Yet another Hacker News

If AI displaces human workers, they will lose more than just pay

27 points andsoitis 2 hours ago 37 comments

verdverm 2 hours ago | parent

We only need look at what the computer did to many (60%) non-college educated people who have difficultly finding meaningful work which can provide for a family.

Daron Acemoglu is talking about this and Building Pro-Worker AI. His 2024 Nobel Prize lecture is quite good (as are his fellow laureates that year)

https://www.nber.org/papers/w34854

nevdka 53 minutes ago | parent

Why would you assume that was the fault of computers? There are many social, economic, and policy changes that would have much larger effects.

verdverm 39 minutes ago | parent

It's not the fault of computers, but they changed the fabric. It was a select few of our fellow humans, who also did deregulation, financialization, and globalization. They all started at the same time and have concentrated wealth and power the last 4-5 decades.

Computers are still a significant factor because most new tasks created were cognitive and needed university education. Or another way, the automation that computers brought eliminated jobs in labor, but we did not create new jobs for those people. The three others were instrumental in that side of the equation.

0c3ca83 1 hour ago | parent

Yes. It removes political power. As a thought experiment, what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?

What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?

augment_me 1 hour ago | parent

I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment and mass extermination of those that refuse.

Otherwise you might end up with disruptive things like protests, blockage of value creating infrastructure, etc.

Another less dramatic option would be containment in prisons or similar where minimal costs can be incurred.

drivebyhooting 1 hour ago | parent

Don’t be daft. All that man power would be excellent for bolstering the army and invading neighboring countries.

I imagine a human body will still be cheaper and more agile than robots for a long while.

altcognito 1 hour ago | parent

Russian typing detected.

ElProlactin 1 hour ago | parent

The irony of comments like this is that the vast majority of people who make them would not be in the group they think they belong to.

pjc50 27 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, that for many people is a "AI must be prevented from happening at all because it will bring about this outcome" argument.

akst 27 minutes ago | parent

> I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment

I say this who is voluntarily returning to university to pursue a different profession after working 10 years as a software engineer. This isn't going to work for 95% of people, people who have dependents children and partners, mortgages.

> mass extermination of those that refuse

I have no words, but you sound like a dickhead.

tavavex 6 minutes ago | parent

You're still undershooting just how grim the optimal outcome of our system is. It's not going to be about 'refusal', like taking a bargain and making choices. If total automation is achieved, huge swaths of people will be placed into that bracket immediately, based largely on their luck, the country they live in and their wealth. An automated world doesn't need this many people to run itself, so only a chosen few will make it through. The rest will eventually be slowly destroyed in the most cruel ways possible. People will keep chanting "Adapt or die" until it turns into simply "Die".

jongjong 1 hour ago | parent

No it doesn't. People can still protest, block roads, boycott etc... If they get UBI/UHI, they will have more time to engage politically too (in a productive way).

psadri 56 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps the real answer is people’s buying power. If people can’t withhold their work, they could withhold their spending, ie boycott misbehaving entities.

10111001 43 minutes ago | parent

>> Yes. It removes political power. As a thought experiment, what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?

>> What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?

> Perhaps the real answer is people’s buying power. If people can’t withhold their work, they could withhold their spending, ie boycott misbehaving entities.

But if they don't have work, they won't have buying power to withhold. Post AI-displacement, the economy will reorient around serving the people who still have buying power (the oligarchs and their hangers-on).

Expect demand for food to plummet and demand for dick-waving pyramids and rocket cars to skyrocket.

mx7zysuj4xew 36 minutes ago | parent

They start waving flags around, voting for someone who will promise to "make things great again" all the while languishing in poverty and dying of fentanyl overdoses

Buttons840 34 minutes ago | parent

The left tea party and left version of Trump hasn't arrived yet, but it's coming.

jacobolus 16 minutes ago | parent

The "Tea Party" was an astroturf operation organized by GOP operatives and funded by the Koch brothers and some other billionaire donors. Its appearance of popular support was substantially artificial and heavily amplified by supportive GOP-aligned media.

What kind of "left" version are you imagining?

pj_mukh 2 minutes ago | parent

“what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?”

This is an interesting question and I’d love to come to a good answer that works for all, but can we also accept that we went from a world that had people manually light lamps around the city like 150 years ago to the full electric lights. Do we then stop that progress now and keep people manually collecting garbage when a replacement tech is around the corner?

cadamsdotcom 1 hour ago | parent

Change hurts those who don't move with the change. Nothing has changed.

axitanull 56 minutes ago | parent

This cliche keeps getting repeated, but it offers no actual insight and ignores all nuances.

noufalibrahim 52 minutes ago | parent

Of course. This has been proven again and again on the economic level. People have to let go of old skills and learn new ones to survive.

For AI though, there is a mental angle which is being discussed now (brain gyms etc.) which was an early concern of mine. When we make something, there is an tangible value created for the buyer/consumer but there is also a more subtle positive effect the on the builder/maker. e.g. even if it's it's cheaper, faster, (and in an imaginary worlds), more healthy to buy packaged food, sitting down and making it subtly changes the chef who makes the food. Sort of the motivation for a grandmother baking a cake for her grandkids.

I've been able to realise many of my abandoned projects due to AI. I can spin up a few agents and have them build things completely without intervention more or less. Many of these are programs I use daily. This is definitely huge. However, I remember the kick of struggling with problems during projects which was where most, if not all, the learning happened. All that experience is what makes me able to command and control these agents properly. It had an effect on me beyond the outcome (most of the projects are dead/abandoned anyway). Another example - I remember an old company called "Bond" which had a robot to create stationery using a calligraphic hand. Contrast that to the almost spiritual effect doing calligraphy has on a master penman. Using automation to create fine calligraphy gets you the former but the individual and society loses the latter. It's not immediately clear to me what the end result will be but I do feel that a lot is being lost.

This is the problem.

axitanull 39 minutes ago | parent

I like that calligraphy example, I am afraid that's how a field would stagnate: the tools become advanced, but now with less and less people wanting to approach and struggle with learning the field, the human intuition, the community effort, and the mastery to push past the bleeding edge withers.

(Unless if AGI could do something like that.)

xeonmc 13 minutes ago | parent

Poignantly illustrated in this Asimov story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668168

WelkinFolk 34 minutes ago | parent

While I agree that new skills must be learnt to survive, what exactly are these new skills in the AI-age?

I see this line everywhere - whenever someone's mourning their loss of a career, there's responses telling the person to "man up" (for lack of a better phrase) and learn new skills. Nobody says what these "new skills" are?

chii 23 minutes ago | parent

> Nobody says what these "new skills" are?

it's unknown, because those skills and work associated with them are not yet created.

Just like how being a live streamer (or youtuber) is not a known skill until the advent of streaming platforms and their associated economies. If you asked on the internet in 1995 what kids would have done for a job in 2025, none of them would've said streamer.

WelkinFolk 13 minutes ago | parent

Understood. Then how does one brace for the upcoming slaughter? People knew that getting into software would become the hot new thing - almost guaranteeing a source of income. Hence the "push" for everyone to get into "coding", at least in my country (India) and from what I've heard on the internet - the US too.

How do people brace for the changes AI brings?

jubilee33 2 minutes ago | parent

That's a pretty philosophical questions when what you want is a concrete answer.

First step is to let go of the fear of it.

Sounds cheesy but reading Ekehardt Tolle helped me.

cadamsdotcom 5 minutes ago | parent

Stuff that used to be hard is easy.

You're blind to the stuff that's easy making previously impossible things hard.

jdprgm 1 hour ago | parent

how the hell does paywalled content possibly get upvoted more than downvoted. are there really that many economist.com subscribers here?

EtienneK 59 minutes ago | parent

You can’t downvote submissions on HN.

bezier-curve 54 minutes ago | parent

Actually, you can't unless you meet a karma threshold. I have been on this site for 6 years and I still haven't reached it because my opinions are too controversial (apparently).

jraph 38 minutes ago | parent

You can't downvote submissions, regardless your karma.

shinryuu 39 minutes ago | parent

What happens is that people flag content instead.

SkyeCA 37 minutes ago | parent

Most people read the headlines and nothing more, the same as with any other aggregator.

gertlex 11 minutes ago | parent

Guilty... but also, I think about article up/downvotes an order of magnitude less than I click the links. I wonder what fraction of users do voting without clicking links.

totetsu 22 minutes ago | parent

All my AI agents know how to circumvent paywalls, silly human just cant keep up

arnon 49 minutes ago | parent

there was also a report i co-authored that talked about the tax implication, at least as of 2025 [1]

[1] https://get.paid.ai/hubfs/The%20$2.7%20Billion%20Agent%20Tax...