"the meritocracy" I want you to look at the president and look at the world's first trillionaire and then try and say that to me again with a straight fave
No kidding. Like, is the meritocracy in the room with us right now? For real, merit might mean something in the world at large, it certainly hasn’t meant a damn thing in American economics for a long ass time.
The idea that society was a meritocracy to begin with is a farce. Social mobility is limited and someone far less skilled, intelligent, hardworking that happens to be born in the right environment will be able to significantly outperform someone who is skilled, intelligent and hardworking if they happened to be born in the wrong situation
An yet reading it or not made no difference as did understanding it. The meritocracy was always an illusion give to those who people like over those who people don’t
sub headline says end of meritocracy. Upward mobility is another way to describe it or better, it’s a symptom of it. (where success is driven by ability and effort rather than background or inherited wealth)
"And America is neither a meritocracy nor has high social mobility compared to other countries."
Depends on what countries you're comparing the US to. Compared to Western Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and especially the Scandinavian countries, you're mostly correct. Though the differences aren't extreme. And the matter of race in the US complicates things greatly.
But compared to the G20 countries apart from those already mentioned, the US is more socially mobile. So Russia, Brazil, India, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, etc.
Yeah it’s not as bad as literally developing countries or failed ones like Russia.
Seems more fair to compared with western countries of similar development and living standards
You assume it's even a human making the post. Maybe you're a bot. Or maybe I'm a bot. Or maybe it's not you're. It's your. Because that's more human. To err is to be human. Or to be divine. Whatever man.
Meritocracy has always been about people's ability to make money, which has only a passing relationship to any actual merit. Most of the seriously meritorious qualities in a person are not money-making.
I think the actual fault in this article is that while AIs are legitimately gaining many meritorious qualities, they really have no capacity for guile, at least not in a way that's useful for making money.
Im not sure what compelled you to respond but it's not exactly unexpected for a comment to pale in thought provocation compared to an entire article. My point wasn't trying to be edgy so maybe you're lost?
correct, but meritocracy in this sociological context was largely invented as a counter to aristocracy and nepotism.
Basically, instead of aristocrats buying commissions, titles and civil service job, the meritocratic middle class competes with them on sheer skill and the skillful prevail. The sociological meaning has kinda remained since.
Nobody ever discussed meritocracy in the context of a 200 IQ African being born and never getting anywhere due to his social circumstances, although governments ever since the 19th century with mass schooling did kinda try to nurture and identify talent and said privileges withered away, to be replaced with a different form of capital and privilege that is a lot harder to counter - not blood and titles, but that of social capital.
If we take just the word at face value then yes, real meritocracy never existed cause the 200 IQ African in Congo is likely never getting anywhere.
Or, public educated, passes SAT and exams well, gets an Ivy League admission, also pays $0 because Ivy League unis pay 100% of demonstrated financial need if you are under like 200k income, networks well, gets a well paid job after thanks to all the networking, gets a house at 40 and pays it off before retirement. A rare, but not impossible story.
Should be noted that only 30-40% of legacy applicants get accepted, and they make up 30% of Ivy League applicants, so they do have a better chance, it's not smooth sailing as you assume, although they do have pretty insane cushions all things considered. The elites are also under immense competition and stress to keep up in the hierarchy.
Ultimately, this is still meritocratic in a sense - you are not cut off by your birth or income as the 17th century bourgies might have been, plenty of avenues exist, but social mobility does remain a thing and there is a meritocratic element to it, even if imperfect.
It is just harder. For example, those with spare income now are buying up hardware. Interest rates and inflation are up so those of us without assets are either staying out of AI and others are going all. Others with wealth are just scalping those trying to keep up and not be left behind. Transfers of wealth in every direction.
one take i have on the economy and life today is that there is no slack. Read 19th or 20th century biographies and those guys have the most random adventures and life never really feels over and when they feel like it, they rebuild a decent material base.
now if you didnt achieve anything by 30, its pretty much over for you.
I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with the point that there isn't enough room for error today, but...
> Read 19th or 20th century biographies and those guys have the most random adventures and life never really feels over and when they feel like it, they rebuild a decent material base.
What reason is there to believe that this isn't just pure survivorship bias? You're reading about the life of someone who was 1) led an interesting enough life to commit to paper and 2) who was successful enough to be able to do so. I really don't see how that's evidence in any way for there being more slack back in the 19th and 20th century
Went to chatgpt to scour the internet for any research or evidence on the topic and this doesnt seem to be much of a falsifable hypothesis in economics, although you can generate certain vibes in psychology and sociology that I captured with my hypothesis about the state of the professional middle class, which seems to be most of us here - our careers and social status is basically a tournament and there is only so many jobs, titles, prestige and neighbourhoods to go around, so the professional middle class cannot afford to be whimsical like our forefathers, who came to a much more narrow and restricted class and simply did not have as many competitors to worry about.
However, this indeed does not generalize at all to society at large.
"It is just harder. For example, those with spare income now are buying up hardware."
Come again?
I'm pretty solidly lower-upper middle class, with a fair bit of discretionary income, as are most of close friends, and neither myself nor anyone I know is "buying up hardware" if what you're referring to is, like, computing hardware to run local AI??
Just cause you aren’t doesn’t mean others aren’t. Go on homelab and it went from hobbiest to executives and sales people and managers taking over as well as crypto bros and their winnings redirecting too.
Not saying nobody would or has. Just that its hard to see the advantage at least in cost considering how outrageously expensive pretty much every part of a rig is for the time being.
Like I would think that until prices come down buying a heavy use subscription would be a lot more cost effective. But that's just my assumption based on what I've overheard about current memory and GPU prices.
People have inflated desires so they buy up $90k cars without a real return. Now people are able to buy a setup and have a direct return if they figure out how to manage it. Most don’t know even then supplies are limited and scalpers know this and suppliers have moved onto enterprise.
You are right that a subscription is better for now but companies have fluctuated their pricing and limits so that is driving many to get their own setups including small businesses and anyone with spare income. They can also move models around and sometimes you just want the same thing since it worked for you already and there are plenty of other use cases like smarter home detection without the cloud while acting like an assistant, helping create mods, managing your metrics and much much more in the right hands or the right setup without being an expert. Nvidia flooded the marketing teams and sales teams of many companies with dgx sparks and things haven’t been the same since.
The US is by no means a perfect meritocracy, but it's the best practical example of any major-power country.
(Meaning not including other former British colonies like Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Which based on more equitable schooling and access to health care, etc probably hold better claims to meritocracy than the US. If that wasn't obvious)
China, India, France and Britain exist though. Obviously the goons are running around pretending that France isn't up there, but they actually have a super serious education system that trains people to a reasonable level and where a nobody who is smart enough actually has a shot at getting literally anywhere.
People may think Britain is very class-divided, but their academic rigor means that people actually do have decent chances of doing well. Then of course, they have some silly stuff like university fees and unfairness related to that, but the doors in Britain for people who perform well intellectually aren't closed. It isn't like France and it isn't India or China at the university level, but it's still a high level of equality because of the good primary level education.
Yup, I know ppl with masters and lots of experience that make shit money in dead-end jobs. Then you got this other friend of mine, who never finished university, lived abroad, dicked around, never been serious. Comes back to town, dad gets him a 120k job where he mostly works from home. And hes still complaining that it sucks and wants to go back to living in Europe. While me and my gf both university educated live in small appartement trying to make ends meet since I lost my job last month
Not a farce at all. Lots of people built solid lives without much education, but good skills and values & we have sopped all that up so we can create a world where everyone is at-will employee that gets rented by their neighbors.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what I'm saying; social mobility was possible and there are/were examples of this but that is the exception not the rule. Of course people with talent and hard work were able to improve their lives but more didn't get that outcome for one reason or another.
I'm suggesting this is just not true and lots of unremarkable people were able to make a life. Watch 80s sitcoms and see the jobs people had, the world was very different not that long ago.
Sitcoms are not, nor have ever been, an accurate portrayal of life. A retail shoe salesman has never been able to comfortably support a middle-class lifestyle.
Its farce because you think that certain skills are more valuable than others. While in reality its a combination of skills + luck thst makes it a meritocracy.
I have seen multiple employees who think they should be paid more, because their are good coders, while being a pain to work with and struggle with ownership. And its the similar situation in another jobs. Someone thinks perfectly stacked shelves should matter the most, when in reality not many people care.
I call bullshit. You can come from nothing, with addict parents, addiction of your own, homelessness, and no college degree... and rise to the top of your profession in Silicon Valley if you're good enough. At least, you used to be able to.
There’s a small percentage of exceptions that are to make it, and because of their circumstances draw a lot of attention and praise. But if your willing to actually read about or study outcomes based on socioeconomic factors, there is an undeniable and extremely significant advantage held by those born higher up the social ladder
A fair point, but I loaded all of my worldly possessions into my shitty car and came out here with no support and no family or friends. Sometimes you gotta go where the opportunities are and seize your chance.
You had a car??? Get a load of Richie Rich here ;-)
I got into the software dev career too around that time without a stem degree and with my main work experience being a caretaker in homes for severely disabled. It only happened because at the time they'd hire anyone who claimed they could program. I claimed I could, and started learning day one of the job.
Without the dot-com bubble, wouldn't have happened.
Elon Musk started out with nothing but generational family wealth, an expired student visa and, as a English speaking white man, the freedom to start a tech company in a foreign country without any fear of that country's government kicking him out like he was some kind of illegal immigrant.
Now he's the world's richest man. If he can do it anyone can!
Fuck off, that's exactly what I did. There are plenty of people out here that did the same.
Silicon Valley was a true meritocracy for a long time. I came out in 1998. I've met plenty of other people with non-traditional backgrounds and without degrees that have done the same out here. It's hard but you just have to be really good.
Does Trust-fund Tommy have it easier because he went to Stanford? Sure, but in the end it comes down to your actual competence. Or did, the AI era has perhaps pulled the legs out the entry-level ladder.
Even if you did it doesn't disprove what I said, in fact I even implied social mobility is possible (but limited). And the exception to the rule doesn't prove that society HAD meritocracy, if your story is true you achieved it despite there not being a meritocracy.
We’re happy for you. Just because it worked out for you doesn’t mean it has for everyone else. That same system you had to fucking play, you know there’s billions others tried too and didn’t make it, right?
Your experiences nor mine are absolute. I came out of my shit too similarly and I didn’t develop fucking spite or “fuck you I got mine”.
You came out of it fearful you might losing what you finally made, and hate anyone asking for more because you never got any fucking help yourself.
You are, genuinely, the core problem virtually no change continues to happen.
That child you were going through all that — they still exist, they just ain’t you, and yet you can’t extend the same empathy nor sympathy you always craved. Anger, resentment, and greed are easier now that you’re comfortable.
Even if this is made up, I know this’ll hit a nerve. Fuck off.
Whatever financial success this individual has gained does not appear to have brought any peace of mind.
There is an entirely separate issue. You could have a system that is very good at drawing out and enriching the most talented 1% or 2%. While the 70% who do the work that keeps society going barely get by and never even own their own home. Remember all the Essential Workers that were suddenly discovered during the COVID lock downs? This is not a meritocracy.
And this is aside from the fact that being born with very unusual talent, like being born into wealth, is luck.
Your specific exreme example is probably pretty damned rare. Rare enough that it hasn't ever been studied closely enough to supply statistics around likelihood.
On the other hand, the best statistics we have indicate that if you're born in the bottom 20% US socioeconomic quintile, you've got a 66.3% chance of moving up into a higher rung. And almost a 40% chance of moving up at least two rungs to the third quintile. Meaning middle class.
That's not as equitable as it ought to be, but compared to someone in 18th century Europe that's pretty incredible.
Delusional. Absolutely delusional to think that someone born into wealth, with connections and support, with access to high quality education and other key resources and opportunities, and all sorts of other head starts vs the average has the same shot at success as someone born into poverty, without access to any of the above, let alone someone who comes from a background of addiction.
"Same shot" is a red herring. Sure, people born into better circumstances find it easier to thrive. But people with the right ability can and absolutely do thrive as well. You're arguing something different
Most people with the right abilities won’t even be discovered if they come from poor backgrounds. You need the predisposition but also the motivation and confidence to develop those. Which usually comes from parents, peers and teachers.
Your talking about the efficiency of the system though, which is not quite the same thing. You're effectively saying, sure it may be a meritocracy but it doesn't work. And you're not wrong, people who might have the aptitude can't develop it without access to resources and low wealth severely restricts that access. And because the system doesn't develop the lower as strata as well, there are many gaps that are filled by people with less natural aptitude but greater access to develop what they have. If the system was more efficient then the people with the most natural aptitude would receive the development thry need and people would be perfectly sorted.
But none of that changes the fact that it is a meritocracy.
It’s not an effective one. Exceptions to the rule and occasional break outs don’t change that, they’re just sob stories to sell the libertarian narrative. When measuring meritocracy as a measure of success driven by ability and effort rather than background or inherited wealth, Denmark, Norway and Finland score highest.
Yeah that’s what they want people to believe. But it’s very unlikely. US is one of the worst countries when it comes to social mobility. A lot of talented people will never even be discovered because they go to shitty schools where no one cares.
You can compare it to any country but I wouldn’t be very proud of beating countries like India, which still has millions of starving children.
A lot of G20 countries are on that list due to sheer size but are much lower in terms of development and per capita GDP.
A country like India with horrible poverty where one out of three children is malnourished, has other issues than beating Denmark in social mobility. Although ironically that would help with those problems as well.
Wrong. It broke the illusion of meritocracy and will force people to confront the reality of circumstances deciding everyone's life and there's no way for everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
This happened in the 20s and 30s. The wealthy did not realize that people deserved dignity and opportunity. It literally took the militant action of workers, where the National Guard gunned them and their families down, just to get OSHA, the 5-day workweek, and child labor laws.
This. A lot of what we’re seeing right now has echoes the turn of the century peak industrial era, when the US was run by a few oligarchs such as the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and their ilk. Was not a fun time for workers from Pinkertons to the National Guard shooting. Took FDRs’ New Deal among other things to recover from the Great Depression.
Yep this right here ai is the great equalizer and anyone that hates it is only seeing for what it is the reality of their circumstances benefiting them allowing them to climb up. Now that’s being shattered and it for sure making people gobbsmacked
So AI boosting is focused on r/Economics today. Very odd behavior in the comments with multiple accounts saying nearly the same thing with the same phrasing. This is weak.
The pattern is every time there is bad news about AI, the bots and LLM addicts ruin social media for a few days. If the market worries sustain this will week, it will continue.
AI is cool. Transformers are cool. LLMs are cool. The cult Frontier Labs that created a temporary moat by buying all of the RAM chips are not cool.
The drug users need to defend their dealers, it's why they can't just be like "oh yeah, the tools can be useful, but the buildout around two money furnace AI companies is unsustainable!"
More IPOs are coming, the debts are looking worse, investors are getting more suspicious.
FUD is on overdrive partly because there's a network effect.
1 bot/shill says something plausible, and there's no shortage of "true believers" to play follow the leader.
A quick spot check on accounts usually shows many set to private, made after 2022, etc. Doesn't prove anything but is always sus as heck.
Most people are too brainrotted to care anyway at this point.
The marketing shenanigans behind this tech (partly using the tech itself) are infinitely worse and more damaging than anything the tech itself could do in isolation.
The names behind a lot of these efforts have a history too. As far back as 2016 at least. IYKYK.
It’s not just those who would be filling these jobs that LLM is taking over that should be worried, it’s the future wealthy as well.
Elon Musk couldn’t care less about the fallout from this because he thinks he’ll either be dead before it happens or on an island somewhere waxing nostalgic about Epstein’s island, but when people are completely unable to earn a living and survive, they’re going to turn their attention to the people who never had to.
We have two more years of this festering pustule of an “administration”, in the meantime there needs to be serious thought put into how to restructure society and economies into sustainable entities that don’t make Soylent green or whatever.
> but when people are completely unable to earn a living and survive, they’re going to turn their attention to the people who never had to.
People reddit larp about this in every conversation about large societal change from AI. And it's a pathetic joke every time. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been laid off from AI, have they had a single large-scale protest? Has a single AI leader been killed?
Americans love to cling to the fantasy of the oppressed rising up against their oppressor, but it is just that: a fantasy. Nobody will ever do shit, people will go to their shit jobs making shit money to be bitch boy for those born into wealth, say their "yes sirs" and then go home, finding their spine only when it's time to post on reddit.
I personally think that companies should have some sort of ratio of net income to number of employees, where if they don’t have enough employees, their tax rate skyrockets to at least 50% of all revenue. If a company doesn’t create jobs, and downsizes so much, there’s no point in keeping their taxes low.
Why don’t we just redistribute the gains gotten by AI? Forcing a ratio of employees to income seems to be such a weird way of handling the potential issue.
We shouldn’t be preventing companies from producing as much as they can with as few employees as they can. That is how we all get a better quality of life over time….as long as that greater productivity is distributed society at large. Policies like you propose can be gamed.
Buddy, producing a bunch of garbage while everyone loses their jobs and the rich get richer chasing endless growth doesn’t improve anyone’s quality of life. Money helps the economy most when it’s being spent instead of hoarded.
Not anymore once jobs get eaten by AI. I am always surprised by assumptions that everything will stay the same. In the past technical innovation might have been disruptive but always created new jobs. I doubt we will see the same if AI is deployed the way some corporate chiefs envision
Yeah, over certain revenue & head count (include H1 and certain subcontractors) we tax you more if revenue/employee count doesn't work for society.
The US is the corporation. Google doesn't matter. Meta doesn't matter. Sears doesn't matter. What matters is that we're growing the next Google. The next Meta. The point is maximizing the wealth of the United States. Aka, the middle class. Flat society.
Businesses should not be net extractors of wealth from community. That's backwards.
The tax code is supposed to be used as a cudgel and lever to product ideal outcomes. We want marriage. We want kids. That locks you into an 18 year consumption cycle. That drives lots of economic value creation. That's good for society so we discount it. But we do it at the parent company level.
Monopoly is bad because it hurts the parent company. Oligarchy is bad because it disrupts entrepreneurial ventures and small/medium companies. And that fucks with the parent company (USA, INC.) and its bottom line.
The best driver of economic success is for a country to make it easy enough with a brilliant idea or brilliant new company to kill Kings. Kings are inherently bad.
The myth of the 10x employee has been debunked many times. Most of the time the "10x" employee has been creating walls around their work and sabotaging their coworkers to create the illusion of productivity.
Myth? I am a professional mathematican. Most good mathematicians publish around 1-2 good papers a year. But Sharon Shelah publishes more than 30 a year (and he is more than 80 years old already). It's not the norm, but such people exists. He is widely considered the world best expert in mathematical logic.
I'm unfamiliar with that person's work specifically, and for all I know they could be good. But generally speaking the way academics publish so many publications per year is by Co authoring with teams of grad students who join their research group or seek them out to be an author on their paper for access to their funding networks. Its more of a reflection of hyper optimization for the funding structure of academia rather than an indication they are a pure unparalleled genius.
Funding at the high end is an incredibly small clique and is almost entirely driven by networking.
According to Businessbro sense, then, Sharon should be a CEO making 100x what a bottom level employee hsould be making becuase he's so brilliant and certainly should be running his own business.
It's pretty easy to gate this for specific annual revenues. If a business makes $1M / year, no ratio. If it makes $10M / year, minimum 10 employees. If it makes $100 M / year, minimum 75 employees. If of makes $1b / year, minimum 600 employees. If it makes $1T / year, minimum 50,000 employees.
You can connect the dots between these points with the right sliders thereby not creating any loopholes.
It seems that most people outside of these subreddits have no idea what’s coming. They think that LLMs are still silly chatbots. When in reality, they are capable of replacing millions of jobs already. Opus 5.5 was a major leap forward, and the progress will continue. Most white collar jobs that aren’t at least manager level will likely be gone in a few years.
So, and I mean this seriously, what are we supposed to do about this? The world governments aren’t just asleep at the wheel, they’re actively pumping the machine… so what are the normal people supposed to do? And are managers really safe, too? I mean, shit, what’s 15 years of experience and an advanced degree when some VP can replace you with a beep boop?
The problem is the job market will never replace these jobs for other areas as fast as needed. So, at some point people wont be able to pay their debts, and you create a crash from that. Also, when people are cash strapped, less products fly off the shelves. What happens? Worse sales, worse results, more layoffs, etc etc, so the massive AI induced layoffs will end in a world financial crisis, arguably the worst yet.
And then what? I’m genuinely curious about what happens next. I know when don’t know anything for certain, but what happens when many or even most jobs are taken over?
There are three possibilities for when AI takes away a significant number of jobs permanently (and new jobs created are also done by AI) leaving tens of millions of people not just unemployed, but unemployable
Which would be odd considering how governments (in the US and across the world) are currently begging and screeching at us to have more babies because population decline is bad and detrimental to economies predicated on endless growth or somesuch.
My sense is that the fertility rate decline discourse is largely being promulgated by the bunker billionaire class as a culture war wedge issue to generate strife among the working class. Similar to discourse about trans people and immigrants.
It's hard to acknowledge--let alone act on--class solidarity with a neighbor who seems to hate you because of your skin color, who you love, and what you choose to do with your uterus.
Its nice to see one person thinking clearly. All the issues you mentioned serve the ruling class as a tool to divide the working class. Anytime trans/immigrant/gender/race content is being pushed as a divisive issue, creating division amongst the working class is the goal of it.
It feels like more people are finally waking up and asking good questions about this madness, but it's definitely hard to cut through all the botted bs.
Not really odd. The young workers pay for the retirement of the old, but that only works while there’s more young people than old.
It was obviously never sustainable in the first place, because the world can’t sustain even the current population levels long term, let alone the increasing level required to maintain state pensions in such a fashion.
By screeching now they can then blame the people that didn’t have kids for them needing to cancel state pensions and retirement entirely.
NOT ONE DIME of unearned income (rent, capital gains, dividends, interest, and other more convoluted sources) is taxed to fund Social Security or Medicare. Nearly all of this income goes to the wealthiest 10%.
This can easily be changed if there is the political will to do so. Generation war is another Identity Politics ploy to divide working people.
There is also the option to undertake a mass nationalisation of automated industries and have governments run as consumer driven cooperatives, while we abandon currency and conventional approaches to non-personal property, and find new methods to allocate resources.
No idea. The logic, so far, of society has been to expand and create more and more jobs. For the first time ever, at least that I remember, we are getting a target to reduce jobs, and make people expendable. Our entire social structure is completely designed and built on the opposite of what this AI wave is tryna do, the effects have the potential to be otherwordly bad. And remember, no politician will every tell you the actual problems of this.
If history is any indication then a sweeping away of the current order and a replacement with another.
Though it still depends on if this is real change or just another fad that will fade away. Jury is still out on that. Is this AI destroying jobs or good old fashioned debt.
I'd argue that if AI is the labour force destroyer then the economic system that we have now that birthed it will be destroyed and replaced. It simply wouldn't serve any purpose. A bit like bronze axe heads becoming redundant as a representation of power and wealth at the end of the bronze age (it's why we dig up so many, they lost value so people just left them in the ground).
What comes next who knows but I feel certain that the current leadership class, political and business will be removed first.
In theory, UBI, because its a rational response to the problem. But, in actuality, we'll be dominated by fear and anger and hatred of other and argue against MY money going to THEM. We'll point at our massive debts and deficits and argue we actually need to reduce welfare and entitlement spending. We'll have violent unrest, riots, revolts and we'll increase deficit spending even more in order to violently put them down, and then, seeing our debts increasing faster than ever we'll cut even more social programs....
This happens slow enough for most ppl to retool for those who can’t we need to vote in fair enough safety nets while providing opportunity for supplemental gig income
retool to what?? you cant have everyone doing blue collar jobs nor at certain ages. then you look at china, they build shit so fast using robots. so blue collar what
I think there will be a lot of work there. And not translator I was envisioning someone more like an editor. Except your boss isn’t a human chief editor, your work performance is based mostly on analytics with regard to how well ‘received’ your work was by end users. I know AI seems very impressive but one thing it does seem to have trouble with is the kind of nuance people spot effortlessly it can’t wrap its limited context around
They built all these warehouses with all these electronics and then they all died. Good luck to the octopus archaeologists of 3 million years from now.
This is a matter of perspective, there are groups who are betting on this deconstruction of the "capitalistic" system by accelerating its own demise using its own rules. It can't forbid ai usage to preserve itself.
It will be like the flick of a switch for most people. The changes are simply happening too fast to adapt.
Consider that software engineering gathers some of then most technologically skilled workers, and even they are struggling to keep up with the rate of progress.
And it is not simply a matter of models and tools, but of trying to make strategic decisions in a context of extreme uncertainty.
Long term 20 plus years no one has a job. Society will have A transition phase from today's world to the next. We will be the generations that has to live through that transition. Hopefully on the other end humans are better off.
Yes I’m sure the people investing trillions in AI buildouts are doing it to keep paying the same amount in labor as they are today. Surely the whole sales pitch isn’t “replace human knowledge work”
deal. See you in 20 years. How much are we betting? And what’s the exact bet? Mass unemployment vs relatively similar unemployment rate? (Can hardly get lower than it is now in most countries)
hey man i wanna believe you just so i can stay sane. like what type of jobs are you talking? all types of sectors or just certain ones or new ones we cant even think of?
staying sane would be advisable in either scenario.
But productivity gains from AI (as usually with any technological leap) would allow humans to focus on higher judgement tasks and specialized skills instead of tedious busywork.
Of course there could be the case that AI could do those too. But first of all I don’t think it could. And if it can we’ll need a new economical model anyway so no need to panic. Can’t be much worse than the current capitalistic system..
I said 20 plus years. I'm long on AI and how it will change society. We have to cross the bridge eventually of having autonomous robots and ai. Long term No one is working unless it's AI assisted. even robots will fix other robots.
Yes, I know you said 20 plus years. And I say there will be more jobs in 20. And there will be still more jobs in 40 years. (per capita as populations will decline).
Technological progress will just change them. As you said, AI assisted. It’ll be more efficient. Baumol effect is gonna go haywire. Which will probably be bad for the cost of pure human work like care, orchestra musician etc.
Then we’d need a new economic model as the markets (everything from housing, office property to retail would collapse). But we’re far from it. Current AI while impressive is still reliant on probabilities which is inherently poorly suited for tasks that require extreme reliability, transparent documentation to the smallest detail and the model maker or owner taking full liability for mishaps.
We still need heads to roll if shit goes sideways. And we still need everything to he documented (not hallucinated) so safety swiss cheese holes can be closed.
But let’s say AI evolves and becomes actually intelligent. Do you really want that AI, which not even the people working on it understand properly and casually give it a “10% chance to kill us all” to fly our airplanes, design high rises and bridges and research pathogens? If it’s really smart, maybe it wants to save elephants and the rain forest instead and decides it’s better to kill these fat useless latte slurping fucks..
I don’t know, maybe AI taking ALL THE JOBS would be the better scenario as it would end capitalism which surely isn’t fantastic for our ecosystems nor mental health. But it would probably be quite messy until a new economic model is born.
It would happen very quickly, first heavy mitigation measures and stimulant checks etc (think covid), then remodeling. Certain markets especially some property would still be beyond saving
Doomers will never do anything that shows actual confidence even though you can literally gamble on market collapse. At least the suicide cults back in the day showed some follow-through.
tOp EcOnOmIst huh?
Show me a top economist who says “long term 20 plus years no one has a job”. The only people saying that are stupid home schooled Silicon Valley bros who wanna hype up their model and 14 year old melodramatic Redditors
Most top economists indeed don’t believe so and think augmentation will outweigh substitution.
Productivity gains will ultimately lead to new jobs that replace lost roles they’d predict. That’s always been the case in history when technology leaps happened.
Nothing we can do. At least in the most powerful country in the world(USA), we have voted away all of powers by falling for billionaire propaganda (our parents did I guess).
It is happening. For example, at the workplace of someone I know, they just fired all the lower level workers. Now the mid-level workers do their jobs, as well.
Is that because of AI, or because of a shit economy and hiking interest rates on the back of a POTUS throwing tariffs at everyone, including a full blown trade war with their second largest trading partner?
I guess you missed the sarcasm. They say it's because of AI. It's possible that the managers actually believe it, but it could also be for any of the reasons you mentioned. The point I was making is that AI isn't replacing that many jobs by itself, although in certain conditions for certain jobs, it can increase productivity.
I mean something is coming but what is the question. Is it augmentation or just as other advancement have shown things change and new roles and opportunities pop up in its place.
It will take 5 to 10 years for most organisations.
They need experts to help with the move and need to spend a lot of money, and are worried about choosing the wrong direction.
They need to update their processes, and make all their systems AI accessible first which will take years.
Some companies will move fast, and that's where initially job losses will be, and some will move very slowly and be dragged into using AI systems or face shrinking margins from competition.
Companies in more regulated industries like finance, medical, etc... will be somewhat shielded initially as regulations take time to catch up.
Accountability, liability. Not the easiest to solve. Sure AI will help assisting and make certain assistant roles more redundant. May also introduce new jobs though.
My firm has hired 1/3 as many entry level developers this year as normal and we're making record profits with record productivity. That's how it happens.
It’ll take even more time for LLMs to develop transparency, ability for clear documentation and to take accountability and liability.
A lot of jobs existed purely for the latter two even before AI.
It takes time to implement at the surface level outside the tech world and with the staggering exponential evolution most companies are unaware of the true potential along with the public. If we were to truly apply AI as it exists now the world would look completely different than the one you face right. Give it a couple years and we’ll get there.
I get what you're saying but you're completely ignoring the AI economical fundamentals. The hardware alone is extremely expensive and replacement hardware costs are coming.
They're literally gambling on the American economy with AI private investors driving up the bond market. Their burrowing costs are about to balloon at the hope of replacing millions of white collar Americans and all for what? Just to have another giant boat on the dock?
They may replace millions of jobs which generate so much tax revenue. Not only that, they also support capitalists who produce goods and services for these millions who lose their jobs. How do they intend to handle this? This is an exercise in job reduction and productivity, with negative outcomes in other areas. Unlike the Internet, AI will neither create new jobs, nor likely create entirely new businesses, which the Internet did. So as much as people may want to be mesmerized by a technology that primarily does cost cutting, I don’t see much else coming out of it.
This. And someone will say the k shaped economy, and that’s certainly going to be the answer for some company, but as someone in corporate strategy at a CPG F500, most CPG companies are in trouble if the white collar workforce disappears in the span of 2 years and we have mass unemployment.
It does make me think if where I'm from shows one possible future.
Where I'm from has a very large labor force with a very few ultra wealthy ultra powerful people. Where does all that money go? Funding political campaigns, having local police / judges / mayors / regulators on their payroll, private armies, mass dole-outs with their names on them to buy citizen loyalty, filling their workforces with legions of people working 3-6 month temp contracts with no opportunity for advancement, buying massive tracts of land, stashing their money abroad.
These AI slaves neither pay any taxes, nor do they buy any services or goods.
Some say not to worry. You will have your universal basic income. That sounds like how it used to be the case in a communist country. Everyone gets the same amount of money, so everyone is a ‘comrade’ - LOL.
The idea is that machines produce everything in abundance… ok, if that is the case, why do people need money, or universal basic income… everything is in abundance, so that universal basic income is a BS concept, because proponents of AI do not know how else to explain that scenario as sustainable.
Does this sound like a credible and sustainable future of humanity? Why are they insulting our intelligence…
As someone else has already said: slavery was not good for the working class. Triangle slave trade caused massive decline of economic growth in Silk road empires.
But perhaps the history of slavery in Islamic world itself is a better example in the context of domestic economic policies. Historically most artisan guilds in Islamic world were opposed to non-domestic slaves. Many Persian and Turkish bazzars prohibited slaves (and sometimes minorities that were made up of refugees or desperate migrants) from entering the Bazzar. Guilds often had strict policies on who could become a craftsman, and in some cases restrictions would be as strict as only allowing the oldest son of an existing member to become a new member. Before the Mongols invasion debt slavery (which predates Islam) was a norm in middle-east with the idea being you sold yourself as a slave for several years in order to repay your debt. But perso-turkish dynasties started regulating who can become a debt-slave, again, because there were just too many debt-slaves and not enough demand! Lashing, amputation, and banishment started becoming common punishments as alternatives to enslavement, becuase there just wasn't enough job. Even for slaves.
It was only the utter and apocalyptic devestation caused by the Mongols invasion that.... "fixed" the economy, and ultimately led to decline of debt slavery in misdle-east.
Unfortunately, I think you’re probably wrong. If you are right, we’re likely to be ok because a huge percentage of the workforce suddenly going offline will either lead to UBI or revolution.
In reality, I think the process will be much messier and worse for all of us. The AI will be able to replace the jobs but the rollout to different industries will be spotty. There are too many laws/regulations and societal norms to get through. So you won’t see a sudden 2 year jump to 30% unemployment. Instead one sector will be hit. Then a lull. Then another sector hit. Etc. We won’t hit the critical mass to get UBI or revolution. Instead we’ll just have slowly increasing misery.
And it’s not just white collar. The physical robots are only a few years out from having the ability to do the same to blue collar.
But the AI, as far as of now, cannot automate a job. There's why too many fuckups and humans needs to filter them. That won't change until a better architecture not entirely based on LLMs appear. Will it eventually appear? Probably but in how many years?
It already is. Hiring of junior programmers is down because a senior programmer + AI is as effective as a senior programmer + junior programmers. Yes someone is still managing the bot, but instead of, say, 3 jobs, you need 1.
I'll be honest about this, this is a societal suicide if companies start doing this. There will be no people to take the expert title making the society regress or stagnate in most fields.
I completely agree. It's the enshitification of everything. We offload all of our thinking to the machine and things work for a bit until they don't and then we're royally screwed because no one is left to pick up the pieces.
The problem is a collective action problem. If I believe my company can poach senior people from your company while replacing juniors with machines, then I don't currently have a short term incentive to pay extra for junior people. I'll let some other saps train them and poach them when I need them. The Nash equilibrium here seems to be nobody hires junior people and we're all screwed in five years.
I hope I'm wrong. And I know nothing about the future (and really, given the wide range of opinions among people who have been thinking deeply about all of this, nobody else does either). But it doesn't seem like there's anyone competent in any position of power in the West who could steer the ship of our society through the treacherous shoals. It also seems like the incentive structures we've baked into our society are almost making this inevitable.
We have made a religion around business where the highest good is maximizing shareholder value, instead of making the organizing principle of private enterprise the promotion of human flourishing. We've invented a machine that is quickly becoming more competent at producing the outputs that humans have usually produced to generate economic activity than humans are. Since our society is structured on these outputs, rather than on the actual good of human flourishing, the machine will eat everything.
And at the top of it all are a bunch of crazies who think they are going to be the first to download their consciousnesses into the machine and live forever as machine-gods. They have so little understanding of metaphysics that they actually think this is a possibility. And with them are a bunch of businessmen who just want to make money and don't think deeply about anything.
It's crazy to say, but I think China has a better chance of coming through this than anywhere in the West.
I'm a dev and the difficulty I currently see is not being able to distinguish the actual knowledge of individual employees. Everybody has become proficient due to our internal agents but that means that everybody is basically as efficient as anyone else. Just 2 years ago there was an understood hierarchy of best and worst devs. Now? Almost everyone can complete any ticket on any project.
Double edged sword. More work being done. Less pride in the work that has been done.
Yes. I heard something said recently in an interview that was essentially "look back at the history of revolutions and pay attention to how many young men were out of work just before they occurred." Yikes.
There's a reason the billionaire class is building remote island compounds right now. Like Bond villains.
If all white collar job below manager are gone why the manager job is safe ? They literally just manage the people below them ? What is the point of keeping manager if there is no one to manage ?
I’m not saying that AI isn’t immensely capable and can’t cause job displacement. But there’s a reason why investors are getting spooked about taking on any more AI-related debt.
• Money is being burnt, and there is no clear source of the sort of revenue needed for mass use of frontier-end AI to be justified.
• mass usage of AI is incredibly expensive, though open source models are becoming very capable for much less of the cost.
• The energy infrastructure needed to sustain the amount of data centers necessary for mass-scale computing at the needed level is just not there.
• Only 1-5% of prior layoffs had anything to do with AI, and have more to do with off-shoring, the economy, etc.
These AI companies are incentivized to make AI look like this society-ending threat. There’s a reason why there was such a uniform push recently to increase government intervention and regulation. If they don’t follow the rules today, why would they follow future regulation? With private investors becoming more strict and spooked, they are in DESPERATE need of the government stepping in and funding. Hence all of our 401Ks being used as collateral.
These questions about efficiency and revenue are very difficult to answer, and the effects of all this money being tied up to a business model that has no proof of being profitable as of now - and definitely nowhere near the level necessary to absorb all this debt and capital expense - can be felt very soon.
This isn’t to say that these founding companies disappearing means that AI will fail - the railroad had similar giants early on which soon collapsed, and we still have railroads.
That’s just to say that this idea that “they can just decide to” use more AI one day and pull the rug out from workers in an instant isn’t realistic.
I’m more scared of these sociopaths running these companies and how willing they are to make everyone else suffer for their temporary gain than I am of AI. And I hope to all that is worthwhile that in the financial crisis they will create as their valuation drops, they will be shamed forever.
>Most white collar jobs that aren’t at least manager level will likely be gone in a few years.
The ones without professional associations - sure (like mine :P). But Lawyers, Doctors, and Engineers? They won't be able to be replaced so easily due to regulations. I'm not saying that AI won't be able to do the jobs that they do - but it will be hard to dislodge them. Opus 5.5 is already a better software engineer than I am in like 90% of situations - but it does need someone to pilot it. Once that's no longer true and it's self directed my job is gonna be gonzo.
All that being said though - we do not know the real costs of AI. At the current subsidized rate opus costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Depending on the codebase you are working on and the complexity of the project - the cost can explode. I don't write much code anymore (even before AI) and I was able to easily spend $500-$1000 a week for the past few weeks. At the prices Anthropic charges now they lose money. They're betting on being able to get the costs down and being able to raise prices but training models is incredibly expensive and the moment you release a new advanced model the Chinese open source models can get 90%+ of your performance just by training off your model so the economics are very shaky. It just doesnt make economic sense to expend so much money on making an advanced model when it can be copied immediately and you lose out on most of the advantage you got from the R&D. Usually when a company has massive R&D expenditures like in pharmaceuticals they can at least patent the drug they developed and sell it exclusively for a period of time.
AI is a pretty crazy technology. It's shocking the amazing results you get just from what is essentially a "statistically most likely next character" generator. That being said - the economics of the business of AI have not fully convinced me - there's some problems there that need to be figured out.
I really don't understand how they solve the automation paradox if AI takes all the jobs. Who will be buying whatever the oligarchs are selling? If labor is gone, what's replacing demand?
You're asking the wrong question. If laborers are no longer needed, what happens to laborers? The oligarchs have an answer to that question, but you won't like it.
Such a Malthusian dilemma. Bioengineered virus to cull the population? Endless conscripted war to cull the population? Civil unrest to cull? So many possibilities.
Some have speculated that an increasing portion of us will be left to die through benign neglect (neoliberalism was the soft launch of this policy), but I don't think that makes sense. Why would a small class of people risk a revolutionary uprising by a global mass of people when they don't need their labor anymore? It's much more likely that we will be actively exterminated. Some of us (men, women, and children) will be enslaved for sex and reproductive work, of course.
What, the top 10% of the US accounts for 50% of the spending? I suppose it'll just be more of that.
The rich and the powerful needing a large consumer middle class from which to derive their wealth and power from, has been a relatively recent invention anyway.
This is a classic contradiction of capitalism. Ironically, automation ultimately means less profits in the long run. Once every company can make their products for extremely cheap and in massive quantities, the price of what they're selling must drop as a result. Yet all companies have to adopt automation regardless, because if they don't they will be beaten out by a company with lower labor costs.
If all labor was automated away the capitalist class would collapse under itself. They would be left with massive machinery for production and no one to sell products to. It would be the end of capitalism altogether.
It's not even fomo so much as it's eat or get eaten. If they don't adopt, their market share will be taken by the companies which do adopt and can provide products or services better and cheaper.
But yep the self defeating spiral has been the story of capitalism since the beginning. It's the main factor that makes it an incredible force for technological innovation to begin with. The only way to continue to make profit when you're constantly adopting products that tank your rate of profit is to try to find a new innovation that gives you an edge. Then that innovation hits the rest of the market, rate of profit tanks, rinse and repeat.
If AI truly does elimate the need for human labor, then there can be no further real cost reducing innovations to be made, rate of profit will go to zero, and it will be the end of capitalism.
This is a misunderstanding of the situation that I’ve seen a lot, and it’s something I’ve thought about a lot.
In classic capitalism you need demand to justify creation of products because you need to be able to pay the labor force required to extract, research, develop, and manufacture products.
However, when a single person or small group of people can control the entire labor stack single handedly due to advances in robotics and AI, then things get weird.
We’re not far from it being possible for wealthy individuals to purchase a self maintaining, autonomous labor force that can complete every step of any production process.
Why does Jeff Bezos need the wider market when he has a large force of autonomous, super intelligent, highly dexterous / strong workers that work 24/7 and each contain more than the sum total of human knowledge within them.
Once that happens there’s little need for the wider economy to exist for the top 0.1% and they each become their own micro-nation. They can continue to trade and barter amongst each other without having to rely on the rabble to sustain their operations.
There will of course be some bastions of free people, but for how long I don’t know. We’ll see measures to avoid revolution, bread and circuses, until it’s no longer needed and they’ve reached an unassailable position at which point they’ll shake us off like fleas from a dog. They’ll pat themselves on the back for having found a solution for climate change and global instability, and Feudalism 2.0 will settle in for a few generations.
Why would you need the token that acts as a proxy for power when you have the power itself on tap.
There's another layer there too: simply eliminating jobs, rather than replacing them. Many jobs that we have now are to make the jobs of other people easier or more efficient. Pretty much all software (dashboards, UI/UX, accounting tools, etc.) are all things that take in data, organize it, then present it nicely. None of that is needed for advanced AI. They can take the raw data and simply skip those steps, moving straight to the action plan.
And it goes well-beyond software: all HR-related orgs, for example.
Opus 5.5 is great at coding because there was so much open software out there and the verification is quick and if the model makes a mistake the result is harmless. Another aspect is that for the past 9 months, the models were being trained by their users. All that tokenmaxxing stuff was just engineers all over the world paying to train the models. So much of the the performance gains have also been from hiring professional engineers and having them teach the models how to use the most common tools and practices. From here on, they would hire the very top engineers for training their models and most of the useful user session data will come from people who can tell the model where the boundaries of its current performance are.
There are local LLMs for coding purposes...in fact you can train them on your code base privately. Not pay for any tokens, share it over a corporate ethernet etc.
Why the hell would a corporation put that on a data center? Just have the dev employees put Jan or another local LLM on their local work laptops.
Use that for coding, and have them train it on the updates as they go and Metadata tags if they're updating database tables or whatever else. This way they don't have to write tedious documentation on internal software updates the next person can come in and it will help to keep things synchronized and people can ask about the architecture too.
>There are local LLMs for coding purposes...in fact you can train them on your code base privately. Not pay for any tokens, share it over a corporate ethernet etc.
I work for one of the leaders in the AI space and I just use the models that they provide access to - including internal ones that aren't public. I agree it's stupid to give me unlimited access to spend like crazy using only the best models - but even if the worse thing would work just fine if I have the choice I'll always just select Opus (mostly because that selection is just pre-populated from my last session). Some companies have token limits but we don't yet :shrug.
Now - the company I work for uses a mono-repo which does represent some issues for the whole LLM + coding combination. The number of input tokens goes up astronomically just because it needs to read so many other files. So if they are going to put token limits to stop the bleeding those limits will still need to be super high.
I mean REAL engineers. That legally can use the term engineer. I'm a software "engineer" - I'm just some dude with a computer science degree. There's no professional accreditation or board or anything.
Huh. That's crazy. In my country there are in fact Software Engineering degrees seperate from Computer Science degrees that are in fact accredited by IPENZ (our equivalent of ABET).
Because it could literally all end overnight if the "AI bubble" pops and costs stop being subsidized. Your Claude Max subscription becomes unavailable to consumers (or even mid sized businesses) with a $2k a month price tag.
Build while you can, the bill is coming due, and something like the midterms could be what sets it off.
AI doesn't go away even if the bubble pops, all the frontier labs go bankrupt, and almost all of the datacenter plans fall through. At the rate the software and hardware are progressing open weight models that run locally will likely be capable of doing everything frontier models can do now in a matter of years.
What is incredible is how partisan the split is. Many nice, thoughtfully Center-left people have convinced themselves it is all parrots of some right wing grift gamble. I can't tell if it is partisan ostrich behavior or because the implications would necessitate truly radical policy.
Honestly, the level to which we don't believe these forecasts is the lack of discussion about nationalization. I don't see how these technologies become so important and are allowed to live in the private sphere outside of the government.
It’s insane that private citizens are saying “we’re building Frankenstein systems that might kill us all” and there’s not some sort of national security issue at all.
Are you suggesting we ask a bunch of 40-60 year olds who have 20-40 years' experience as office workers to become construction laborers, painting and coating workers, welders, wind turbine techs, woodworkers, diesel mechanics, electricians, boilermakers, and solar panel installers? Those are the most in-demand blue collar jobs right now, per Indeed.
Do you think they'll physically be capable of performing those jobs?
Because that would leave to mass violence and instability. Once you start telling people their life as they know it is over, the consequences of their actions start looking pretty meaningless to them.
If the American government functioned there would be a New Deal type jobs program that floated citizens who want to go to trade school. How many people who are, say, 38 and a white collar worker can afford to quit their jobs and go to trade school full time?
It's easy saying "learn a trade" but we (Americans) don't have a safety net that allows for that.
Idk, all the research seems to show that retraining just doesn't work. Generally, education is used like a blind meme and substitute for richer engagement with the problems.
Re: UBI, someone made the lovely example of Arab states as a UBI demonstrator. That seems grim.
I have no clue what exactly our objective is and how we solve for it. Only thing I am certain of, is that if it is as insane as the labs are claiming that it will have too much power to exist outside of government.
Will they be less capable then 20-30 year olds yes… will they be useful on the job site, absolutely .
The same was suggested for factory workers when knowledge work displaced factory jobs …
And people who casually suggest complete job destruction seem to overlook the fact how easy it is to blow up datacentres. Mass unemployment will lead to mass luddite behaviour.
I personally dont think it will turn bleak, but 20 - 30% unemployment would make anyone who works at the Frontier labs a living nightmare.
Most won't do much. Look at 3rd world countries. Lots of very poor people living in shanty towns near fancy, big skyscrapers. Yet, relatively few major uprisings. Most individuals focused on survival and well-being of their families.
As for your thoughts, more difficult than one might think. However, could foresee world events leading to a similar outcome.
Such as nuclear weapons being detonated in space, which could take out large swaths of satellites, especially in lower orbits. Affecting communications, timing which many services rely on, and possibly GPS, though probably somewhat hardened. And frying many ground-based computer systems. Plus, damaging power transformers and other critical infrastructure too.
In short, war leads to mass destruction, which then leads to massive rebuilding and jobs. At least for a while. Hope it doesn't play out that way, but it traditionally has. WWII is a prime example.
Not only is the function of a lot of middle managers dubious in the first place, if there are 70% fewer line workers there's 70% less need for people up manage them.
I mean what's the difference between manager and SVP if we're taking about gains and advances on an exponential scale? Under those assumptions you very rapidly progress between your average worker bee and Einstein
> Most white collar jobs that aren’t at least manager level will likely be gone in a few years.
The average manager is just a status update meat proxy. Heck with good context it can also make CEO-level decisions, but you can’t blame AI when shit goes south. The whole business game is making bets to minimize risk based on a vast array of unknowns. An LLM can technically make far better data driven decisions than humans.
The job may still be there even if that manager isn't competent. The most likely outcome is whoever was best in that org at adapting to the new AI world will be in that manager position, wrangling and taking responsibility for the LLMs.
as a dev I've effectively become a software manager. I manage a handful of agents who do all the implementing, QA, code reviews, chaos testing, etc. I just give the final sign off approval.
Oh please. As though the people in these subreddits have any clue. Reddit is mostly a place to be outraged about AI and claim that they will never use it and will boycott anyone who does.
You can find anything you want to find being said on reddit. Far more interesting than that banality is what you choose to focus on and what you choose to ignore and forget.
Also very true. The lack of public education about what's coming is shocking. But I don't think that people will be retained in the future based on them being a manager, but on their knowledge and adoption of the new tech. Which most people are oblivious to. They think GPT is fancy Google.
Managers and c suites are there to assume liability. If shit goes wrong you can’t fire the llm, but you can fire the cto or ceo. (Yes this just happened at my org. The board wanted to go in a different direction and someone had to fall on the sword)
AI sucks at things where it can’t get quick feedback like coding or math, or things where there is no consensus answer. If you ask it to make business decisions it’s just going to summarize what’s on google/reddit.
Managers are making business decisions based on what they get from AI. Frankly, Ive seen managers and ceos using AI much more than I do. And I think this is much more prevalent than we think.
I think they won’t be replaced first. They are the ones who are deciding who gets fired and they are the ones who frame how everyone else’s performance is perceived.
Technical people are better suited to reviewing the output and steering AI.
C suites have a tendency to make delusional decision without the technical people keeping them grounded. This doesn't help that AI are really good Yes men that will feed the C suites ego.
Counterpoint what is stopping me from having a model comb over all of the documentation and summarizing it? I have had fantastic managers who are still mentally there and those that make the most basic technical fuckups. If how some are spinning it is true nobody has any reason to have a monopoly on "muh big picture"
At my day job this is super clear to me as our software factory is functional and just being refined now.
On the weekends when I ask agents to automatically list a bunch of eBay listings for me, it’s still frustrating that it failed 50% of the time. I can see why most people don’t think agents can do much. It’ll improve but the typical $20 sub isn’t impressive.
most manager level jobs will be redundant because there is no one to manage left except people driving the ais and those definitely are not the current manager generations! who just drive people around but have no clue about processes!
They’ll still be needed for a while. Managers will review the output and steer the AI agents as needed. They might even keep a few staff on hand to perform first level review of the AI output, but it will be a tiny fraction of the original headcount. They’ll also make decisions for their departments and the organizations as a whole.
I don’t see that happening at the senior manager level for a while. For example, a corporate tax department considering some complex strategy like a new transfer pricing plan, or the consequences of a tax election. Senior managers will be around for a while to sign off on those decisions, even though AI will play a huge role in making them. I can think of countless other examples for treasury/finance, R&D, sales/marketing, supply chain, etc.
I think i have read the sentence "Opus 5.5" was a massive leap forward in three different languages and for a variety of models in countless reddit threads over the course of the year.
The sentences are always structured in exactly the same way.
Regardless of how accurate it is, this has to be bots.
Capable or replacing tens of millions of jobs and actually replacing tens of millions of jobs are very different things… I agree with you about the capabilities but maybe trying taking a small step back and look at the bigger picture
There’s a genuine question as to whether AI can replace these jobs at an equivalent level and most importantly, at an equivalent cost. For the moment AI companies are subsidizing token costs massively. They tried charging full cost earlier this year and companies blew through their annual AI budgets in DAYS. The headlines were about companies using too many tokens but that wasn’t the new thing that drove costs up it was the change in token prices. So far, AI can’t replace an entire worker in almost any field but can enable 1 worker to do the work that 2-3 workers used to do. Companies are trying to find the balance of how much AI to use vs how many employees to have. It’ll take years to work out the balance in each industry. Not saying we won’t get to the point that AI can just replace tons of people (I’m sure it will in fact) but I think it will take longer than most expect.
"longer than most expect" is really up for interpretation here... the frontier so moving so fast (fueled by Trillions $$), it's unlike anything i've seen
100% but the frontier and what large employers are able to reliably implement is the gap I’m seeing. Little startups are getting infinitely more out of AI than the big employers are and I wonder if that will continue even as the frontier marches on.
Yeah I work at BIG UNIVERSITY We are slow moving and don't have shareholders to worry about. AI is used by the students today, but enterprise wide admin/staff replacement is a long way off. Plus if they tried to pull something off in a hurry the unions would probably be able to stop it.
And I worked at Google in ai integration, what's your point? You really think your judgement, or anyone's for that matter, is better than frontier models? They can lap humans in "innovation", the only question rn is cost. And there's no fundamental reason the costs won't go down, it's a mathematical problem, and universe already shows that information density can be much higher for information processing in an entity (I.e. humans).
Think about gpt 4o, compare how much it cost, to gpt 6.1 sol. When it launched, gpt 4o was at 5 dollars/million tokens of input and 15 for output. Today, gpt 6.1 sol is at 2 dollars per million input and 10 dollars per million output.
When you control for intelligence level (using parameter count as a weak proxy), this is orders of magnitude improvement already, and it's not even been 5 years.
I see talented engineers using ai to great effect. And idiots using it to be faster idiots.
Owning a tools doesn’t make you a carpenter.
I could be wrong, but so could you… predicting the future is hard.
In my view ai will be like every other technological leap forward. It will kill some jobs, but in the long run create others that can’t even be conceived of now.
That’s true, but I’m of the opinion that much of the agi and this will destroy the world stuff is hyped up to boost stock prices.
I suspect that agi is going to end up being something like nuclear fusion.
Where it’s going to happen, but that last 1% improvement ends up taking 50 years or maybe never happens.
But… if the super intelligence takes over and tries to kills us all then debating about the economic pros and cons and what will happen to jobs is ridiculous… cause the resistance would always be hiring, and unemployment would be at 0%.
It seems to me that only people on Reddit are psychotic about AI to the point that they screech about it taking all jobs. No one I know IRL talks like that.
Meritocracy is a farce to begin with, because the elite class got their cushy jobs through nepotism, not merit, so nepotism among the working class, especially in this AI era, should not be demonized but normalized.
Honestly, it is so apparent how rigged the game is, how can anyone with a straight face claim this is a "meritocracy". The US health industry is a fucking scam. We see the incompetents that rise to the top.
Anyone who thinks a meritocracy exists is dumb beyond redemption. There are many reasons for this, but I'll explain using the simplest: inheritance cannot exist in a meritocracy.
There. Now you can forever shut up about meritocracy.
Perfect meritocracy does not exist. The current society is more meritocratic than anyone existed in the last 3000 years. Happy? Your single brain cell organism
One could argue 40 years ago was more meritocratic. I realize historically speaking that is not another age but recent history is kid of what we are talking about in here.
The society we live in is a flawed meritocracy but social mobility was possible and probably better than most if not all time periods in history. AI could make it worse than any period in history.
Different person, but I think that there is a third option in here.
We know that kids of well-educated parents hear almost an order of magnitude of words before kindergarten, which helps with vocabulary pickup. Parents with well-educated parents read more to their kids, and spend more time helping kids with homework. Kids who grow up in stable two-parent homes outperform those who do not on nearly every measure of achievement. Kids who see their parents read are more likely to read. etc....
There are a ton of non-nepotism and non-eugenic family-related factors that influence where kids land on the economic spectrum as they become adults.
If that’s the case, which is that a certain level of merit is simply a product of an existing high merit family, then why give these kids even additional points through inheritance. They’ve already grown up wealthy. Why do they need even bigger head starts than their older family members. You certainly don’t add even more advantage by basically eliminating taxes on inheritance and stepping up the basis so wealth can transfer intergenerational tax free.
Sure. I'm not arguing against any of that. I'm just pointing out that parental behavior (distinct from money or genetics) has enormous impacts on the likelihood that kids succeed.
The core problem, from a policy perspective, is that parental behavior is an almost insurmountable advantage for kids. (Or a disadvantage for other kids.) There's almost no amount of money, funding for schools, etc... that can make up for poor parental behavior. Which is frustrating, since then our only real lever for helping kids realize their full potential is some variation of telling parents to get good.
Nepotism or eugenics’ is the kind of false dichotomy people invent when their own bloodline maxed out at participation trophy and a vape. Inheritance isn’t some secret eugenics plot, it’s just the basic recognition that competent people tend to raise less useless kids and that you don’t get to loot their shit just because your parents were useless.
One miss here is the probability of WWIII as the two biggest AI players compete for resources. Just as WWII was an order of magnitude more destructive than WWI, this conflict will, to put it mildly, reshuffle the wealth deck.
The thing that worries me the most is that it is a pathway to optimization for the wealthy who will be controlling the goals set into AI (until it potentially turns on them). I look at what algorithms have done over the last 20 years and have they made people happier?
Rational by product of capitalism in a post Industrial Revolution world. Almost like the consolidation of ownership of what was the net result of human labor is a bad thing.
My assumption is that the most likely trajectory for the future looks more like Elysium than Star Trek.
And some of the most powerful players are actively advocating for futures that would toss people into economic wood chippers (i.e. Marc Andreeson / Peter Thiel).
Sam Altman and Dario Amadei have visions that are closer to star trek than Elysium, but the liklihood that they prevail vs the libertarian sociopaths seems far less likely.
Man oh man if only people took everyone's warnings about AI takeover seriously. But no, you all said "you'll get left behiiiiiind just let it happen". Rapey logic.
This is actually a good thing, intelligence has never been taxed, lets be honest, everyone is born different, some people have much better software than others and that has always been the most unfair thing about life.
I have to agree to that, we already do that with some genetic diseases i believe, but genetic modification should be a thing, with limitations, also for intelligence, or physique. True equality is a good thing. An 80iq and a 160 iq dont have the same chances in life. Meritocracy has always been partially a lie since the amount of effort it takes to achieve thing is different for esch person depending on his genetic lottery.
True equality isn't a thing. It never will be. In one scenario, someone feels upset because they can't learn as quick as the other. In the other scenario with "true equality," the higher intelligence would see themselves at the same occupational level as a bunch of morons. Which would quickly drive someone to cut the cord.
It isn't really even possible to achieve equality with respect to that; the premise feels asinine. I think it works out though, because most people just accept that some people simply are able to see more, and they would never be capable of being in that position/executing that idea or whatever.
The most realistic outcome is going to be an even greater extent of wealth consolidation. So the equality for most people will just be living paycheck to paycheck in a subscribe your life model.
So use the tools to create something and join the equity ownership class. They are staggeringly inexpensive for how much they allow you to scale you're own output in both skills and productivity
Yes. I agree those who don't adapt are screwed as I'm sure the coopers, fletchers, and ferriors also were
There was never a meritocracy, so it doesn’t really matter. Can’t be a meritocracy in a world where you’re given a job based on who you know rather than what you know. What we have and have always had is nepotism.
AI amplify the competent much more than the mediocre. My mid coworkers get 10% speedup from ai while I produce the same as the other teams and improve quality of work faster
You wanna share some of your work? Come on don't be shy. I've worked with a lot of STEM folks and frankly they won't shut up about it (myself included). Your blog doesn't really cover it which is odd
Nepotism and feudal like wealth transfer through equity and trust funds has already ended most of the meritocracy... Ai is just the automation we were promised in the mid 1900s scifi dreams of accelerated industrialisation..
TinyerGriffin | 7 hours ago
"the meritocracy" I want you to look at the president and look at the world's first trillionaire and then try and say that to me again with a straight fave
kinkysubt | 4 hours ago
No kidding. Like, is the meritocracy in the room with us right now? For real, merit might mean something in the world at large, it certainly hasn’t meant a damn thing in American economics for a long ass time.
t234k | a day ago
The idea that society was a meritocracy to begin with is a farce. Social mobility is limited and someone far less skilled, intelligent, hardworking that happens to be born in the right environment will be able to significantly outperform someone who is skilled, intelligent and hardworking if they happened to be born in the wrong situation
FuttleScish | a day ago
I mean if you actually read the article you’ll see they’re talking about the end of the assumption of meritocracy
Ok-Industry120 | a day ago
He doesnt read. But he does complain about meritocracy
Responsible-Laugh590 | 21 hours ago
An yet reading it or not made no difference as did understanding it. The meritocracy was always an illusion give to those who people like over those who people don’t
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
Tbf, the title says the “end of meritocracy”. If there is no such thing, the title is misleading and wrong.
dyslexda | 20 hours ago
The title says "end of upward mobility."
Rupperrt | 20 hours ago
sub headline says end of meritocracy. Upward mobility is another way to describe it or better, it’s a symptom of it. (where success is driven by ability and effort rather than background or inherited wealth)
Nearby-Chocolate1840 | 20 hours ago
While upward mobility and meritocracy are certainly related, they aren't interchangeable.
Rupperrt | 20 hours ago
a true meritocracy leads to high upward (and downward) mobility. It’s the main symptom of a meritocracy.
Anyway, the headline and subheadline mention both. And America is neither a meritocracy nor has high social mobility compared to other countries.
Nearby-Chocolate1840 | 19 hours ago
"And America is neither a meritocracy nor has high social mobility compared to other countries."
Depends on what countries you're comparing the US to. Compared to Western Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and especially the Scandinavian countries, you're mostly correct. Though the differences aren't extreme. And the matter of race in the US complicates things greatly.
But compared to the G20 countries apart from those already mentioned, the US is more socially mobile. So Russia, Brazil, India, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, etc.
Rupperrt | 19 hours ago
Yeah it’s not as bad as literally developing countries or failed ones like Russia.
Seems more fair to compared with western countries of similar development and living standards
dyslexda | 18 hours ago
No, it says "Artificial intelligence is coming for the meritocracy."
Do you have trouble reading?
t234k | a day ago
Pot, kettle.
unga_bunga_mage | 22 hours ago
You assume it's even a human making the post. Maybe you're a bot. Or maybe I'm a bot. Or maybe it's not you're. It's your. Because that's more human. To err is to be human. Or to be divine. Whatever man.
FlyingBishop | 15 hours ago
Meritocracy has always been about people's ability to make money, which has only a passing relationship to any actual merit. Most of the seriously meritorious qualities in a person are not money-making.
I think the actual fault in this article is that while AIs are legitimately gaining many meritorious qualities, they really have no capacity for guile, at least not in a way that's useful for making money.
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
Then they should have chosen a different title than “the end of meritocracy”
Doggleganger | 22 hours ago
I didn't read the article, I just asked AI what it said.
t234k | a day ago
And if you actually read my comment you'll see I'm talking about the fact that there was never a meritocracy.
Nutella_Boy | 23 hours ago
Just because you lived some experience doesn't mean it's false out of your circle.
reggionh | a day ago
bro stop trying to be edgy and engage thoughtfully. the article is very nuanced, your comment is just a brain fart in comparison.
t234k | 23 hours ago
Im not sure what compelled you to respond but it's not exactly unexpected for a comment to pale in thought provocation compared to an entire article. My point wasn't trying to be edgy so maybe you're lost?
dyslexda | 20 hours ago
So your goal is to talk about irrelevant things?
FuttleScish | a day ago
Which is irrelevant to the article
[OP] In_der_Tat | a day ago
The authors address this point of contention, even if just en passant, but it is not the central argument. I'd suggest you to read the article.
Flimsy_Complaint490 | a day ago
correct, but meritocracy in this sociological context was largely invented as a counter to aristocracy and nepotism.
Basically, instead of aristocrats buying commissions, titles and civil service job, the meritocratic middle class competes with them on sheer skill and the skillful prevail. The sociological meaning has kinda remained since.
Nobody ever discussed meritocracy in the context of a 200 IQ African being born and never getting anywhere due to his social circumstances, although governments ever since the 19th century with mass schooling did kinda try to nurture and identify talent and said privileges withered away, to be replaced with a different form of capital and privilege that is a lot harder to counter - not blood and titles, but that of social capital.
If we take just the word at face value then yes, real meritocracy never existed cause the 200 IQ African in Congo is likely never getting anywhere.
t234k | 23 hours ago
I am not talking about lost Einsteins, I mean Americans, even within the same geographic area.
Privately educated gets a place at an Ivy League because legacy admissions then gets a big nepo job and a paid off house at graduation.
Versus a state school student that had great grades and no other advantages.
Flimsy_Complaint490 | 22 hours ago
Or, public educated, passes SAT and exams well, gets an Ivy League admission, also pays $0 because Ivy League unis pay 100% of demonstrated financial need if you are under like 200k income, networks well, gets a well paid job after thanks to all the networking, gets a house at 40 and pays it off before retirement. A rare, but not impossible story.
Should be noted that only 30-40% of legacy applicants get accepted, and they make up 30% of Ivy League applicants, so they do have a better chance, it's not smooth sailing as you assume, although they do have pretty insane cushions all things considered. The elites are also under immense competition and stress to keep up in the hierarchy.
Ultimately, this is still meritocratic in a sense - you are not cut off by your birth or income as the 17th century bourgies might have been, plenty of avenues exist, but social mobility does remain a thing and there is a meritocratic element to it, even if imperfect.
KellyShepardRepublic | 21 hours ago
It is just harder. For example, those with spare income now are buying up hardware. Interest rates and inflation are up so those of us without assets are either staying out of AI and others are going all. Others with wealth are just scalping those trying to keep up and not be left behind. Transfers of wealth in every direction.
Flimsy_Complaint490 | 21 hours ago
i agree.
one take i have on the economy and life today is that there is no slack. Read 19th or 20th century biographies and those guys have the most random adventures and life never really feels over and when they feel like it, they rebuild a decent material base.
now if you didnt achieve anything by 30, its pretty much over for you.
RashmaDu | 12 hours ago
I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with the point that there isn't enough room for error today, but...
> Read 19th or 20th century biographies and those guys have the most random adventures and life never really feels over and when they feel like it, they rebuild a decent material base.
What reason is there to believe that this isn't just pure survivorship bias? You're reading about the life of someone who was 1) led an interesting enough life to commit to paper and 2) who was successful enough to be able to do so. I really don't see how that's evidence in any way for there being more slack back in the 19th and 20th century
Flimsy_Complaint490 | 11 hours ago
Very valid point.
Went to chatgpt to scour the internet for any research or evidence on the topic and this doesnt seem to be much of a falsifable hypothesis in economics, although you can generate certain vibes in psychology and sociology that I captured with my hypothesis about the state of the professional middle class, which seems to be most of us here - our careers and social status is basically a tournament and there is only so many jobs, titles, prestige and neighbourhoods to go around, so the professional middle class cannot afford to be whimsical like our forefathers, who came to a much more narrow and restricted class and simply did not have as many competitors to worry about.
However, this indeed does not generalize at all to society at large.
Nearby-Chocolate1840 | 20 hours ago
"It is just harder. For example, those with spare income now are buying up hardware."
Come again?
I'm pretty solidly lower-upper middle class, with a fair bit of discretionary income, as are most of close friends, and neither myself nor anyone I know is "buying up hardware" if what you're referring to is, like, computing hardware to run local AI??
???
KellyShepardRepublic | 13 hours ago
Just cause you aren’t doesn’t mean others aren’t. Go on homelab and it went from hobbiest to executives and sales people and managers taking over as well as crypto bros and their winnings redirecting too.
Nearby-Chocolate1840 | 10 hours ago
Not saying nobody would or has. Just that its hard to see the advantage at least in cost considering how outrageously expensive pretty much every part of a rig is for the time being.
Like I would think that until prices come down buying a heavy use subscription would be a lot more cost effective. But that's just my assumption based on what I've overheard about current memory and GPU prices.
KellyShepardRepublic | 8 hours ago
People have inflated desires so they buy up $90k cars without a real return. Now people are able to buy a setup and have a direct return if they figure out how to manage it. Most don’t know even then supplies are limited and scalpers know this and suppliers have moved onto enterprise.
You are right that a subscription is better for now but companies have fluctuated their pricing and limits so that is driving many to get their own setups including small businesses and anyone with spare income. They can also move models around and sometimes you just want the same thing since it worked for you already and there are plenty of other use cases like smarter home detection without the cloud while acting like an assistant, helping create mods, managing your metrics and much much more in the right hands or the right setup without being an expert. Nvidia flooded the marketing teams and sales teams of many companies with dgx sparks and things haven’t been the same since.
Nearby-Chocolate1840 | 20 hours ago
The US is by no means a perfect meritocracy, but it's the best practical example of any major-power country.
(Meaning not including other former British colonies like Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Which based on more equitable schooling and access to health care, etc probably hold better claims to meritocracy than the US. If that wasn't obvious)
impossiblefork | 12 hours ago
China, India, France and Britain exist though. Obviously the goons are running around pretending that France isn't up there, but they actually have a super serious education system that trains people to a reasonable level and where a nobody who is smart enough actually has a shot at getting literally anywhere.
People may think Britain is very class-divided, but their academic rigor means that people actually do have decent chances of doing well. Then of course, they have some silly stuff like university fees and unfairness related to that, but the doors in Britain for people who perform well intellectually aren't closed. It isn't like France and it isn't India or China at the university level, but it's still a high level of equality because of the good primary level education.
In India there's even the JEE.
tigeratemybaby | 17 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
USA ranks 27th on the social mobility index, which is the best measure that we have.
Its behind the UK at 21st.
Bobbsen | 14 hours ago
This is from 2020. I’d wager things have changed significantly since then.
Druken_sincerity | 10 hours ago
Yup, I know ppl with masters and lots of experience that make shit money in dead-end jobs. Then you got this other friend of mine, who never finished university, lived abroad, dicked around, never been serious. Comes back to town, dad gets him a 120k job where he mostly works from home. And hes still complaining that it sucks and wants to go back to living in Europe. While me and my gf both university educated live in small appartement trying to make ends meet since I lost my job last month
GenericFatGuy | 20 hours ago
The area code you were born in is a better indicator of your future than anything else.
notaquarterback | 21 hours ago
Not a farce at all. Lots of people built solid lives without much education, but good skills and values & we have sopped all that up so we can create a world where everyone is at-will employee that gets rented by their neighbors.
t234k | 15 hours ago
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what I'm saying; social mobility was possible and there are/were examples of this but that is the exception not the rule. Of course people with talent and hard work were able to improve their lives but more didn't get that outcome for one reason or another.
notaquarterback | 8 hours ago
I'm suggesting this is just not true and lots of unremarkable people were able to make a life. Watch 80s sitcoms and see the jobs people had, the world was very different not that long ago.
modzRtarderz | 4 hours ago
Sitcoms are not, nor have ever been, an accurate portrayal of life. A retail shoe salesman has never been able to comfortably support a middle-class lifestyle.
DarkSkyKnight | 23 hours ago
This is one of the dumbest subs on Reddit. Every time I open a thread I see stupid, hyperbolic shit like this.
rubixd | 7 hours ago
I swear there is a logarithmic relationship between the size of a sub and the amount of negativity and doomerism present within it.
dangeldud | 9 hours ago
This is really only true at the extremes.
Redrose03 | 7 hours ago
Life is 80% luck and 20% grit
OogieBoogiez | 5 hours ago
I wish we would weaponize AI to take out billionaires wealth.
GentleFoxes | 17 hours ago
Right. Upward mobility was dead the last 30 years.
Ill_Specific_6144 | 16 hours ago
Its farce because you think that certain skills are more valuable than others. While in reality its a combination of skills + luck thst makes it a meritocracy.
I have seen multiple employees who think they should be paid more, because their are good coders, while being a pain to work with and struggle with ownership. And its the similar situation in another jobs. Someone thinks perfectly stacked shelves should matter the most, when in reality not many people care.
BiteyHorse | a day ago
I call bullshit. You can come from nothing, with addict parents, addiction of your own, homelessness, and no college degree... and rise to the top of your profession in Silicon Valley if you're good enough. At least, you used to be able to.
SuperSaiyanCockKnokr | a day ago
There’s a small percentage of exceptions that are to make it, and because of their circumstances draw a lot of attention and praise. But if your willing to actually read about or study outcomes based on socioeconomic factors, there is an undeniable and extremely significant advantage held by those born higher up the social ladder
BiteyHorse | a day ago
Of course there's an advantage. It's certainly far from impossible if you're good, though.
Calm-Excuse5161 | 21 hours ago
not impossible but improbable
hippydipster | 10 hours ago
Or if you're lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, like, say, in Silicon Valley in 1998.
BiteyHorse | 4 hours ago
A fair point, but I loaded all of my worldly possessions into my shitty car and came out here with no support and no family or friends. Sometimes you gotta go where the opportunities are and seize your chance.
hippydipster | 4 hours ago
You had a car??? Get a load of Richie Rich here ;-)
I got into the software dev career too around that time without a stem degree and with my main work experience being a caretaker in homes for severely disabled. It only happened because at the time they'd hire anyone who claimed they could program. I claimed I could, and started learning day one of the job.
Without the dot-com bubble, wouldn't have happened.
BiteyHorse | 3 hours ago
85 Monte Carlo, baby. Got stolen a month after getting here, lol.
Ninevehenian | a day ago
What are the statistics on that? How many can do it? 1 person or 1.000.000?
BadmiralHarryKim | a day ago
Elon Musk started out with nothing but generational family wealth, an expired student visa and, as a English speaking white man, the freedom to start a tech company in a foreign country without any fear of that country's government kicking him out like he was some kind of illegal immigrant.
Now he's the world's richest man. If he can do it anyone can!
t234k | a day ago
Okay, sounds like a great story to get people to keep working hard. Wish that were true anyways.
BiteyHorse | a day ago
I fucking lived it.
t234k | a day ago
Yeah I bet you were able to overcome addict parents and homelessness and climb to the top of Silicon Valley without a degree.
BiteyHorse | a day ago
Fuck off, that's exactly what I did. There are plenty of people out here that did the same.
Silicon Valley was a true meritocracy for a long time. I came out in 1998. I've met plenty of other people with non-traditional backgrounds and without degrees that have done the same out here. It's hard but you just have to be really good.
Does Trust-fund Tommy have it easier because he went to Stanford? Sure, but in the end it comes down to your actual competence. Or did, the AI era has perhaps pulled the legs out the entry-level ladder.
t234k | a day ago
Even if you did it doesn't disprove what I said, in fact I even implied social mobility is possible (but limited). And the exception to the rule doesn't prove that society HAD meritocracy, if your story is true you achieved it despite there not being a meritocracy.
WeAreHereWithAll | 23 hours ago
He’s gonna keep repeating the same mistakes again and again and again, just in different forms.
And he won’t even realize it.
WeAreHereWithAll | a day ago
We’re happy for you. Just because it worked out for you doesn’t mean it has for everyone else. That same system you had to fucking play, you know there’s billions others tried too and didn’t make it, right?
Your experiences nor mine are absolute. I came out of my shit too similarly and I didn’t develop fucking spite or “fuck you I got mine”.
You came out of it fearful you might losing what you finally made, and hate anyone asking for more because you never got any fucking help yourself.
You are, genuinely, the core problem virtually no change continues to happen.
That child you were going through all that — they still exist, they just ain’t you, and yet you can’t extend the same empathy nor sympathy you always craved. Anger, resentment, and greed are easier now that you’re comfortable.
Even if this is made up, I know this’ll hit a nerve. Fuck off.
Livid_Village4044 | 19 hours ago
Whatever financial success this individual has gained does not appear to have brought any peace of mind.
There is an entirely separate issue. You could have a system that is very good at drawing out and enriching the most talented 1% or 2%. While the 70% who do the work that keeps society going barely get by and never even own their own home. Remember all the Essential Workers that were suddenly discovered during the COVID lock downs? This is not a meritocracy.
And this is aside from the fact that being born with very unusual talent, like being born into wealth, is luck.
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
It’s extremely rare and absolutely an outlier. In the US more so than in almost any other western country.
Nearby-Chocolate1840 | 19 hours ago
Your specific exreme example is probably pretty damned rare. Rare enough that it hasn't ever been studied closely enough to supply statistics around likelihood.
On the other hand, the best statistics we have indicate that if you're born in the bottom 20% US socioeconomic quintile, you've got a 66.3% chance of moving up into a higher rung. And almost a 40% chance of moving up at least two rungs to the third quintile. Meaning middle class.
That's not as equitable as it ought to be, but compared to someone in 18th century Europe that's pretty incredible.
cogsandapertures | a day ago
Delusional. Absolutely delusional to think that someone born into wealth, with connections and support, with access to high quality education and other key resources and opportunities, and all sorts of other head starts vs the average has the same shot at success as someone born into poverty, without access to any of the above, let alone someone who comes from a background of addiction.
Kernel_Internal | a day ago
"Same shot" is a red herring. Sure, people born into better circumstances find it easier to thrive. But people with the right ability can and absolutely do thrive as well. You're arguing something different
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
Most people with the right abilities won’t even be discovered if they come from poor backgrounds. You need the predisposition but also the motivation and confidence to develop those. Which usually comes from parents, peers and teachers.
Kernel_Internal | 21 hours ago
Your talking about the efficiency of the system though, which is not quite the same thing. You're effectively saying, sure it may be a meritocracy but it doesn't work. And you're not wrong, people who might have the aptitude can't develop it without access to resources and low wealth severely restricts that access. And because the system doesn't develop the lower as strata as well, there are many gaps that are filled by people with less natural aptitude but greater access to develop what they have. If the system was more efficient then the people with the most natural aptitude would receive the development thry need and people would be perfectly sorted.
But none of that changes the fact that it is a meritocracy.
Rupperrt | 21 hours ago
It’s not an effective one. Exceptions to the rule and occasional break outs don’t change that, they’re just sob stories to sell the libertarian narrative. When measuring meritocracy as a measure of success driven by ability and effort rather than background or inherited wealth, Denmark, Norway and Finland score highest.
hippydipster | 10 hours ago
No, he's getting back to the original point
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
Yeah that’s what they want people to believe. But it’s very unlikely. US is one of the worst countries when it comes to social mobility. A lot of talented people will never even be discovered because they go to shitty schools where no one cares.
Nearby-Chocolate1840 | 19 hours ago
That's absolute bullshit.
Among the G20 countries the US has among the highest rates of social mobility.
Rupperrt | 19 hours ago
27th spot. Not at developing country level but not great either
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/social-mobility-by-country
Nearby-Chocolate1840 | 19 hours ago
Is it really fair, in the sense of apples to apples, to compare US to most of the countries on that list?
I cited the G20 for a reason.
Rupperrt | 18 hours ago
You can compare it to any country but I wouldn’t be very proud of beating countries like India, which still has millions of starving children.
A lot of G20 countries are on that list due to sheer size but are much lower in terms of development and per capita GDP.
A country like India with horrible poverty where one out of three children is malnourished, has other issues than beating Denmark in social mobility. Although ironically that would help with those problems as well.
Relative_Average758 | 22 hours ago
Now those people will own AI adjacent infra. Gotta secure the future for little Johnny Nepobaby.
They will be the perpetual aristocracy, insulated with their AI robot army from being overthrown.
swegmesterflex | 21 hours ago
It was a meritocracy for a little window. If you learned to code you'd be winning.
Crafty_Aspect8122 | 14 hours ago
Wrong. It broke the illusion of meritocracy and will force people to confront the reality of circumstances deciding everyone's life and there's no way for everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
thedudedylan | 13 hours ago
This happened in the 20s and 30s. The wealthy did not realize that people deserved dignity and opportunity. It literally took the militant action of workers, where the National Guard gunned them and their families down, just to get OSHA, the 5-day workweek, and child labor laws.
endlessedlne | 12 hours ago
This. A lot of what we’re seeing right now has echoes the turn of the century peak industrial era, when the US was run by a few oligarchs such as the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and their ilk. Was not a fun time for workers from Pinkertons to the National Guard shooting. Took FDRs’ New Deal among other things to recover from the Great Depression.
Emergency_Eagle1502 | 13 hours ago
Yep this right here ai is the great equalizer and anyone that hates it is only seeing for what it is the reality of their circumstances benefiting them allowing them to climb up. Now that’s being shattered and it for sure making people gobbsmacked
AwkwardTickler | 23 hours ago
So AI boosting is focused on r/Economics today. Very odd behavior in the comments with multiple accounts saying nearly the same thing with the same phrasing. This is weak.
Olangotang | 22 hours ago
The pattern is every time there is bad news about AI, the bots and LLM addicts ruin social media for a few days. If the market worries sustain this will week, it will continue.
AI is cool. Transformers are cool. LLMs are cool. The cult Frontier Labs that created a temporary moat by buying all of the RAM chips are not cool.
The drug users need to defend their dealers, it's why they can't just be like "oh yeah, the tools can be useful, but the buildout around two money furnace AI companies is unsustainable!"
RyanCargan | 15 hours ago
More IPOs are coming, the debts are looking worse, investors are getting more suspicious.
FUD is on overdrive partly because there's a network effect.
1 bot/shill says something plausible, and there's no shortage of "true believers" to play follow the leader.
A quick spot check on accounts usually shows many set to private, made after 2022, etc. Doesn't prove anything but is always sus as heck.
Most people are too brainrotted to care anyway at this point.
The marketing shenanigans behind this tech (partly using the tech itself) are infinitely worse and more damaging than anything the tech itself could do in isolation.
The names behind a lot of these efforts have a history too. As far back as 2016 at least. IYKYK.
Nearby-Chocolate1840 | 19 hours ago
What's the same thing these multiple accounts are saying with the same phrasing?
Kurovi_dev | 22 hours ago
It’s not just those who would be filling these jobs that LLM is taking over that should be worried, it’s the future wealthy as well.
Elon Musk couldn’t care less about the fallout from this because he thinks he’ll either be dead before it happens or on an island somewhere waxing nostalgic about Epstein’s island, but when people are completely unable to earn a living and survive, they’re going to turn their attention to the people who never had to.
We have two more years of this festering pustule of an “administration”, in the meantime there needs to be serious thought put into how to restructure society and economies into sustainable entities that don’t make Soylent green or whatever.
snubdeity | 18 hours ago
> but when people are completely unable to earn a living and survive, they’re going to turn their attention to the people who never had to.
People reddit larp about this in every conversation about large societal change from AI. And it's a pathetic joke every time. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been laid off from AI, have they had a single large-scale protest? Has a single AI leader been killed?
Americans love to cling to the fantasy of the oppressed rising up against their oppressor, but it is just that: a fantasy. Nobody will ever do shit, people will go to their shit jobs making shit money to be bitch boy for those born into wealth, say their "yes sirs" and then go home, finding their spine only when it's time to post on reddit.
dfsw | 13 hours ago
French are doing their thing while Americans sit online and dream about being as brave as the French.
Unctuous_Robot | 22 hours ago
I personally think that companies should have some sort of ratio of net income to number of employees, where if they don’t have enough employees, their tax rate skyrockets to at least 50% of all revenue. If a company doesn’t create jobs, and downsizes so much, there’s no point in keeping their taxes low.
mdthornb1 | 20 hours ago
Why don’t we just redistribute the gains gotten by AI? Forcing a ratio of employees to income seems to be such a weird way of handling the potential issue.
Unctuous_Robot | 20 hours ago
Kills the “but small businesses!” argument. As well as downsizing for other reasons
mdthornb1 | 20 hours ago
We shouldn’t be preventing companies from producing as much as they can with as few employees as they can. That is how we all get a better quality of life over time….as long as that greater productivity is distributed society at large. Policies like you propose can be gamed.
Unctuous_Robot | 19 hours ago
Buddy, producing a bunch of garbage while everyone loses their jobs and the rich get richer chasing endless growth doesn’t improve anyone’s quality of life. Money helps the economy most when it’s being spent instead of hoarded.
HourOpposite527 | 19 hours ago
Not anymore once jobs get eaten by AI. I am always surprised by assumptions that everything will stay the same. In the past technical innovation might have been disruptive but always created new jobs. I doubt we will see the same if AI is deployed the way some corporate chiefs envision
mdthornb1 | 19 hours ago
That’s why we need the redistribution of the productivity gains. I wrote the explicitly in the 3 sentence post you replied to.
puglife82 | 5 hours ago
Bro how do all republican politicians and half the American voters react when they hear “redistribute”
mdthornb1 | 5 hours ago
Same way they would if you propose an extra tax like this.
IClosetheDealz | 15 hours ago
English please
Individual_Guest_323 | 22 hours ago
My dude, most software companies where like that before AI, is dumb.
das_war_ein_Befehl | 20 hours ago
No, because your standard SaaS company has about $150-250k in revenues per employee. You still needed lots of people
thortgot | 7 hours ago
Salesforce ~$600k/employee, Netsuite ~$650k/employee
What prototypical SaaS are you referring to?
Unctuous_Robot | 22 hours ago
Those software companies don’t need all that money if they’re not hiring anyone.
Individual_Guest_323 | 22 hours ago
All the software companies then leave your shithole country, I really do not know why I will maintain a company that do not need your workforce.
You guys always had the worst options to solve the problems.
fragtore | 15 hours ago
Give a better solution?
420everytime | 13 hours ago
So what?
If they leave, let someone from within the country vibe code their software and ban them from selling their software in your country.
American software companies need American consumers much more than we need them
IClosetheDealz | 15 hours ago
English please
artisanrox | 9 hours ago
They can leave the country, and go somewhere with a 40-50% tax rate lolololololol
Individual_Guest_323 | 9 hours ago
Ireland have 12% buddy
Unctuous_Robot | 22 hours ago
Ok. Don’t let them operate in the US.
Individual_Guest_323 | 22 hours ago
They will not operate, the US would be a shithole at that point, with no money.
That would means banning any company outside the US, lmao.
alilhillbilly | 16 hours ago
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yeah, over certain revenue & head count (include H1 and certain subcontractors) we tax you more if revenue/employee count doesn't work for society.
The US is the corporation. Google doesn't matter. Meta doesn't matter. Sears doesn't matter. What matters is that we're growing the next Google. The next Meta. The point is maximizing the wealth of the United States. Aka, the middle class. Flat society.
Businesses should not be net extractors of wealth from community. That's backwards.
The tax code is supposed to be used as a cudgel and lever to product ideal outcomes. We want marriage. We want kids. That locks you into an 18 year consumption cycle. That drives lots of economic value creation. That's good for society so we discount it. But we do it at the parent company level.
Monopoly is bad because it hurts the parent company. Oligarchy is bad because it disrupts entrepreneurial ventures and small/medium companies. And that fucks with the parent company (USA, INC.) and its bottom line.
The best driver of economic success is for a country to make it easy enough with a brilliant idea or brilliant new company to kill Kings. Kings are inherently bad.
topyTheorist | 16 hours ago
So if a company has a genius employee who is 10 times more efficient than an average person, they should be taxed more?
Djamalfna | 10 hours ago
The myth of the 10x employee has been debunked many times. Most of the time the "10x" employee has been creating walls around their work and sabotaging their coworkers to create the illusion of productivity.
topyTheorist | 10 hours ago
Myth? I am a professional mathematican. Most good mathematicians publish around 1-2 good papers a year. But Sharon Shelah publishes more than 30 a year (and he is more than 80 years old already). It's not the norm, but such people exists. He is widely considered the world best expert in mathematical logic.
True-Hold-1140 | 8 hours ago
Im sure a few exist but the vast majority of 10x anything is bullshit
0sm1um | 4 hours ago
I'm unfamiliar with that person's work specifically, and for all I know they could be good. But generally speaking the way academics publish so many publications per year is by Co authoring with teams of grad students who join their research group or seek them out to be an author on their paper for access to their funding networks. Its more of a reflection of hyper optimization for the funding structure of academia rather than an indication they are a pure unparalleled genius.
Funding at the high end is an incredibly small clique and is almost entirely driven by networking.
Im an academic in engineering sciences BTW.
topyTheorist | 4 hours ago
He published 1361 papers, of which 414 were solo. And from what I heard, even when he publishes with someone else, usually he does most of the work.
0sm1um | 4 hours ago
That is impressive, but still far from the norm.
There are still other more subtle ways to inflate publication count like intentionally small scope, excessive self references, autoplagerism.
Forgetting your example, it's stuff like this which makes me very dubious of publication counts as a metric of productivity in academia.
artisanrox | 9 hours ago
According to Businessbro sense, then, Sharon should be a CEO making 100x what a bottom level employee hsould be making becuase he's so brilliant and certainly should be running his own business.
sem-nexus | 3 hours ago
I’ve been a business owner for 8.5 years
One good employee can be worth more than 10 mediocre ones
Alarmed-Quail7617 | 22 hours ago
So destroy small businesses, great idea /s
Least_Art5238 | 21 hours ago
It's pretty easy to gate this for specific annual revenues. If a business makes $1M / year, no ratio. If it makes $10M / year, minimum 10 employees. If it makes $100 M / year, minimum 75 employees. If of makes $1b / year, minimum 600 employees. If it makes $1T / year, minimum 50,000 employees.
You can connect the dots between these points with the right sliders thereby not creating any loopholes.
Capable-Chard-1054 | 20 hours ago
So they hire 50k faces in a cheap country to pass this?
Unctuous_Robot | 22 hours ago
Do you know what ratio means?
DrJupeman | 22 hours ago
Yes, I think the poster did which is why he asked the question.
allllusernamestaken | 19 hours ago
What work would these forced hires do?
Unctuous_Robot | 19 hours ago
Well, you can start with the guys doing the work of five laid off people and spread that work out.
NightSpaghetti | 15 hours ago
Yup, a company racking in massive profits with few employees is basically siphoning wealth away from society.
RequirementNo4895 | 18 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
epukinsk | 8 hours ago
Good idea. Removing payroll taxes would be a start.
getmeoutoftax | a day ago
It seems that most people outside of these subreddits have no idea what’s coming. They think that LLMs are still silly chatbots. When in reality, they are capable of replacing millions of jobs already. Opus 5.5 was a major leap forward, and the progress will continue. Most white collar jobs that aren’t at least manager level will likely be gone in a few years.
cogsandapertures | a day ago
So, and I mean this seriously, what are we supposed to do about this? The world governments aren’t just asleep at the wheel, they’re actively pumping the machine… so what are the normal people supposed to do? And are managers really safe, too? I mean, shit, what’s 15 years of experience and an advanced degree when some VP can replace you with a beep boop?
Tulaodinho | a day ago
The problem is the job market will never replace these jobs for other areas as fast as needed. So, at some point people wont be able to pay their debts, and you create a crash from that. Also, when people are cash strapped, less products fly off the shelves. What happens? Worse sales, worse results, more layoffs, etc etc, so the massive AI induced layoffs will end in a world financial crisis, arguably the worst yet.
TheTimberFactory | 23 hours ago
It will be a negative feedback loop and it will be absolute chaos.
It would not surprise me in the least if this leads to either World War III or another Civil War.
Solid_Owl | 18 hours ago
It'll probably be a moral class war. Humanists vs the AI Capitalist Intelligentsia.
cogsandapertures | a day ago
And then what? I’m genuinely curious about what happens next. I know when don’t know anything for certain, but what happens when many or even most jobs are taken over?
USSMarauder | 23 hours ago
There are three possibilities for when AI takes away a significant number of jobs permanently (and new jobs created are also done by AI) leaving tens of millions of people not just unemployed, but unemployable
Kataphractoi | 23 hours ago
> Government genocide of the 'welfare parasites'
Which would be odd considering how governments (in the US and across the world) are currently begging and screeching at us to have more babies because population decline is bad and detrimental to economies predicated on endless growth or somesuch.
Fresh-Possibility-75 | 22 hours ago
My sense is that the fertility rate decline discourse is largely being promulgated by the bunker billionaire class as a culture war wedge issue to generate strife among the working class. Similar to discourse about trans people and immigrants.
It's hard to acknowledge--let alone act on--class solidarity with a neighbor who seems to hate you because of your skin color, who you love, and what you choose to do with your uterus.
EjaculatingAracnids | 19 hours ago
Its nice to see one person thinking clearly. All the issues you mentioned serve the ruling class as a tool to divide the working class. Anytime trans/immigrant/gender/race content is being pushed as a divisive issue, creating division amongst the working class is the goal of it.
Fresh-Possibility-75 | 16 hours ago
It feels like more people are finally waking up and asking good questions about this madness, but it's definitely hard to cut through all the botted bs.
NomadStorm | 22 hours ago
Not really odd. The young workers pay for the retirement of the old, but that only works while there’s more young people than old.
It was obviously never sustainable in the first place, because the world can’t sustain even the current population levels long term, let alone the increasing level required to maintain state pensions in such a fashion.
By screeching now they can then blame the people that didn’t have kids for them needing to cancel state pensions and retirement entirely.
Livid_Village4044 | 18 hours ago
NOT ONE DIME of unearned income (rent, capital gains, dividends, interest, and other more convoluted sources) is taxed to fund Social Security or Medicare. Nearly all of this income goes to the wealthiest 10%.
This can easily be changed if there is the political will to do so. Generation war is another Identity Politics ploy to divide working people.
kratos61 | 20 hours ago
> the world can’t sustain even the current population levels long term
It absolutely can.
NomadStorm | 20 hours ago
No, it can’t.
TheContrariat | 22 hours ago
There is also the option to undertake a mass nationalisation of automated industries and have governments run as consumer driven cooperatives, while we abandon currency and conventional approaches to non-personal property, and find new methods to allocate resources.
mcchicken_deathgrip | 15 hours ago
That would only follow the bloody revolution option
maplecremecookie | 23 hours ago
Why would the government genocide us when they could just conscript everyone and force us to fight the conscripts of other nations to the death?
fuckinkangaroos | 20 hours ago
Virus is simplest form of culling. Covid maybe test-run
cassinonorth | 6 hours ago
Feel like the order of those events can sequentially go 3 then 2 then 1. Not going to be pretty.
Tulaodinho | a day ago
No idea. The logic, so far, of society has been to expand and create more and more jobs. For the first time ever, at least that I remember, we are getting a target to reduce jobs, and make people expendable. Our entire social structure is completely designed and built on the opposite of what this AI wave is tryna do, the effects have the potential to be otherwordly bad. And remember, no politician will every tell you the actual problems of this.
mayhemski123 | 22 hours ago
If history is any indication then a sweeping away of the current order and a replacement with another.
Though it still depends on if this is real change or just another fad that will fade away. Jury is still out on that. Is this AI destroying jobs or good old fashioned debt.
I'd argue that if AI is the labour force destroyer then the economic system that we have now that birthed it will be destroyed and replaced. It simply wouldn't serve any purpose. A bit like bronze axe heads becoming redundant as a representation of power and wealth at the end of the bronze age (it's why we dig up so many, they lost value so people just left them in the ground).
What comes next who knows but I feel certain that the current leadership class, political and business will be removed first.
Dry_Lengthiness5468 | a day ago
Mass deaths worldwide.
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
least melodramatic Redditor
Dry_Lengthiness5468 | 23 hours ago
It's already happening. The DOGE cuts to USAID is causing the deaths of millions.
Infinite_Dress_3312 | 23 hours ago
The notion of a prosperous comfortable middle class is a blip in history
hippydipster | 9 hours ago
In theory, UBI, because its a rational response to the problem. But, in actuality, we'll be dominated by fear and anger and hatred of other and argue against MY money going to THEM. We'll point at our massive debts and deficits and argue we actually need to reduce welfare and entitlement spending. We'll have violent unrest, riots, revolts and we'll increase deficit spending even more in order to violently put them down, and then, seeing our debts increasing faster than ever we'll cut even more social programs....
This was predicted
OutsideMenu6973 | 23 hours ago
This happens slow enough for most ppl to retool for those who can’t we need to vote in fair enough safety nets while providing opportunity for supplemental gig income
Unctuous_Robot | 22 hours ago
Tell everyone that’s been downsized for to take their jobs already, with their lack of safety nets.
BriefAvailable9799 | 19 hours ago
retool to what?? you cant have everyone doing blue collar jobs nor at certain ages. then you look at china, they build shit so fast using robots. so blue collar what
OutsideMenu6973 | 19 hours ago
Proof reading mostly. Fine tuning content to taste. Localization. AI’s not great at these since it requires so much nuance and context
Character-Nebula-613 | 18 hours ago
Translator was one of the first jobs to go, now reviewers fight to check AI translations for scraps.
OutsideMenu6973 | 17 hours ago
I think there will be a lot of work there. And not translator I was envisioning someone more like an editor. Except your boss isn’t a human chief editor, your work performance is based mostly on analytics with regard to how well ‘received’ your work was by end users. I know AI seems very impressive but one thing it does seem to have trouble with is the kind of nuance people spot effortlessly it can’t wrap its limited context around
cogsandapertures | 23 hours ago
I sure hope you’re right.
CloudTransit | 23 hours ago
They built all these warehouses with all these electronics and then they all died. Good luck to the octopus archaeologists of 3 million years from now.
senseven | 20 hours ago
This is a matter of perspective, there are groups who are betting on this deconstruction of the "capitalistic" system by accelerating its own demise using its own rules. It can't forbid ai usage to preserve itself.
ApprehensiveEbb592 | 22 hours ago
Don’t forget to mention that the sky will also fall. Where do folks come up with this apocalypse nonsense?
TooCereal | 22 hours ago
this is a pretty grounded scenario. layoffs increase and this is what happens as a result.
3owi | a day ago
Vote left, for basic income.
teelin | 17 hours ago
Doesnt work. We have a globalised economy and this AI is a problem at global scale.
ventomareiro | 19 hours ago
It will be like the flick of a switch for most people. The changes are simply happening too fast to adapt.
Consider that software engineering gathers some of then most technologically skilled workers, and even they are struggling to keep up with the rate of progress.
And it is not simply a matter of models and tools, but of trying to make strategic decisions in a context of extreme uncertainty.
Wobblewobblegobble | a day ago
Long term 20 plus years no one has a job. Society will have A transition phase from today's world to the next. We will be the generations that has to live through that transition. Hopefully on the other end humans are better off.
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
There will be as many if not more jobs in 20 years. They’ll look different in parts. Wanna take a bet?
das_war_ein_Befehl | 20 hours ago
Yes I’m sure the people investing trillions in AI buildouts are doing it to keep paying the same amount in labor as they are today. Surely the whole sales pitch isn’t “replace human knowledge work”
Rupperrt | 20 hours ago
as said, wanna take a bet?
das_war_ein_Befehl | 19 hours ago
Sure, if LLMs pan out there will be fewer jobs, especially jobs that pay the same relative amount of dollars as they do today
Rupperrt | 19 hours ago
deal. See you in 20 years. How much are we betting? And what’s the exact bet? Mass unemployment vs relatively similar unemployment rate? (Can hardly get lower than it is now in most countries)
Shrinks99 | 17 hours ago
You may enjoy https://longbets.org/
Rupperrt | 17 hours ago
I like it, thanks!
BriefAvailable9799 | 19 hours ago
hey man i wanna believe you just so i can stay sane. like what type of jobs are you talking? all types of sectors or just certain ones or new ones we cant even think of?
Rupperrt | 19 hours ago
staying sane would be advisable in either scenario.
But productivity gains from AI (as usually with any technological leap) would allow humans to focus on higher judgement tasks and specialized skills instead of tedious busywork.
Of course there could be the case that AI could do those too. But first of all I don’t think it could. And if it can we’ll need a new economical model anyway so no need to panic. Can’t be much worse than the current capitalistic system..
Wobblewobblegobble | 23 hours ago
I said 20 plus years. I'm long on AI and how it will change society. We have to cross the bridge eventually of having autonomous robots and ai. Long term No one is working unless it's AI assisted. even robots will fix other robots.
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
Yes, I know you said 20 plus years. And I say there will be more jobs in 20. And there will be still more jobs in 40 years. (per capita as populations will decline).
Technological progress will just change them. As you said, AI assisted. It’ll be more efficient. Baumol effect is gonna go haywire. Which will probably be bad for the cost of pure human work like care, orchestra musician etc.
USSMarauder | 23 hours ago
How do you know that AI won't do those new jobs also?
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
Then we’d need a new economic model as the markets (everything from housing, office property to retail would collapse). But we’re far from it. Current AI while impressive is still reliant on probabilities which is inherently poorly suited for tasks that require extreme reliability, transparent documentation to the smallest detail and the model maker or owner taking full liability for mishaps.
We still need heads to roll if shit goes sideways. And we still need everything to he documented (not hallucinated) so safety swiss cheese holes can be closed.
But let’s say AI evolves and becomes actually intelligent. Do you really want that AI, which not even the people working on it understand properly and casually give it a “10% chance to kill us all” to fly our airplanes, design high rises and bridges and research pathogens? If it’s really smart, maybe it wants to save elephants and the rain forest instead and decides it’s better to kill these fat useless latte slurping fucks..
Cold-Environment-634 | 23 hours ago
I hope you are right. Few people it seems share your take but I hope like hell you’re being the most realistic
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
I don’t know, maybe AI taking ALL THE JOBS would be the better scenario as it would end capitalism which surely isn’t fantastic for our ecosystems nor mental health. But it would probably be quite messy until a new economic model is born.
Cold-Environment-634 | 23 hours ago
Agree, but that new economic model would have to be settled on pretty much immediately. It would get very ugly otherwise
Rupperrt | 22 hours ago
It would happen very quickly, first heavy mitigation measures and stimulant checks etc (think covid), then remodeling. Certain markets especially some property would still be beyond saving
LossDisastrous3782 | 23 hours ago
Doomers will never do anything that shows actual confidence even though you can literally gamble on market collapse. At least the suicide cults back in the day showed some follow-through.
classicalySarcastic | 20 hours ago
May I interest you in some Flavor-Aid (couldn't even buy the name-brand SMH) in these trying times? /s
Infinite_Dress_3312 | 23 hours ago
No top economist agrees with you
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
tOp EcOnOmIst huh?
Show me a top economist who says “long term 20 plus years no one has a job”. The only people saying that are stupid home schooled Silicon Valley bros who wanna hype up their model and 14 year old melodramatic Redditors
Most top economists indeed don’t believe so and think augmentation will outweigh substitution.
Productivity gains will ultimately lead to new jobs that replace lost roles they’d predict. That’s always been the case in history when technology leaps happened.
https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/goldman-sachs-exchanges/how-will-ai-impact-the-labor-market
Alternative-Suit5541 | 22 hours ago
Nothing
Watch and die lol
Or riot like France
Globally
Also not happening
Elf_Maeve | 19 hours ago
Nothing we can do. At least in the most powerful country in the world(USA), we have voted away all of powers by falling for billionaire propaganda (our parents did I guess).
They have full control and we have no say.
YeetCompleet | 18 hours ago
It's time to acknowledge the man that pointed out the contradictions in this system 159 years ago
GenericFatGuy | a day ago
If they're already capable of replacing millions of jobs, then when exactly does that happen? What are they waiting for?
CactusWrenAZ | a day ago
It is happening. For example, at the workplace of someone I know, they just fired all the lower level workers. Now the mid-level workers do their jobs, as well.
GenericFatGuy | a day ago
Is that because of AI, or because of a shit economy and hiking interest rates on the back of a POTUS throwing tariffs at everyone, including a full blown trade war with their second largest trading partner?
CactusWrenAZ | a day ago
I guess you missed the sarcasm. They say it's because of AI. It's possible that the managers actually believe it, but it could also be for any of the reasons you mentioned. The point I was making is that AI isn't replacing that many jobs by itself, although in certain conditions for certain jobs, it can increase productivity.
GenericFatGuy | 23 hours ago
Fair enough. I did indeed miss the sarcasm.
Maleficent_Flow_8355 | a day ago
Technology problem moves fast. Logistics and people problems are solved slower. They are coming eventually.
Inanesysadmin | 22 hours ago
I mean something is coming but what is the question. Is it augmentation or just as other advancement have shown things change and new roles and opportunities pop up in its place.
jellyhessman | 20 hours ago
Nearly all of these "AI is replacing everybody at X company because they laid off 3000 people!" articles usually fail to say they were moved to India.
GenericFatGuy | 20 hours ago
Or that people get hired back once the initial story passes.
tigeratemybaby | 17 hours ago
It will take 5 to 10 years for most organisations.
They need experts to help with the move and need to spend a lot of money, and are worried about choosing the wrong direction.
They need to update their processes, and make all their systems AI accessible first which will take years.
Some companies will move fast, and that's where initially job losses will be, and some will move very slowly and be dragged into using AI systems or face shrinking margins from competition.
Companies in more regulated industries like finance, medical, etc... will be somewhat shielded initially as regulations take time to catch up.
Rupperrt | a day ago
Accountability, liability. Not the easiest to solve. Sure AI will help assisting and make certain assistant roles more redundant. May also introduce new jobs though.
3owi | a day ago
Needs capable humans to implement it. Those humans are rare. But after that... jobs decline
jawknee530i | 23 hours ago
My firm has hired 1/3 as many entry level developers this year as normal and we're making record profits with record productivity. That's how it happens.
TheAmorphous | a day ago
It takes time to have the LLM learn the job and write code to do it. Then you need a lot of testing. It's absolutely coming. Sooner than later.
Rupperrt | a day ago
It’ll take even more time for LLMs to develop transparency, ability for clear documentation and to take accountability and liability.
A lot of jobs existed purely for the latter two even before AI.
Important-Aspect6883 | 23 hours ago
It takes time to implement at the surface level outside the tech world and with the staggering exponential evolution most companies are unaware of the true potential along with the public. If we were to truly apply AI as it exists now the world would look completely different than the one you face right. Give it a couple years and we’ll get there.
Humble-Bear | 23 hours ago
There is a lot of corporate protectionism going on. If the managers fire w\the worker bees, there is no on left for them to manage
TheTimberFactory | 23 hours ago
I get what you're saying but you're completely ignoring the AI economical fundamentals. The hardware alone is extremely expensive and replacement hardware costs are coming.
They're literally gambling on the American economy with AI private investors driving up the bond market. Their burrowing costs are about to balloon at the hope of replacing millions of white collar Americans and all for what? Just to have another giant boat on the dock?
Literally, what is the point here?
bringbackmegaman | 18 hours ago
Have you seen those ai slop restaurant menus?
He must think those are an acceptable replacement for human designers
flat5 | 16 hours ago
This is coming, and you're either going to be one of the few winners or one of the many massive losers, and the point is to not be the latter.
Adventurous_Bath3999 | a day ago
They may replace millions of jobs which generate so much tax revenue. Not only that, they also support capitalists who produce goods and services for these millions who lose their jobs. How do they intend to handle this? This is an exercise in job reduction and productivity, with negative outcomes in other areas. Unlike the Internet, AI will neither create new jobs, nor likely create entirely new businesses, which the Internet did. So as much as people may want to be mesmerized by a technology that primarily does cost cutting, I don’t see much else coming out of it.
BrogenKlippen | 23 hours ago
This. And someone will say the k shaped economy, and that’s certainly going to be the answer for some company, but as someone in corporate strategy at a CPG F500, most CPG companies are in trouble if the white collar workforce disappears in the span of 2 years and we have mass unemployment.
FrereKomnene | 23 hours ago
It does make me think if where I'm from shows one possible future.
Where I'm from has a very large labor force with a very few ultra wealthy ultra powerful people. Where does all that money go? Funding political campaigns, having local police / judges / mayors / regulators on their payroll, private armies, mass dole-outs with their names on them to buy citizen loyalty, filling their workforces with legions of people working 3-6 month temp contracts with no opportunity for advancement, buying massive tracts of land, stashing their money abroad.
PunkPirate56364 | 23 hours ago
Imagine AI as a bunch of slaves we brought home, which do not require wages, food, only electricity. But they can only do certain jobs.
Us humans, we could switch to doing more of those other jobs. Build more housing, better infrastructure, and we could work less hours too.
Economy which is getting extra free work can be much better for population.
das_war_ein_Befehl | 20 hours ago
The antebellum south was not a good time for free wage workers. So the dynamic will be much like that
PunkPirate56364 | 14 hours ago
With current system yes.
System needs to change.
Adventurous_Bath3999 | 21 hours ago
These AI slaves neither pay any taxes, nor do they buy any services or goods.
Some say not to worry. You will have your universal basic income. That sounds like how it used to be the case in a communist country. Everyone gets the same amount of money, so everyone is a ‘comrade’ - LOL.
The idea is that machines produce everything in abundance… ok, if that is the case, why do people need money, or universal basic income… everything is in abundance, so that universal basic income is a BS concept, because proponents of AI do not know how else to explain that scenario as sustainable.
Does this sound like a credible and sustainable future of humanity? Why are they insulting our intelligence…
PunkPirate56364 | 14 hours ago
AI and robots do require electricity, maintenance, all kinds of parts.
We could by law ensure that only humans can perform some of these jobs. Which would mean AI isn't fully autonomous and humans hold the power.
Ammordad | 19 hours ago
As someone else has already said: slavery was not good for the working class. Triangle slave trade caused massive decline of economic growth in Silk road empires.
But perhaps the history of slavery in Islamic world itself is a better example in the context of domestic economic policies. Historically most artisan guilds in Islamic world were opposed to non-domestic slaves. Many Persian and Turkish bazzars prohibited slaves (and sometimes minorities that were made up of refugees or desperate migrants) from entering the Bazzar. Guilds often had strict policies on who could become a craftsman, and in some cases restrictions would be as strict as only allowing the oldest son of an existing member to become a new member. Before the Mongols invasion debt slavery (which predates Islam) was a norm in middle-east with the idea being you sold yourself as a slave for several years in order to repay your debt. But perso-turkish dynasties started regulating who can become a debt-slave, again, because there were just too many debt-slaves and not enough demand! Lashing, amputation, and banishment started becoming common punishments as alternatives to enslavement, becuase there just wasn't enough job. Even for slaves.
It was only the utter and apocalyptic devestation caused by the Mongols invasion that.... "fixed" the economy, and ultimately led to decline of debt slavery in misdle-east.
PunkPirate56364 | 16 hours ago
I said it can be much better for population, it can be worse for population as well.
Banning AI would mean falling behind countries which do not ban it.
Society needs to be restructured in a way that population benefits from AI.
AwkwardTickler | 23 hours ago
We cant get AI to even replace APSCAN. We might want to take a realistic approach to what AI can do and not just glaze the companies with lies.
LossDisastrous3782 | a day ago
You’re gambling your entire net worth on this, correct?
meister2983 | 21 hours ago
If you are young you probably should just from the pure hedging justification.
As someone a bit older, there's obviously risks to doing so. For instance, extreme government regulation.
LitespeedClassic | 20 hours ago
Unfortunately, I think you’re probably wrong. If you are right, we’re likely to be ok because a huge percentage of the workforce suddenly going offline will either lead to UBI or revolution.
In reality, I think the process will be much messier and worse for all of us. The AI will be able to replace the jobs but the rollout to different industries will be spotty. There are too many laws/regulations and societal norms to get through. So you won’t see a sudden 2 year jump to 30% unemployment. Instead one sector will be hit. Then a lull. Then another sector hit. Etc. We won’t hit the critical mass to get UBI or revolution. Instead we’ll just have slowly increasing misery.
And it’s not just white collar. The physical robots are only a few years out from having the ability to do the same to blue collar.
Aware-Individual-827 | 19 hours ago
But the AI, as far as of now, cannot automate a job. There's why too many fuckups and humans needs to filter them. That won't change until a better architecture not entirely based on LLMs appear. Will it eventually appear? Probably but in how many years?
mcchicken_deathgrip | 15 hours ago
Considering the rate of change we've seen in only 3 years since the first models were released, that day might be coming sooner than people expect.
LitespeedClassic | 11 hours ago
It already is. Hiring of junior programmers is down because a senior programmer + AI is as effective as a senior programmer + junior programmers. Yes someone is still managing the bot, but instead of, say, 3 jobs, you need 1.
Aware-Individual-827 | 10 hours ago
I'll be honest about this, this is a societal suicide if companies start doing this. There will be no people to take the expert title making the society regress or stagnate in most fields.
LitespeedClassic | 9 hours ago
I completely agree. It's the enshitification of everything. We offload all of our thinking to the machine and things work for a bit until they don't and then we're royally screwed because no one is left to pick up the pieces.
The problem is a collective action problem. If I believe my company can poach senior people from your company while replacing juniors with machines, then I don't currently have a short term incentive to pay extra for junior people. I'll let some other saps train them and poach them when I need them. The Nash equilibrium here seems to be nobody hires junior people and we're all screwed in five years.
I hope I'm wrong. And I know nothing about the future (and really, given the wide range of opinions among people who have been thinking deeply about all of this, nobody else does either). But it doesn't seem like there's anyone competent in any position of power in the West who could steer the ship of our society through the treacherous shoals. It also seems like the incentive structures we've baked into our society are almost making this inevitable.
We have made a religion around business where the highest good is maximizing shareholder value, instead of making the organizing principle of private enterprise the promotion of human flourishing. We've invented a machine that is quickly becoming more competent at producing the outputs that humans have usually produced to generate economic activity than humans are. Since our society is structured on these outputs, rather than on the actual good of human flourishing, the machine will eat everything.
And at the top of it all are a bunch of crazies who think they are going to be the first to download their consciousnesses into the machine and live forever as machine-gods. They have so little understanding of metaphysics that they actually think this is a possibility. And with them are a bunch of businessmen who just want to make money and don't think deeply about anything.
It's crazy to say, but I think China has a better chance of coming through this than anywhere in the West.
Economy_Zombie_3026 | 6 hours ago
I'm a dev and the difficulty I currently see is not being able to distinguish the actual knowledge of individual employees. Everybody has become proficient due to our internal agents but that means that everybody is basically as efficient as anyone else. Just 2 years ago there was an understood hierarchy of best and worst devs. Now? Almost everyone can complete any ticket on any project.
Double edged sword. More work being done. Less pride in the work that has been done.
Cabezone | 20 hours ago
In the California Bay Area, a lot of the jobs out here are robotics training facilities for AI. At least a dozen startups.
MyFeetLookLikeHands | 9 hours ago
UBI isn’t some panacea. how does going on vacation work? who buys middle income anything? how does the middle income housing rental situation work?
LitespeedClassic | 9 hours ago
I agree. UBI probably cannot work. It's something akin to digital serfdom. I am not optimistic about the scenario we are living in.
jetpacksforall | 5 hours ago
There’s usually a very short interval between “my kids can’t eat” to “fix this or swing from a lamppost.”
LitespeedClassic | 4 hours ago
Yes. I heard something said recently in an interview that was essentially "look back at the history of revolutions and pay attention to how many young men were out of work just before they occurred." Yikes.
There's a reason the billionaire class is building remote island compounds right now. Like Bond villains.
Shaskakmat | 15 hours ago
If all white collar job below manager are gone why the manager job is safe ? They literally just manage the people below them ? What is the point of keeping manager if there is no one to manage ?
senoritaasshammer | 23 hours ago
I’m not saying that AI isn’t immensely capable and can’t cause job displacement. But there’s a reason why investors are getting spooked about taking on any more AI-related debt.
• Money is being burnt, and there is no clear source of the sort of revenue needed for mass use of frontier-end AI to be justified.
• mass usage of AI is incredibly expensive, though open source models are becoming very capable for much less of the cost.
• The energy infrastructure needed to sustain the amount of data centers necessary for mass-scale computing at the needed level is just not there.
• Only 1-5% of prior layoffs had anything to do with AI, and have more to do with off-shoring, the economy, etc.
These AI companies are incentivized to make AI look like this society-ending threat. There’s a reason why there was such a uniform push recently to increase government intervention and regulation. If they don’t follow the rules today, why would they follow future regulation? With private investors becoming more strict and spooked, they are in DESPERATE need of the government stepping in and funding. Hence all of our 401Ks being used as collateral.
These questions about efficiency and revenue are very difficult to answer, and the effects of all this money being tied up to a business model that has no proof of being profitable as of now - and definitely nowhere near the level necessary to absorb all this debt and capital expense - can be felt very soon.
This isn’t to say that these founding companies disappearing means that AI will fail - the railroad had similar giants early on which soon collapsed, and we still have railroads.
That’s just to say that this idea that “they can just decide to” use more AI one day and pull the rug out from workers in an instant isn’t realistic.
I’m more scared of these sociopaths running these companies and how willing they are to make everyone else suffer for their temporary gain than I am of AI. And I hope to all that is worthwhile that in the financial crisis they will create as their valuation drops, they will be shamed forever.
4Looper | 22 hours ago
>Most white collar jobs that aren’t at least manager level will likely be gone in a few years.
The ones without professional associations - sure (like mine :P). But Lawyers, Doctors, and Engineers? They won't be able to be replaced so easily due to regulations. I'm not saying that AI won't be able to do the jobs that they do - but it will be hard to dislodge them. Opus 5.5 is already a better software engineer than I am in like 90% of situations - but it does need someone to pilot it. Once that's no longer true and it's self directed my job is gonna be gonzo.
All that being said though - we do not know the real costs of AI. At the current subsidized rate opus costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Depending on the codebase you are working on and the complexity of the project - the cost can explode. I don't write much code anymore (even before AI) and I was able to easily spend $500-$1000 a week for the past few weeks. At the prices Anthropic charges now they lose money. They're betting on being able to get the costs down and being able to raise prices but training models is incredibly expensive and the moment you release a new advanced model the Chinese open source models can get 90%+ of your performance just by training off your model so the economics are very shaky. It just doesnt make economic sense to expend so much money on making an advanced model when it can be copied immediately and you lose out on most of the advantage you got from the R&D. Usually when a company has massive R&D expenditures like in pharmaceuticals they can at least patent the drug they developed and sell it exclusively for a period of time.
AI is a pretty crazy technology. It's shocking the amazing results you get just from what is essentially a "statistically most likely next character" generator. That being said - the economics of the business of AI have not fully convinced me - there's some problems there that need to be figured out.
p001b0y | 21 hours ago
I really don't understand how they solve the automation paradox if AI takes all the jobs. Who will be buying whatever the oligarchs are selling? If labor is gone, what's replacing demand?
OddlyFactual1512 | 19 hours ago
You're asking the wrong question. If laborers are no longer needed, what happens to laborers? The oligarchs have an answer to that question, but you won't like it.
Economy_Zombie_3026 | 5 hours ago
Such a Malthusian dilemma. Bioengineered virus to cull the population? Endless conscripted war to cull the population? Civil unrest to cull? So many possibilities.
Fresh-Possibility-75 | 16 hours ago
Communism for the 1%.
Some have speculated that an increasing portion of us will be left to die through benign neglect (neoliberalism was the soft launch of this policy), but I don't think that makes sense. Why would a small class of people risk a revolutionary uprising by a global mass of people when they don't need their labor anymore? It's much more likely that we will be actively exterminated. Some of us (men, women, and children) will be enslaved for sex and reproductive work, of course.
Ok_Chest4612 | 5 hours ago
What, the top 10% of the US accounts for 50% of the spending? I suppose it'll just be more of that.
The rich and the powerful needing a large consumer middle class from which to derive their wealth and power from, has been a relatively recent invention anyway.
mcchicken_deathgrip | 15 hours ago
This is a classic contradiction of capitalism. Ironically, automation ultimately means less profits in the long run. Once every company can make their products for extremely cheap and in massive quantities, the price of what they're selling must drop as a result. Yet all companies have to adopt automation regardless, because if they don't they will be beaten out by a company with lower labor costs.
If all labor was automated away the capitalist class would collapse under itself. They would be left with massive machinery for production and no one to sell products to. It would be the end of capitalism altogether.
p001b0y | 14 hours ago
That lines up with my thinking as well. It’s self-defeating.
FOMO is driving every corporation towards an endpoint that destabilizes the system that created their wealth.
mcchicken_deathgrip | 13 hours ago
It's not even fomo so much as it's eat or get eaten. If they don't adopt, their market share will be taken by the companies which do adopt and can provide products or services better and cheaper.
But yep the self defeating spiral has been the story of capitalism since the beginning. It's the main factor that makes it an incredible force for technological innovation to begin with. The only way to continue to make profit when you're constantly adopting products that tank your rate of profit is to try to find a new innovation that gives you an edge. Then that innovation hits the rest of the market, rate of profit tanks, rinse and repeat.
If AI truly does elimate the need for human labor, then there can be no further real cost reducing innovations to be made, rate of profit will go to zero, and it will be the end of capitalism.
BidoofInfestation | 9 hours ago
This is a misunderstanding of the situation that I’ve seen a lot, and it’s something I’ve thought about a lot.
In classic capitalism you need demand to justify creation of products because you need to be able to pay the labor force required to extract, research, develop, and manufacture products.
However, when a single person or small group of people can control the entire labor stack single handedly due to advances in robotics and AI, then things get weird.
We’re not far from it being possible for wealthy individuals to purchase a self maintaining, autonomous labor force that can complete every step of any production process.
Why does Jeff Bezos need the wider market when he has a large force of autonomous, super intelligent, highly dexterous / strong workers that work 24/7 and each contain more than the sum total of human knowledge within them.
Once that happens there’s little need for the wider economy to exist for the top 0.1% and they each become their own micro-nation. They can continue to trade and barter amongst each other without having to rely on the rabble to sustain their operations.
There will of course be some bastions of free people, but for how long I don’t know. We’ll see measures to avoid revolution, bread and circuses, until it’s no longer needed and they’ve reached an unassailable position at which point they’ll shake us off like fleas from a dog. They’ll pat themselves on the back for having found a solution for climate change and global instability, and Feudalism 2.0 will settle in for a few generations.
Why would you need the token that acts as a proxy for power when you have the power itself on tap.
Sounds fantastical, but mark this post.
Sknowman | 19 hours ago
There's another layer there too: simply eliminating jobs, rather than replacing them. Many jobs that we have now are to make the jobs of other people easier or more efficient. Pretty much all software (dashboards, UI/UX, accounting tools, etc.) are all things that take in data, organize it, then present it nicely. None of that is needed for advanced AI. They can take the raw data and simply skip those steps, moving straight to the action plan.
And it goes well-beyond software: all HR-related orgs, for example.
Efficient_Algae_4057 | 19 hours ago
Opus 5.5 is great at coding because there was so much open software out there and the verification is quick and if the model makes a mistake the result is harmless. Another aspect is that for the past 9 months, the models were being trained by their users. All that tokenmaxxing stuff was just engineers all over the world paying to train the models. So much of the the performance gains have also been from hiring professional engineers and having them teach the models how to use the most common tools and practices. From here on, they would hire the very top engineers for training their models and most of the useful user session data will come from people who can tell the model where the boundaries of its current performance are.
No-Language6720 | 19 hours ago
There are local LLMs for coding purposes...in fact you can train them on your code base privately. Not pay for any tokens, share it over a corporate ethernet etc.
Why the hell would a corporation put that on a data center? Just have the dev employees put Jan or another local LLM on their local work laptops.
Use that for coding, and have them train it on the updates as they go and Metadata tags if they're updating database tables or whatever else. This way they don't have to write tedious documentation on internal software updates the next person can come in and it will help to keep things synchronized and people can ask about the architecture too.
God corporate America is so stupid.
4Looper | 18 hours ago
>There are local LLMs for coding purposes...in fact you can train them on your code base privately. Not pay for any tokens, share it over a corporate ethernet etc.
I work for one of the leaders in the AI space and I just use the models that they provide access to - including internal ones that aren't public. I agree it's stupid to give me unlimited access to spend like crazy using only the best models - but even if the worse thing would work just fine if I have the choice I'll always just select Opus (mostly because that selection is just pre-populated from my last session). Some companies have token limits but we don't yet :shrug.
Now - the company I work for uses a mono-repo which does represent some issues for the whole LLM + coding combination. The number of input tokens goes up astronomically just because it needs to read so many other files. So if they are going to put token limits to stop the bleeding those limits will still need to be super high.
ThrowCarp | 20 hours ago
>But Lawyers, Doctors, and Engineers?
Uh, big dawg, Software Engineering was hit the hardest with AI layoffs.
GrippingHand | 19 hours ago
They mean "real" engineers, who require licenses and accept liability for their work.
ThrowCarp | 19 hours ago
True. Mechanical and Civil Engineers with PE licenses haven't been affected anywhere near as bad.
Serves Electronics and Software right for making fun of Civil majors during uni.
4Looper | 18 hours ago
I mean REAL engineers. That legally can use the term engineer. I'm a software "engineer" - I'm just some dude with a computer science degree. There's no professional accreditation or board or anything.
ThrowCarp | 18 hours ago
Huh. That's crazy. In my country there are in fact Software Engineering degrees seperate from Computer Science degrees that are in fact accredited by IPENZ (our equivalent of ABET).
NottheIRS1 | 22 hours ago
Because it could literally all end overnight if the "AI bubble" pops and costs stop being subsidized. Your Claude Max subscription becomes unavailable to consumers (or even mid sized businesses) with a $2k a month price tag.
Build while you can, the bill is coming due, and something like the midterms could be what sets it off.
USS_Penterprise_1701 | 20 hours ago
AI doesn't go away even if the bubble pops, all the frontier labs go bankrupt, and almost all of the datacenter plans fall through. At the rate the software and hardware are progressing open weight models that run locally will likely be capable of doing everything frontier models can do now in a matter of years.
Meandering_Cabbage | a day ago
What is incredible is how partisan the split is. Many nice, thoughtfully Center-left people have convinced themselves it is all parrots of some right wing grift gamble. I can't tell if it is partisan ostrich behavior or because the implications would necessitate truly radical policy.
Honestly, the level to which we don't believe these forecasts is the lack of discussion about nationalization. I don't see how these technologies become so important and are allowed to live in the private sphere outside of the government.
ZipBoxer | a day ago
It's also quantum in that it's completely useless and simultaneously a threat to all jobs, art, and humanity.
BrogenKlippen | 23 hours ago
It’s insane that private citizens are saying “we’re building Frankenstein systems that might kill us all” and there’s not some sort of national security issue at all.
TheTimberFactory | 23 hours ago
It really says a lot when the liberal party has not mentioned, whatsoever, about UBI or the great job replacement that is coming.
They're absolutely bought out too. Our tax payers are literally going to finance this great job replacement without a fight, are we?
Its quiet, all too quiet at this point in time.
PunkPirate56364 | 23 hours ago
Why UBI when we need more workers? White collars jobs are being lost but we need more blue collar workers.
And a lot of people would rather collect UBI checks then work blue collar jobs.
dulcimerist | 23 hours ago
Are you suggesting we ask a bunch of 40-60 year olds who have 20-40 years' experience as office workers to become construction laborers, painting and coating workers, welders, wind turbine techs, woodworkers, diesel mechanics, electricians, boilermakers, and solar panel installers? Those are the most in-demand blue collar jobs right now, per Indeed.
Do you think they'll physically be capable of performing those jobs?
DrJupeman | 22 hours ago
Why not?
modzRtarderz | 2 hours ago
Because that would leave to mass violence and instability. Once you start telling people their life as they know it is over, the consequences of their actions start looking pretty meaningless to them.
Economy_Zombie_3026 | 5 hours ago
If the American government functioned there would be a New Deal type jobs program that floated citizens who want to go to trade school. How many people who are, say, 38 and a white collar worker can afford to quit their jobs and go to trade school full time?
It's easy saying "learn a trade" but we (Americans) don't have a safety net that allows for that.
Meandering_Cabbage | 47 minutes ago
Idk, all the research seems to show that retraining just doesn't work. Generally, education is used like a blind meme and substitute for richer engagement with the problems.
Re: UBI, someone made the lovely example of Arab states as a UBI demonstrator. That seems grim.
I have no clue what exactly our objective is and how we solve for it. Only thing I am certain of, is that if it is as insane as the labs are claiming that it will have too much power to exist outside of government.
PunkPirate56364 | 14 hours ago
Yes and yes.
krastem91 | 22 hours ago
I genuinely don’t see the problem ?
Will they be less capable then 20-30 year olds yes… will they be useful on the job site, absolutely .
The same was suggested for factory workers when knowledge work displaced factory jobs …
Nitros14 | 23 hours ago
If people were smart they'd all France and revolt against their own elites.
The government isn't going to work for you unless you demand it does.
No-Brain9413 | 22 hours ago
This is all good news by the way, assuming that single payer healthcare is adopted in the US along with a Universal Basic Income.
The end result could be an incredible amount of free time.. right??
Ok-League-1106 | 22 hours ago
And people who casually suggest complete job destruction seem to overlook the fact how easy it is to blow up datacentres. Mass unemployment will lead to mass luddite behaviour.
I personally dont think it will turn bleak, but 20 - 30% unemployment would make anyone who works at the Frontier labs a living nightmare.
ronreadingpa | 16 hours ago
Most won't do much. Look at 3rd world countries. Lots of very poor people living in shanty towns near fancy, big skyscrapers. Yet, relatively few major uprisings. Most individuals focused on survival and well-being of their families.
As for your thoughts, more difficult than one might think. However, could foresee world events leading to a similar outcome.
Such as nuclear weapons being detonated in space, which could take out large swaths of satellites, especially in lower orbits. Affecting communications, timing which many services rely on, and possibly GPS, though probably somewhat hardened. And frying many ground-based computer systems. Plus, damaging power transformers and other critical infrastructure too.
In short, war leads to mass destruction, which then leads to massive rebuilding and jobs. At least for a while. Hope it doesn't play out that way, but it traditionally has. WWII is a prime example.
Atticus_Taintwater | 23 hours ago
>that aren’t at least manager level
Everyone below SVP should be equally concerned.
Not only is the function of a lot of middle managers dubious in the first place, if there are 70% fewer line workers there's 70% less need for people up manage them.
Infinite_Dress_3312 | 23 hours ago
I mean what's the difference between manager and SVP if we're taking about gains and advances on an exponential scale? Under those assumptions you very rapidly progress between your average worker bee and Einstein
Oryzae | 22 hours ago
> Most white collar jobs that aren’t at least manager level will likely be gone in a few years.
The average manager is just a status update meat proxy. Heck with good context it can also make CEO-level decisions, but you can’t blame AI when shit goes south. The whole business game is making bets to minimize risk based on a vast array of unknowns. An LLM can technically make far better data driven decisions than humans.
lurkingowl | 9 hours ago
The job may still be there even if that manager isn't competent. The most likely outcome is whoever was best in that org at adapting to the new AI world will be in that manager position, wrangling and taking responsibility for the LLMs.
NeoVisionDev | 6 hours ago
as a dev I've effectively become a software manager. I manage a handful of agents who do all the implementing, QA, code reviews, chaos testing, etc. I just give the final sign off approval.
morty_morty | a day ago
Oh please. As though the people in these subreddits have any clue. Reddit is mostly a place to be outraged about AI and claim that they will never use it and will boycott anyone who does.
Rupperrt | 23 hours ago
Reddit is also a place where AI is gonna replace 95% of all jobs by next year according to some subreddits. They’ve been saying that since 2024.
hippydipster | 10 hours ago
You can find anything you want to find being said on reddit. Far more interesting than that banality is what you choose to focus on and what you choose to ignore and forget.
Responsible-Ball-162 | 6 hours ago
the apocalypse is next week
I mean next month
I mean next year
I mean--
loulan | a day ago
It's not just reddit. Most people I meet IRL have no clue what AI has been capable of in the past few months.
morty_morty | a day ago
Also very true. The lack of public education about what's coming is shocking. But I don't think that people will be retained in the future based on them being a manager, but on their knowledge and adoption of the new tech. Which most people are oblivious to. They think GPT is fancy Google.
It's wild.
00raiser01 | 21 hours ago
Managers are the first to be replaced. What are they doing to be immune to AI work.
Frankly C suites are useless.
GodzillaSpark | 20 hours ago
Managers and c suites are there to assume liability. If shit goes wrong you can’t fire the llm, but you can fire the cto or ceo. (Yes this just happened at my org. The board wanted to go in a different direction and someone had to fall on the sword)
00raiser01 | 19 hours ago
The direction should be individual technical person can take big corporate lunch with LLMs.
Many of these big corporate are vastly inefficient with a lot of useless baggage at the upper level.
thortgot | 7 hours ago
Liability shifting is what those baggage layers are for.
It creates cohesive "units" thats can be partitioned, separated and replaced without affecting the greater whole.
WhatNazisAreLike | 18 hours ago
AI sucks at things where it can’t get quick feedback like coding or math, or things where there is no consensus answer. If you ask it to make business decisions it’s just going to summarize what’s on google/reddit.
Curious_Analyst986 | 14 hours ago
Managers are making business decisions based on what they get from AI. Frankly, Ive seen managers and ceos using AI much more than I do. And I think this is much more prevalent than we think.
00raiser01 | 16 hours ago
C suites suck at that too.
Material-Command-854 | 16 hours ago
I think they won’t be replaced first. They are the ones who are deciding who gets fired and they are the ones who frame how everyone else’s performance is perceived.
getmeoutoftax | 21 hours ago
Steering AI, reviewing the outputs, and making management decisions for their departments and organization as a whole.
00raiser01 | 21 hours ago
Technical people are better suited to reviewing the output and steering AI.
C suites have a tendency to make delusional decision without the technical people keeping them grounded. This doesn't help that AI are really good Yes men that will feed the C suites ego.
big_cock_lach | 18 hours ago
Let me guess? You’re a tech person?
There’s a reason why tech people are the first that are getting replaced by AI.
Strong_Challenge1363 | 8 hours ago
Counterpoint what is stopping me from having a model comb over all of the documentation and summarizing it? I have had fantastic managers who are still mentally there and those that make the most basic technical fuckups. If how some are spinning it is true nobody has any reason to have a monopoly on "muh big picture"
00raiser01 | 16 hours ago
They get layoff only for the C suites to screw the company products further and can't maintain or delivery anything.
Ill_Specific_6144 | 17 hours ago
Technical people execute tasks, they have no idea about the bigger picture. Its far more likely that junior/mid level will be replaced before C suite
00raiser01 | 16 hours ago
My experience has been the opposite. Their in an ivory tower for their views. Vastly disconnected to the product they sell.
Moral-Relativity | 22 hours ago
Jobs are easy to eliminate. Customers though are harder to create.
pan-re | 22 hours ago
Just kill Ai
GodzillaSpark | 19 hours ago
At my day job this is super clear to me as our software factory is functional and just being refined now.
On the weekends when I ask agents to automatically list a bunch of eBay listings for me, it’s still frustrating that it failed 50% of the time. I can see why most people don’t think agents can do much. It’ll improve but the typical $20 sub isn’t impressive.
werpu | 15 hours ago
most manager level jobs will be redundant because there is no one to manage left except people driving the ais and those definitely are not the current manager generations! who just drive people around but have no clue about processes!
LuigiTheTweak_eth | 9 hours ago
Business replaces humans at the businesses expense.
kingjdin | 8 hours ago
I disagree. AI is good at some tasks, but not good at jobs. There’s a big difference between good at tasks and good at jobs.
Foreign-You160 | 7 hours ago
Isn’t the manager supposed to be the one working with people? You expect him to be there and not the people he manages?
getmeoutoftax | 7 hours ago
They’ll still be needed for a while. Managers will review the output and steer the AI agents as needed. They might even keep a few staff on hand to perform first level review of the AI output, but it will be a tiny fraction of the original headcount. They’ll also make decisions for their departments and the organizations as a whole.
Foreign-You160 | 7 hours ago
I think they will keep someone around to do this, because most have no clue
walksonfourfeet | 7 hours ago
Why can AI be managers? Actually seems like a better fit. In fact, AI C-class would save so much money. It would be a game changer
getmeoutoftax | 7 hours ago
I don’t see that happening at the senior manager level for a while. For example, a corporate tax department considering some complex strategy like a new transfer pricing plan, or the consequences of a tax election. Senior managers will be around for a while to sign off on those decisions, even though AI will play a huge role in making them. I can think of countless other examples for treasury/finance, R&D, sales/marketing, supply chain, etc.
Orion113 | 5 hours ago
If all you need is someone to sign off, why not replace all the managers with AI and have the CEO sign off on everything they decide?
Xarradin | 4 hours ago
I think i have read the sentence "Opus 5.5" was a massive leap forward in three different languages and for a variety of models in countless reddit threads over the course of the year.
The sentences are always structured in exactly the same way.
Regardless of how accurate it is, this has to be bots.
getmeoutoftax | 4 hours ago
I’m not a bot. I just use these models extensively and know for a fact that they’re capable of replacing tens of millions of jobs.
laosurv3y | an hour ago
For a fact? Do you even know what 10 different jobs 100% do?
youngchunk | 4 hours ago
Capable or replacing tens of millions of jobs and actually replacing tens of millions of jobs are very different things… I agree with you about the capabilities but maybe trying taking a small step back and look at the bigger picture
laosurv3y | an hour ago
Or people who have bots do their thinking for them.
GoldenFox7 | 4 hours ago
There’s a genuine question as to whether AI can replace these jobs at an equivalent level and most importantly, at an equivalent cost. For the moment AI companies are subsidizing token costs massively. They tried charging full cost earlier this year and companies blew through their annual AI budgets in DAYS. The headlines were about companies using too many tokens but that wasn’t the new thing that drove costs up it was the change in token prices. So far, AI can’t replace an entire worker in almost any field but can enable 1 worker to do the work that 2-3 workers used to do. Companies are trying to find the balance of how much AI to use vs how many employees to have. It’ll take years to work out the balance in each industry. Not saying we won’t get to the point that AI can just replace tons of people (I’m sure it will in fact) but I think it will take longer than most expect.
maxbonaparte | 3 hours ago
"longer than most expect" is really up for interpretation here... the frontier so moving so fast (fueled by Trillions $$), it's unlike anything i've seen
GoldenFox7 | 3 hours ago
100% but the frontier and what large employers are able to reliably implement is the gap I’m seeing. Little startups are getting infinitely more out of AI than the big employers are and I wonder if that will continue even as the frontier marches on.
Utahstock_12 | 3 hours ago
Yeah I work at BIG UNIVERSITY We are slow moving and don't have shareholders to worry about. AI is used by the students today, but enterprise wide admin/staff replacement is a long way off. Plus if they tried to pull something off in a hurry the unions would probably be able to stop it.
Frosty_Fish1695 | 22 hours ago
Managers are going to get cut first. Keep ICs who can manage fleets of agents. Then cut them when the agents are self sufficient
bobbo6969- | a day ago
Pretty sure Tony stark invented the iron man suit and the Time Machine with Jarvis. Jarvis didn’t replace Tony.
SeniorLoan647 | a day ago
It's a comic book bro, come back to the real world
bobbo6969- | a day ago
I started writing a post about my irl work experience with ai, enterprise workflow, and innovation… decided the iron man thing summed it up better.
SeniorLoan647 | a day ago
And I worked at Google in ai integration, what's your point? You really think your judgement, or anyone's for that matter, is better than frontier models? They can lap humans in "innovation", the only question rn is cost. And there's no fundamental reason the costs won't go down, it's a mathematical problem, and universe already shows that information density can be much higher for information processing in an entity (I.e. humans).
Think about gpt 4o, compare how much it cost, to gpt 6.1 sol. When it launched, gpt 4o was at 5 dollars/million tokens of input and 15 for output. Today, gpt 6.1 sol is at 2 dollars per million input and 10 dollars per million output.
When you control for intelligence level (using parameter count as a weak proxy), this is orders of magnitude improvement already, and it's not even been 5 years.
bobbo6969- | a day ago
I see talented engineers using ai to great effect. And idiots using it to be faster idiots.
Owning a tools doesn’t make you a carpenter.
I could be wrong, but so could you… predicting the future is hard.
In my view ai will be like every other technological leap forward. It will kill some jobs, but in the long run create others that can’t even be conceived of now.
One things for sure. We’ll find out.
photon1701d | 21 hours ago
Yes, but he created Ultron as well, whom by all intents and purposes, should have wiped everything out.
bobbo6969- | 21 hours ago
That’s true, but I’m of the opinion that much of the agi and this will destroy the world stuff is hyped up to boost stock prices.
I suspect that agi is going to end up being something like nuclear fusion.
Where it’s going to happen, but that last 1% improvement ends up taking 50 years or maybe never happens.
But… if the super intelligence takes over and tries to kills us all then debating about the economic pros and cons and what will happen to jobs is ridiculous… cause the resistance would always be hiring, and unemployment would be at 0%.
TopicSoft6567 | 20 hours ago
Maybe, but the dudes on Reddit also think they’re smarter than everyone and this place is a crazy echo chamber
invisible_shrek | 13 hours ago
It seems to me that only people on Reddit are psychotic about AI to the point that they screech about it taking all jobs. No one I know IRL talks like that.
Xeynon | 10 hours ago
I've been using AI at my job for three years now and I continue to see no evidence predictions like this are about to come true.
Responsible-Ball-162 | 6 hours ago
lmfao
Joseph20102011 | a day ago
Meritocracy is a farce to begin with, because the elite class got their cushy jobs through nepotism, not merit, so nepotism among the working class, especially in this AI era, should not be demonized but normalized.
[OP] In_der_Tat | a day ago
You may read my reply to the other commenter who shared a similar view or, even better, read the article in its entirety.
thissomeotherplace | 12 hours ago
Meritocracy*
*results may vary
Honestly, it is so apparent how rigged the game is, how can anyone with a straight face claim this is a "meritocracy". The US health industry is a fucking scam. We see the incompetents that rise to the top.
digitaljestin | 19 hours ago
Anyone who thinks a meritocracy exists is dumb beyond redemption. There are many reasons for this, but I'll explain using the simplest: inheritance cannot exist in a meritocracy.
There. Now you can forever shut up about meritocracy.
Holbrad | 14 hours ago
Just because we don't live in a perfect meritocracy doesn't mean we don't live in the most meritocratic age ever.
fadeawaythegay | 17 hours ago
Perfect meritocracy does not exist. The current society is more meritocratic than anyone existed in the last 3000 years. Happy? Your single brain cell organism
thedudedylan | 13 hours ago
One could argue 40 years ago was more meritocratic. I realize historically speaking that is not another age but recent history is kid of what we are talking about in here.
SciencePristine8878 | 4 hours ago
The society we live in is a flawed meritocracy but social mobility was possible and probably better than most if not all time periods in history. AI could make it worse than any period in history.
raythenomad | 14 hours ago
Inheritance is a part of meritocracy of family unit. It’s not somebody fault if you parents are bums
digitaljestin | 10 hours ago
"meritocracy of a family unit" sounds like you can't decide between nepotism or eugenics, but in either case you are avoiding saying it aloud.
mcsul | 9 hours ago
Different person, but I think that there is a third option in here.
We know that kids of well-educated parents hear almost an order of magnitude of words before kindergarten, which helps with vocabulary pickup. Parents with well-educated parents read more to their kids, and spend more time helping kids with homework. Kids who grow up in stable two-parent homes outperform those who do not on nearly every measure of achievement. Kids who see their parents read are more likely to read. etc....
There are a ton of non-nepotism and non-eugenic family-related factors that influence where kids land on the economic spectrum as they become adults.
Medical-Hair-8934 | 3 hours ago
If that’s the case, which is that a certain level of merit is simply a product of an existing high merit family, then why give these kids even additional points through inheritance. They’ve already grown up wealthy. Why do they need even bigger head starts than their older family members. You certainly don’t add even more advantage by basically eliminating taxes on inheritance and stepping up the basis so wealth can transfer intergenerational tax free.
mcsul | 2 hours ago
Sure. I'm not arguing against any of that. I'm just pointing out that parental behavior (distinct from money or genetics) has enormous impacts on the likelihood that kids succeed.
The core problem, from a policy perspective, is that parental behavior is an almost insurmountable advantage for kids. (Or a disadvantage for other kids.) There's almost no amount of money, funding for schools, etc... that can make up for poor parental behavior. Which is frustrating, since then our only real lever for helping kids realize their full potential is some variation of telling parents to get good.
raythenomad | 10 hours ago
Nepotism or eugenics’ is the kind of false dichotomy people invent when their own bloodline maxed out at participation trophy and a vape. Inheritance isn’t some secret eugenics plot, it’s just the basic recognition that competent people tend to raise less useless kids and that you don’t get to loot their shit just because your parents were useless.
digitaljestin | 10 hours ago
Thanks for confirming to everyone that you are on the eugenics side. We were all wondering.
Dobby068 | 14 hours ago
You make no sense whatsoever.
digitaljestin | 11 hours ago
As I said, folks; beyond redemption.
Dobby068 | 10 hours ago
All the people in my social circle have been successful in life, based on their own skills and work attitude, started from just about nothing.
You sound bitter, before you insult anybody that is better than you, maybe you should reconsider, look in the mirror or something.
StillALilBoy | 9 hours ago
you're the one who sounds bitter honestly
Dobby068 | 9 hours ago
How so ? I did not produce the idiotic statement to which I replied. Do you subscribe to that opinion ?
StillALilBoy | 9 hours ago
because you took it personally
Dobby068 | 9 hours ago
Not bitter. Just don't like people posting idiotic statements.
Do you subscribe to this opinion that there is no meritocracy in the world and ... even worse, inheritance is what proves this ?
StillALilBoy | 9 hours ago
which makes you sound bitter
it is irrelevant to what i subscribe to, it's not what i'm talking about
Dobby068 | 9 hours ago
Got it! 😂😂😂
Here's the thing, only someone that failed in life due to his own limitations can claim there is no meritocracy in life.
Distinct-Response907 | 21 hours ago
One miss here is the probability of WWIII as the two biggest AI players compete for resources. Just as WWII was an order of magnitude more destructive than WWI, this conflict will, to put it mildly, reshuffle the wealth deck.
Arcnounds | 17 hours ago
The thing that worries me the most is that it is a pathway to optimization for the wealthy who will be controlling the goals set into AI (until it potentially turns on them). I look at what algorithms have done over the last 20 years and have they made people happier?
ZeraDoesStuff | 13 hours ago
Jokes on you, there is no Meritocracy
Never was
The most hard working people are mostly also the poorest people having multiple jobs just to make ends meet
Agitated_Newt_7655 | 16 hours ago
Rational by product of capitalism in a post Industrial Revolution world. Almost like the consolidation of ownership of what was the net result of human labor is a bad thing.
Mordin_Solas | 8 hours ago
My assumption is that the most likely trajectory for the future looks more like Elysium than Star Trek.
And some of the most powerful players are actively advocating for futures that would toss people into economic wood chippers (i.e. Marc Andreeson / Peter Thiel).
Sam Altman and Dario Amadei have visions that are closer to star trek than Elysium, but the liklihood that they prevail vs the libertarian sociopaths seems far less likely.
[Deleted] | 2 hours ago
Man oh man if only people took everyone's warnings about AI takeover seriously. But no, you all said "you'll get left behiiiiiind just let it happen". Rapey logic.
Surebuddy112 | 23 hours ago
This is actually a good thing, intelligence has never been taxed, lets be honest, everyone is born different, some people have much better software than others and that has always been the most unfair thing about life.
AwarenessNo5921 | 18 hours ago
Yeah true maybe we should make sure the worse software doesn't get installed on other systems to fix that 🤔🤔
Surebuddy112 | 18 hours ago
I have to agree to that, we already do that with some genetic diseases i believe, but genetic modification should be a thing, with limitations, also for intelligence, or physique. True equality is a good thing. An 80iq and a 160 iq dont have the same chances in life. Meritocracy has always been partially a lie since the amount of effort it takes to achieve thing is different for esch person depending on his genetic lottery.
AwarenessNo5921 | 16 hours ago
True equality isn't a thing. It never will be. In one scenario, someone feels upset because they can't learn as quick as the other. In the other scenario with "true equality," the higher intelligence would see themselves at the same occupational level as a bunch of morons. Which would quickly drive someone to cut the cord.
It isn't really even possible to achieve equality with respect to that; the premise feels asinine. I think it works out though, because most people just accept that some people simply are able to see more, and they would never be capable of being in that position/executing that idea or whatever.
The most realistic outcome is going to be an even greater extent of wealth consolidation. So the equality for most people will just be living paycheck to paycheck in a subscribe your life model.
ExtensionMoose1863 | 23 hours ago
So use the tools to create something and join the equity ownership class. They are staggeringly inexpensive for how much they allow you to scale you're own output in both skills and productivity
Yes. I agree those who don't adapt are screwed as I'm sure the coopers, fletchers, and ferriors also were
[OP] In_der_Tat | 16 hours ago
Teach me.
ExtensionMoose1863 | 7 hours ago
Teach yourself. You literally are on a device that has access to all human knowledge.
Also the best part about these tools is you can just ask THEM to help you learn ... All you need is a good idea and the passion to follow it through
TheIncandescentAbyss | 19 hours ago
There was never a meritocracy, so it doesn’t really matter. Can’t be a meritocracy in a world where you’re given a job based on who you know rather than what you know. What we have and have always had is nepotism.
throwingitaway12324 | 7 hours ago
lol not true at all
TheIncandescentAbyss | 7 hours ago
You get jobs based on who you know, not what you know. Everyone knows this.
throwingitaway12324 | 7 hours ago
True for some sure but not true for the majority of
quantum-fitness | 13 hours ago
AI amplify the competent much more than the mediocre. My mid coworkers get 10% speedup from ai while I produce the same as the other teams and improve quality of work faster
Strong_Challenge1363 | 8 hours ago
You wanna share some of your work? Come on don't be shy. I've worked with a lot of STEM folks and frankly they won't shut up about it (myself included). Your blog doesn't really cover it which is odd
thortgot | 7 hours ago
People who do serious work don't publish it online.
Osiris_Raphious | 10 hours ago
Nepotism and feudal like wealth transfer through equity and trust funds has already ended most of the meritocracy... Ai is just the automation we were promised in the mid 1900s scifi dreams of accelerated industrialisation..