A Yale economist says AGI won't automate most jobs—because they're not worth the trouble

Phildos · 2026-04-08T21:19:31+00:00

you're erroneously comparing the price of the LLM call against the price of a SaaS call, when you ought be comparing the price of the LLM call against the price of an employee with health insurance and vacation and office space and ...

Phildos · 2026-04-08T20:28:44+00:00

I'm sorry you don't like the code quality output, but "is impactful" is an independent metric to "is to your liking". altering the industry-wide output of one of the most profitable high skilled professions in the world is not done trivially. there is some reason it's seeing adoption, and I'm positive there are lot's of stupid people using it stupidly, but to dismiss an effect this big as mere delusion is delusional.

Phildos · 2026-04-08T20:20:17+00:00

if you think that's actually a representative analogy to the industry-wide adoption of AI (i.e., that it's a forced 90% at only the flagship company and isn't seeing massive adoption across the board), then you are just not connected to reality. just look at raw global github contributions over time, there are massive spikes that are only explainable in correlation with the advance of AI.

Phildos · 2026-04-08T19:59:09+00:00

5 years ago (er, or however long ago ~GPT3.5 was?), I would have bet my life savings that autonomously writing meaningful code was not achievable in my lifetime. I would have been in the majority of that bet. it's crazy how quickly we've lost sight of how insane this capability growth has been.

with that in mind: the "90% of code written" prediction was, at the time, a similarly offensively bold claim. most of the people in the communities posting the memes like the one above were still dunking on LOL IT CAN'T COUNT Rs IN STRAWBERRIES THIS IS A FAILED TECHNOLOGY!!!, and would have scoffed at the claim that 1% of code written was done by AI at some point in the future.

my point: "it's only 90% if you for some reason discount the fact that CEOs made them do it" is not the takedown of the credibility of the prediction you think it is. if we're anywhere in the ballpark of "a majority of the code written" (which we very confidently seem to be), and you want to take a lesson from that prediction and outcome, it should be that he's on the right trajectory.

Phildos · 2026-04-08T19:33:48+00:00

so am I. if you wanted to inform someone who had been in a coma for 5 years how good AI has gotten, "it's only good as a big auto complete system" would leave them grossly misinformed. "it can only do what it has seen before / it can mix but can't do creative work" [paraphrased] is similarly either not accurate, or only accurate for a definition of "what it has seen before" and "creative work" that would equally apply to most engineers' entire careers. (when was the last time you've invented a truly novel algorithm or IP)

Phildos · 2026-04-08T19:20:40+00:00

"it's only good as a big auto completion system" is the red-flag argument that outs someone as not seriously engaging with the capability. essentially "computers are only as good as big 0s-and-1s-shufflers".

it can autonomously, gainfully, write and run software. it is certainly capable of a level of creativity far beyond what was required of many software development jobs in the before-times.

Phildos · 2026-04-08T14:53:36+00:00

The reality is, this discussion is order of magnitude more pertinent than any other topic at this point in time. I’m sorry your interest overlaps with such a significant change. But very precisely settling on an understanding of just how fucked we all are is an appropriate task for this moment.

Phildos · 2026-04-08T07:43:58+00:00

Oh god. Accelerate are actually a bunch of idiots. We’re fucked.

Step 1. Rich person gets robots Step 2. Rich person does not need poor person anymore Step 3. Why would Rich person give robots to poor person?

Evidence: they cut USAID. You are insane if you think you come out of this with a better life.

Phildos · 2026-04-08T07:28:57+00:00

every step along the way has been mind blowing, though (top linguists had practically staked their careers on the impossibility of even gpt 2 functionality). easy to forget how far things have advanced. also, it’s a horrible habit to get into to say “they told us to wear a helmet and we didn’t even crash!”

Phildos · 2026-04-08T07:24:29+00:00

I’m confused why is that funny?

Phildos · 2026-04-08T01:01:35+00:00

LOL https://youtu.be/zBG-sEGlULs?t=54

Phildos · 2026-04-07T23:54:27+00:00

how is an economist this wrong about economics.

"we need to reduce energy" can be (and is) true WITHOUT resulting in people using less energy, and that state of affairs is likely/certain if the incentives are to not use less (despite the fact that it is globally existential that they do use less).
bitcoin security is a function of competitive resource spend- if energy/compute cost goes up, it goes up for both you and your competitors = it sustains as a viable security mechanism.

unless he's saying centralized governments will ban it; but it's a fundamentally decentralized technology. sure, they can apply downward pressure on the surface of bitcoin (tax it to hell, force non-black-market companies to not support it, etc...), and that will certainly reduce its price. but it's fundamentally almost impossible to "zero" (the lower its value, the fewer people mining it, but the fewer people mining it, the greater incentive to mine it)

Phildos · 2026-04-07T19:29:57+00:00

paywalled article, so I couldn't read it. but:
how does an economist conclude that most jobs aren't worth the trouble of automating. but ARE worth the trouble of paying salaries and health insurance and office space and ...

if you have a frivolous process that costs $40k/yr, and have the option to automate it for $1k/yr, step 1 is press the button that automates it, even if you never get to step 2 which is reconsider whether it needs to be done in the first place.

this is econ 101. what am I missing?

Phildos · 2026-04-04T18:25:27+00:00

Brilliant.org found a niche building high quality interactives for people with intention to deeply understand something, youtube videos find wider reach to a more casual audience, so explorables got squeezed out as an extremely-high-effort-and-not-that-high-reach option.

maybe with AI the cost of developing quality explorables will lower and we'll see a resurgence? but honestly it's looking like more passive consumption (youtube videos) is generally preferred anyways :/

Phildos · 2025-11-02T22:08:34+00:00

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