Nathan Labenz: prediction

Transcript context

…server logs knows that you're absolutely right, that there's no way to scale human time and attention to read all of the server logs. So two organizations that are coming to mind, other conversations that I've had and hope to do full episodes with before too long. One is Workshop Labs. You may have seen one of the founders there, maybe two founders there, wrote the intelligence curse, and they're working toward a similar goal where they're like, how can we defend the bargaining position of labor as long as we can to keep the and it's a good challenge to me because I feel like I'm and this is maybe something worth interrogating a little bit in terms of possible difference between our worldview I feel like in the end again there's a lot of cope going on right I look at somebody like Tyler Cowan who I respect tremendously and have read his work for literally 20 years now I looked back recently and I think the first mention of zero marginal product workers ZMP workers he's called them dates to like 2010 maybe even a little bit earlier than that and it was a financial crisis mortgage bubble bursting sort of thing where all of a sudden and this is fairly typical in recessions all of a sudden companies look around and they're like okay we got to get by here with less who do we not really need and they don't tend to do that sort of thing because it's painful in all sorts of ways until they're really forced to but the financial crisis forced them to and then what seemed to be discovered in a lot of places is hey we could actually basically do the same thing with 10 fewer workers and i don't know if tyler coined the term zmp workers or not but he was certainly blogging about it quite a bit back then fast forward to today and he's like don't expect the labor share to go down all that much there's going to be various reasons it'll rebalance out and i'm kind of like i don't know man it seems like we're already at a place where i'd rather work with clawed code in many cases than hire a junior developer i'm not sure i think it's still very much debated like how much that's hitting aggregate statistics and we'll only know that in the rearview mirror but i have a very hard time imagining a world where the majority of people don't end up in a zmp situation where and this also goes to what you're talking about with organizational dynamics and speed and dorkesh has put out some good essays on this and i think like a jaya katra has also philosophized quite effectively in terms of as the volume and the speed becomes so overwhelming like only ais can handle it so i guess if i try to boil that down to a question for you like how agi pilled are you like how far do you think this goes over the next couple of years and if you imagine this sort of waterline rising from maybe even before ai in 2010 it turns out like big companies didn't need five to ten percent of their people how high does that go to me it seems like it clearly goes to a majority of people that are just e even before ai in 2010 it turns out like big companies didn't need five to ten percent of their people how high does that go to me it seems like it clearly goes to a majority of people that are just going to have a really hard time contributing in the sort of fully realized aiified enterprise of the future and maybe we still have executives because we want judgment or decision making or whatever but there's not a lot of executives so i tend to come to an end state of we're going to need a new social contract we're going to need a ubi and then obviously it becomes a huge question how do we get there and on what timeline and what does that transition look like and i don't have good answers i like often wave my hands and say we'll have to figure that out but it doesn't have a lot of time to figure that out but anyway how far do you see this going…

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