I came across this article in another Lemmy community that dislikes AI. I’m reposting instead of cross posting so that we could have a conversation about how “work” might be changing with advancements in technology.
The headline is clickbaity because Altman was referring to how farmers who lived decades ago might perceive that the work “you and I do today” (including Altman himself), doesn’t look like work.
The fact is that most of us work far abstracted from human survival by many levels. Very few of us are farming, building shelters, protecting our families from wildlife, or doing the back breaking labor jobs that humans were forced to do generations ago.
In my first job, which was IT support, the concept was not lost on me that all day long I pushed buttons to make computers beep in more friendly ways. There was no physical result to see, no produce to harvest, no pile of wood being transitioned from a natural to a chopped state, nothing tangible to step back and enjoy at the end of the day.
Bankers, fashion designers, artists, video game testers, software developers and countless other professions experience something quite similar. Yet, all of these jobs do in some way add value to the human experience.
As humanity’s core needs have been met with technology requiring fewer human inputs, our focus has been able to shift to creating value in less tangible, but perhaps not less meaningful ways. This has created a more dynamic and rich life experience than any of those previous farming generations could have imagined. So while it doesn’t seem like the work those farmers were accustomed to, humanity has been able to shift its attention to other types of work for the benefit of many.
I postulate that AI - as we know it now - is merely another technological tool that will allow new layers of abstraction. At one time bookkeepers had to write in books, now software automatically encodes accounting transactions as they’re made. At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
These days we have fewer bookkeepers - most companies don’t need armies of clerks anymore. But now we have more data analysts who work to understand the information and make important decisions. In the future we may need fewer software coders, and in turn, there will be many more software projects that seek to solve new problems in new ways.
How do I know this? I think history shows us that innovations in technology always bring new problems to be solved. There is an endless reservoir of challenges to be worked on that previous generations didn’t have time to think about. We are going to free minds from tasks that can be automated, and many of those minds will move on to the next level of abstraction.
At the end of the day, I suspect we humans are biologically wired with a deep desire to output rewarding and meaningful work, and much of the results of our abstracted work is hard to see and touch. Perhaps this is why I enjoy mowing my lawn so much, no matter how advanced robotic lawn mowing machines become.
There is. Value is getting more for less. Horses created value for farmers by plowing more land for the same amount of human effort, and that required a higher initial investment into the horse. Tractors increased that value by reducing time spent plowing as well as eliminating horse maintenance, and that required a higher initial investment into the tractor. And so on.
Value is tangible and quantifiable. You calculate initial and ongoing costs (investments, subscriptions, etc) and compare to improvements in yield, and value is the yield divided by the costs before and after the change. If AI helps you sell more products and that increase exceeds the additional cost of the AI tool, or you produce a similar amount of products with less cost (i.e. AI actually replaces jobs), then that’s value.
True. I don’t understand the comparison to value though, servants will exist regardless of the value created by some change. If value is high enough, the servants will live a better life due to access to better products. But there will always be a division between those in power and those not in power.
This is true regardless of the economic system. As long as there is a separation of those in power and those not in power, there will be a gap in means, and AFAICT we’ve never known a time where that gap hasn’t existed.
That said, being a servant isn’t necessarily bad. The poor in the US and Europe are far better off than the poor in much of the rest of the world. Why? If a society is able to provide stability, everyone is better off. Generally speaking, someone needs to have more power than others in order to produce stability, because that power gap is essential to stop others from usurping power. Why is Africa so screwed up? Because groups are able to challenge the power of the government and take for themselves outside the legal framework. They run mines operated through child labor, threaten law enforcement, etc, all to get more value than they would otherwise be allowed to get working through legal channels.
They’re selling a product. When was the last time you saw an advertisement that didn’t overhype the product? I just watched a bunch of ads for a KFC chicken sandwich while watching some big college football games. If I go to KFC and buy that chicken sandwich, will it look anything like what they showed in the ad? Absolutely not!
Some execs will get sucked into that pitch, and others will be more careful in testing the product out to know what value it actually offers. We’re doing that right now in my company. Basically, we have an outside contractor that has been supporting one of our products for several years now, and we’re pushing them to demonstrate a substantial increase in productivity using AI tools. They get paid based on demonstrating that improvement. I think that’s the right way to do it, you test a new product out, and if it delivers as advertised, you increase use of it, and if it doesn’t, you stop using it. Don’t jump all in based on some marketing, jump all in based on actual experience.
The way capitalism has worked for centuries is that some new tech replaces a bunch of jobs, and that creates opportunities for new jobs, often w/ higher pay (sometimes not).
Look at the cotton gin. Before this point, cotton wasn’t very profitable, since it was too labor intensive to harvest. When the cotton gin was invented in 1793, it completely transformed the economy of the southern US and drove up demand for slavery since there was now a ton of money to be made harvesting cotton. If slavery was illegal, this would instead drive up demand for paid farm hands. Here’s an article about cotton exports before and after the civil war, exports increased in the early 1800s as more and more farms adopted cotton gins, stalled during the civil war, and continued its increase after the civil war (after slaves were freed). Here’s an image that shows that:
This has happened in a number of other areas, such as:
Each of those inventions killed tons of jobs, while creating new jobs. Instead of having people manually calculating things like artillery trajectories, we now have IT, software development, and analysis jobs. Instead of people going around town every night to light lamps, they can manage electrical distribution to entire cities, monitor the status of the grid (i.e. getting a message that a bulb has died), etc.
My point here is that the technological advancement created jobs because it made an industry more profitable. Everyone wanted cotton shirts because the old standard, wool, sucked, especially in the summer. We have an IT industry with tons of subfields because we don’t need a room full of computers to calculate things like artillery trajectories and financial results. We have a widespread electrical network that brings light, climate control, and computation to individual homes at the cost of a few jobs lighting street lamps. The constant here is that employers want to get the most value they can (i.e. prefer unpaid slaves to paid farm hands), but they will invest in increased production if that increases profits proportionally.
I’m not too worried about the job market w/ AI. Yeah, it’ll replace some jobs, but it’ll create others. If running a content distribution network is less expensive, perhaps they can afford to take on less profitable content (i.e. indie content), which creates more content creation jobs. If running a search engine is cheaper, perhaps it makes sense to make lots of niche search engines that help discover content w/ less ad budget, and that improves profitability of smaller creators. If building new software projects is cheaper, perhaps they can pay software architects more to oversee more projects (fewer employees, more lucrative roles). And so on.
Generally speaking, innovations that increase value tend to apply downward pressure on prices because that lowers the barrier to competition, which means increased job creation and often better distribution of wealth. The transition period is certainly hard, but the net result after is usually positive.