> But the fact that people are shifting their spending toward going out to eat more suggests that the burden is not as crushing as the WSJ’s viral chart suggests.
Not necessarily going out to eat more but likely paying more when going out. You didn’t assume that the slight rise in the percentage of income spent on groceries was people buying more groceries.
It also might describe more of a bimodal distribution. The upper-middle-class and above eating out both more, and at higher price-points, and others being less able to do so. Though anecdotally, it seems like everyone is eating out, or door-dashing more.
The next step would be to allow tribal groups to buy other land and take their tribal privileges with them. They could come in, develop an area using privilege to overcome NIMBY opposition and then sell out to go develope somewhere else!
If AI reduces the productivity gap between low skilled and high skilled workers, wouldn't this increase the outsourcing of white collar professional jobs to countries like India and Vietnam?
I actually think it'll be the opposite. See my other comment. Problem is, that's only true for as long as you need the low paid workers to review the AI output. The quality gap just isn't that big. Give it a few years and companies will be comfortable trusting AI to make cost-bounded business decisions, just like they currently trust low paid humans. There will be mistakes but the cost of them will be lower than the savings from automation. Then you will only need a handful of more highly skilled workers to handle the out-of-distribution cases.
You also need low-skilled data generation or augmentation to make it all work. Increasingly this can be automated for the most common cases as well, but as we continue to push the frontier of use cases for AI further, I suspect this will be a persistant demand for a long while.
"If AI reduces the productivity gap between low skilled and high skilled workers, wouldn't this increase the outsourcing of white collar professional jobs to countries like India and Vietnam?"
That's the whole point of the oligarchs funding AI; don't you know?
Interesting point. I will add that this too would be great for reducing global inequality, and thus a wonderful thing from a humanity-wide utilitarian rather than nationalistic perspective.
You are obviously in the upper 20%, so you are find with "reducing global inequality." A middle-income worker in the US won't be so sanguine about a transfer of a large portion of his employability and wealth to Vietnam.
Not only am I financially secure, but also retired. Thus I am indeed presenting a disinterested position.
I agree that workers (actually all groups) will now and always have pushed for privilege and rent seeking. This is pretty well documented. The way the free market works is that workers do not have property rights in "employability" and the definition of wealth does not extend to future potential income they have not yet produced or earned.
From a logical, and empirical and a moral perspective, I would argue that both Americans and Vietnamese would be better off with free trade and open competition.
I read recently where one EU country, Denmark I think, is planning to give Ukraine all of Denmark's artillery. That seems like a sensible move to me, as artillery sitting in Denmark is pretty useless. Why not then send their pieces to the front now where it will do some lasting good? I presume that Denmark will then purchase new and improved artillery to replace its stocks. Denmark will have the luxury of being able to shop around for the best value and to wait for manufacturing to ramp up to meet this demand (after all, who is going to threaten Denmark's actual landmass, other than Russia, which is currently mired in eastern Ukraine). Ukraine does not have this luxury. If the Russians are soundly defeated this year, it will take them decades to be in a position to threaten Europe again. During that long lull, Europe can easily replace its stocks of weapons and munitions. Maybe France and Germany should consider doing the same, particularly France, which has a large mass of friendly neighbors between it and Russia.
For sure, France wouldn't want to send every piece of military equipment it owns to Ukraine. But if a good portion of what it owns is solely for defense of the homeland, what good is it sitting in a warehouse when the only belligerent country that could ever threaten France (or Italy, the UK, Spain, etc.) on the ground is Russia and Russia alone? Take Russia down a notch now while the notching is good.
As for Ukrainian competency, that is certainly a concern.
Also, the fact that France actually uses its weaponry, and has one of the larger military-industrial complexes because of it, including for export, is all the more reason it can find both stockpiles and spare, or increased capacity to supply ukraine.
A near future sci-fi novel that has high tech companies owned by American indigenous tribes with cool ass names and new major cities on Tribal land sounds like such a neat world to explore
We do already have a lot of cool indigenous names in the United States - Massachusetts, Mississippi, Illinois, Seattle, Chicago, Omaha, Dakota, Alabama, Tallahassee, Kennebunkport, etc. We just got so used to them that we forgot they were indigenous!
This is part of the interesting parallelism between Australia and the United States as now-independent former British colonies: both involved extensive white contact with (and displacement of and violent conflict with) indigenous peoples in such a way that a lot of modern settlements bear obviously indigenous names.
(I guess there's also parallelism with Canada but that's a lot less geographically and historically differentiated from the U.S.)
As a young person growing up In Maryland where every single stream reflects an Indian name (Potomac, Susquehanna, Anacostia, etc.), I used to have this fantasy that the first settlers arrived, grabbed a Native American by the throat, asked him the name of the stream, and then hit him over the head with war club, having no further use for him. 🥺☹️🥺😢☹️
I once asked a question in an online forum of whether Reservations are a way around sclerotic regulations which choke off American productivity. A bunch of libertarians called me a communist for asking (still not sure why). I ask again here.
Don’t Native American reservations have various regulatory exemptions and work arounds that would make them excellent alternatives to foreign charter cities?
Admittedly I am ignorant on the details. Anyone have thoughts?
Until recently, if the reservations became populated with non-indigenous peoples the (correct) fear would be that the reservations be annexed to become a non-reservation territory. This seems ingrained in the very-regulated, communical, NIMBY-like rules in place for land-usage on many tribal lands.
I think it would be extremely dystopian, honestly. They'd be held by extended family groups that don't really have to follow any laws they don't feel like restraining themselves with. I know multiple tribes in Washington have been accused of stripping people of Tribal citizenship as retribution for personal disputes or to force them to vacate their homes. (to be either rented for profit or given to more favored families), which doesn't make me optimistic that we wouldn't see similar results from business disputes.
Thanks. To work, the Tribes would need to thread the needle between ensuring freedom for capital from US regulations and freedom from exploitation by the tribe itself. I wonder if it is possible. Your statement makes me suspect something is fundamentally missing.
With AI when I read “low-skill and high-skill” I just keep hearing “low-wage and high-wage”. I’m going to need a lot of convincing that AI, while not replacing people, is going to devalue them. Basic turning whole other sectors into McDonalds. People are necessary but largely disposable and thus low-wage.
Also, as someone in Residential Construction, the electrical panel example showed astonishing ignorance on the authors part, not really helping the case being made. Home Depot DIY culture has already made enough problems for professionals that have to come in and fix DIY disasters.
> But this chart does two things for us. First of all, the y-axis starts at zero, so you can see how modest the recent increase is.
Great post as always, but the graph you show here does not start at zero, but at 0.1. If it starts at zero, I think your point will become even more visually clear.
Canada's indigenous population is 4.5% of the population, compared to about 1.5% for the US. The difference in political power is even more pronounced, and that's led to greater FN self-governance and in some cases, greater business development maturity.
So, I do extremely complex customer and field-tech support work.
I am somewhat worried that companies are going to think they can get away with replacing roles like mine with AI-assisted poorly trained n00bs. Right now the model is that you have less-educated, less-trained people working from scripts and flow-charts (many of which are being _written_ by people like me who have a deep theoretical understanding of the products we support and hard-won experience with tracing from patterns of symptoms to root causes) to resolve the more common problems, and then if the case defies solution by that kind of script-following, the case gets escalated.
If AI helps the lower-tier people triage things faster, that's great. I could even buy that AI may be useful in helping to sort through data on incidents across a large fleet (e.g. Tesla's many many thousands of PowerWalls) and identify classes of case where we need to refine the guidance for the lower-tier people.
But I think some companies may misguidedly think they can just take humans out of the loop entirely and let AI answer the calls, with no or minimal ability to escalate to a person. We already _see_ that kind of thing happening in some places, where there's some kind of robotic phone response, and negligible staffing if you try to escalate, so you sit on hold for an hour and then the system tells you, too bad, call volumes are higher than expected, call back some other time.
Cross over with Slow Boring on parking: make descendents of formerly enslaved persons owners of urbans streets and roads so they can charge the parking fees and collect congestion tolls. win-win!
Unironically, I think some progressive municipality somewhere using a pigouvian tax for reparations purposes very much falls into a"laboratory of democracy" type of policy experiment worth trying.
Re: weapons. Does anyone know why this is? Last thing I read on this (which might have been here) European weapons factories were partly idle and waiting for work. Governments kept claiming to be ramping up aid, but somehow that wasn't translating into purchase orders. It was unclear why that is, though. If the UK is any guide it might be civil services that are refusing to implement orders they dislike?
Re: AI productivity. Economics is one of the better fields and I'm totally open to this possibility, but a gut reality check tells me to be careful here. Measuring productivity of individuals is notoriously difficult. The cited evidence boils down to two forms of work: writing English (customer support responses) and writing code. I absolutely 100% believe that gen AI can improve the productivity of customer support agents - people who churn out repetitive answers to things. It is politer, more helpful, more verbose, more knowledgeable and more verbally fluent than the average call center worker. Give the bottom rung a chance to outsource thinking to a machine and I can see how the results will improve because most support tickets are duplicates.
But it doesn't follow that this will rebuild the middle class; that's the sort of grandiose over-generalization that gives intellectualism a bad name. The problem here is that if AI can answer support requests then the very next step is to just replace the lower-than-average workers entirely. Today that isn't feasible because inferencing latency is too high to make AI fully fluent in [phone] conversation, and companies don't trust AI to make decisions yet (see how Air Canada just got burned by a hallucinated policy). But TTS is now human quality or higher, and Groq is demonstrating real-time low latency inference, and the hallucination problem is becoming better understood/more solvable. At this point I think we're only a couple of years away from callcenters that handle almost all calls/chats purely with AI and only a handful of highly trained/trusted managers, whose job is exclusively resolving obscure edge cases. This will increase western productivity numbers because their cost base will go down whilst output remains the same or goes up (people will use support more), and decrease poor country productivity numbers because the agents that get laid off will stop producing entirely.
W.R.T. generalizing this to all jobs, I feel deeply uncomfortable about that. I can believe the general thrust is true _at the moment_, because the easiest way to integrate AI into a workflow today is to give existing workers suggestions, and that will boost weak performers in the short run. But again, the question is what happens next? I read a lot of coding gen AI papers and the way things are going here seems clear enough to me - AI will become increasingly able to plan out and execute whole sub-projects independently, and then whole projects. That means the work of using gen AI will shift from reviewing small and simple auto-completions to figuring out what's possible and what exactly should be built, whilst simultaneously reviewing/fixing the hardest parts where the AI training set is of no use. That's usually considered the most senior work! So again, I think we see that whilst currently AI is a boost to lower performers, very near term and small improvements could easily just obsolete the lower performers leaving all the remaining work to the people on the very leading edge of the profession.
That said, I'm not a doomer about these things. There's just so much freaking work to do out there, so much potential that goes unharvested, and so much of the dysfunction and effort in the software industry goes into working around the very high cost of labor, that we could easily 100x our productivity and still have plenty of employment in the sector. The way the job looks might change a lot, but the existence of the job won't.
I am not as negative as you are but would definitely urge young people to look at high paying, but traditionally blue-collar jobs. Electrician, nurse, plumber, cop, firefighter, etc. There are already huge needs in these fields, they top out lower but start above what most typical white collar jobs do (so if you invest a lot early in your career you may be able to out earn a lot of other jobs), and they are less likely to be disrupted as all of the jobs have a hands on element that will be difficult to replicate in the next few decades.
Isn't the issue more that arms manufacturers won't invest in increased production capacity unless they're assured of guaranteed long-term sales (5 years or more)?
So what's the hold-up with Europe? Where is the kink in the line between words & actions? Is it that their gov'ts are not following through with purchase orders? Or that the manufacturing capacity simply no longer exists?
If the former, why? Is it because their welfare states are so expensive, that with a population significantly older on average than it was in 1989 they can no longer afford to maintain their welfare states AND spend more on defense? If this is the case, I hate to break it to you, but not a single German or Frenchman is going to agree to any reduction in lifestyle in order to fund the military when Russia almost certainly cannot and will not conquer past Poland. Hell, just look at the revolts that break out in Europe now periodically every time they try to remove subsidies for farmers. The attitude is, if the Russians take eastern Europe, so what? They had it all during the Cold War and we did just fine then.
If the holdup is point #2, lack of physical plant, then you're still up shit creek because the physical capital no longer exists and will have to be rebuilt, necessitating lots of money (which takes you back to point #1). In this scenario, Denmark is particularly foolish for donating all of their artillery. Even if they place the orders for new kit today, when is it going to be delivered? In five years? Taiwan is already waiting for back-filled orders!
When the West decided that heavy manufacturing was gauche and that civilized countries should financialize and move their economies over to services, it basically decided to gamble on there never being large-scale great power conflict ever again. Gambled and lost, it would seem.
There’s no real net cost to a government to buy weapons from manufacturers in its own country, absent corruption.
My feeling though is that both Europe and the US have badly run arms manufacturers.
> When the West decided that heavy manufacturing was gauche and that civilized countries should financialize and move their economies over to services, it basically decided to gamble on there never being large-scale great power conflict ever again.
In my most cynical moments I think that Russia (with its unhealthy vodka-soaked lifestyle) actually has an advantage over the health-conscious contemporary West, because far fewer of its citizens end up needing expensive care in nursing homes (because they don't live long enough to get dementia in the first place).
Although that logic makes me wonder why China bothered with the whole Zero Covid thing, given that Covid is a killer overwhelmingly of the old and frail.
Making shells requires large amounts of steel, and the Western world's steel industries were reeling from a long-running lack of domestic demand, as well as Chinese dumping: in 2015 China's _overcapacity_ in steel production was twice the entire EU's _total_ capacity!
Have you seen Klarna's data yet on customer service job replacements? AI replaced 700 live chat agents completely and is getting better scores. It's possible online customer service as a job doesn't exist in 5 years.
My experience with AI live chat is that it sucks for anything other than the most basic questions. Any nuance whatsoever and the bot eventually taps out, followed (eventually) by a live person. Especially worthless are the voice menu protocols one has to wade through for several minutes to then repeated state in a few words "why am I calling" in order to finally access a live person.
The voice menu protocols are awful. Actual AI customer service should be able to be better than that (it should at least be able to let you skip most of the option tree by just understanding your first question!), but I haven't encountered it yet.
I’m bullish on the idea that AI ends up being more helpful for the middle class/consumers than the worst case scenarios that get a lot of focus, but complex medical procedures like (vascular) catheterization are one of the worst examples I can think of. I perform medical procedures part time and can tell you that a lot of procedural competency is just reps, not lack of information or cognitive issues. I explain to new trainees that the learning process js more like driving than textbook learning or even other areas of clinical practice.
What’s odd to me is there are many areas of clinical medicine that have become algorithmic in a way that would lend itself to an AI takeover. But while I could see some patients preferring the expediency and convenience of an AI doctor for straightforward decisions, I think most will continue to want the more nuanced expertise and plans developed by humans.
I interpreted him as gesturing at the idea that experienced nurses would be able to start taking over a lot of procedures that currently only get done by specialized surgeons or other doctors. But he definitely didn't explicitly say that, if that is what he meant.
> But the fact that people are shifting their spending toward going out to eat more suggests that the burden is not as crushing as the WSJ’s viral chart suggests.
Not necessarily going out to eat more but likely paying more when going out. You didn’t assume that the slight rise in the percentage of income spent on groceries was people buying more groceries.
It also might describe more of a bimodal distribution. The upper-middle-class and above eating out both more, and at higher price-points, and others being less able to do so. Though anecdotally, it seems like everyone is eating out, or door-dashing more.
Tribal lands as Charter Cities! :)
The next step would be to allow tribal groups to buy other land and take their tribal privileges with them. They could come in, develop an area using privilege to overcome NIMBY opposition and then sell out to go develope somewhere else!
If AI reduces the productivity gap between low skilled and high skilled workers, wouldn't this increase the outsourcing of white collar professional jobs to countries like India and Vietnam?
I actually think it'll be the opposite. See my other comment. Problem is, that's only true for as long as you need the low paid workers to review the AI output. The quality gap just isn't that big. Give it a few years and companies will be comfortable trusting AI to make cost-bounded business decisions, just like they currently trust low paid humans. There will be mistakes but the cost of them will be lower than the savings from automation. Then you will only need a handful of more highly skilled workers to handle the out-of-distribution cases.
You also need low-skilled data generation or augmentation to make it all work. Increasingly this can be automated for the most common cases as well, but as we continue to push the frontier of use cases for AI further, I suspect this will be a persistant demand for a long while.
Moreover, humans also make mistakes.
"If AI reduces the productivity gap between low skilled and high skilled workers, wouldn't this increase the outsourcing of white collar professional jobs to countries like India and Vietnam?"
That's the whole point of the oligarchs funding AI; don't you know?
As someone from the "global south" I'm eternally grateful.
Interesting point. I will add that this too would be great for reducing global inequality, and thus a wonderful thing from a humanity-wide utilitarian rather than nationalistic perspective.
You are obviously in the upper 20%, so you are find with "reducing global inequality." A middle-income worker in the US won't be so sanguine about a transfer of a large portion of his employability and wealth to Vietnam.
Not only am I financially secure, but also retired. Thus I am indeed presenting a disinterested position.
I agree that workers (actually all groups) will now and always have pushed for privilege and rent seeking. This is pretty well documented. The way the free market works is that workers do not have property rights in "employability" and the definition of wealth does not extend to future potential income they have not yet produced or earned.
From a logical, and empirical and a moral perspective, I would argue that both Americans and Vietnamese would be better off with free trade and open competition.
Real interesting point! Anecdotally I see a bit of this with software development and some audit work
I read recently where one EU country, Denmark I think, is planning to give Ukraine all of Denmark's artillery. That seems like a sensible move to me, as artillery sitting in Denmark is pretty useless. Why not then send their pieces to the front now where it will do some lasting good? I presume that Denmark will then purchase new and improved artillery to replace its stocks. Denmark will have the luxury of being able to shop around for the best value and to wait for manufacturing to ramp up to meet this demand (after all, who is going to threaten Denmark's actual landmass, other than Russia, which is currently mired in eastern Ukraine). Ukraine does not have this luxury. If the Russians are soundly defeated this year, it will take them decades to be in a position to threaten Europe again. During that long lull, Europe can easily replace its stocks of weapons and munitions. Maybe France and Germany should consider doing the same, particularly France, which has a large mass of friendly neighbors between it and Russia.
Maybe but you’d hope that the Ukrainians do better with it this time.
France is still a quasi imperial power unlike Denmark, it needs its stuff to keep francophone Africa in line.
For sure, France wouldn't want to send every piece of military equipment it owns to Ukraine. But if a good portion of what it owns is solely for defense of the homeland, what good is it sitting in a warehouse when the only belligerent country that could ever threaten France (or Italy, the UK, Spain, etc.) on the ground is Russia and Russia alone? Take Russia down a notch now while the notching is good.
As for Ukrainian competency, that is certainly a concern.
Also, the fact that France actually uses its weaponry, and has one of the larger military-industrial complexes because of it, including for export, is all the more reason it can find both stockpiles and spare, or increased capacity to supply ukraine.
A near future sci-fi novel that has high tech companies owned by American indigenous tribes with cool ass names and new major cities on Tribal land sounds like such a neat world to explore
We do already have a lot of cool indigenous names in the United States - Massachusetts, Mississippi, Illinois, Seattle, Chicago, Omaha, Dakota, Alabama, Tallahassee, Kennebunkport, etc. We just got so used to them that we forgot they were indigenous!
This is part of the interesting parallelism between Australia and the United States as now-independent former British colonies: both involved extensive white contact with (and displacement of and violent conflict with) indigenous peoples in such a way that a lot of modern settlements bear obviously indigenous names.
(I guess there's also parallelism with Canada but that's a lot less geographically and historically differentiated from the U.S.)
And then there's Hawaii, where *all* the placenames (except military bases and their associated housing) are still indigenous.
As a young person growing up In Maryland where every single stream reflects an Indian name (Potomac, Susquehanna, Anacostia, etc.), I used to have this fantasy that the first settlers arrived, grabbed a Native American by the throat, asked him the name of the stream, and then hit him over the head with war club, having no further use for him. 🥺☹️🥺😢☹️
I once asked a question in an online forum of whether Reservations are a way around sclerotic regulations which choke off American productivity. A bunch of libertarians called me a communist for asking (still not sure why). I ask again here.
Don’t Native American reservations have various regulatory exemptions and work arounds that would make them excellent alternatives to foreign charter cities?
Admittedly I am ignorant on the details. Anyone have thoughts?
Until recently, if the reservations became populated with non-indigenous peoples the (correct) fear would be that the reservations be annexed to become a non-reservation territory. This seems ingrained in the very-regulated, communical, NIMBY-like rules in place for land-usage on many tribal lands.
I think it would be extremely dystopian, honestly. They'd be held by extended family groups that don't really have to follow any laws they don't feel like restraining themselves with. I know multiple tribes in Washington have been accused of stripping people of Tribal citizenship as retribution for personal disputes or to force them to vacate their homes. (to be either rented for profit or given to more favored families), which doesn't make me optimistic that we wouldn't see similar results from business disputes.
Thanks. To work, the Tribes would need to thread the needle between ensuring freedom for capital from US regulations and freedom from exploitation by the tribe itself. I wonder if it is possible. Your statement makes me suspect something is fundamentally missing.
With AI when I read “low-skill and high-skill” I just keep hearing “low-wage and high-wage”. I’m going to need a lot of convincing that AI, while not replacing people, is going to devalue them. Basic turning whole other sectors into McDonalds. People are necessary but largely disposable and thus low-wage.
Also, as someone in Residential Construction, the electrical panel example showed astonishing ignorance on the authors part, not really helping the case being made. Home Depot DIY culture has already made enough problems for professionals that have to come in and fix DIY disasters.
> But this chart does two things for us. First of all, the y-axis starts at zero, so you can see how modest the recent increase is.
Great post as always, but the graph you show here does not start at zero, but at 0.1. If it starts at zero, I think your point will become even more visually clear.
Canada's indigenous population is 4.5% of the population, compared to about 1.5% for the US. The difference in political power is even more pronounced, and that's led to greater FN self-governance and in some cases, greater business development maturity.
So, I do extremely complex customer and field-tech support work.
I am somewhat worried that companies are going to think they can get away with replacing roles like mine with AI-assisted poorly trained n00bs. Right now the model is that you have less-educated, less-trained people working from scripts and flow-charts (many of which are being _written_ by people like me who have a deep theoretical understanding of the products we support and hard-won experience with tracing from patterns of symptoms to root causes) to resolve the more common problems, and then if the case defies solution by that kind of script-following, the case gets escalated.
If AI helps the lower-tier people triage things faster, that's great. I could even buy that AI may be useful in helping to sort through data on incidents across a large fleet (e.g. Tesla's many many thousands of PowerWalls) and identify classes of case where we need to refine the guidance for the lower-tier people.
But I think some companies may misguidedly think they can just take humans out of the loop entirely and let AI answer the calls, with no or minimal ability to escalate to a person. We already _see_ that kind of thing happening in some places, where there's some kind of robotic phone response, and negligible staffing if you try to escalate, so you sit on hold for an hour and then the system tells you, too bad, call volumes are higher than expected, call back some other time.
Cross over with Slow Boring on parking: make descendents of formerly enslaved persons owners of urbans streets and roads so they can charge the parking fees and collect congestion tolls. win-win!
Unironically, I think some progressive municipality somewhere using a pigouvian tax for reparations purposes very much falls into a"laboratory of democracy" type of policy experiment worth trying.
Re: weapons. Does anyone know why this is? Last thing I read on this (which might have been here) European weapons factories were partly idle and waiting for work. Governments kept claiming to be ramping up aid, but somehow that wasn't translating into purchase orders. It was unclear why that is, though. If the UK is any guide it might be civil services that are refusing to implement orders they dislike?
Re: AI productivity. Economics is one of the better fields and I'm totally open to this possibility, but a gut reality check tells me to be careful here. Measuring productivity of individuals is notoriously difficult. The cited evidence boils down to two forms of work: writing English (customer support responses) and writing code. I absolutely 100% believe that gen AI can improve the productivity of customer support agents - people who churn out repetitive answers to things. It is politer, more helpful, more verbose, more knowledgeable and more verbally fluent than the average call center worker. Give the bottom rung a chance to outsource thinking to a machine and I can see how the results will improve because most support tickets are duplicates.
But it doesn't follow that this will rebuild the middle class; that's the sort of grandiose over-generalization that gives intellectualism a bad name. The problem here is that if AI can answer support requests then the very next step is to just replace the lower-than-average workers entirely. Today that isn't feasible because inferencing latency is too high to make AI fully fluent in [phone] conversation, and companies don't trust AI to make decisions yet (see how Air Canada just got burned by a hallucinated policy). But TTS is now human quality or higher, and Groq is demonstrating real-time low latency inference, and the hallucination problem is becoming better understood/more solvable. At this point I think we're only a couple of years away from callcenters that handle almost all calls/chats purely with AI and only a handful of highly trained/trusted managers, whose job is exclusively resolving obscure edge cases. This will increase western productivity numbers because their cost base will go down whilst output remains the same or goes up (people will use support more), and decrease poor country productivity numbers because the agents that get laid off will stop producing entirely.
W.R.T. generalizing this to all jobs, I feel deeply uncomfortable about that. I can believe the general thrust is true _at the moment_, because the easiest way to integrate AI into a workflow today is to give existing workers suggestions, and that will boost weak performers in the short run. But again, the question is what happens next? I read a lot of coding gen AI papers and the way things are going here seems clear enough to me - AI will become increasingly able to plan out and execute whole sub-projects independently, and then whole projects. That means the work of using gen AI will shift from reviewing small and simple auto-completions to figuring out what's possible and what exactly should be built, whilst simultaneously reviewing/fixing the hardest parts where the AI training set is of no use. That's usually considered the most senior work! So again, I think we see that whilst currently AI is a boost to lower performers, very near term and small improvements could easily just obsolete the lower performers leaving all the remaining work to the people on the very leading edge of the profession.
That said, I'm not a doomer about these things. There's just so much freaking work to do out there, so much potential that goes unharvested, and so much of the dysfunction and effort in the software industry goes into working around the very high cost of labor, that we could easily 100x our productivity and still have plenty of employment in the sector. The way the job looks might change a lot, but the existence of the job won't.
I am not as negative as you are but would definitely urge young people to look at high paying, but traditionally blue-collar jobs. Electrician, nurse, plumber, cop, firefighter, etc. There are already huge needs in these fields, they top out lower but start above what most typical white collar jobs do (so if you invest a lot early in your career you may be able to out earn a lot of other jobs), and they are less likely to be disrupted as all of the jobs have a hands on element that will be difficult to replicate in the next few decades.
Evidence for AI replacing workers:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91039401/klarna-ai-virtual-assistant-does-the-work-of-700-humans-after-layoffs
Isn't the issue more that arms manufacturers won't invest in increased production capacity unless they're assured of guaranteed long-term sales (5 years or more)?
So what's the hold-up with Europe? Where is the kink in the line between words & actions? Is it that their gov'ts are not following through with purchase orders? Or that the manufacturing capacity simply no longer exists?
If the former, why? Is it because their welfare states are so expensive, that with a population significantly older on average than it was in 1989 they can no longer afford to maintain their welfare states AND spend more on defense? If this is the case, I hate to break it to you, but not a single German or Frenchman is going to agree to any reduction in lifestyle in order to fund the military when Russia almost certainly cannot and will not conquer past Poland. Hell, just look at the revolts that break out in Europe now periodically every time they try to remove subsidies for farmers. The attitude is, if the Russians take eastern Europe, so what? They had it all during the Cold War and we did just fine then.
If the holdup is point #2, lack of physical plant, then you're still up shit creek because the physical capital no longer exists and will have to be rebuilt, necessitating lots of money (which takes you back to point #1). In this scenario, Denmark is particularly foolish for donating all of their artillery. Even if they place the orders for new kit today, when is it going to be delivered? In five years? Taiwan is already waiting for back-filled orders!
When the West decided that heavy manufacturing was gauche and that civilized countries should financialize and move their economies over to services, it basically decided to gamble on there never being large-scale great power conflict ever again. Gambled and lost, it would seem.
There’s no real net cost to a government to buy weapons from manufacturers in its own country, absent corruption.
My feeling though is that both Europe and the US have badly run arms manufacturers.
> When the West decided that heavy manufacturing was gauche and that civilized countries should financialize and move their economies over to services, it basically decided to gamble on there never being large-scale great power conflict ever again.
No truer words ever spoken.
Another example of short-term American thinking. I won't smear another country with that fault.
In my most cynical moments I think that Russia (with its unhealthy vodka-soaked lifestyle) actually has an advantage over the health-conscious contemporary West, because far fewer of its citizens end up needing expensive care in nursing homes (because they don't live long enough to get dementia in the first place).
Although that logic makes me wonder why China bothered with the whole Zero Covid thing, given that Covid is a killer overwhelmingly of the old and frail.
Making shells requires large amounts of steel, and the Western world's steel industries were reeling from a long-running lack of domestic demand, as well as Chinese dumping: in 2015 China's _overcapacity_ in steel production was twice the entire EU's _total_ capacity!
Have you seen Klarna's data yet on customer service job replacements? AI replaced 700 live chat agents completely and is getting better scores. It's possible online customer service as a job doesn't exist in 5 years.
My experience with AI live chat is that it sucks for anything other than the most basic questions. Any nuance whatsoever and the bot eventually taps out, followed (eventually) by a live person. Especially worthless are the voice menu protocols one has to wade through for several minutes to then repeated state in a few words "why am I calling" in order to finally access a live person.
The voice menu protocols are awful. Actual AI customer service should be able to be better than that (it should at least be able to let you skip most of the option tree by just understanding your first question!), but I haven't encountered it yet.
Their data says otherwise: https://www.klarna.com/international/press/klarna-ai-assistant-handles-two-thirds-of-customer-service-chats-in-its-first-month/.
Same feedback scores, better overall results
Perhaps, but my lived experience is another way of knowing. Something like that.
It’s fascinating to watch France say a lot while doing so little
I'm just perpetuating a stereotype here but sitting around in cafes while engaging in "discuter" is very French thing.
I’m bullish on the idea that AI ends up being more helpful for the middle class/consumers than the worst case scenarios that get a lot of focus, but complex medical procedures like (vascular) catheterization are one of the worst examples I can think of. I perform medical procedures part time and can tell you that a lot of procedural competency is just reps, not lack of information or cognitive issues. I explain to new trainees that the learning process js more like driving than textbook learning or even other areas of clinical practice.
What’s odd to me is there are many areas of clinical medicine that have become algorithmic in a way that would lend itself to an AI takeover. But while I could see some patients preferring the expediency and convenience of an AI doctor for straightforward decisions, I think most will continue to want the more nuanced expertise and plans developed by humans.
I interpreted him as gesturing at the idea that experienced nurses would be able to start taking over a lot of procedures that currently only get done by specialized surgeons or other doctors. But he definitely didn't explicitly say that, if that is what he meant.
Any chance of getting Econ 102 (and Hexapodia) into written form? Like have an AI assistant listen and write up a summary? :)