Median income in the US is much higher than $12-18/hr, it is about $30/hr. 25th percentile make $20/hr. 10th percentile make $15.58. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.htm
So, the people you are mentioning making 12-18/hr, are literally below 1 in 4, to less than 1 in 10. These are not “average middle class Americans” except maybe in that higher end. These are low wage earners and are far below “average”.
I mean absolutely nothing normative by this statement, nothing about whether this is good or bad or what we should do policy, socially, whatever. But saying someone making below the 10th percentile is average is like saying someone making $75/hr is average.
Statistically parents spend more time with their kids now than in the 1900s, and the trend seems towards more and more time, especially among fathers.
There’s some “well we have no idea how much is quality time” argument, but just looking across my own families over time the reality is more like modern parents being way more present than their parents.
The issue lies elsewhere. It’s almost a zeitgeist, the direction and evolution of ideas, and less any actual cause. At least that’s how it seems to me.
I agree in some sense, I think the runway on human physical labor is measured in decades. But it’s likely not infinite, and likely not 100 years. I expect my children will at least see “the end” in their lifetimes.
Human physical labor also has a ticking clock, albeit longer than software engineering.
Of course again, this is if we don’t put up or find unknown-unknown walls on machine intelligence. I think there is a pretty high chance we just make sufficient machine intelligence illegal for a very long time, at least until labs can fine-tune models enough to be smart enough to replace humans but dumb/lobotomized enough to not make a bio-weapon.
This requires an assumption that humans have some capacity that LLMs/machines can not fundamentally match (or match cheaply, or we’ll make matching it illegal).
That’s fine, but one of those assumptions has to be the case for your statement to be true. If they meet or exceed all productive human capacities at lower cost, are not stopped by regulations or some kind of near insurmountable “exponential cost of intelligence”, then this is completely utterly different than the agriculture shift.
My generals observation about people like you is that you assume “the future form of ai is just a chat bot, like today” and that is just not the case, and it’s not what anyone is worried about. Many of us are “playing” with real agents, grafting together agentic memory systems, kicking around early experimental harnesses, seeing what kind of self learning loops we can hack, perfecting evals, wiring in eyes and ears and a heart-beat to these things. And those of us who are often take a look at the Frankenstein result and go “ya, this could completely replace us with enough iterations”.
We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital.
The window of uncertainty is absolutely massive. I could also equally see a world that looks mostly like ours today because it becomes illegal to use sufficiently intelligent AI (Mythos is already generating guardedness, and it’s not smart enough to replace capable humans). Eg if ai that is sufficiently intelligent to truly replace humans is as dangerous as an atom bomb (or chemical weapon, or even a machine gun) then it could just be illegal to use except for use by the governments of the world.
Or high intelligence, enough to replace all humans, becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of energy and data compared to humans that we maintain a kind of biological advantage on a large category of economically valuable tasks.
Or training sufficiently advanced ai to replace us requires judgements and training data that is essentially beyond us (eg if we can’t figure out what the right answer is, how can we train or judge an AI)
No one has any real idea what is going to happen. What we need tho is a collective promise, through our democracies and communities and governments, that we will make it right. Institutions and laws that make sure the benefits are distributed broadly, that we stay safe, that we have a better world because of it. If people get that I think everyone will be mostly excited by ai, not opposed.
I don’t think the claim is that people will be less productive, the world will be far more productive.
The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.
Have you not met Americans? The very first thing 95% of Americans will say if you propose public transport closer to their house is that you are bringing crime. Also if the transit comes close then someone might build condos or apartments near it! Oh the horror!
I had a lady parade around my neighborhood handing out fliers saying that extending the bus stop to our neighborhood was going to bring rapists and pedophiles into the neighborhood. I thought she was an odd one out and insane so I made a joke about it at a neighborhood event a few weeks later.
Really? The modern ones I’ve run into lately are like 100x better than the old flows. “Press 1 for sales. Press 2 to know our hours. Press 3 if you have a ticket. Press 4 to hear our website address…”.
Of course nothing beats a human with real agency at the company but like, these modern agents could be 100x better than what airlines and internet service providers currently have.
My city is deadlocked on doing anything about the literal crimes I’ve described because acting against violent offenders is seen as oppressing the downtrodden. Building new shelter capacity is insanely difficult because no one wants concentrations of this near them, and concentrated homeless services turn the area into a waste land (like pioneer square) due to the amount of criminal and antisocial behavior. Raising enough money in taxes seems out of the question because everyone thinks someone else should pay.
So you get common crime and antisocial behavior in much of the city and no one can do anything about it.
What cities? You’re right that I never saw anything like this when I lived in Oslo, nor did I see anything like it living in Sydney.
I’m reacting to a specific environment in two major west coast cities, Seattle which I now live, and San Francisco where I regularly travel for work. What I’m describing is not unlucky in these cities, it’s “I take the light rail to pioneer square for work every day.”
Yes the guy who screamed “I’m going to f*ing kill you!” Out of nowhere at my daughter and then chased us, or set fire to random trees in my neighborhood for fun, or cut the copper wiring off the side of my house, or took sledge hammers to local park statues, these people are definitely not a problem. No the problem is really the people who think it should stop. Those horrible, insensitive people.
They’r being so selfish. Drug addicted should have every right to pull you down screaming by your hair because they’re tweaked out of their mind. And after seeing that, you should be welcoming every one you see to your home.
You’re really the problem for feeling uncomfortable walking by the man jerking off to passerby’s, so intolerant of you.
(Every one of these is a true example I have witnessed, along with too much other insanity to write down, from just the last year in Seattle. so don’t tell me im exaggerating)
The everything crisis is somewhat apt, but if I look at my cohort (older gen z/very young millennial) it’s really mostly a cost of housing crisis.
And if I look at the squeeze I feel as a very high income young person, it’s still just cost of housing. The amount of house a salary of x buys was utterly decimated in the last 4 years, especially in the metros that have good job growth.
Solve the housing crisis and you’ll have happy young people and future generations. Maybe not so much boomers.
This is disinformation. Blackrock and Vanguard manage the accounts of people who own these. They themselves do not own the shares. It would be like you saying you don’t own your 401k, Fidelity does.
There are still control concerns, if blackrock and vanguard started throwing around weight more they’d have a lot of power as investor aggregators. They do “control the vote”, in theory, on a lot of the economy through their aggregation. AFAIK they don’t use this much because it’s not practical for their funds. But framing them as real owners is the kind of boogeyman crap.
Yes. Kind of. Anything involving home invasion I’ve usually seen them go in like an occupying force. Including the time i called them because a small group was going around the neighborhood trying to break into houses. They show up with bullet proof vests and assault rifles at the ready and pull everyone out of their houses.
There is huge variation in what the US trend looks like from the ground that varies by region, age, income level, industry, and demographic.
EI think if you’re a professional class baby boomer the trajectory has looked fantastic through your life.
If you’re a 35 middle income living on the coasts (where at least 100 million Americans live) you may have watched affordability collapse and QOL decease significantly over the last decade.
I agree, difference between explosive growth and “consistent draw” is large employers setting up in the region.
Another interesting anecdote is that I know many people who work remote for companies all over the world who moved to the Seattle area once they had a remote job. I am one of these people who moved once I got a remote job. Im not sure what kind of impact this has long run. I think the flywheel drawing high skill people to Seattle is still very strong.
“ Most of the attraction of living there historically was its extremely business-friendly environment.”
How old are you? What propaganda told you this? In my generation (young millennial/genz) the attraction of living in Seattle, which pulled me and almost a dozen professional friends at this point has been:
- high quality urban living in a temperate environment. Including access to great parks, waterfront, bikeability in the city
- access to great outdoors and regional amenities like skiing, ocean fishing, hiking, wine country
- liberal policies and general friendly society (it’s friendlier here than the east coast)
- no state income tax (we’re all very high tax bracket)
- a high enough income population that you can find a plethora of high-end products and services that cluster around high income earners (only a few us cities have this stronger than Seattle I feel)