> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!

As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.

> AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications."

Yes it is. YC has a company working on picking strawberries, even. Hardware takes longer than software, but if you think the robots aren't coming, you're not paying attention. The only question is how long will they take to reach the general public? There are test runs already in automotive factories and elsewhere, and yeah, they're slow and don't work very well, for now, but there's a lot of money going into making them better.

And then where will we be?

I'll take you up on that attempt to find a silver lining:

Previously privileged people having a hard time is maybe a good recipe for class solidarity, which is maybe something we could use in society. Maybe it will be good for us... collectively, if not individually.

Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.

EDIT: But also, I suspect I would be "fuck-you angry' at reading this comment if I had a family depending on me.

I think you're concluding too much and too little from this statistic at the same time. Just because current AI systems can't automate manual labor doesn't mean that's not coming with a future generation of robotics and ML models. And just because AI performs well on a benchmark doesn't mean it's "taking the jobs". You still need humans to decide what's important to work on and to do the high-level system design and engineering. You might need fewer human employees at one company to do the same amount of work, but this creates an enormous opportunity for teams to do more and for more people to start companies.

The lump of labor fallacy needs to go away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

> So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs

No, we are currently unable to do most tasks that require physical manipulation, independent of what anyone wants.

different side of the same coin: Of course smart companies are going to automate the most profitable tasks first, they seek profits! However, the benefit for society is also the greatest. As long as competition holds, the reduced costs in these tasks will represent the greatest savings for consumers. Tech has been creating disinflation for decades for consumers. AI may accelerate that (it hasn't so far).

Finally I will be free to pursue my hobby of cleaning toilets!

> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!

Instead most of us are "embracing" AI by training __it__ instead.

Embrace, extend, ... and being extinguished.

For a fictional take on this which arguably does well when considered to inform discourse see:

https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm

This is what happens “automation” is done to maximize profit (by minimizing expenses in the form of salary) instead of maximizing human happiness (in the form of automating mundane jobs that nobody gets satisfaction from doing). In short, the usual problem of taking GDP as a proxy of well-being.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that AI truly is able to automate away basically all software development. Any oversight currently performed by humans can itself be done by agents.

...don't you think the ability to create virtually unlimited amounts of software, at virtually no cost, is going to lead to major advances in robotics? I realize there's a lot of very hard problems involved in e.g. robotic hands (to take one example), but once software development is practically free, I'd expect a lot of seemingly-impossible problems to get resolved by the sheer quantity of what we can create and experiment with.

> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!

Yes like all the drivers and truckers who retained 10 years ago because self driving cars will take their jobs. Lucky all of them retrained in time!

I did this a few years ago and I’m so happy I did. It doesn’t pay as well to rehang doors, but I’m glad that I never talk to a computer or even look at a computer screen all day at my job

It's interesting, the digital/physical barrier seems like the last line of defense we have against metastasized indifferent agents. Once they start causing problems, how are we gonna feel about robotics? Clearly a future where all of the "thinking problems" are easily solved but we still have to pick up trash kinda sucks. I'm sure they'll figure that out for us though.

Elimination of these jobs is going to be good for everyone else. It's going to reduce the unearned returns to people born with high IQs and aptitude for coding or lawyering or whatever, and reduce upper middle class wages. That, in turn, will drive down prices. The reason housing is unaffordable isn't Jeff Bezos. It's because 20% or so of workers get paid very disproportionately to everyone else and they've been bidding up the price of housing. If Google could fire all their engineers housing would become much more affordable for everyone else in the Bay Area (like it was decades ago before engineering salaries got so high). It'll be more like Iowa or South Dakota is today.

Nope! :) Once mobile manipulator robots become good enough (and safe enough), AI will also take "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms" jobs as well. Large number of those bad jobs can be done with existing grippers or a simplified robot hand (without needing much more complicated human-like hand).

You're just irrational and not thinking. All those jobs are also something people want to and have automated. Street sweeping with a brigade of men vs one guy with those orange little street sweeping vehicles. Automated car wash. Self checkout in stores. Obviously whoever pays a salary currently, would rather not pay that but get the thing done faster and cheaper. There is nothing mustache twirling about this. Works the same way on every level. Do you 3x more when you get something done on your house or bathroom, so it's done by 3x as many workers who are forbidden from using power tools? Why not? Don't you want to help those guys have a job? Why are you so evil?

i think this is mixing correlation and causation

"They" figured out that it's a lot easier to hillclimb AI on verifiable digital tasks, and it just so happened that white collar jobs tend to pay more

Ai will decimate customer support jobs but those are not considered highly paid

If robotics continue to progress, we'll have all the robots to do our dishes and clean our bathrooms as you wish

The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.

If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".

If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.

> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!

Or maybe, idk, we do something about this?

I'm already a part of a generation that's the first in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents.

They don't "want" anything. They preach to enterprises and intentionally create a fear of missing out to get more paying business customers on board of this hype train. This is what is happening.

This is also the reason absolutely no attention is spent on evolving B2C products.

What is being exploited is the overt attention businesses pay to their own cost metrics, to the point where broader strategy is getting thrown under the bus in favor of efficiency. I believe this is an illusion, and for many companies that jump on board, sober learnings are right around the corner.

"They'd pay you nothing if they could."

I'll say this: I'm teaching myself every skill I can think of. I'm already pretty decent at finish carpentry, structural carpentry, electrical, mechanical work, HVAC, auto repair, auto body, welding and a few other less lucrative things.

I was thinking briefly I might want to go to law school, but who knows how much longer that's going to be a thing.

there are also declining birthrates globally. People are living longer and fewer young people are being born to be able to replace them as well as to do all the work in supporting such a population. Which means jobs like janitorial and food service are going to become much more in demand anyway.

> Reason to be optimistic, amirite?

Reason to unionize, more like.

A decade ago, you would find that tech people on HN and elsewhere considered themselves an exception to the forces that were declining real wages and living conditions. People would unironically say "you should've got a CS degree". Even if it were true, it's pretty useless advice because not everyone can do that. And even if they did, the unemployment rate for CS people would be even more extreme than it is right now.

What tech people are discovering now (some of them at least) is that they have more in common with the trash man than they do with Jeff Bezos. Many, particularly on HN, viewed themselves as temporary embarrassed billionaires (to borrow the arguably misattributed Steinbeck quote). So they sought to preserve a system that they ultimately thought would benefit them and they were only one exit away from that reality.

This is a rude shock for many. For some, it'll be the beginning of class consciousness. Hopefully society doesn't completely unravel before the pendulum swings the other way.

Here is another view: maybe AI will automate jobs that are overpaid anyway and this might raise the baseline for the jobs that make everyday life actually possible. Of course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable path

> AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications."

All those are physical things and physical LLMs are right around the corner. It’s coming for those jobs too within the next year or two I would imagine. Especially the ones you mentioned seem very easy for a robot to do. There are some physical tasks that will take much longer like being an electrician or a plumber or a roofer. There’s too much precision and intricacy involved in those but cleaning out a restroom and resupplying it that’s easy as hell. A robot like Figure 3 could probably do those autonomously today somewhat badly.

AI is coming for jobs involving programming and math (which tend to pay higher) because it's possible to generate infinite training data for those fields via using a compiler/theorem prover to check correctness. They're not coming for high-paying jobs like investment banking and architecture because you can't generate infinite synthetic training data for those.

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