Will the AI backlash spill into the streets?

> customers are slower at packing than cashiers

Where I'm from, cashiers don't pack the groceries of customers

Self-checkout won.

Every time I go to Target there are two lanes manned by staff. Everything else is self-checkout. This is every Target I go to in my state.

Every time I go to Home Depot, there is one person manning the checkout. Everything else is self-checkout.

Even fast food places have self-checkout stalls that seem to be growing in popularity. In the last few years, McDonalds has been rapidly deploying the tech.

Boba places. Self-checkout has been promoted to first-class and is the only way to order at several of them.

It's everywhere. When I was growing up, Kroger used to have every single checkout aisle staffed. Now they have one or two.

I'm honestly shocked that the perception is that self-checkout hasn't won. It's everywhere and dominates the checkout modalities.

> the shoplifting deterrence effect of staffing

This is all cost modeled. They have lots of cameras and security staff by the door. Even if the tech doesn't work, the mere threat of getting caught is enough to stop most losses. The business accepts that they won't catch everything. They're still saving money by using automated checkout.

Because the productivity growth in the last decades thanks to automation and many other factors has benefited workers? (Hint: It has not.)

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

The questions of who will benefit from AI is a political questions. As power is currently firmly in the had of the capital class, AI will only make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Wages are not based on how much value you produce but how much it cost to reproduce your labor. How much it cost for you to stay alive and be able to work and feed your family. What kind of living standard that entails is a political matter and depends on how strong your unions are, how willing you are to fight for it and so on.

Same with welfare. It is something which was fought for and if the power balance is such that they can get away with giving you less, they will do. In fact some rich pricks would gladly turn you into soylent green if they could get away with it.

If most people don't work (or most people's work contributes only a small fraction of the economy), where do they derive their political capital that gives them any social welfare at all? Why would the powerful AI overlords owned by large conglomerates give them anything or care what they think?

> It's important to note that compared to human labor, AI is extremely cheap.

Frontier models are being provided at a loss right now to my "knowledge", and they're already as crap as you'd want to go, if not even crappier, for worker replacement in my experience.

The fruits of virtually all the productivity gains in the last 40 years has gone straight to the top while the 99% has stagnated amidst rising costs in essentials. Broadly-shared prosperity has only come about through strong unions, regulation, and redistributive taxation, which seems politically farther away than it's been in decades. The wealthiest elite don't just want wealth, they want power over others -- why would they tolerate an economic system where anyone can live a decent life independent of work?

This is both overly optimistic and overly simplistic.

It doesn't matter how many products and services your society shits out, what matters is how you organize it. And clearly we're already way past the point where the amount of products and services is a bottleneck to quality of life. Access to healthcare, job security, home ownership, the ability to afford kids, good food, all of these things are going down, not up, despite the fact that as a whole we're much better off than in the last century.

Virtually no one can sustain a family on a single salary, it was the norm not so long ago

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Haruki-Seitani/publicat...

Housing is more and more out of reach

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335721006/figure/fi...

Most of the productivity gain doesn't translate into income:

https://files.epi.org/charts/img/235212-28502-body.png

Sure enough we now have access to instant brain rot doomscrolling services, infinite low quality entertainment, vast amount of ultra processed food, &c. but if anythings these things are distractions.

That view is refreshingly naïve and equally wrong. Prices are determined by the market, not by how hard something was to produce.

And as exhibit A I provide progress in automation in the last decades (enormous) in relation to the median buying power of the population in developed nations.

It just doesn't work the way you describe, but I have sympathies for naïvely believing that it does.

I see it another way. I think the products will become cheaper to produce but the prices will remain the same or higher. Just because something is cheaper does not mean businesses are obligated to reduce price. If anything it's the opposite (as long as you can get away with it).

Living on social welfare now offers a lifestyle as luxurious as working full-time in the past.

Self-driving vehicles are the perfect example of how something that seems so close can be so far away.

April 29, 2014 - "Milken 2014: Driverless cars due in five years"[0]

Nov 24, 2015 - "Ford is 5 years away from self-driving cars"[1]

Oct 20, 2016 - "A Driverless Tesla Will Travel From L.A. to NYC by 2017"[2]

Now general consensus is level 5 autonomous self-driving is decades away, at least.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/04/29/milken-...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-is-5-years-away-from-se...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...

The thing about that recent rollout of self-driving trucks is they picked a stretch of road connecting Houston to another shipping point in a very straight line. And they bragged about 2000 "unassisted" miles on that stretch of road which is ~250 miles in length. So they're basically championing the idea that their trucks which have driven about less than 10 trips without an on-vehicle driver in that area is competent enough to be relied upon in a real work capacity.

Whether this amount of success is proof that there won't be any issues with the tech in that area, remains to be seen. Hell, they're not even interested yet in talking about how this may pan out outside their Houston trial runs.

The issue is people are assuming 100% automation and job replacement by AI/ML overnight - that is NOT happening in the near future.

Realistically, we are going to see 20-30% reductions in headcount in the near-to-medium term. THIS IS STILL CATASTROPHIC.

A number of earlier stage companies I've funded have already been heavily utilizing automation to simplify code generation or scaffolding/project ops work. They use the cost savings to hire experienced SWEs at high base salaries and are able to hit the same development metrics as they would have if they had a large team of average paid SWEs. On the BDR side, they are using a massive amount of video/audio automation to scale out cold calling or first impressions, so reducing the need to hire teams of BDRs hitting the phones all the time. And finally, they are automating tier 1/2 support ticket responses and communication so reducing the need for teams of support engineers spending time basically respondng to customers with the polite equivalnet of "read the docs".

Basically, a Series A startup that would have had a staff of 50 employees 10 years ago can essentially output the exact same as a Series A startup with a headcount of 20 employees today, and with a tangible path to FCF positivity.

This is a net reduction in jobs, and a significant one at that, because most people just cannot upskill - it's hard.

> What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do?

Part of the problem is the definition of "AI" is extremely nebulous. In your case, you seem to be talking about an AGI which can self-improve, while also having some physical interface letting it interact with the real world. This reality may be 6 months away, 6 years away, or 600 years away.

Given the current state of LLMs it's much more likely they will create jobs, or change workflows in existing jobs, rather than wholesale replace humans. The recent public spectacle of Microsoft's state-of-the-art Github Copilot Agent[0] shows we're quite far away from AI agents wholesale replacing even very junior positions for knowledge work.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152

Jevons Paradox likely applies here. There could be an initial reduction in jobs, but longer term humans using AI will reduce the cost (increase the efficiency) of those jobs which will increase demand more than merely satisfy it.

Basically any job that uses a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing tool, etc will all become more efficient and if Jevons Paradox applies, demand for those things will increase beyond the reduction due to efficiency gains.

I can imagine that for many fields it will be cheaper to have humans use AI (in the near term) rather than try to make fully automated systems that require no/little supervision.

The jobs created by the need to build and maintain robots (and industrial machinery in general) are very few compared to the amount of jobs the machines replaced. The new jobs that the industrial and other technological revolutions created were mostly in other economical sectors, like services and commerce.

> What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do?

AI lack skin-in-the-game, they cannot bear responsibility for outcomes. They also don't experience desires or needs, so they depend on humans for that too.

To make an AI useful you need to apply it to a problem, in other words it is in a specific problem context that AI shows utility. Like Linux, you need to use it for something to get benefits. Providing this problem space for AI is our part. So you cannot separate AI usefulness from people, problems are distributed across society, non-fungible.

I am not very worried about jobs, we tend to prefer growth to efficiency. In a world of AI, humans will remain the differentiating factor between companies.

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

If AI is roughly where IT is in the 60's, we might see actually decreased productivity for a while until people (yes people) figure out how to use it effectively.

You’re just making things up here. LLMs or other forms of “AI” can’t do most jobs, so it’s silly to speculate what will happen when it replaces humans in those jobs it can’t actually perform.

To the extent it can automate tasks under the direction of humans, it’s not even clear it makes those humans more productive, but it is clear that it harms those humans’ own skillsets (beyond prompt engineering).

Agreed. AI looks to be a war between professional opinion-havers and fact-rememberers and the future. They finally see automation as dangerous because no one will need their opinion or their recall any more. The working class were already automated to death (and the opinion-havers cheered it on), because their working class opinions hasn't been taken into consideration since Taylor and Ford figured out that we can eliminate individual knowledge in physical work and push that knowledge upwards into the institution itself. They can just lay you off and train some new ones, and the new hires will have a worse contract than you had.

The reason working people's jobs haven't been automated away is because people are cheaper and more conscientious than robots. Even worse, the robots are owned by famous rent-seekers who see you as prey, so defending yourself against the robots as a customer adds to the overhead of choosing them. How do you know it's not going to cost you 10x as much to fix/update them as it cost you last year? You don't, because you were locked into a scammer who unilaterally decided to raise rates on you or the entire industry, or simply got in over their head and shut down, leaving you without a vendor. Minimum wage employees don't do that.

Now asking some dipshit McKinsey consultant or some social media expert for 10 ideas to increase sales? LLMs can give you 100, summarize them, and rank them with references. They are only getting better at this. We criticize them because they only give us a list of obvious answers, but the reason we hire recent graduates is for them to give us the list of obvious answers they learned while being educated in their specialty. "Creativity" gets assigned to whoever has the social capital to be seen as a legitimate and worthy "creative," or, more accurately, the person with the money either chooses somebody to run the show who they suspect has a magic secret formula or aura, or they take on that identity themselves.

That white collar middle-class magic is gone. People who could do difficult arithmetic quickly used to make a lot of money, too.

> No political force will fight for onshoring services jobs or incorporating barriers to reduce automation in most white collar jobs.

Only people who get protection would be the ones that are unified enough to have the institutions to launder cash to give to politicians. Doctors, realtors, etc.