.
In the 50s there were 3 cars/10 Americans. Now it's 9. Homeownership went for 55% to 66%. College degrees 6% -> 38%. We used to spent 20% of income on food. Now it's around 8%. Poverty among 65+ went from 35% to 10%.
We've got big problems in our economy and income inequality is certainly one of them, but it's asinine to pretend that most individuals in society have not benefitted from technological progress.
Machines made blue collar work near worthless, except for some crafts.
And things like ChatGPT can lower the worth of white collar jobs.
To whom would companies sell their stuff if nobody worked enough to earn money to buy their stuff?
> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
Is the promise you're referring to that work will be so valuable that people need only work less than a quarter as much to live a material lifestyle equivalent to CE 1823 or 1923, or that there will be so much work to be done that there's no unemployment to speak of in 2023? Both of those seem to be true...
It should be entirely possible. We just need an AI capable of generating its own capital, then the investor class can be removed from the loop.
A workers co-op owned company headed by an AI decisioning board would be able to maintain constant, real time feedback and coordination with all workers, and would be faster and more maneuverable then human headed companies.
That’s not the fault of automation. As a society we’ve chosen to increase our population and level of consumption instead and automation is simply the engine for it.
It's here, you're living in it, most likely. You just have to lower your wants to the standards of whenever that prediction was made.
It's not like there's unclaimed habitable territory that anyone can just go be subsistence farmers on - someone has laid claim to that land and it's not you
So, no this isn't an option either as you're forced to interact with the rest of the world that demands your input
If you want 2023-level housing, you'll need to put in 2023-level work, unfortunately.
Quality today is generally much better and "average" isn't the same. I read a piece one some woman who lived around 200 years ago and she traveled to a city ~100km away, which was a noteworthy biographical event back then. That's a distance some people do daily on their way to work these days. Travel to a different continent? You'd be exceptional if you did so once in your life, today that's available to most people in the West to do once a year (granted, it won't be the luxury version, it'll be like my trip to NYC 25 years ago where we stayed in a hotel that was being renovated, the elevator was out once and we had to climb 12 floors but it was super affordable).
They're going to try to grow and get rich off the increased productivity.
It’s partly a product of capitalism within a nation, but also a product of the basic struggle for wealth and power at the international level. This is a common discussion in my chosen industry; we have well paying jobs and good working conditions, but only because we are (significantly) ahead. Our lead, and by extension the good life, could completely vanish in five to ten years if we stop pushing forward.
The end result of creative destruction is not so we can all work less, it's so things that we value become cheaper, allowing us to reallocate resources to things that are equally or more valuable. It gives rise to new companies and industries that either a) could not work without the new tech, or b) were prohibitively expensive.
The classic example is the fridge. Before it existed there was an entire industry that revolved around transporting blocks of ice. Now imagine all the industries, technological advancements, scientific advancements that would not exist if we didn't have the ability to make a box really really cold, relatively cheaply.
Creative destruction leads to economic growth (increasing the pie), not a society that doesn't have to work 40hours a week.
Others have already commented on the fact that quality of life has generally increased.
I think it's also worth realizing that over the course of a lifetime people today spend a much smaller fraction of their waking hours engaged in work than before.
100 years ago a typical man in a developed country might have started work aged 14 and then stopped working a few years before death if they were lucky to not die before.
Nowadays even someone "uneducated" would start working at 18, while others might start aged 22 or older. And a common expectation is to have a retirement of 15+ years.
So averaging over a lifetime we do work a lot less as a fraction of our lives than in earlier times.
Edit: numbers were plucked from thin air based on my experiences of my own country, but i guess the general point applies to most developed countries
That's the opposite of what GP predicted: that people would be more productive and produce more, not work less.
Programmers are way more productive than the were sixty years ago. We don't have fewer programmers, or part-time programmers, but we do have vastly more and better software.
Maybe they wouldn't, but then the insurers come. Not all of the 1% of errors from an AI will be disastrous - if it happens to be "jaw-droppingly destructive" rarely enough for the insurance to make sense economically, that AI will be used.
I personally would hate to spend all my time on leisure activities. I would still be working as hard but on my passion projects.
No offense but who wants to spend most of their time on leisure activities. That gets old fast. It is a lot more fun being productive. Maybe I'm just weird.
A person on minimum wage in the USA today can enjoy a higher quality of life than kings of a few hundred years ago. My point being that automation has brought huge benefits to society, even if we are blind to them.
That's called leisure, being able to direct your actions without worry about them paying the bills, leisure.
Of course you could choose to vegetate in front of a screen, but you're also free to walk the hills, create art, create machines, write software or poetry, or whatever.
I would count that as leisure, why wouldn't that count?
Leisure isn't laying on a couch eating grapes; leisure is the freedom of deciding what to do with your time,.
So … you would spend all your time on your chosen leisure activities—your passion projects. That is the point.
It turns out people would rather work more and have more stuff.
Please explain. I think you're underestimating how much things have changed, and are making a lot of assumptions about what you mean by "quality of life .. 70 years ago" and "working 2 hours a day" that would not be obvious (or available) to other people.
Industrial automation did create the 2hr weeks - only that it's the people who paid capital and and invested in their creation that got those 2hr weeks.
But everybody else got the benefit as the general access and availability of many more goods and services than otherwise would've been possible.
Why is More stuff =/= a better life not blatantly obvious at this point
Having an iPhone doesn't make your life better
Which is a different question from productivity
The world would be a much better place without the iPhone[1].
[1] with the exception of all iPhones running iOS 6 or earlier
