Hacker News

I've done it with Local 60. I didn't last long. The work is legit heavy and hours are crazy. I lasted 4 months before I figured it is not for me. 6 am safety meetings and talk about injuries or someone getting decapitated was not a good motivator either.

I was a software engineer at a FAANG, now an airline pilot. I feel a bigger sense of satisfaction with my job now, because at least at the end of the day I helped people get to where they needed to go.

The work is was doing in big tech was pretty far from anything that would help people in any tangible way.

The money isn't as good but the office view is way better.

I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.

Hello fellow electrician, I was previously electrical engineer :-) I enjoy healthy weight loss while not sitting continuously in the office.

How did you make the switch? Did you go back to school or do some sort of apprenticeship?

OT. What’s the going rate for adding a new circuit from the panel? Let’s say the circuit ended with an external outlet outside of the garage and to an outlet inside the garage.

Automated harvesting machines for fruits is not an accomplishment of AI. Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI. Robotic manufacturing is nothing new.

Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.

AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.

My understanding is that all of these endeavors involve scale and are very different from a drop-in replacement humanoid robot.

Like with the particular examples you sited, cleaning restrooms can have a huge number of "edge cases" which nothing short of a robot with human-like capabilities could handle.

If expenditures on AI is as huge as it is, with the financials being as shaky as they are, despite AI seeming to be very effective for very high paying jobs, I can't immagine the capex and shaky financials for replacing menial labor en mass. Like immagine all the chips, metals, compute needed as well as the maintenance, depreciation, vandalism, etc.

While they are slow and dont work well, their cost / output is already on human parity. The Figure 3 test runs are proving that humanoid robots are already good enough for isolated repetitive tasks (factory work).

AI isn't a technical problem. It's an economic one.

There's nothing inherently wrong with automating away certain jobs, particularly if they're dirty, dangerous or repetitive. And I include agriculture in this. The problem is how we as a society handle that. Do we let AI specifically and automation in general to make a handful of people more wealthy? Or do we share those benefits so people have to work less? In short, it's an income and wealth distribution question.

Sadly, I think we're automation will mean minting trillionaires while the fabric of society unravels around us.

This is a gleaming silver lining view. Blindingly so. The largest customers of the trades class are the white collar class. The largest customers of service industries are the white collar class. It _will_ be "the rich get poorer and the poor get poorer". This is a hollowing out and redistributing up of wealth, plain and simple.

It's the reason AI company leaders are so adamant about framing it as a post-singularity utopia with UBI. They have no answer other than "you're all going to be jobless, better figure that out." Worse yet, they see it merely as a policy problem, rather than a problem they're responsible for. It _is_ a policy problem, no doubt, but the angry mobs won't be coming for policy.

> 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.

I think you're confused. The true upper class isn't going anywhere, those are the people so rich they don't need to work (and if they do "work," it's tending their empire). They'll keep getting richer.

The "downward mobility" you're talking about the upper middle class and middle class. People who need to work, but can live comfortably on their wages. This is really about flattening the working class into its poorer levels (and kicking away the ladders the people in those levels could use to lead a more comfortable life, no more getting a college degree and graduating from the factory floor to the office).

It's about increasing inequality and creating an unbridgeable chasm between the poor and rich.

Hollowing out the middle class (and yes I consider software engineers to be mostly upper middle class, most of them need to continue working for someone else) is not a good thing. What makes you think any of this is creating upward class mobility instead of just increasing wealth concentration?

This would be downwards only class mobility. Not very helpful if you don't also have people moving in the opposite direction.

Your argument is that a lot of people, who worked very hard, losing their jobs would be a good thing actually, because maybe we can have a violent communist revolution where we can all be poor together. At least millions will starve in the resulting civil war, then millions more in the resulting communist rule.

You also have this hilarious talk of "privilege" with this weird assumption that all of the white collar workers of course come from great privilege (perhaps telling on yourself and letting your guilt come out), despite many of us having grown up poor, are from poor areas, and worked our way out.

If the number of job openings go up, but at the same time the average job opening has worse pay and conditions, I don't see the connection to the lump of labour fallacy.

As far as I know, that's how the lump of labour fallacy actually works! There's an equilibrium between supply and demand for labour such that workers are (more or less) choosing the best jobs they can find. There's infinite demand for labour, but not at any price, so demand destruction of the best jobs can still happen. There will be infinitely more jobs, but they won't be as good as the ones that were destroyed.

Of course, demand creation for really good jobs can also happen. What the GP is saying is that they believe demand destruction will outpace demand creation for really good jobs and everyone will be forced into less desirable jobs. I don't see how this is inconsistent with the lump of labour fallacy.

> And although you might need fewer human employees at one company to do the same amount of work with AI, this creates an enormous opportunity for small teams to start new companies and invent new technologies.

Yes, I'm sure all the wage slaves who are suddenly forced out of the labor market that was barely allowing them to scrape by paycheck to paycheck will suddenly start creating new businesses and become investors in new technology and not just become homeless leading to a massive increase in diseases/crimes of despair.

If (and it's a massive if) what passes for AI these days gets good enough to replace any substantial number of workers it will be a disaster.

My current experience is that we're all just producing more output. Client doesn't pay us more, we don't work more, we aren't hiring more. We simply produce more work with a team that's remained the same size.

Some of the projects we've done would have required 4-6 additional people, but realistically, pre-ai, we would just not do the project or we would do it over a period 3-4x longer.

There's just so much to do.

Nothing to do with that

Company stock value goes up when they lay off staff. Next quarter shareholder maximization is the goal. AI and layoffs is the strategy to get there.

Lump of Labor is a fallacy, but a lot of bosses, upper management, and investors wish it was true.

If by "currently" you mean "for the foreseeable future", then sure.

Guarantee you it’s more feasible with the insane investment we have been seeing than dc’s in space are.

Oh yeah I definitely expect savings to be passed to consumers, like with all the tax cuts and deregulation we’ve been doing for decades.

The only “disinflation” consumers have experienced is devaluation of products through obsolescence as newer, often more expensive alternatives enter the market.

I’d love to see some of that disinflation you’re talking about. From my perspective, luxuries have gotten cheaper while basic necessities like food, housing, and medicine have become dramatically more expensive across the board.

More and more it’s seeming that the “societal benefits” from the last fifty years of progress have largely been concentrated at the top.

You automate automation first, what is so hard to understand about this?

You pick the highest leverage occupation first. Automating lawyers gives you.. angry lawyers? Automating programmers gives you improved ways of doing literally all other things because all other automation requires.. automation. That is to say bucketloads of software.

It’s completely obvious what the play is here and it has nothing to do with pay. We pay peanuts for tokens so automating a developer for 200-500 a month worth of tokens ain’t getting you to a trillion a year.

RSI is the play and it’s already happening. Our work is easier and faster and anyone that claims otherwise I have a very hard time taking serious.

You think they come for mathematicians’ pay? If you want to earn money I guarantee you they need to automate some other low-hanging fruits first that pay a lot better.

No, programming and math is basically what AI research is. You automate that and you got the golden ticket to all other things.

Most people's highest spending categories are food, housing and healthcare. How are these disinflating?

We're automating high paying careers and making what, the consumer's todo list and budgeting apps cheaper for them? My expensive smartphone is going to cost me ~$10/mo over its lifespan. I don't care if most of these consumer products get cheaper when they're a tiny portion of my spending

Automating most jobs means extraordinary unemployment.

Which doesn’t play well with “savings for consumers”, because these consumers will be unemployed.

Trillions of annual US equities profits will continue to go to the top ~10% of households holding ~93% of US equities. Tech didn't create disinflation for decades, globalization and China manufacturing with ~1B people to the world did (only recently has China scaled up robotics and automation for manufacturing in preparation for their population decline due to forward looking structural demographics).

Just like good blue collar jobs were shipped overseas, good knowledge jobs are going to be shipped to GPUs whenever they can.

> the reduced costs in these tasks will represent the greatest savings for consumers

Bud, thinking that for-profit corporations - many of whom are in an oligopoly or monopoly position in their markets - are going to pass along savings from not paying people is like thinking the stripper really likes you.

Remember how things were cheaper before the pandemic? Well, there were supply shortages and prices rose accordingly. Supply and demand at work, nothing surprising there. The supply chain shocks eventually went away. Some prices have sort-of come down, but many just haven't. Why? Because the people selling goods and services now know that people can and will pay the higher price.

Now, they might do that through taking on debt and working additional jobs to the detriment of themselves, their families, their communities, and their country, but no one who both matters and can do something about it keeps track of those things.

Why would those savings be passed to consumers? The red scare disappeared a long time ago. Wages have not kept pace with profits and productivity for 20 years.

Not just cleaning. There are huge opportunities in snaking out plugged toilets. Let's see an LLM do that!

Exactly! The human dream of machines writing poetry, painting pictures and writing music is here and we can finally be free of those burdens to scrub toilets and empty the trash. Utopia.

Isn't it just typical the humans get automation v1 the wrong way around, haha

Yeah, but manufacturing things takes materials and time; I'd give it at least a few years before we manage to squeeze people out of that too.

The robots are going to be controlled by the same billionaires that make employees pee in bottles or fire hundreds on a whim over tweets.

Our labor power is going to be fully eroded and the robots will not be serving us.

> I'm sure they'll figure that out for us though.

Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.

Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.

AI likely does accelerate robotics usefully - certainly in sensing and control. But there are major bottlenecks that are not software, that AI can only help with as a generic engineering tool, same as it helps planes and fridges.

I'm convinced that businesses will never find offloading menial low-wage labor to robts more cost effective than just hiring underpaid laborers.

> Clearly a future where all of the "thinking problems" are easily solved but we still have to pick up trash kinda sucks.

Oh don't worry Mr. Former Software Engineer. You won't be picking up the trash or cleaning toilets. You have things like an expectation for your work to pay a reasonable wage. You'll be passed over for a third world immigrant who'll work for a pittance, and they'll be replaced only when robots are capable enough and cheap enough to undercut _them_.

What work do you do?

I spend maybe 12h a year cleaning the bathroom and the dishwasher is a robot. How is that a market to keep dozens of harmonic drives operational. Unless there is some "post scarcity" there is no way it will be common place.

I agree with you about not treating programming as a protected skill that has a right to be well paid, but computers were never “supposed” to be anything. They’re in no way inevitable in their current forms and any ideas about how they were supposed to be were just desires.

> 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 think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian.

No it's more dystopian. The "historical accident" was a little respite, where some workers could be comfortable and well off. They had a little market power to take the edge off their exploitation.

Now that market power is taken away, and they can enjoy the poverty they were always "meant" to have.

> 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.

Come on. Society isn't going to value "keeping restrooms clean." The people doing that will continue to be poorly paid and disrespected. It's just the opportunities to do something better will be taken away, so there will be more labor available for that kind of work.

>"and this might raise the baseline for the jobs..."

That's a bizarre non sequitur, pure wishful thinking. Its like saying Maybe getting cancer is good, because it will cure my arthritis.

> Of course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable pathOf course only if the extra revenue doesn't flow into the pockets of billionaires, which is the more probable path

That is the only path under Capitalism, so we shouldn't expect any different.

> cleaning out a restroom and resupplying it that’s easy as hell.

But is it cheaper than paying someone around $5 in labor to do it? Because until it is, it's not economical to have a robot do it.

Because you’re seeing this firsthand? It’s not what I’m seeing being involved in both investment banking and architecture. This kind of untethered speculation based on feels is so misguided. Both fields are seeing significant upheaval due to AI with no sign of that impact slowing down.

turns out its also very easy to create slides and floor plans and yes its easier to train for those.

I think you may also be incorrect on your notion that training data is proportional to good models if anything the opposite is true. what ai models are ultimately trying to be are a universal theorem prover and encode all human knowledge into "theorems" and rulesets

not trying to come off too harsh here but i think most of the work is just innovating on the frontier or people pleasing

> architecture because you can't generate infinite synthetic training data for those.

It's just harder to do. Would not be at all surprised to see e.g. Autodesk bought out for exactly that purpose.

> Is this not just a gimmick? You still need people on hand to take over if the robot has an issue, I don't see how it would reduce labour costs.

"take over IF the robot has an issue" is exactly how it reduces labor costs.

2020: 10 waiters, waiting tables. You're on the hook for each of their salaries.

2030: 10 robots, one human waiter passively overseeing the cluster. You're on the hook for minor parts/occasional repair for the robots, and one person's salary.

Its not about a 100% staff elimination, but a large overhead reduction ensuring the few humans you're keeping around are more efficient overall for dollars generated in revenue versus the all-human staff before.

Plus, in certain cases, like kiosks replacing cashiers at fast food establishments, there's now one less qualification needed from employees (good social skills), increasing the pool of acceptable options you can hire where before some of those candidates would have been unsuitable for the job.

The demand for food delivery in the places where the robots are viable is nearly infinite. My city has had them for two years and there are still just as many humans doing deliveries, they are just sharing the already-crowded sidewalks with robots.

I don't use them; not because of any moral objection, but because they can't come inside buildings. The whole point of food delivery is to avoid going outside. Most human couriers come directly to your unit. The food delivery companies have spoiled us too much, and we are not ready to return to a world where you have to put on shoes to get food. Oddly, the delivery robots are probably better suited to suburbia, where folks are used to answering the front door to pick up a food delivery. But the distances involved aren't viable until you have delivery Waymos that can move at highway speeds.

It seems in China hotels commonly have robots deliver room service meals. I guess it makes sense, the building is not too hard to navigate for a robot, and it would take a worker 3+ minutes for each delivery. I thought it was maybe a gimmick, but it seems >30% of hotels have them now.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202609/10/WS6aa122a5e4b06d4a...

The thing with those jobs where its like 1 guy operating the skid steer and six guys watching with arms folded, is those other six guys are just waiting their turn to do something specialized on the job. The skid steer work is the limiting factor, and that idle labor is worth paying to have on call on site essentially for when the specific needed task is done. To an extent for sure, but that is the idea of more specialized jobs. There isn't always enough work in front of you to have a specialist work 100% 24/7 like some CPU, but you want them around for when there is work for them to do.

no i think there are alot of people inside companies that are essentially playing telephone. they are communicating, writing documents and emails, "working". but really they actually produce nothing

It's also a terribly foolish idea to try and drive endless efficiency out of scenarios like this. People have tried this with bureaucracies many times, and then one day a disaster happens or they have a huge project with a deadline or whatever, and the flexibility/inefficiency of the organization has been driven out to the point that previously achievable goals become impossible. Slack in systems is a _good_ thing.

I guess we can evaluate this claim by looking at profit margins. In industries with thin margins (eg., retail often has 1-2%) then there is significant competitive pressure. There we would not see "spare labour" because it would be competed-away.

In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.

I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.

That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.

Yep, the "bullshit jobs" narrative sounds like an elegant description of corporate reality at the macro level, but always seems to fall apart whenever I've seen specific examples given which do in fact serve a useful purpose when interrogated.

(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)

> a model needs to be attractive

From what I see on many recent TV ads, not really.

Your dream requires only you to have that power though.

Longer dev cycles gave management time to think through and correct bad business decisions. Now they'll get to tighten that feedback loop where bad decisions (or good ones) get implemented quickly. It will be interesting to see what that split is and the reaction to that.

I dunno. It definitely can happen.

Code was never the bottleneck.

I've worked with plenty of teams that did the "in prod the same day" trick without AI.

The problem was just fucking ego. Designer has an ego, product owner has an ego, QA has an ego, stakeholder has an ego, platform teams have massive egos, developers have egos.

Unrelated but: the only reason people are shipping more with AI is because more people are ok with slop now.

AI makes it all worse, because office workers are now trying to take each other's job and trying to protect their fiefdom.

Ego and agendas multiplied by 1000.

The real culprit is a combination of too many levels of hierarchy and performance reviews IMO. Especially when multiple levels along a management chain disagree on what a report must work on.

This is the kind of shit I have to fight every day. I have to align my manager, skip, VP. If I don't align them, one of them will be necessarily pissed no matter what I do, and the pissed one will fire orders down to hate on me, overriding the opinions of anyone on the way down.

Stakeholder seems like a fundamental concept that you can't really get around. For example, I can't change the time buses pick up students at schools if I haven't worked with the schools to know when their kids will be let out. I guess you can say, "they'll figure it out when the buses aren't there" -- but this just seems like you're picking a fight you could've avoided.

Yeah I fucking hate them.

I have to mention words like "stakeholder" at behavioral interviews and to leadership just to sound like I belong at my seniority level.

But I don't want anyone holding any stakes. I wish people would just get shit done. Shit that matters to the CEO. Or leave.

AI gives all the cooks the idea that they have the technical knowhow needed to take technical decisions

Are they free though? You have to pay for inference

Lest we forget that late-training is now 2/3 coding tasks because it is the main area where there is ROI for users, such that we can find a mutually beneficial arrangement to pay off their massive investments and debt, maybe, tbd - open weights may wreck their financial projections