Shirayuki
14d ago
This didn't happen during industrialisation and electrification though. Yes, to some extent the nature of work expanded and changed, but productivity grew very obviously and rapidly in those eras in a way that we don't seem to be seeing with computerisation.
Shirayuki
14d ago
Great post.
I've recently learned about Solow's Paradox, the idea that productivity growth in developed countries doesn't appear to be reflecting the impact of computers / the internet / the smartphones despite their obvious incredible impacts on society and it's been pretty fascinating to think about.
Consensus seems to be split between productivity statistics overestimating inflation and underestimating real growth and theories that computing really just hasn't significantly moved productivity for various reasons [personally I think this would explain a lot....]
What kind of catastrophic scenarios are you thinking about?
I can see a lot of ways in which current/modest AI advancements are going to make the world worse (damage to the education system, the end of audiovisual content as reliable evidence, propaganda/astroturfing/surveillance) but really these are all just extensions of existing slow decline, not catastrophic scenarios per se.
I'm personally of the opinion that normie dooming about AI and the job market is just a way to express the growing malaise that's enveloping the west and has little to do with actual macroeconomic effects.
Yes, if we do manage to create truly transformative AI that obviates labour everything is on the table - I'm not too interested in litigating AGI timelines but if that does happen it's not just going to be a weak white collar labour market, we're walking out the other end gods or 6 feet under.
On the other hand, if we top out somewhere around "useful tools" level as we are now it's not clear to me that anything is likely to change macro-economically. There's been no meaningful changes to any macroeconomic statistics attributable to LLM's as of yet [unless you count the wild valuations of AI companies].
In my domain, software, there's quite bitter culture wars about how useful LLM's are on a micro level [personally I find them very useful but certainly not a replacement for anyone yet] but there really haven't been noticeable improvements in software productivity on a macro level. All the commercial software I use day-to-day is still varying degrees of shit and there's been no noticeable change in velocity in open-source [the use of Copilot in the .net repo is quite amusing, https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762].
Even the internet, clearly the most transformative and life-altering invention of the last half-century has had questionable impacts on GDP and productivity growth.
It's true that individual tasks may become obsoleted like copy-writing and perhaps translation [although every translator friend of mine seems to be drowning in work right now] but jobs have always been augmented by technology to replace tasks and that's nothing new. The vast majority of white collar work is in my opinion either transformative-AI-complete or there because we want a human [for liability/regulation/comfort] even if a machine could already do it. If we reach the point where AI is not outcompeted by AI-human centaurs in doing meaningful white collar work then we should be much more concerned about not being paperclipped than whether Becky can still get a job in HR or marketing.
To return to the original point, my opinion is that AI kvetching is largely driven by people wanting a safe way to express the sentiment that life in the West is just generally going downhill. I was struck by a quote I heard from a friend the other day, that "nobody dreams of the 22nd century" like men in the 20th century used to dream of what the 21st might look like.
A blue triber might tell you it's because the billionaires are taking all the money and that climate change will end the world, a red triber might say it's because mass immigration and the death of Christian values is ending western society, and a grey triber might say it doesn't matter because AI will save/fix/kill us all. Nobody can agree on the causes, but pretty much nobody in the first world thinks life will look better in a century without some sort of eschatological transformation.
Anecdotally my extended family in the old country seem to be much more optimistic about the future and everyone seems pretty optimistic about AI despite being mostly pretty poor by first world standards. Each generation saw pretty drastic jumps in quality of life and things are looking upwards for the next generation too. You can see here that it's almost all poorer countries on an upwards trajectory excited for AI and richer countries going downhill that don't like it which is interesting to consider.
https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/public-opinion
Shirayuki
23d ago
Interesting, thanks.
The current evidence seems to align with my preconceptions that absolutely nothing has happened so far for humans, although I wasn't aware of that dog trial which does seem promising. Perhaps it's true that AI will lead to further innovation in the space, but personally I'd at least like to see some immortal mice before I start hoping to overcome the human condition.
I'm not entirely sure I believe this but the bear case isn't that hard to articulate.
We hit the top of the S-curve for LLM's and they merely become very useful tools instead of ushering in the singularity or obviating human labor. Frontier research starts stagnating as a result of having picked all the low-hanging fruit / the competency crisis / failure of higher ed / loss of state capacity / pick your favourite boogeymen and life in 2050 looks about as similar to 2025 as life in 2025 looks about as similar to 2000. This hypothetical world is probably worse for the median westerner compared to 2025 owing to some combination of immigration / climate / financialisation etc etc and the path of civilization doesn't look great without some sort of technological salvation but it's unlikely that any of these issues will be back-breaking in one generation.
Re preparation: it's interesting to me that a lot of people's reaction to millenarism is to make life choices that would be very dumb in any world where Nothing Happens. Assuming you're already reasonably happy with your current life, liquidating your job and savings seems to me to have low upside (how much happier is burning all your bridges to be a hedonist really going to make you?) and very high downside (I can see lots of worlds where having a decade or more of savings gets you through the worst of AI societal upheaval, and of course if Nothing Happens your life is knocked significantly off-track).
This is kind of where I'm at personally, I still save a large amount of my income even though I'm also not quite sure if life will still look the same in 25 or 50 years. In any world where it does look similar I'm set, I'm more prepared for any medium-level scenario where investments are still useful in getting through the transition period or retain relevance post-transformation, and in worlds where life becomes so good or so bad that property and index funds become worthless there really nothing I could have done anyways, liquidating everything to do drugs or travel doesn't seem like it has a great ROI when I'm already broadly content with my current life.
As a side note: why are you bullish on LEV? It's my understanding as a complete medical layman that we've pretty much made zero progress on life extension. We're much better at keeping the very young, mothers in childbirth, the unlucky (genetic diseases, trauma, infection, disease etc) and the ill-and-probably-should-be-dead elderly alive, but modern technology hasn't really meaningfully moved the quality-adjusted lifespan of the average healthy person afaik.
You write like you're an AI bull, but your actual case seems bearish (at least compared to the AI 2027 or the Situational Awareness crowd).
LLMs, even if they don't progress one tiny bit further, will be transformative for this role and there are millions of roles like this throughout the economy.
True, there's a lot of places where LLM's could be providing value that are yet unexplored, but changing the workflows of bank analysts is a far cry from the instantiation of a machine god within half a decade.
There's a real sense in which it's just getting better at everything
This is vibe based I suppose and I can mostly only speak for programming, but personally I think most improvements are coming from increased adoption and tooling since around GPT-4. Benchmarks and twitter hype keep going up but I'm not convinced that this reflects meaningful improvement in models for real-world tasks and use cases.
Have we made any progress on an open-source AMD CUDA equivalent, closed out even a statistically noticeable higher number of outstanding issues in Chromium or made Linux drivers competitive with Windows yet? Has GDP or any macro-economic measure moved at all in a way attributable to AI?
Lots of engineers report more productivity using AI tools and I absolutely do too, but better code completion, better information retrieval and making prototyping much easier doesn't make a replacement for an engineer or even represent the biggest improvement to software dev productivity we've ever seen. I attribute a lot more of my productivity to having access to a compiler, the internet and cloud compute rather than LLM assistance.
With zero advancement at all in capabilities or inference cost reductions what we have now, today, is going to change the world as much as the internet and smart phones. Unquestionably.
I think this is true too, in a decade. The white-collar job market will look quite different and the way we interact with software will be meaningfully different, but like the internet and the smartphone I think the world will still look recognizably similar. I don't think we'll be sipping cocktails on our own personal planet or all dead from unaligned super intelligence any time soon.
Shirayuki
1mo ago
Therein lies the real proof of ownership, really. I agree with you that it's an universal concept but I'm not sure one's body is the best concept to illustrate it.
If I want something from you and can't take it, then you own it. If I want something from you and can take it, then you don't own it.
This is physical reality and one's physical body isn't exempt from this. Indeed there are many people whether imprisoned, disabled or otherwise incapacitated that don't really own their own body in a meaningful sense.
Shirayuki
1mo ago
If I'm standing in front of you I'm perfectly capable of making your fingers start moving by having my brain send a signal down my arm. Anything that happens in between those two events is just an implementation detail.
That's a lot of emotive language in your post.
I don't have an opinion about this guy in particular (although clearly you do) but this is a horrific precedent to try and set, this argument could easily be applied to a citizen. There's nothing about the executive's argument that actually requires him to be an immigrant and the courts could equally "not have jurisdiction" over a citizen on foreign soil.
If there was the executive will to actually get this man back it's plainly obvious a phone call could be made to El Salvador to put this man on a flight back tomorrow. He's only there on the behest of the United States in the first place.
I struggle to understand the polemic against lists per se.
It sounds like you and Sam have more of an issue with people treating these sorts of lists as an end all and be all which I completely agree with but I'm also not quite sure who's actually treating them as some sort of objective truth. It's just fun to show others what you like and think valuable and conversely what others like and think is valuable.
It's very difficult to contribute to scientific inquiry without first having a grounding in the state of the art and in my opinion it would also be difficult to be "an independent thinker" without first having a grounding in the most fundamental existing works. That's pretty much just a "list" by another name.
Sidenote: I do agree that often these types of lists are too often Anglo and Androcentric, probably because a significant number of people in the West who still have serious interest in reading are the based right-winger type at this point.
I personally actually like the 4chan one that Sam hates so much the most, although it is missing some obvious candidates like the Classic Chinese Novels, Austen, TKAM and Eliot (I'm sure I'm showing my own biases here though).
I'd be interested in what else you feel these lists don't cover enough. Maybe it could even be... a list?
It clearly benefits the median American household, so either the median American household has a white collar woman or it's not just white collar woman whose wages are going up.
I'd be interested to see demographics of new households adjusted for population growth. Just anecdotally and based off urban demographics, younger men are more likely to stay at home (especially if lower-earning or unpartnered) whereas the median woman is more likely to have moved out to an urban metro and gotten some sort of decently paying white-collar job.
Hence household income went up but there's still plenty of disaffected men who can't / won't make it in the white-collar world and see their real wages and status falling like a rock. I do agree that it's more accurate to say "real incomes have been down for a generation for many American workers" because if you had white-collar exposure you likely did very well in absolute terms over the last generation.
The issue is that even if they're much better off absolutely and can afford a huge amount of food, technology and clothing most of the things people care about when feeling rich are relative and simply can't be accessible to everyone.
That means that the median American is living in a less desirable, in absolute terms, than the median American in 1980
Where this has become a problem is with domestic service industries like education, medicine, the trades, etc. but this may be partially an unavoidable effect of the productivity growth that drove down prices in other sectors.
This nails it on the head imo. Even for the median household that has done well in absolute terms they likely live in a smaller or less desirable location compared to their parents and their real wages, while they have gone up, have likely gone up less relative to the cost of domestic services and hence they feel poor because they've gone down the totem pole.
The hedonic treadmill cuts both ways, the things that people think were so great about the imagined past were not considered so great by those living in the actual past. Being at the bottom of the totem pole sucks no matter what year it is.
This is very true though. The issue is that nobody thinks they'll be the poor peasant who struggles to feed themselves and they all think they'd be in a higher class where property and domestic service was much cheaper in relative terms.
Shirayuki
2mo ago
My father grew up affording meat and getting new clothes twice yearly on his birthday and the new year, nowadays a meaty meal and an outfit would barely cost an hour's minimum wage in the west. The austerity of my father's childhood doesn't exist in the west and would be much rarer than a few generations ago even by global standards.
Really nearly everything is cheap if you have a Western income that isn't a zero-sum status competition (housing, education, luxury goods), artificially constrained by regulation (housing, healthcare, education, childcare) or dependent on high Western labor costs (housing, healthcare, childcare).
Technology could help with the last of these but I can't really see anything short of the singularity solving regulated artificial scarcity and anything short of the end of humanity solving status competitions.
Shirayuki
2mo ago
While I agree in that in general Americans are incredibly prosperous in absolute terms real median household income doesn't really paint the full picture here.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q (real male earnings)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252882800Q (real female earnings)
The growth in real median household income is, to my understanding, driven by more women entering the full-time workforce and the growth of highly-paid white collar service work (which the median woman is more suited to and which AI has a good chance to cannibalize soon) which doesn't benefit you one bit if you're a working class male who can't attract a white-collar partner.
Really, "prosperity" to most people means access to zero-sum things such as land in desirable areas, social status and the labor of other people. Access to those things has absolutely gone down for the median American worker in a world where wealth inequality keeps increasing and where other countries have become much wealthier relative to America, and where worst of all they keep getting blasted by social media about other people having it better than them 24/7.
Pretty much nobody cares that all but the very worst off Americans can afford a flat-screen tv, the total digital sum of human knowledge online and much more food than they could ever stomach even if that would have been unimaginable a few generations ago, all of that is just eaten up by the hedonic treadmill and they're still miserable because they're at the bottom of the totem pole and see no way up.
Shirayuki
3mo ago
I'm curious as to why Australia is an exception in the data.
I can't imagine the average IQ is uniquely low.
Is it just that Australia is actually able to prevent illegal immigration, visa overstaying notwithstanding, and selective pressure from the points system sufficiently counterbalances legal refugee intake?
To follow on from rockbier1218's excellent question and the responses below, does anyone have experience or advice with joining a church as an atheist (or more generally, how I might get more community in my life?)?
I'm looking to get more community in my life, and the two realistic ways I can see to get it is either through church or through some sort of interest group. I've largely ruled out the second since I don't really share interests with the people in my area and most of these groups end up pretty transient in my experience. I do have a friend that would likely introduce me to their church if I asked, I just want to think it through before broaching the question.
To be honest I think I would have a happier life if I had the capability for religious belief. The below thread was quite thought-provoking, but ultimately I don't think I can convince myself out of materialism and this really isn't the sort of thing that it's possible to force, even if I don't have any issues with the orthopraxy.
Is it heretical to be interested in religion only for the material benefits? I'm not sure, perhaps this is the cross that I have to bear.
It just means largely giving up other forms of entertaininment, like video games or TV, and perhaps more importantly, not being a workaholic
Am I overestimating the importance of books to the average Mottzian (and in self-cultivation in general)?
This it it IMO. While I would consider myself someone who enjoys reading (I try to read a book every two weeks or so) I certainly wouldn't consider giving up everything else I enjoy doing in favor of only reading books the best use of my time. There's many more worthwhile movies, video games, internet text etc that's worth engaging with that I'll never experience in my lifetime, to speak nothing of all the pleasurable non-consumption activities I could be doing, so it really seems ludicrous on the face of it to give everything else up to max out my books/year stat.
To go on a vaguely CW tangent, and I'm only bringing this up because your post brought this to mind and not because I'm trying to say you're doing this, is that I think there's a general tendency to elevate some types of consumption as being more virtuous than others, when really they're all just intellectually gratifying activities stratified by ease of access as a proxy for wealth and perceived intellect.
For example, I don't consider the consumption of books, international travel, and live artistic performances any more or less superior than the consumption of internet blogs, local outings and tv shows, yet it's the first class of activities that are considered higher status because they better signal intelligence, disposable income and free time.
While I have no problem with the many people that really do just enjoy the first class of pleasurable things in and of themselves, I have to admit that I find myself reflexively on guard when I meet someone who makes how many books they read, how many countries they've been to or how many live shows they've seen the center of their personality.
Increasingly I find that many people in the PMC class use their hobbies as a way of bludgeoning others for their lack of virtue and to improve their own status rather than because they actually inherently enjoy doing these things (although I suppose elites have been doing this since antiquity, so I can't really point at modern PMCs in particular).
But PMC strivers seem to turn out badly?
While I agree that the QoL floor for someone reasonably competent in the West is in absolute terms a good deal, it seems quite obvious to me that the winners of the PMC striver game live, on average, relatively superior lives to those who lose such games and that this disparity is likely to increase with time. Real wages have been flat for decades in most industries, pretty much only PMC's have actually seen notable real wage growth. The fact that most people have decent lives is because the absolute pie of American prosperity is so large, not because they're getting similar percentages that they got in the past.
- Working conditions are generally better for successful strivers: while the process of getting there is perhaps unenviable, there's many winners who end up in highly paid sinecures while the losers end up serving at the pleasure of their bosses in much worse conditions.
- Those numbers in your bank account, even if never used for consumption, represent a level of material security that most people don't have access to. The modal American is fucked if they get a cancer diagnosis and can't work for a year: this isn't as much of a problem for a PMC with enough money to live off savings while doing chemo, and enough human capital to find another job after having sat out of the labour market for some time.
- While I think luxury and conspicuous consumption is highly overrated, there's many life improvements resistant to the hedonic treadmill that are disproportionately available to the PMC class e.g positional access to real estate to improve the commute, outsourcing unpleasant labour, and access to elective healthcare procedures. While some of these will become more accessible as productivity improves, positionally desirable land and access to the time of other people is always going to be zero-sum and disproportionately available to those with more resources and status.
- Status, while ghoulish to chase for its own sake, is instrumentally important: access to higher quality people and ability to influence the world is arguably even more important in a society that is likely to become more and more productive.
Yes, it's possible to over-optimize for striving: the stereotypical divorced and obese multi-millionaire MD is a sad outcome that I'd highly prefer to avoid. At the same time, it's not like the average non-striver is particularly happy or surrounded by friends in this atomised society we've created for ourselves, and there's plenty of strivers that end up rich and still have happy lives and families outside of work.
Perhaps you're right and the juice will eventually be no longer worth the squeeze: competition gets so high that it's no longer worth it to compete, and the losers still get tolerable lives in the end. That doesn't change the fact that the winners will enjoy the spoils and the proles won't.
Shirayuki
5mo ago
Capitalism is the best alignment strategy known to mankind.
Pay people less while they are still in training, then once trained provide them (slightly less) pay and benefits as compared to what they could find elsewhere with their new skills and all your retention issues largely disappear.
If nursing homes are all on the brink of insolvency or something then perhaps we need a larger discussion on how nursing homes are funded, but that's hardly a good reason not to train people if those are skills you require.
Shirayuki
5mo ago
Semi-skilled blue collar work may be unglamorous but it pays a living wage. .... Remember, the US is quite literally the wealthiest society in human history.
This is true as of right now, but I'm not convinced that it will still be true in my child's generation. It seems likely some combination of AR/VR, robotics and immigration will eventually come for these jobs too, although definitely slower than white-collar ones. As I mentioned in my other comment though, it does seem unlikely that both blue-collar work can be economically unviable and that the west is insufficiently prosperous to keep everyone fed and housed at least, so I should probably be less neurotic on that point.
You can just not have your kids do the extreme striver rat race.
I think this is directionally true, but I think it's generally very difficult to suppress the instinct to want to give your children everything you can.
In some ways it was easier for my parents because they barely had anything and thus considered keeping me alive and out of prison a success, but now I have some level of optionality it's really hard to suppress the instinct that I should provide for my children as much as humanly possible. I suppose I did turn out wildly beyond my father's expectations despite everything so perhaps I should be less concerned about this.
Thanks for responding, you've given me some things to consider.
Shirayuki
5mo ago
I did read it, but didn't find it too interesting. Speculating about space colonisation post-singularity is so far out of society's current frame of reference it feels largely like navel gazing. I find myself more concerned with the more realistic short-term outcomes that might occur.
Shirayuki
5mo ago
Thank you: this was a beautiful post, I feel it has helped me a fair bit.
Materially, you are better off than the vast majority of people who have ever lived. Maybe the next generation will do worse, maybe not, but unless something really apocalyptic happens, they will still be materially well off by historical standards.
You're absolutely right, and I should make efforts to be more grateful for this. I'll confess I have some anxieties around being forced into poverty from being brought up by parents who grew up "third world poor" without adequate nutrition or modern healthcare and who passed down very similar anxieties. Rationally I do agree that outside of the really apocalyptic timelines I cannot control neither I nor my family are ever going to experience that sort of real material deprivation.
Even if you have to retrain into a more working class job, that's not the end of the world, or even your world.
This is true as well. I think it's easy to get caught up as thinking of your job title as your identity in modern society: internally I can't deny that a lot of my identity is centered around being a "tech guy", which is probably something I should work on. It does seem likely to me that either "I'm not competitive in the blue-collar labour market" or "my current capital is insufficient to support my family" are possible outcomes, but if I'm no longer fit to unclog a toilet likely society will be wildly productive enough to keep my children fed and housed at least.
Yesterday, I visited Saint Anthony's Monastery in Florence, Arizona
I looked up some pictures, and it really does look sublime. I'd like to visit some day as well, life permitting.
find other interesting and potentially beautiful things to do, even with a rather dull and low status day job
I think I would be happy if my children could find something they wanted to do, even if that does end up being joining a cult or a monastery. My father considered his job complete if I survived to eighteen having been fed three meals a day and without a criminal record, perhaps I need to take some lessons from him.
If you need an AWS capable employee for your business but can't afford to pay close to market wages for one you can hardly expect them to stay out of the goodness of their heart, and should probably re-evaluate your business model.
Shirayuki
5mo ago
Given that apparently the majority of these guys picked up the necessary skills quickly and managed to get better jobs elsewhere it's hardly charitable to call them all mediocre based on the very little you know about them.
To the OP, I think you've buried the lede in your post: somehow the majority of your workforce have all managed to find better jobs in a short span of time. Make your job roughly (or even slightly less) attractive than the "better" jobs they have and you'll have much less churn, people as a rule of thumb prefer stability and don't want to pay the costs of switching jobs if their alternatives are all about the same.
If you don't want to compete as an employer that's your prerogative, but it's no mystery why people would leave if apparently nearly every job is a better alternative to yours.
Extremely depends on what you consider high status, Ilona Staller was famously elected to the Italian parliament off the top of my head.
I mean, I agree in general that active and former prostitutes are generally lower status, but I don't think looking for high status outliers is a good way to show that, since the vast majority of people are not high status or influential by any useful definition of the phrase.
Honestly, former prostitutes have better odds of becoming influential just by virtue of being closer to centers of power. It is not like most nurses or childcare workers have any power or influence either even those are much more respectable professions.
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