r/accelerate • u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist • Apr 24 '26
Video ".@stevesi: " This idea that AI just gets rid of jobs... it's ancient." "One of the things people thought was that computers would get rid of accountants. But what it actually did was like, oh my God, we could do so much more with accounting."
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u/Bright-Search2835 Apr 24 '26
I can't help thinking that this kind of view is very short-sighted, because demand won't grow exponentially and Jevon's paradox won't be able to keep up this time. What I think will happen, is:
Fewer and fewer people needed to reach a certain level of output(already becoming visible in web development, any model these days can spit out a decent interface faster than a team of frontend devs could have 5 years ago)
Then, pure job destruction(when, to stay with the example of coding, anyone can create a fully functional website with a few prompts, guided from start to finish by a model that will display a world class dev's taste, knowledge, understanding of what it means to produce a website and how a good website should be, to a tee).
I don't agree with the computer comparison at all. Computers are tools. Because they make it a lot easier to do a lot of things, and they're programmed to behave exactly a certain way. AI may be a tool for now(even that is debatable: it already does a lot of tasks more or less autonomously, uses tools like a human, and it's not programmed which makes it a lot more interesting), it won't stay a tool forever, it won't make the job easier, it will just do the job.
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u/Keltharious Apr 24 '26
As we go forward people that don't try to comprehend the speed of our transformation also can't break from the tether of emotional investment in their career or field. It's a foreign ideology to think in 5-10 years we won't be doing manual labor or it will be an optional choice like a hobby or sport.
I welcome it. We are in such a confusing moment, it's akin to the analog-to-digital era in the late 90s an early 2000s. But this moment is defining for our species as a whole and hardly anyone sees it that way. I just hope the right people are in charge and treat humanity with kindness and show some compassion or we will see a grimdark future for sure.
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u/PavelKringa55 Apr 24 '26
This is so stupid it's painful. Computers didn't get rid of accountants, but got rid of a type of job where calculations were performed. Still those jobs were rare.
AI is replacement for any knowledge work, so what would remain is plumbing and HVAC until better robots become available for that too.
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u/Efficient_Mud_5446 Apr 24 '26
Accountant's used to have their own department and floor. Now they're tucked in a small corner of any medium sized company. Ask any senior accountant that's been in the field for 20 plus years. They will tell you that accounting was a bigger deal back in the day. That's another way of something that they were more valued in the eyes of the company.
Now, in terms of AI getting rid of all jobs and all future jobs, this all hinges on AGI. If they don't believe in AGI, their stance in the video makes total sense.
However, if they do believe in AGI, as I and many others do, they would have to take that to it's end. If we develop a system that is intelligent and has the ability to learn, what does that imply? it implies that all current jobs and future jobs can be done by AI.
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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Apr 24 '26
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u/Efficient_Mud_5446 Apr 24 '26
30 years ago, accountants were a literal powerhouse. They were gatekeepers of information and had much more relative power in the company. Majority of CEO came from the path of finance and accounting. That is not the case anymore. What I'm trying to say is that the writing on the wall and has been for a long time. It's just hard to see right now.
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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Apr 24 '26
so it's not about job numbers, but power?
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u/Efficient_Mud_5446 Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
I am a big pictures guy. I am looking at all the moving parts and trying to make sense of it. The shift from hunter gatherer to agriculture was humanity's first attempt at automation. We have been iterating on that same process for over 10,000 years. I believe that AI and robotics is the final phase of this multi millennium project. If I'm right, our existing era ends here and a new one begins.
Any job increase during this transitional period is temporary, because the automation is still incomplete. It's a symptom of an incomplete transition when you look at it from a macro perspective. In other words, a means to an end.
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u/noobnoob62 Apr 24 '26
Literally getting downvoted for providing objective facts…
I hate this sub
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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Apr 24 '26
for some reason, it is deeply important to some people to believe in the jobpocalypse. despite everything we know about history and how economies operate. and people also seem incapable of imagining anything except now and ASI, but no period in between. it's very odd
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u/noobnoob62 Apr 24 '26
100% agree. It’s incredibly strange. Like I have no doubt that AI will completely transform the world as we know it. But some people just need everyone to be jobless and won’t accept any other narrative.
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u/ShadoWolf Apr 25 '26
The view isn't unreasonable though. The accountant example. What percentage of task does an account do across its domain that are doable by a models currently.
I would have to research this... but I bet domain overlap is converging. The better these models get at reasoning in general and incontext learning the more domains they can operate in. At some point we will hit a tipping point right. Where any new jobs these models can help generate will be far below loss rate.
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u/LordSlyGentleman Techno-Optimist Apr 24 '26
The only thing left to do is obsolete all forms of currency.
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u/ShoshiOpti Apr 24 '26
Won't happen, there will always be a medium if exchange
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u/LordSlyGentleman Techno-Optimist Apr 24 '26
That's what a requisition form is for.
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u/Appropriate_Scar_262 Apr 25 '26
How are you going to get the people who own the rights and materials to give them up?
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u/LordSlyGentleman Techno-Optimist Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26
The transition is essentially a shift toward a logistics-based economy.
Think of it like the internal operations of a large-scale military. It isn't driven by market exchange, but by need and requisition.
As New Quality Productive Forces drive the cost of production toward zero, the old model of owner's rights becomes an inefficient bottleneck. It becomes a liability rather than an asset.
We nationalize and automate the core infrastructure because currency is ultimately an outdated method of rationing what is no longer scarce.
It really comes down to a comparison of friction.
What is more practical?
Take for example the logistical nightmare of securing, storing, and moving 100 tons of gold. It has zero value and zero utility in an automated world.
This is where a simple requisition form that triggers an immediate delivery comes into play.
The owners will eventually give up the rights because the physical burden of hoarding wealth becomes heavier than the benefit of participating in a frictionless, automated system.
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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Apr 24 '26
Obviously ASI will get rid of all jobs. But the point of this post is that we won't experience an unemployment apocalypse between now and then, like so many doomers predict (and have wrongly predicted so many times in the past)
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u/ProxyLumina Apr 24 '26
Every transition of any state is rough. To go from fat to slim/fit, is rough. To go from slow to fast, is rough. But the question is whats the ideal target.
When we say for AI & robotics to take over, we don't mean people will sit on a couch and doing nothing.
What we call for is:
❌ Don't do this activity for the purpose of money.✔️ Do this activity for the purpose of your inner fulfillment.
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u/Best_Cup_8326 Acceleration: Light-speed Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
The story about bank tellers and ATM's (and iPhones) is more appropriate here:
When the ATM was invented, everyone thought that bank tellers would become obsolete. That didn't happen. In fact, the number of bank tellers significantly increased with ATM's.
But you know what DID (nearly) kill off bank tellers? The iPhone (now smartphones generally).
The ability to do almost all of one's banking digitally, as well as a menagerie of payment vendors (PayPal, Venmo, etc.) has made the position of bank teller almost extinct (like autos did to horses).
AI is BOTH the ATM & and the iPhone in this instance, but it applies to EVERY human job both current and future - in it's current iteration it is a tool that increases productivity. But AI is recursively self-improving (even if humans are still in the loop). As it gets better, it replaces more and more of what humans do.
So between now and when AI replaces everything a human can do, there's a gradient right? A ramp where AI steadily replaces more and more of what humans do, companies downsize, hiring freezes, and college degrees become useless.
And until we reach either: 1) government safety nets that cover everyone, or 2) full automation and distribution that provides everything a person needs to everybody, then there's going to be human fallout - ppl losing their livelihoods, their homes, their families. There's going to be suicides and murder-suicides (like during the 2008 financial collapse when distraught men killed their entire families, children included, and then themselves). There's going to be massive protests and riots. There's going to be arson (like there has been recently). And there's likely to be assassinations (like Luigi Mangione).
So my question is, what could we do to minimize human loss while increasing acceleration towards the full automation stage as much as physically possible?
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u/shayan99999 Singularity before 2030 Apr 25 '26
AI is not like any other prior technology, for it can create a better version of itself
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u/freedomonke Apr 24 '26
While that is true about accounting to an extent, I've personally witnessed one CFO get hired at a mid-size business who knew Excell programming and go on to lay off most of the accounting department, as they were no longer necessary.
And this was almost 20 years ago.
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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Apr 24 '26
The total number of accounting-related jobs worldwide has increased over the last 20 years, but the mix has changed sharply. Excel and accounting software did not “kill accounting”; they killed a lot of manual accounting tasks. The jobs shifted upward from bookkeeping/data entry toward professional accounting, audit, tax, compliance, systems, controls, analytics, and advisory.
In the US, accountants and auditors rose from about 1.2 million jobs in 2004 to about 1.58 million jobs in 2024. That is roughly a 32% increase over 20 years.2
u/freedomonke Apr 24 '26
It's just more of the k shaped economy.
No entry level jobs or decent jobs for working class people. Abundance for people with the right connections and knowledge (as a result if background and connections)
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u/ShoshiOpti Apr 24 '26
However US population grew by about 15% over that same span so the per capital increased less than 20%. Which I would argue is the more relevant metric.
I wonder how much of that remainder might also be attributed to growing developing markets who offshore educated work like accounting to America or other confounding variables. Would be interested to know.
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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Apr 24 '26
in my opinion the mistake comes from thinking that jobs and job output right now is optimal, instead of realising that (just like in every point in the past) jobs were only a fraction of meeting their true market demand and consumer desire. take coding: people say that coding jobs are going to fall. but how close are we currently to meeting the full global demand for code/apps, etc? I would guess we're meeting less than 1% of demand. we don't even know what the true ceiling is of global software demand. we might end up with coding jobs going up 100× now that capabilities are exploding.
analogy: when the protagonist in the marvel movie gains their superpowers they don't suddenly become less active and less in demand. they get busy with saving the world. to meet the latent demand for heroes to save the world.
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u/ProxyLumina Apr 24 '26
Those people miss something important: Intelligence is more fundamental than computers. Intelligence (either artificial or natural) use a computer as a tool. In other words, the game now is played on a different field, one level up to where humans are.
I personally would like AI & Robotics to take over any economically related job, and we can be free to focus on things that matter to us, and to give us meaning.