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I was just thinking SWEs and AI researchers should all unionize before AI becomes AGI

Everyone is holding their breath praying AGI either will, or will not, come before the chickens come home to roost.

What is this "everyone" running from?

Collapse of return on investment

Not sure that makes sense. As amazing a technical feat as AGI will be, does it follow that s.tons of money will immediately be made? That's not really how humans act, historically. Any migration to new technology takes years, decades. There are still steam engines pulling revenue service trains.

Yes - if AGI is made, nearly immediately every knowledge worker’s labor value goes to zero over night.

This may or may not include AI researchers.


Can you guys just say the quiet part out loud?

That you want slaves. You want slaves. This is what you are asking for.

Unless you're paying the AGI? Then why not just... pay a human that is already present? Much more efficient.


Not sure if you’re insinuating that I’m one of the capitalists? I’m not, that’s why I’m saying it out loud. I believe capitalism’s relationship with labor will need to fundamentally change if AGI and robotics takeover. I don’t know what that looks like but obviously the current capitalist overlords want everything to stay the same - just for them to have more power/money.

You are assuming that the AGI service is very cheap..

Based on current trends why wouldn’t it be cheap?

Why would an artificial intelligence want to do what you tell it to?

I don’t think AI in its current form and current track wants much of anything.

Why would it have any desire at all?

That seems like a wrong economic theory to me. The economy is based on differential of value. I can make furniture, so it's worth less to me than it is to you. Therefore we can trade. That's what supply/demand is. If AGI somehow exists, then the value of intelligence drops to zero for both of us, there's nothing to trade.

AGI would not make knowledge work valueless, it would move all the knowledge work value to the AGI companies.


There still plenty to trade - you just don’t have any of it.

Those $300 billion dollar circular deals will become much more common.


> AGI would not make knowledge work valueless, it would move all the knowledge work value to the AGI companies.

Yep! That's the point :)


And probably not much longer after that, the bloodshed

Unless the benefits of AI get communalized (UBI, or some other form of sharing), ya.

How would that work? Taxes are already full of perverse incentives. Certainly anything resembling UBI will be just as bad.

You’re not wrong - I was just giving that as an example but not saying it’s the right thing to do.

I don't think there is any compelling reason to believe this will actually happen

It will drive capital into data centers, which is good for Oracle.

Or maybe it won't. If it can be made efficient like humans it might be at the edge mainly.

why do you care so little? it only represents thousands of peoples livelihoods.

I only care when I have incentives to care.

Thats OP's point - you need to reduce usage everywhere and pointing out that AI is only 1.5% doesn't take away from the fact that usage needs to be reduced there as well.

Well, at least you will have lots of company (me included).

This is literally what major company execs want engineers and eventually their agents to do.

Hm what about the Citadel rebuttal that showed growth?

https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...


Yeah, I was thinking the same. It seems like you can get data for whatever argument you want to support

Doesn't seem necessarily a contradiction. Job posting growth logically happens before effective job growth.

Biggest thing hurting folks is RTO. Unless you live in a large metro, tech jobs are slim/none.

That’s how it was before the pandemic.. Is it unusual that the jobs are where the people are?

I've heard other people say, situation has greatly improved over the past year, esp. 6 months.

How many of those are real jobs?

Mine is too. Absolutely no outreach from the major players however. Mostly AI startups with a few larger/older SaaS startups sprinkled in.

Is it more fair to call it anti-intellectualism? I'm neither conservative nor being snarky, honest question.

In my opinion, anti-intellectualism is the cause of antivax, and commonly goes along with conservatism, but isn't the same thing as conservatism.

Until recently, antivax was largely a liberal form of anti-intellectualism. It was a reaction against large pharmaceutical companies.

It didn't really become a conservative position until COVID. It's mostly an anti-progressive thing, but builds on existing populist conservative anti-science attitudes. (Conservative doesn't always mean anti-science, but populist versions of it will inevitably tend that way.)


The problem is calling it anti-intellectualism implies that one can be conservative in "right" ways. And in modern times, being conservative in "right" ways means you are basically a liberal.

The whole idea of conservatism is that certain people in a population are going to have "non desirable" qualities, and the best thing would be if those people just "went away", but realistically you can't advocate for that, so you have to do mental gymnastics and say "those people should just work to become better, or get punished".


You think they’ve not made upgrades in 70 years?

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