Comment by socalgal2

IMO, this is one of the better takes in this thread. I'm a big fan of Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, which gives a very condensed version of some economic ideas - one of them being automation, with really good examples in the past of labor saving machines like the printing press being created. When I first read it a decade ago I didn't think my profession might be like the printing press, but it's definitely in the crosshairs now.

If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad things happen and we have to make the best of them and move on.

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.

If this is what you think needs to happen and you live in the US, then you should be freaking out right now, not calmly posting takes like this. UBI is not a thing almost any current American politician is considering, and the overton window is speeding in the opposite direction.

You should not expect people to be reasonable about this. I don’t know what the answer here is, but if you want it to be UBI, you need to fight for it. The alternatives (artificial price controls, the dumb make-work policies you correctly disdained, first-amendment-breaking/privacy-violating AI bans) are out there, and if you don’t fight for the thing you want, you’re gonna get one of those.

> We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators.

As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods.

The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before.

Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers.

> Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.

I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.

The fear, which many (like myself, and Andrew Yang) have since before GenAI hit it big, is that the coming automation revolution will be magnitudes more disruptive than prior economic revolutions. It's one thing for particular skilled industries to evolve or go away; it's another when massive, diverse, frontline-and-management roles across the economy will all be wiped out in the coming decade or two.

Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of millions of jobs in the US alone.

COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream politics about improving the welfare system of the country to prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-wealthy shareholders and owners.

Just lost my UX Researcher, Designer, UI Developer and CX Support job (8 years) two weeks of ago. They said doing a great job but have to lay you off. Within a week i put my house up for sale and received an offer.

Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a nurse.

My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.

I'm going to sound like a luddite I'm sure but I'm tried of these analogies using horses, tractors and so on. Labor involving muscles was replaced with tractors but people could just switch to using the other half of their body; The Brain. Now that a lot of the creative tasks and knowledge work is being replaced there isn't anywhere for those people to go. Maybe people with esoteric industry knowledge, vibe-coding skills or trade skills will be fine.

For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.

> At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens.

I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress.

"Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I mean Keynes argued something like: if the Treasury filled old bottles with banknotes, buried them in disused coal mines, filled the mines with rubbish, and then left it to private enterprise to dig them up again, there would be no more unemployment and the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it actually was."

But it really does feel sometimes like. Why do we feel this powerlessness to progress? Why can't we architect the world we want to have? I have really been wondering. Lots of religious groups want to revert some progress. Maybe these whole network cities folks have a point. Maybe we can have a city like pegged to the like technical and architectural standards of the victorian era.

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.

have been hearing from several ex-AWS colleagues about the job losses within their teams and the number of people impacted since yesterday. it’s depressing, but also symptomatic of a much larger obvious shift already underway for some time now, now being further accelerated by new technology.

AI and automation are rapidly erasing roles across both white and blue collar work. this is now a present present reality in almost all sectors. extrapolating this, it is clear this ongoing displacement will drive successive waves of unemployment and underemployment, placing severe strain on social contracts and accelerating societal instability. countries with strong social compacts may weather the coming storm. but others, especially those with larger population that lack "cultural ballast" >cough USA< will likely to slide into chaos, if not outright anarchy.

harder question to ponder is this: in a world where human labor is no longer the primary allocator of income and resources remain finite, sustaining nearly half of today’s global population under existing economic models begins to look fundamentally untenable. china’s one child policy starts to feel less irrational and more prescient.

beginning to think that perhaps I should be advising my kids to learn a trade on the side, as a backup plan, even as they chart their budding careers in the corporate world.

Thinking that because in the past the effect of progress was a net positive after a while it will always be like that is a cognitive bias. When looking at the large scale, in previous cases, people replaced by automation would go into jobs that were not automated.

But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward

Everyone works 20 hours/week.

The 'problem' isn't what you think it is. The people in power are worried that lifting the boot off of the neck of the working class may result in loss of power for them.

They are right. Hence the stalemate.

This is exactly how I feel. I entered the software industry right before GPGPU programming was becoming a thing. I was aware of AI and neural nets back then and saw the future and decided I wanted to be part of it.

So what if my job is no longer a thing in several decades. That's the entire point.

There's infinite number of ways to make a living. My way isn't better than anyone else's.

People willing to adapt will always have opportunities awaiting them. The world is rich and fruitful.

Plus all the fun parts of computer science are still remaining to be pondered. The fun of computers is the high of the aha moment, not the coding lol

The people benefitting from the profits accumulated from layoffs would never allow their margins to be cut by having to pay for UBI. Why do people act like this even remotely on the political horizon? There will simply be an even larger underclass and the wealthy enclaves will build higher walls. “At least the companies will be more efficient” is such a cucked take, insane

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

That's what the TSA is in the US

What progress? Our planet is dying and those who have most loudly touted "Progress" are the ones killing it.

If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer is obvious.

The alternative is indeed UBI, and the obvious way to fund it is to tax automation so that it actually scales to however many people end up without jobs.

But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

And what is? AI slop? There is no objective purpose to any of this, all of it is preference.

I prefer that people have a way to express themselves in a way that gives them subjective meaning, maybe a bullshit job is a good enough solution.