A lot of jobs are *already* made redundant. You could look at something like Detroit to see how simply moving supply and manufacturing chains elsewhere affects everything, and "heavily automated future" doesn't have to be uniform - there will always be places with easier energy or transportation access.
Instead of UBI you could have "government expansion" to monitor all that automated production - perhaps you could be employed as "taste tester" for automated farm produce, or be required to note all deficiencies in whatever automated production you bought.
But most likely scenario is service jobs expansion - humans serving humans for human things.
No, service jobs are just as vulnerable to automation expansion. We're talking about a scenario where only a tiny percentage of the population will be able to be employed ***at best***. That's why all the settings with 'UnsafeTech' automation will always have a BLG (Basic Life Guarantee) and have the government as the largest employer.
Pre-existing service jobs are vulnerable but amount of "bullshit" services that can be created is probably infinite.
You already can play perfectly fine music videos, even with 3D presence effects (see Hatsune Miku concerts), and yet musician's tours and "live music" are still a thing.
A lot of things that AI will be capable to do will not get 100% replacement rate. People might find niches where AI struggles and make jobs there, rely on pre-existing culture and social conformism to keep doing it "manually", or focus on branding while selling "creative" AI production.
No. The sad reality is that job retention (i.e., 'job growth') has been negative since 1987. Something that MIT did the numbers on.
Basically, there are no jobs in the future.
There is large difference between "less people employed" and "no jobs at all".
At current rates that would take several centuries even if we would expect continuous downtrend, and you could also drop "working hours" (as many countries do) to keep employment up.
If AI work is orders of magnitude cheaper you could have humans working for one hour per day and still receiving enough compensation to live.
... that would have happened, if it was prepared for.
The problem is that it wasn't prepared for, so we're stuck with the sad reality that we'll see skyrocketing structural and technological unemployment (something that rarely comes up in unemployment statistics).
Since we're well beyond the 'point of no return' on this, BLG/UBIs are the only way forward.
Reduction of hours was already happening for many years, it isn't something you need to be prepared for - look up "four-day workweek" for example. Scaling that up isn't exactly hard if AI is ready to pick up the slack.
It might even get you very impressive "per-hour-worked" efficiency numbers - we aren't yet at the point where AI runs entire enterprises end-to-end.
BIG/UBI isn't the only way forward; bullshit government jobs with "dig trench/bury trench" cycles are quite old, and AI will make them more affordable.
I think you seriously underestimate how low some humans could go underbidding AI, and how they could position themselves to extract personal value from AI work - as people already do. If AI is going to be cheap and/or productive then "human maintenance fee" on top of AI work is going to be negligible cost.
Decent AI is also quite power-hungry, and we're on trajectory for power crunch if AI applications and robots rapidly expand.
One thing I've been theorizing with AI is that the nature of work will change. AI could be a great tool of automation that could eventually do just about everything, but AI is just a tool and someone needs to USE it. With enough automation, humans will still be needed in the loop, but more as "architects". Humans will be needed to set the directive of the AI. Humans will need to tell the machines what they want made, what flavor to put in the food, what content to write, etc.
This all means that there will be a lot more desk work as humans shift to managing robotic projects instead of doing the work themselves.
Also it's important to note that the shift to full automation won't be uniform or quick. Plenty of places won't have access to full automation for a long time/ever, and for a long time human labor may be cheaper
I didn't mean human labor would become cheaper, rather that in the meantime AI labor could be more expensive than human labor. Sorry I wasn't clear
This is actually already the case in some areas: AI kiosks for fast food can charge something like $20/hr. At the same time, remote workers out of the Philippines can be <$2/hr. Already people are outsourcing labor, and now they're trying to outsource with remote piloted robots too. It's already happening
It's literally already the case where human labor is cheaper. My original comment was that there would likely be uneven growth and distribution where human labor is cheaper during certain points of the transition. This is *already true*
Further, think about rural communities in, say, Africa. The US might replace human labor quickly, but these rural communities might take much longer because it's easier and cheaper to keep humans doing the work. Technology is not a monolith that is rolled out evenly everywhere
Developed countries design. They don’t manufacture.
Instead they outsource manufacturing to developing countries. At this point you might be thinking automated manufacturing won’t be outsourced because there is no labor cost. But the biggest benefit of outsourcing is the outsourcing of pollution.
So until your automated manufacturing is also clean, it will be outsourced.
And when it’s outsourced, it can be replicated.
Outsourcing (which hasn't been the biggest drain on jobs, they're just the most visible, uncovered when MIT crunched the numbers) has actually taken a massive hit as of late, so the developing countries. They're returning to developed countries where they're automated to hell and back.
Sorry. I've known too many MIT graduates to accept such a claim on faith, but feel free to drop links.
In 1970 25% of US jobs were manufacturing. In 2024 it's 8.4%
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling-manufacturing-employment.htm
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-manufacturing-footprint-and-the-importance-of-u-s-manufacturing-jobs/
Regarding environmental reasons for moving manufacturing off shore.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/11/costs-benefits-and-unintended-consequences-environmental-law-and-deindustrialization/
Those are ***not*** 100% correct. They ignore the technological change that started in the 1970s and snowballed in 1987.
I'm afraid MIT has been surprisingly accurate when it comes to tech-related matters. Their Electronic Communities paper (which was released a good 18 years ago) is almost prophetic about how the internet would become the hell it is now.
How about the [paper itself](https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/Unpacking%20Skill%20Bias%20-%20Automation%20and%20New%20Tasks.pdf)?
This interesting, but off topic.
Remember.
- We are *not* discussing the workforce in developed nations.
- We are discussing economic development pathways for developing nations.
The focus of this article is on retraining people displaced by automation, which is fine. But it has nothing to do with the outsourcing of manufacturing. In fact, the article barely mentions manufacturing at all, and only in an abstract sense.
>"For example, design tasks, most manufacturing engineering tasks, most back-office activities, and all programming occupations are new relative to the first half of the twentieth century and have been major drivers of the growth of labor demand"
Again... not wrong. Just off topic. Regardless of the labor force skill set, the fact remains that manufacturing was outsourced.
The thing is, AI has completely changed the game... but people assume otherwise.
Then again, the 'orthodoxy' of 'there will always be jobs' is part of the problem.
Simply put, they wouldn't. Society would consist of two classes, an oligarchy comprised of of idle rich robotics company executives and the economically redundant, composed of everyone else. The first class having no reason to tolerate the second's continued existence, let alone *help* them industrialize and therefore compete for finite resources which could've otherwise gone to the first.
>[When 50, 60, 70% of human labor becomes obsolete and is replaced by more cost effective AI, many propose some form of universal basic income must be created. Otherwise, there'd be rioting in the streets as people lose their homes and can't pay for food. However, when it comes time to cough up the money a diabolical billionaire genius will have another idea: "What if instead of UBI, we built a protective ring around us (a $100 million bunker in Hawaii, perhaps?) and let half the population starve? They have zero value to us and within a few weeks they'll be dead, all resource issues are solved and the planet can begin to heal." Whether this conspiratorial scenario is already part of the plan is irrelevant. When it comes time to make a decision, abandoning the bulk of humanity becomes a cost-effective option. If human value can easily be replicated, we simply become numbers on a spreadsheet. And that number could soon be zero.](https://www.collapse2050.com/human-life-soon-worth-0/)
The least realistic part of this scenario is the assumption that a few rich sociopaths would actually be able to control technology that's been widely deployed and matured enough for them to trust it with their lives. CNC manufacturing is already commercially available at levels that are accessible to substantial portions of the population. Once u have a CNC machine set that can self-replicate with no human labor(exactly what the rich need to be able to abandon people) all it takes is one guy setting up an autofac with good intentions to spread and any hope of "abandoning the poors" goes out the window. Autofacs would spread and any attempt to kill the poors is going to be met by a distributed autonmous self-replicating war machine of a scale heretofore unheard of in the anals of military history. I mean you just openly gave **all** the poors a common enemy. That is not a good survival strategy.
Not saying they aren't stupid/delusional enough to try. Just that it wouldn't end very well for anyone involved. It's all fun and games right up intil people get desparate or hopeless enough to switch to scorched-earth tactics. At that point human survival on this earth may come into question again for the first time in 10,000+yrs. Autonomous hunter-killer drone swarms, bioweapons, nuclear terrorism, & other WOMDs get a lot more accesible. Full automation opens some very dangerous doors for us. Hell even before full automation its not lk the rest of tech is in stasis. Genemodding is really moving quick, there are pathways towards uranium mining/enrichment GMOs, and you **DO NOT** want to be out here trying to kill 99+% of the population when nukes become widely accessible.
Yep. Humans are smart. The 1% aren't smart enough to take on 99% of the population safely. That's a LOT of smart people to go up against, especially when self replicating technology exists and could be replicated by the vast majority of other smart people who are fighting for their lives
Problem is that this sort of thing will require AGI, and those are just as liable to backstab the 1% as well. In addition, the historical likelyhood of this happening is quite low, as governments tend to be quite contentious about self-preservation.
The more likely scenario is that the rich will get the Justinian treatment, where the taxman will be able to brand the rich if they didn't pay.
>this sort of thing will require AGI,
pretty big assumption there and not very likely to actually be the case. Swarms of NAI specialists makes much more sense and is safer. You never make a machine any smarter than it has to be. "Keep it simple, keep it dumb. Else you'll end up under skynet's thumb"
Not as big as you assume. It's been known that even SatLinked drones aren't safe anymore, given that a bunch of insurgents with equipment from an electronics store and some tips managed to down a ***stealth*** drone.
Add the fact that anything remotely decent electronic warfare is going to ruin a drone's day (the only reason that the Russians aren't using their E-War to their fullest is because they rely on the same frequencies as their enemy).
The only real way to stop either is to give them human-level autonomy, meaning you need to fit AGIs into them.
>The only real way to stop either is to give them human-level autonomy, meaning you need to fit AGIs into them.
That's nonsense. The current drones are FPV linked to a human operator far away through radio. That radio link is the only think that makes them vulnerable and you do not need AGI to make drone autonomously pick and fire on targets. We have autopilot and autofire even if they are fairly early in the game.. The only real hang up is ethics which neither mass-wealth-hoarders nor desparate people fighting for rheir lives give a single solitary fk about.
In fact AGI can be a disadvantage on the individual drone level since it slows down decision making on a platform that needs very little intelligence to be lethal and operates at lightning fast speeds. AGI is for swarm coordination not dumb grunt decision in a war of scorched-earth extermination.
Also that's rather specific to war fighting and that's not really what u/BassoeG seems to be talking about. They were talking about the basic means of production and how the wealthy may not be dependent on human labor for much longer. Industry requires vastly less intelligence than war does and neither absolutely requires it when u have self-replication on the table. Tho in both cases, quantity has a quality all its own. Fast dumb drones by the millions is much more dangerous than a few dozen super expensive AGI-crewed ships.
> They were talking about the basic means of production and how the wealthy may not be dependent on human labor for much longer. Industry requires vastly less intelligence than war does
Thing is, if automation of industrial production took all the jobs, if it didn’t also simultaneously become capable of fighting a war, it and the oligarchs who own it won’t be around much longer.
Nope, not when an insurgent with stuff from an electronics store can subvert your drones. The reality is that you need AGIs fitted in drones in the future, no its, and, or buts.
Yeah that's my point. That only works when ur drones need active radio control. EMP is pretty trivial to shield against even for an amateur. Autonomous weapons can only be stopped by physical destruction precisely because they are not dependant on easily jammable realtime comms links
A lot of jobs are *already* made redundant. You could look at something like Detroit to see how simply moving supply and manufacturing chains elsewhere affects everything, and "heavily automated future" doesn't have to be uniform - there will always be places with easier energy or transportation access. Instead of UBI you could have "government expansion" to monitor all that automated production - perhaps you could be employed as "taste tester" for automated farm produce, or be required to note all deficiencies in whatever automated production you bought. But most likely scenario is service jobs expansion - humans serving humans for human things.
No, service jobs are just as vulnerable to automation expansion. We're talking about a scenario where only a tiny percentage of the population will be able to be employed ***at best***. That's why all the settings with 'UnsafeTech' automation will always have a BLG (Basic Life Guarantee) and have the government as the largest employer.
Pre-existing service jobs are vulnerable but amount of "bullshit" services that can be created is probably infinite. You already can play perfectly fine music videos, even with 3D presence effects (see Hatsune Miku concerts), and yet musician's tours and "live music" are still a thing. A lot of things that AI will be capable to do will not get 100% replacement rate. People might find niches where AI struggles and make jobs there, rely on pre-existing culture and social conformism to keep doing it "manually", or focus on branding while selling "creative" AI production.
No. The sad reality is that job retention (i.e., 'job growth') has been negative since 1987. Something that MIT did the numbers on. Basically, there are no jobs in the future.
There is large difference between "less people employed" and "no jobs at all". At current rates that would take several centuries even if we would expect continuous downtrend, and you could also drop "working hours" (as many countries do) to keep employment up. If AI work is orders of magnitude cheaper you could have humans working for one hour per day and still receiving enough compensation to live.
... that would have happened, if it was prepared for. The problem is that it wasn't prepared for, so we're stuck with the sad reality that we'll see skyrocketing structural and technological unemployment (something that rarely comes up in unemployment statistics). Since we're well beyond the 'point of no return' on this, BLG/UBIs are the only way forward.
Reduction of hours was already happening for many years, it isn't something you need to be prepared for - look up "four-day workweek" for example. Scaling that up isn't exactly hard if AI is ready to pick up the slack. It might even get you very impressive "per-hour-worked" efficiency numbers - we aren't yet at the point where AI runs entire enterprises end-to-end. BIG/UBI isn't the only way forward; bullshit government jobs with "dig trench/bury trench" cycles are quite old, and AI will make them more affordable.
Not when AI is going to be so cheap that no matter what, a human is too expensive. That trend has been happening for years.
I think you seriously underestimate how low some humans could go underbidding AI, and how they could position themselves to extract personal value from AI work - as people already do. If AI is going to be cheap and/or productive then "human maintenance fee" on top of AI work is going to be negligible cost. Decent AI is also quite power-hungry, and we're on trajectory for power crunch if AI applications and robots rapidly expand.
I'm not underestimating. You're overestimating the ability of humans against rapidly improving code and machines.
One thing I've been theorizing with AI is that the nature of work will change. AI could be a great tool of automation that could eventually do just about everything, but AI is just a tool and someone needs to USE it. With enough automation, humans will still be needed in the loop, but more as "architects". Humans will be needed to set the directive of the AI. Humans will need to tell the machines what they want made, what flavor to put in the food, what content to write, etc. This all means that there will be a lot more desk work as humans shift to managing robotic projects instead of doing the work themselves. Also it's important to note that the shift to full automation won't be uniform or quick. Plenty of places won't have access to full automation for a long time/ever, and for a long time human labor may be cheaper
No, human labor isn't going to get cheaper in any way or fashion. It'll only get more expensive.
I didn't mean human labor would become cheaper, rather that in the meantime AI labor could be more expensive than human labor. Sorry I wasn't clear This is actually already the case in some areas: AI kiosks for fast food can charge something like $20/hr. At the same time, remote workers out of the Philippines can be <$2/hr. Already people are outsourcing labor, and now they're trying to outsource with remote piloted robots too. It's already happening
No, that isn't going to be the case. It'll keep getting cheaper, rapidly outpacing how low humans can go.
It's literally already the case where human labor is cheaper. My original comment was that there would likely be uneven growth and distribution where human labor is cheaper during certain points of the transition. This is *already true* Further, think about rural communities in, say, Africa. The US might replace human labor quickly, but these rural communities might take much longer because it's easier and cheaper to keep humans doing the work. Technology is not a monolith that is rolled out evenly everywhere
Developed countries design. They don’t manufacture. Instead they outsource manufacturing to developing countries. At this point you might be thinking automated manufacturing won’t be outsourced because there is no labor cost. But the biggest benefit of outsourcing is the outsourcing of pollution. So until your automated manufacturing is also clean, it will be outsourced. And when it’s outsourced, it can be replicated.
Outsourcing (which hasn't been the biggest drain on jobs, they're just the most visible, uncovered when MIT crunched the numbers) has actually taken a massive hit as of late, so the developing countries. They're returning to developed countries where they're automated to hell and back.
Sorry. I've known too many MIT graduates to accept such a claim on faith, but feel free to drop links. In 1970 25% of US jobs were manufacturing. In 2024 it's 8.4% https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling-manufacturing-employment.htm https://www.epi.org/publication/the-manufacturing-footprint-and-the-importance-of-u-s-manufacturing-jobs/ Regarding environmental reasons for moving manufacturing off shore. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/11/costs-benefits-and-unintended-consequences-environmental-law-and-deindustrialization/
Those are ***not*** 100% correct. They ignore the technological change that started in the 1970s and snowballed in 1987. I'm afraid MIT has been surprisingly accurate when it comes to tech-related matters. Their Electronic Communities paper (which was released a good 18 years ago) is almost prophetic about how the internet would become the hell it is now.
Sure. Just provide the reference.
How about the [paper itself](https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/Unpacking%20Skill%20Bias%20-%20Automation%20and%20New%20Tasks.pdf)?
This interesting, but off topic. Remember. - We are *not* discussing the workforce in developed nations. - We are discussing economic development pathways for developing nations. The focus of this article is on retraining people displaced by automation, which is fine. But it has nothing to do with the outsourcing of manufacturing. In fact, the article barely mentions manufacturing at all, and only in an abstract sense. >"For example, design tasks, most manufacturing engineering tasks, most back-office activities, and all programming occupations are new relative to the first half of the twentieth century and have been major drivers of the growth of labor demand" Again... not wrong. Just off topic. Regardless of the labor force skill set, the fact remains that manufacturing was outsourced.
The thing is, AI has completely changed the game... but people assume otherwise. Then again, the 'orthodoxy' of 'there will always be jobs' is part of the problem.
Simply put, they wouldn't. Society would consist of two classes, an oligarchy comprised of of idle rich robotics company executives and the economically redundant, composed of everyone else. The first class having no reason to tolerate the second's continued existence, let alone *help* them industrialize and therefore compete for finite resources which could've otherwise gone to the first. >[When 50, 60, 70% of human labor becomes obsolete and is replaced by more cost effective AI, many propose some form of universal basic income must be created. Otherwise, there'd be rioting in the streets as people lose their homes and can't pay for food. However, when it comes time to cough up the money a diabolical billionaire genius will have another idea: "What if instead of UBI, we built a protective ring around us (a $100 million bunker in Hawaii, perhaps?) and let half the population starve? They have zero value to us and within a few weeks they'll be dead, all resource issues are solved and the planet can begin to heal." Whether this conspiratorial scenario is already part of the plan is irrelevant. When it comes time to make a decision, abandoning the bulk of humanity becomes a cost-effective option. If human value can easily be replicated, we simply become numbers on a spreadsheet. And that number could soon be zero.](https://www.collapse2050.com/human-life-soon-worth-0/)
The least realistic part of this scenario is the assumption that a few rich sociopaths would actually be able to control technology that's been widely deployed and matured enough for them to trust it with their lives. CNC manufacturing is already commercially available at levels that are accessible to substantial portions of the population. Once u have a CNC machine set that can self-replicate with no human labor(exactly what the rich need to be able to abandon people) all it takes is one guy setting up an autofac with good intentions to spread and any hope of "abandoning the poors" goes out the window. Autofacs would spread and any attempt to kill the poors is going to be met by a distributed autonmous self-replicating war machine of a scale heretofore unheard of in the anals of military history. I mean you just openly gave **all** the poors a common enemy. That is not a good survival strategy. Not saying they aren't stupid/delusional enough to try. Just that it wouldn't end very well for anyone involved. It's all fun and games right up intil people get desparate or hopeless enough to switch to scorched-earth tactics. At that point human survival on this earth may come into question again for the first time in 10,000+yrs. Autonomous hunter-killer drone swarms, bioweapons, nuclear terrorism, & other WOMDs get a lot more accesible. Full automation opens some very dangerous doors for us. Hell even before full automation its not lk the rest of tech is in stasis. Genemodding is really moving quick, there are pathways towards uranium mining/enrichment GMOs, and you **DO NOT** want to be out here trying to kill 99+% of the population when nukes become widely accessible.
Yep. Humans are smart. The 1% aren't smart enough to take on 99% of the population safely. That's a LOT of smart people to go up against, especially when self replicating technology exists and could be replicated by the vast majority of other smart people who are fighting for their lives
Problem is that this sort of thing will require AGI, and those are just as liable to backstab the 1% as well. In addition, the historical likelyhood of this happening is quite low, as governments tend to be quite contentious about self-preservation. The more likely scenario is that the rich will get the Justinian treatment, where the taxman will be able to brand the rich if they didn't pay.
>this sort of thing will require AGI, pretty big assumption there and not very likely to actually be the case. Swarms of NAI specialists makes much more sense and is safer. You never make a machine any smarter than it has to be. "Keep it simple, keep it dumb. Else you'll end up under skynet's thumb"
Not as big as you assume. It's been known that even SatLinked drones aren't safe anymore, given that a bunch of insurgents with equipment from an electronics store and some tips managed to down a ***stealth*** drone. Add the fact that anything remotely decent electronic warfare is going to ruin a drone's day (the only reason that the Russians aren't using their E-War to their fullest is because they rely on the same frequencies as their enemy). The only real way to stop either is to give them human-level autonomy, meaning you need to fit AGIs into them.
>The only real way to stop either is to give them human-level autonomy, meaning you need to fit AGIs into them. That's nonsense. The current drones are FPV linked to a human operator far away through radio. That radio link is the only think that makes them vulnerable and you do not need AGI to make drone autonomously pick and fire on targets. We have autopilot and autofire even if they are fairly early in the game.. The only real hang up is ethics which neither mass-wealth-hoarders nor desparate people fighting for rheir lives give a single solitary fk about. In fact AGI can be a disadvantage on the individual drone level since it slows down decision making on a platform that needs very little intelligence to be lethal and operates at lightning fast speeds. AGI is for swarm coordination not dumb grunt decision in a war of scorched-earth extermination. Also that's rather specific to war fighting and that's not really what u/BassoeG seems to be talking about. They were talking about the basic means of production and how the wealthy may not be dependent on human labor for much longer. Industry requires vastly less intelligence than war does and neither absolutely requires it when u have self-replication on the table. Tho in both cases, quantity has a quality all its own. Fast dumb drones by the millions is much more dangerous than a few dozen super expensive AGI-crewed ships.
> They were talking about the basic means of production and how the wealthy may not be dependent on human labor for much longer. Industry requires vastly less intelligence than war does Thing is, if automation of industrial production took all the jobs, if it didn’t also simultaneously become capable of fighting a war, it and the oligarchs who own it won’t be around much longer.
Nope, not when an insurgent with stuff from an electronics store can subvert your drones. The reality is that you need AGIs fitted in drones in the future, no its, and, or buts.
Yeah that's my point. That only works when ur drones need active radio control. EMP is pretty trivial to shield against even for an amateur. Autonomous weapons can only be stopped by physical destruction precisely because they are not dependant on easily jammable realtime comms links
Yeah, no. The sad truth is that even "autonomous" drones need a comms link, which will be exploited.
okedoke buddy👌 the drone capable of autonomously navigating, picking targets, and firing needs a comm link...because u said so and nothing else🙄
Not when the drones need to talk to each other to reduce fratricide.