Yes, but I do worry about junior knowledge worker job loss. These models are very good (and getting better) at the vast dark matter of "donkey work" that happens in knowledge-based industries -- work typically done by junior devs / analysts / lawyers / consultants, paralegals, admin assistants, customer success / support, etc. -- and those roles comprise the bulk of the workforce.
And worse, these are the tasks that help the junior people eventually grow into the skilled knowledge workers required to operate models, so there's a pipeline problem too.
I do too, but I think it currently has a lot more to do with the quasi-recession we've been in since the end of ZIRP and AI is a better excuse to stop training juniors than telling investors it's belt tightening, just like layoffs.
I'm already seeing tech execs/hiring managers getting very frustrated at the lack of new-senior-engineers to hire. The market will correct for this in time.
Curious if you can share any backing information from your last statement? As a senior engineer (well, that's my job title anyway), I find it encouraging.
This doesn't break it down by experience, and I can't find specific data on that, but the recent spike in demand for engineers + subsequent drop in unemployment this year is well documented [1].
The demand for senior+ engineers has remained steadier through this downturn from my anecdotal observations, with new grads being by far the most negatively affected, but even that seems to both be shifting from talking to people a handful of years younger than me + CS enrollment has already precipitously declined [2] as the narrative that programming is dead because of AI has spread rapidly.
All that leads me to think it's going to be a junk-show over the next decade for people trying to hire as the pipeline was destroyed.
To follow on from that comment, if the growth in breadth of capacity of AI leads to a decrease in the risk of running a smaller business, which I don't think is an unreasonable prediction, then it's not inevitable people do lose their jobs. Employers get smaller, higher-leverage, and more plentiful.
Back then people were mostly farmers, but we already automated that job away.
Not completely, but compared to the middle ages we 50x'd their output. Which is a great illustration what it means to make a job 50 times more productive. We went from 80-90% of the population being required to barely make enough food for everyone to survive, to 4% of the population producing such an abundance that consuming too much food has become a systemic health issue
At the mere cost of destroying soil, and polluting water and the atmosphere in only 200 years! Possibly this will also play out well, and there is a huge market of... maybe social media influencer economy to pick up those being automated out of their previous work... or rather identity, as actually much like in the middle ages, the modern world also makes the profession largely the identity of the individual.
I'm pretty skeptical on the outcomes and the costs also (natural and social as well), but possibly we can have 50x or even more software in the end! The phrase will be truer than ever:
Maybe ironically, but software and robotics should allow us to scale regenerative agriculture in a way that doesn't leave everyone in poverty. We already have lasers mounted to trailers doing precise weeding instead of broad herbicide usage.
Next innovation could be to scale succession planting, which keeps the ground from being exposed in between crops and lets you transition from nitrogen fixers to users quicker, getting more food out per acre while reducing fertilizer usage. But you can't do that with current harvesters and human labor is too valuable to spend on this.
Also take broccoli harvesting, typically you get a few big heads, then it keeps producing smaller heads, but it's not economical to harvest the smaller heads with human labor. Robotic harvesting lets the same plant produce more food per acre and uses the energy needed for new plants instead to keep producing food.
Masses will be unemployed, due to robots displacing them, but human labor will also be too costly. We won't be able to afford a person shepherding, but we will need to produce "meat" (substitutes) in plants, or in inhumane animal-jail, and we'll need robot-weedkiller lasers to produce the feedstock instead of letting animals graze... and we'll give the food produced this way to people on UBI...
This is where this is going, the whole industrialism is totally self-serving, and for every problem its answer is digging deeper in the rabbit hole, and creating 2 more problems in addition to solving the initial problem only half-way.
I don't want to say what you are suggesting is not possibly useful, I just want to emphasize how stuff works out in reality, in addition to doing some nice stuff like what you called out (the halfway solution to the problems). All we get is more alienation and humans getting depressed and feeling a lack of purpose... but somehow we cannot afford to pay fair prices for the agricultural work, and pay fair prices for the food, and not overproduce and overpollute... and the same thing is happening in every aspect of the human condition, not only food production, which is the most basic and ancient activity we have been doing.
Cattle grazing is helpful for fields left fallow, but succession planting is far superior in so many other ways. You can mix plants which repel particular pests with those susceptible to them (and other beneficial strategies), topsoil is grown instead of depleted, flowers are present for wide range of season so bees naturally thrive with food always available, you don't need a significant generator of greenhouse gas running around (cows), and it gets more vegetables per acre so it would be good if vegetables were cheaper because we don't eat enough of them.
I have done succession planting in my home garden, but it's definitely not worth the time investment for the food alone. But it's real neat to see your aphid problem disappear as the nasturtiums pop up without any pesticides needed. You can even feed the world with it, if most everyone wanted to be farmers... (as opposed to some Organic practices which is the same mass farming but the pesticides are "naturally-derived")
Not all tilled land is suitable for planting, as many are drained swamps. In my home this is a huge problem, as the water circle has been distrupted so much that we are on the way to becoming a desert with climate change compounding on top the the more than a century long draining megaproject nobody is willing to undo due to short term economic interests. Fuck the next generations, I guess...
There are other grazing animals in addition to cows btw, as temperate marshland forest can be grazed by pigs, for example. Also sheep, and goat exist for example.
Vegetable production is nice, but we don't need to work all land. We don't need to produce so much food that we cannot use up meaningfully, just waste or take to places to create overpopulation there also. Reckless industrialism and capitalism are the core barriers to sustainability. (the former includes socialist planned-economical models also, we've seen our part of that also)
Farming has been destroying soil and polluting water for thousands of years. The Tigris & Euphrates used to be crazy fertile, now it's desert. Yes, the destruction has accelerated but farms now feed 8 billion people.
There definitely were what could be considered knowledge workers in the (high) middle ages, it just wasn't the majority of work like today. The knowledge workers then were just a tiny, elite faction, mostly employed by the church or directly by nobility. Kindgoms were still big bureaucracies and needed scribes, theologians, academics, lawyers.
Relatively few anyway. Monks (who wrote and edited books and managed libraries, and also taught), artists and musicians, bookkeepers/treasury/exchequer, scribes/chancery (who were the administrators of the kingdoms), and bankers all existed in European "middle ages". But a significantly smaller part of economy/society compared to "western world" now, yes.
Are you sure? Any functional organization requires keepers to oil the machine. First the government. The best examples were the chinese empire, the catholic church, and the various kingdoms. Or do you think that everyone was either fighting or farming? Stewardship is knowledge work. Bookkeeping is another.
> Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs?
They do not care unless these companies can get a bailout.
UBI only exists for companies that are too big to fail. Case in point, 2008 and SVB when there was too much money on the line.
One of the AI companies attempted to guarantee themselves a way for the government to bail them out if they were close to defaulting on the debt from the data center build out.
SVB didn't get bailed out, their investors and creditors were wiped out. You could argue depositors were bailed out -- as they took the undue risk of keeping more than $250k in a single bank (though as part of a requirement for getting a loan from SVB, you had to have your operating accounts with them. So lots of companies had no choice, as SVB was one of the few banks that would lend to them).
Arguably, the main impact of securing SVB depositors above the $250k limit is that it prevented thousands of people from being laid off that week, as their employers wouldn't have had the money to make payroll the following Wednesday.
Thank you for saying this. Continuing to point at SVB as a bailout is annoying. They were not bailed out. Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always. Without trusted banking we have no economy.
> Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always
Sure, but is that the case now? Is everyone made whole when a bank fails and they have more deposits than the insurance limits? Or only when it's the well-connected / too-big-to-fail?
So I don't think it's unreasonable to describe SVB as a bailout. Not for the investors, but for the depositors. Has anything changed to reduce the moral hazard / make it less likely to recur?
So we all now know that a bailout DID occur with the SVB depositors who had all their money in the bank and most deposits were over the FDIC insurance limit. The FDIC insurance rules somehow didn't apply here because there was too much money at risk. (And too big to fail).
But if there was a bank failure at a regionally smaller bank with a regular customer or startup depositing the same amount of money over the insurance limit, their money is gone.
Just like Intel got a "bailout" from investment as chosen by the US government, AI will eventually have a very similar story.
In early 2023, within the span of two months, the United States
experienced three out of the four largest commercial bank failures in
U.S. history, as Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and First Republic
Bank all toppled.1 Yet, despite these banks having roughly $300 billion in
uninsured deposits at the time of their failures2 and despite the failures
costing the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) of the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation (FDIC) an estimated $38 billion, uninsured
depositors took no losses in any of the failures.3 While these results were
striking, they were far from unusual. Since 2008, uninsured depositors
have experienced losses in only 6% of total U.S. bank failures.
...
Formally,
the United States caps deposit insurance at $250,000 per account,6 but,
in reality, the post-2008 financial system comes close to providing de
facto total deposit insurance covering all amounts in all accounts.
It sounds like the economy would largely reduce to the small minority class of independently wealthy people.