This is sarcasm or?
Artificial Intelligence thread
- Thread starter 9dashline
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Yeah, the transition period, the short and medium terms, will be hard for some folks. But the long term prospects are absolutely promising.what did agricultural machinery do to the agricultural output that people consume? Nowadays, less people, at least in developed countries, work in the agricultural field even though more agricultural output is produced. The fundamental factor is that at least some folks will become more productive; and economics 101 tells us that growth in productivity increases economies.
The argument commits what's essentially a conservation violation. It tracks the *distribution pathway* (wages) and, upon seeing that pathway eliminated, concludes the *productive output* itself disappears. That's like watching someone replace a steam turbine with a more efficient one and predicting the grid will go dark because the old turbine is offline.
Decompose it:
**1. Jevons Paradox is the immediate rebuttal.** If agentic coding makes software production 10-100x cheaper, demand for software doesn't stay constant — it explodes. Every problem that was previously uneconomical to solve with software becomes tractable. The historical pattern is unbroken: making a productive input cheaper increases total consumption of the output, not decreases it. The argument assumes fixed demand for coding output, which is the lump-of-labor fallacy wearing a tech costume.
**2. The spending collapse thesis requires money to vanish from the system, which it can't.** If firms spend less on developer salaries, that surplus accrues *somewhere* — retained earnings, lower prices, dividends, reinvestment. Each of those channels re-enters the spending stream. Lower prices transfer purchasing power directly to consumers. Reinvestment creates new demand. The only leak is idle cash balances, which is a monetary policy problem with known solutions, not a thermodynamic inevitability.
**3. The implicit model is a closed system at equilibrium, but economies are open dissipative structures.** They don't conserve jobs — they conserve the capacity to generate surplus and route it. Eliminating a high-friction conversion pathway (expensive human labor for routine tasks) and replacing it with a low-friction one increases the system's total work capacity. The argument treats labor as fuel being consumed rather than as a catalyst facilitating transformation.
The *real* concern buried in there — that the transition creates a severe *distribution* mismatch where capital captures most of the surplus while displaced workers can't access it fast enough — is legitimate. But that's an institutional plumbing problem, not a thermodynamic one. The system has more free energy available, not less. The question is whether the distribution infrastructure adapts fast enough to prevent local damage during the transition.
FriedRiceNSpice
Major
Productivity advancements reshuffled labor from agriculture to industry. Further technological advancements and globalization reshuffled some labor from industry to knowledge work. Once AI drastically reduce the number of knowledge worker jobs- where will labor be redirected?
We will see more "social" workers. Kai Fuu Lee has explained it well in his book "AI and superpowers". You can listen to it on YouTube.
It’s now the top 6!
Was gonna post that.
Really shows how things change fast.
OpenAI not too long ago was thought to be untouchable and now it has come to this.
Still waiting for the international release, damn lawyers.