This discussion also presents the Industrial Revolution as a smooth transition to a new economy, but that was not the case. After the revolution, most people's quality of life actually declined. Sure, people got new jobs, but those were mostly factory jobs. People were working in dirty environments full of chemicals hazards and toxins. There were no safety standards at all. A lot of workers were being killed or maimed by the machineries. They had to work 14-hour shifts every day. You even had kids who were 7-8 years old who had to work. Plowing the fields looked like a dream job compared to the most factory jobs at that time. It took decades of protests, activism, and labor movements for the ordinary working people to finally get the benefits of productivity that the machines allowed.

I’m not a big YouTube commenter normally but since I generally really like these conversations I thought I’d push back on some of the points.  Broadly both Dimitri and Casey rely heavily on this sorta folk narrative about what the industrial revolution was, and that it was a bunch of people essentially trading in their scythes and plows, moving to the city, and enjoying a significantly higher quality of life.  In reality, it was an incredibly violent and destructive process that took 100s of years, and many of the people living through it actually would have seen it as representing a dramatic decrease in their quality of life.  When you gaze back at it from the standpoint of living in the 21st century USA, i think it is easy to imagine that it was inevitable that that process would lead to the cheap consumer goods and increased quality of living we enjoy today.  I do also think its worth factoring in that many parts of that improved quality of life, take for example the 40 hour work week, were won by people in direct opposition to industrialists (in this case, the factory workers/labour unions), who you maybe could say are analogous in some ways to the anti-ai crowd today.   Getting a bit rambly here but just wanted to add this, since in general I’ve found this series very clear headed and a breath of fresh air.  Thanks!

We should reframe “a white collar worker replaced by ai” as “a regular person’s salary was stolen by a billionaire”.

As a senior software engineer I have not seen any of my fellow engineers replaced by AI, but I haven’t seen any junior engineers in years and the rest of us are expected to do the work of 2+ people. Meanwhile all the new budget/investment or theoretical profit from productivity goes straight to Anthropic, not to people who need jobs.

The very first conversation here was jokingly titled "should I become a carpenter?". And now you literally discuss the transition from software engineering to construction. What an irony!

Thank you for these great discussions!

EDIT: for anyone seeing this comment, Demetri replied in the comment chain, very interesting discussion.
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There's only so many things humans can do:
- manual labour (move things around, assemble them)
- plan / organise manual labour (as in, thinking)
- communicate with other people to organise the manual labour

When we automated manual labour, the other 2 became more prevalent. If we automate these other two, there is no more skills humans have that can be useful.
By the way, going back to manual labour (carpenter argument), if everyone is now a carpenter/plumber, the value of that labour goes way down. So it's not going to only impact white collar.

On allowing smaller teams to do bigger project, this will have one consequence : bigger concentration of wealth/rewards from success into smaller groups of people (a founder instead of a company), generating more inequality, driving less jobs, less ability to buy the things made by the few successful products etc.

The historical analogy with the Industrial Revolution is one that should be teased out more, I think. The Industrial Revolution created a working-poverty underclass for the better part of 150 years (broken only by the two World Wars, the rise of unions, and institution labor laws), and more or less directly led to both Communism and Fascism. We might want to find some way to avoid that sort of thing if possible.

We already have the technology to build all the housing we need and grow all the food we need. It's not capacity that's the problem, it's artificial scarcity.

Something I worry about is that if your job goes from doing X, to babysitting AI to do X, your job now has a much lower skill floor. It makes you incredibly replaceable. If AI is doing the real work, how will anyone have job security of any kind?

1:21:20 There were a lot of people who kept plowing fields instead of moving to the cheapest housing in the nearest city and working in a 19th century factory. The problem was that mechanized farming drove down commodity crop prices so much that eventually those who didn’t or couldn’t switch had to sell their farms. Or their children had to go get the factory jobs because the advent of factory farming meant there wasn’t anything worthwhile for them to do on their parents’ farm. That’s not to say that non-mechanized farming was inherently desirable, but it’s not like working in a factory was necessarily so much more desirable that everyone wanted to throw down their plows and switch.

It may be more true now of our largely service-based economy that people would prefer service sector jobs to physical labor jobs even at the same or slightly lower wages, but I’m not automatically convinced. For software engineers and other people in relatively prestigious careers that have an element of a creative outlet that is probably true (at least thinking personally), but I think there’s probably quite a few people in more mundane service sector work (a grocery store cashier, for example) that would be interested in jobs that let them be outside more and be more active, particularly if those jobs carried the same level of pay and social prestige.

For me the fundamental issue I have with the job dislocation issue, is that I don’t have any confidence that these AI companies actually care about the people being dislocated. I go to how corporations behave  in general which is to create value for shareholders and investors. Unemployment is collateral damage and not their direct responsibility.

Love the videos Casey, wish you would pack them in audio form and push it as a podcast, it would be excellent to listen to on the go.

All I want to know, is how long until I can prompt "Build me a Windows 11 compatible version of Windows 7 with no Microsoft telemetry features and no Windows Update."  I'd add "make no mistakes", but even without that it would still be a superior version.

theres a lot of mention about this utopic future where we do not need to sell our labour to live a decent life. theres only talk about the tecnology of AI without an aknowledgement of the funadamental changes our economic sistem would necessitate, and the forces that would be requiered to achieve it.

We already could (and should) all be working less with better conditions. We have the automation tecnologie and resources to provide every person in the planet with food, housing and healthcare. The reason why we are still working so many hours is due to greed and the manufacturing of unnecessary markets, plus an inconceivable amount of material waste (deserts filled with airplanes, landfills of cars and clothes, etc.)

Thanks again for this amazing podcast!

One issue I have with the hypothetical jobs that people do come up to is that they are significantly less skilled and easier to replace jobs than the one AI removes. That means that even IF it creates jobs, those jobs will be worse, and worse paid jobs, meaning that the overall wealth gab will keep raising, now on steroids.
Concentration of wealth and lower worker rights, earnings and bargening power will make the economy and lives of people worse.
So even the happy outcome of this is still bad, just not as bad.

Of note, previous major disruptions occurred over a generation, not a single decade. Separately, I really like having a computer that I can program that does work for me; I'm completely uninterested in reversing the roles and toiling to clean up after my computer.

Edit: LOL. I unpaused the video and Casey raised exactly this point 😅

My main issue with the argument that we can't predict what new jobs might exist in say 50 years from now is that we kinda sorta can. We can't say for sure exactly what those jobs will entail but we can make decent educated guesses. A service that exists only for people to share cat pictures with each other (a social network for example) sounds weird until we realise that we have always shared things with each other via other means. Like letters, verbal stories, etc. There are certain basic requirements that we have as a species and basically all meaningful work can be boiled down to a function of those. In all even if we can't predict the exact shape of the job market 50 years from now we should be able to at least predict what functions it would serve and make educated guesses as to how AI would be used in those functions if it were to become actually useful.

PS: In my opinion in any future with actually useful AI we will have barely any jobs. Almost all work that can be automated will be automated. We see this even with every AI bro's favourite - "<<insert fast food chain>> is hiring". Due to the proliferation of online deliveries many restaurants here in my city have reduced headcounts. They don't need as many people at their counters as they used to. Not even for answering the phone for home deliveries because it is all done via an app.

We really need to start delineating between productive and unproductive work as the classical economists did. There is so much confusion. Many of these jobs discussed were never productive to begin with but consumptive

Ya know, there’s a 4th option here. Everyone loses their job, there are no meaningful replacements, and the result is a handful of people on earth live in unimaginable splendor while everyone else lives in squalor. This has been the norm through history. The rich are marching us back towards the mean. If y’all want to see where we’re headed, just go to Guatemala City.

Not sure why I've been skipping this videos, this was actually really nice to hear and entertaining. Keep up the good work guys,
Now I'll go watch the other 8 hahah

Another excellent and enriching conversation!