Lots of people do all kinds of things that are not explicitly written down at their jobs. Those things cannot be tokenized, they cannot be taken in by AI no matter how intelligent and sophisticated it gets. They are judgement calls, made by real people, who think harder and bring more to the table than any machine, no matter how many FLOPS.

But, nonetheless, those jobs will probably disappear, and the machine will reorganize itself to maximize its self-legibility, making tons more money but becoming yet more shitty and inhumane in the process. Discarding the whole reason the jobs exist in the first place (stuff like Value and Service — oh excuse me, sorry, meaningless cost centers to be optimized).

Sort of like how Radiologists do all kinds of important shit, that gets entirely hand waved away in this think-piece as 99% automatable. Yeah, sure guys, the radiologist — actual doctors for fucks sake — I’m sure he is nothing but a warm body between the patient and the computer, signing paperwork and collecting cheques.

A friend works for accounting firm servicing decent number of HVAC shops they are not as profitable as it would appear from outside from crazy markups.

> “Baumol-type effects” means that everything that didn’t get more productive got more expensive anyway, but we consume more of it all the same because society as a whole got richer.

It depends how you measure. The cost in goods or purchasing power goes up, but the cost in hours stays the same.

There is probably an equivalent of Amdahl's law for GDP - overall productivity will be bottlenecked by the least productive sectors.

Until AI becomes physically embodied, that would mean all high-mix, low-volume physical labor is likely going to become a lot more valuable in the mid-term.

Classic Paradox of Automation - As automation gets better, two things happen:

Cost of goods goes down - think factory automation improving line rate.

There is less human intervention, but that intervention requires more expertise.

"If you can make $30 an hour as a digital freelance marketer (a job that did not exist a generation ago), then you won't accept less than that from working in food service."

Yesterday's food service workers are today's web marketers. This might explain why the www has become so polluted with garbage

> We are at the point in the technology curve with AI where every day someone figures out something new to do with them, meaning users will take any chip they can get, and use it productively.

Sure, that's an assertion.

But (with just as many citations), mine would be:

This boom is absolutely, 100%, fueled by the combined factors of: 1) employees outsourcing the cognitive load of their jobs to models that are, impressively "close", but not quite _as_ good as a well-trained human.

ie, we're replacing google with a fun, but terribly energy-wasteful (and _very often_ factually wrong) "make up an answer" tech.

and 2), AI "app developers" who are having fun with the previously "impossible" (*cf. https://xkcd.com/1425/) APIs of multi-modal natural language, and "didn't sci-fi warn us about this?" simulations.

Neither of which are good for productivity, if we measure productivity as "improving circumstances for the mutual commonwealth of all life". Which is the goal.

* oh, I _did_ use a citation after all.

It is an interesting article, but _far_ too sure of itself in all the wrong areas.

> HVAC wage

This is mostly down to people being afraid of anything even remotely trades-like. Learn to do some basic home repair, it will save you thousands.

> This graph can mean different things to different people: it can mean “what’s regulated versus what isn’t” to some, “where technology makes a difference”

Cars are pretty heavily regulated...

What I see is what is necessary to live and what isn't. Elastic vs inelastic demand.

> the average American middle-class household can comfortably manage a new car lease every two years

Huh, no, the average American middle-class household cannot do this.

> If one sector becomes hugely productive, and creates tons of well-paying jobs, then every other sector’s wages eventually have to rise, in order for their jobs to remain attractive for anyone.

I'm sorry, but anyone who has lived in the lower income brackets knows this just isn't true.

This is hard to read. Whoever wrote this is extremely out of touch and thinks they're eminently intelligent. It reminds me of the "smug San Francisco" South Park episode. The world is going down a road of hurt and you've got elites who are so busy "winning" over the past 50 years running around sniffing their own farts.

How are ‘new cars’ and ‘cell phone services’ considered ‘unregulated’?

Be warned, this is actually an article about LLMs :p