just-a-dreamer- t1_ja4mntq wrote
There will be a massacre among white collar jobs. I expect accelerated layoffs toeards the end of this decade.
The problem is, this are professionals that are hard to retrain. A fired grocery/factory worker can plug into something new due to low barriers.
If you want the professional lifestyle, you might take 5 years for a new profession and job experience for a good sallary position.
And AI will catch up to you in 5 years. Firing white collar workers destablizes the pillars of the capitalist system, which is good at large.
zxq52 t1_ja5q2n5 wrote
It's the bankers not some programmer. Guaranteed most here think the US government creates dollars. Nope, only bankers create dollars. In fact, even the physical bills and coins which represent less than 5 percent of total dollars are paid for by the central bank to the treasury. Digital dollars they just wish into existence.
dwarfarchist9001 t1_ja6en7i wrote
Fractional reserve banking doesn't actually create dollars, even though the effect on the economy is similar to if it did.
zxq52 t1_ja6kgf5 wrote
It's not even a fractional reserve any more and it absolutely creates dollars. In fact the banking system is the only thing that does create dollars.
It doesn't surprise me in the least though that reddit defends the real culprit. Go after the little guys is always the response here or something unrelated like small and medium size businesses.
In short, the banking system ABSOLUTELY creates dollars and is the only thing that does.
They stopped requiring reserves in 2020. https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
You may be one of those that tries to call dollars debts or some such nonsense but they are literally dollars. They spend as dollars and are legally accepted as dollars and only they are accepted as dollars. They are dollars. Sorry.
DorkRockGalactic t1_ja7y2xr wrote
You're confusing a lot of things, and nobody on Reddit is going after the little guys. You're talking to random strangers most of which are the little guys. We're all individuals with different opinions and knowledge.
Money is more accurately described as an abstraction of obligation.
I worked 10 hours in the field ergo you owe me 2 bushels of rice next week.
I gave you a chicken ergo you owe me 5 hours housework in the future.
Except it's exchangeable for any service, good, or property like real estate/machinery/whatever. It's needed so we can avoid bartering all the time which is slow and more complicated than using money.
The Federal Reserve is a Central Bank. It behaves like a Credit Union for the Banks we actually get to be customers of.
Every bank like BoA, Wells Fargo, and so on has their own bank account at the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve doesn't print anything. It creates money abstractly, most often digitally, by incrementing numbers in those bank accounts that each retail/whatever bank has with them.
The Federal Reserve has one advantage nobody else has, which is it can buy Treasury Bonds from it's "customers" the retail banks by creating money out of thin air. It does it by "incrementing the numbers in those bank accounts" and then it takes ownership of the Treasuries it's member-banks sold to them.
However it is buying Treasuries from the Banks in order to create money. It can also sell those Treasuries later because it owns them after it purchased them.
It also has a disadvantage nobody else has. When the Federal Reserve gets paid for the Treasuries it sells, the money disappears into thin air. This is how the Federal Reserve destroys money.
Fractional Reserve doesn't create more money the same way, like the OP said. What happens is when you deposit 1000 dollars in your bank, they loan say 800 dollars of it out.
They still owe you 1000 dollars. However now someone else has 800 dollars to spend, but they do have to pay it back eventually. That person may spend the 800 on a hotel so now the hotel has 800 dollars to spend, and so on.
This is why "Money" is debt. However it's better characterized as an abstraction of obligation. The person who was loaned 800 dollars has an obligation to the bank that loaned it to them. The bank has an obligation to you, the person that deposited 1000 dollars.
It works as long as the bank doesn't go bankrupt. They do a lot of complex stuff to make sure that doesn't happen. Fractional Reserve is more of a regulation that makes sure the bank doesn't go bankrupt, and can give you your 1000 dollars back when you ask for it even if the person they loaned 800 dollars to hasn't paid THEM back yet.
Not everyone wants their money back all at the same time, so it usually works out. If everyone does want their money back at the same time, the bank goes bankrupt. This is a "run on the bank" which Fractional Reserve tries to force them to avoid like a sort of safety.
That doesn't mean it will always work though.
It's a complex system and it's hard to understand. The complexity and the abstractions all over the place make it seem nefarious until you understand it better.
As far as the "hurt the little guy" stuff, that's even more complicated and it's related to politics, the Federal Reserve, and the law, and so on. It's not just the fault of the Federal Reserve it's our leaders across the board in corporate offices, in government, everywhere to blame.
We haven't built a system that encourages fairness but the Federal Reserve is only a small part of it. It's more of a tool that doesn't care one way or the other. You can use a hammer to build a house or you can use it to bash someone's skull in. The hammer is blameless it's the user that is at fault.
It's better to focus on the political leaders as well as people in the executive and judicial branches because they can actually do something about it, and they haven't. They've been working for the very rich.
zxq52 t1_jaasj8y wrote
The federal reserve absolutely creates dollars. Describing various open market operations it engages in changes NOTHING. You are just describing the general operation.
>However it's better characterized as an abstraction of obligation.
It spends as money, it's money. It's just plain stupid to suggest otherwise.
Once again US banks are no longer fractional reserves. I posted the link.
>can give you your 1000 dollars back when you ask for it even if the person they loaned 800 dollars to hasn't paid THEM back yet.
This hasn't been an issue since the vast majority of money went digital. They don't even consider it any more. The point of the reserves in the past WAS so you could they could hand out paper money and overall would have enough.
>It's a complex system and it's hard to understand
Not at all. It is when you want to be deceptive.
>The complexity and the abstractions all over the place make it seem nefarious until you understand it better.
That's just funny. A central authority with absolute control over everyone's lives that has the ability to create endless amounts of money with no one able to know how they spend it...nahh....not nefarious at all.
>t's not just the fault of the Federal Reserve it's our leaders across the board in corporate offices, in government, everywhere to blame.
No, it's just the central banks. That's really it. Good to know their sycophants are all over the place though.
>It's more of a tool that doesn't care one way or the other.
Cool. Let's audit it.
>It's better to focus on the political leaders as well as people in the executive and judicial branches because they can actually do something about it, and they haven't. They've been working for the very rich.
If you aren't working for the bankers, you should be! They'll pay you handsomely for this level of propaganda.
DorkRockGalactic t1_jaavo80 wrote
You're a conspiracy nut. You need help!
zxq52 t1_jab2emv wrote
I guess it's crazy to think an entity that can create endless amounts of money could become evil.
You're right. Let's just vote harder.
[deleted] t1_ja5p1z4 wrote
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DorkRockGalactic t1_ja7zm2h wrote
I don't think there will be.
These AIs are dependent on human output in order to be created in the first place. A LLM isn't going to create a new philosophy or a new style of art or literature.
They're not going to have ideas for new software or consumer products. They have no creativity, they regurgitate patterns that humans created.
They're actually not as impressive as the news or our feelings make them out to be.
We haven't created AGI yet and we're nowhere close.
They will be force multipliers, like a firearm is in war, rather than replacements.
The person using ChatGPT to write blogs still has to spin up the websites, decide on the topics, prompt ChatGPT correctly, and then has to review the output to make sure it makes sense.
I tried getting it to generate a resume for me the other day. It made a lot of little mistakes with pronouns or content. I had to prompt it again and again to get it right. Then I had to do one final edit because it has some weird parts.
It did save me about 1-2 hours though if I was writing it by myself.
[deleted] t1_ja6qkrc wrote
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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja6va1y wrote
Narrow AI is more than capable to replace most white collar positions.
There is a limit what the market can bear in new services. When you have 5x more capacities as a law firm as an example, you do not have 5x more clients. You fire 4 out of 5 lawyers. They are gone.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja6wnku wrote
> Narrow AI is more than capable to replace most white collar positions.
Problem being that it's not wise to replace those positions. Especially considering so many of them are fairly highly paid, so even a substantial UBI isn't enough to satisfy the sense of loss of economic stability and security.
Yet we're hurtling headlong into doing this, for everyone, all at once it seems, and somehow thinking everything will be okay.
just-a-dreamer- t1_ja6xeuw wrote
If you expect fairness in the capitalist system, you are in the wrong place.
You are nothing but a unit of production calculated against a unit of revenue. Firing white collar workers is the most logical thing a business can do, for they cause the highest expense.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja6zght wrote
I'm not saying you're wrong, not one bit.
I'm just saying that, while this made sense historically, we're approaching a point where this mindset is likely going to cause civilizational disruption— and not the good kind (if there even is such a thing as "good" civilizational disruption)
And not because "white collar workers are important" or anything. I mean the prospect of double digit unemployment, with the intent on reaching triple digit unemployment, and thinking that everyone will be all for this if we pay them $1,000 or so every month (or maybe even $2,000 if generous) is outrageously psychotic and sheltered thinking
Like, to everyone on this subreddit who says "I can't wait for robots to take all our jobs!" Just.... I almost want to say "Fuck off, you don't understand what you're asking." It's not as simple as "I hate my job, let a robot do it so I can use VR and synthetic media all day." Maybe that's what it means to you. That's not what it means to 90% of society. What Average Joe is hearing is "A robot's taking my job, in fact my whole career and the life ahead of me that I planned is now obsolete. I might get something that isn't even minimum wage to subsist upon, or I might get Soviet communism instead. Also, my grandchildren are going to be turned into nonhuman digital intelligences inside of a computer, and no, I don't have any say in it because some incredibly techno-optimistic tech elites decided to create Skynet."
You'd have to actually be deeply, profoundly autistic or socially retarded to think that the massive, overwhelming reaction to this isn't going to be "Fuck that, I'm getting my gun and shooting up the data centers." Not by some lone wolf. Not by some small group of Luddites. I mean by, you know, the 50% to 70% of society you just unemployed.
It could be good. It could genuinely play out well. But we've taken precisely zero steps towards such a positive outcome.
Lawjarp2 t1_ja78q97 wrote
Exactly. But even scarier is the fact that initial set of people who will lose jobs will go from high paying to not even UBI yet. Without UBI this will be chaos in just 5-6 years.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja7a4co wrote
It's not just the people in high paying jobs. You can add creative jobs to that too. And that's important because of our cultural insulation over what creativity is and how it's a "human" thing. We already saw a fierce protest against AI art simply over still images. Imagine what it's going to be like when it's full storytelling, multimedia projects, and music.
A combination of white collar and creative work being automated in such short order is disastrous. But I'm going a step further to say that even a lot of blue collar jobs will be getting automated in a few short years once robotics pick up. Not all of them, surely, but enough that the general unemployment rate should be around 50% to 70%.
UBI is not enough.
Even communism is not enough.
This is not a problem that can be fixed just by throwing money at it. It's a cultural, psychological, and behavioral issue as well. We're going to tell hundreds of millions of people still living a decade or even two decades in the past "You're out of a job, you're of a career, and your grandchildren are going to be posthumans."
What exactly does this sub think is going to happen? Really, honestly. What do Singularitarians seriously think is going to happen? Everyone shrugs and says "Okay, good"?
If so, then I might actually need to leave this sub for good.
just-a-dreamer- t1_ja73evy wrote
I hope people shoot the elites, not the data centers. I see no problem in that. Intelligent people are more efficient fighters.
In simple terms, in capitalism people fear about their jobs getting automated. In socialism people celebrate the reduction of labor through automation.
The eradication of the capitalist system is a an accomplishment in itself, the height of human civilization.
Besides, what other system than socialism could distribute the fruits of AI labor across civilization? At some point in time next to no human being will be able to "work for a living".
Even if you try hard to be the best you can be, it won't be good enough. The capitalist system has nothing to offer to you.
[deleted] t1_ja75nzf wrote
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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja76pcd wrote
Are there more workers than ever before? I don't see them. The share of the population that is actually working is declining for decades.
When does a young person truly start working? Close to a majority after college. It was at 15 or earlier not long ago.
Huge parts of the population is on disability, which is more or less wellfare. Millions suck off military/govt pensions after 2-3 decades of work which is also wellfare in a sense.
And there is the ever growing masses of retirees, from old age to asset millionaires living off passive income.
All in all, people who actually go out and work are fewer and fewer in number.
Sad_Anteater3428 t1_ja7s2r4 wrote
This is ahistorical nonsense. The lowest labor force participation on record (since we started tracking) was 58.1% in December 1954 (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART). Remember, far fewer women worked then. The US population in 1954 was roughly 154M people. Today it is roughly 336M (source: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html). For added context, unemployment during the Great Depending was somewhere around 25% (source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1948/article/pdf/labor-force-employment-and-unemployment-1929-39-estimating-methods.pdf) and much higher among people of color and women. So, yes, there are far more workers today and far lower unemployment.
Labor force participation rate has declined from its all-time high in the late 90s, but population has increased at the same time. In 2003, when the labor force participation rate was above 65%, there were roughly 138M workers in the US. In January 2023, there were over 160M workers (source: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-employment.htm), greater than the entire US population when labor force participation was at its lowest — and 22M people higher than two decades ago despite a ~3.5%-4% decline in participation rate.
Are there problems in this country? Absolutely. But we can’t fix them if we ignore basic facts.
just-a-dreamer- t1_ja7tz7p wrote
That is because large parts of the USA were agricultural 70 years ago. It was and is a core conservative agenda to not count farm workers on payroll to work them as semi slaves.
Of course, it has racist origins concerning blacks and mexicans.
Large parts of the category of white women didn't officially work untill the 1960's, but of course they did work. Home industry was way more established few generatioms ago with sewing machines and odd jobs. Most women also did the job a daycare worker would attend to these days.
The youth did work full time starting as young as 16 not that long ago. Extended higher education has brought down their contribution. There is only so much work you can contribute while studying full time.
While the labor participation rate rose on paper, it actually went down. It only depends what you count as labor.
The black sharecroper that puts his family to work in the south didn't count as such.
Sad_Anteater3428 t1_ja7wqdt wrote
While your basic premise of systemic undercounting of Black and Latino workers is correct, that changed during the 1980s (source: https://www.bls.gov/mlr/1999/12/art1full.pdf). Housework by (predominantly) women has never been counted. And the share of white male workers has declined since the 1950s. As the linked article states, “In contrast to the labor force participation of women, those of men decreased significantly during the 1950–98 period” (largely because of better disability insurance; disabled/seriously injured men had no choice but to work 50+ years ago) .And, again, the population has more than doubled since 1954. Even if the BLS were consistently undercounting people of color, we’d definitely notice if roughly a third of the population were still undercounted in labor force participation.
In any case, changes in how the data were collected/interpreted 40 or 70 years ago still don’t account for the fact that we have roughly 22M more workers today than twenty years ago.
Edit: Updated with partial reason for decline among white male workers
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