Technology

Automation doesn't necessarily mean a better quality of life. We're fatter than ever, more depressed than ever, and we still work more than a medieval peasant.

I always bring this up, automation is what made slavery profitable in the south. When the cotton gin was invented slaveowners didn't start using less slaves for the same out put of cotton. They started buying more slaves to increase the output of cotton with a higher profit margin. That's what happens anytime we see a new form of automation, companies don't reduce work hours and keep the pay the same, they try to increase production and the workers that were replaced will be made to do some other menial task machines can't do, and they will also be made to work 40hrs a week. This whole automation thing increasing our quality of life is a total fucking myth.

Biggest difference between this and the industrial revolution and general automation is that education used to be your saving grace. This person could've been fluent in 10 languages and AI would still replace them.

I suspect that, in 50 years or so, we’ll look back at this time as the beginning of the “AI Revolution”, and see it as an overall net positive.

For the wealthy, yes. Investors love having less mouths to feed.

Writers and artists are very obvious casualties. Many other workers will find their jobs affected by AI as well. However, it’s also worth noting that we are nowhere near strong, general purpose AI.

That's part of the problem. We'll be lowering our standards to accept whatever formulated method of culture experience gets spoon fed to us, while true art goes by the wayside, along with creativity. Granted that's already happening in many entertainment industries, this just further accelerates the fad-chasing and reduces the set of levers that executives have to just tweaking formulas until the audiences match with their wallets. A true AGI might have an inkling or spark of creativity versus the formulaic results you get from model driven AI.

And what AI is likely to become, for now, is a tool to increase the productivity of professionals. It will mean that fewer people are needed to perform a task. But, there will still be a need for people to oversee the and direct the AI.

Fewer people, meanwhile our population continues to increase. That means housing and healthcare continue in the trajectory of being less accessible to the majority.

The Industrial Revolution wasn’t the end of the world, neither was the Digital Revolution or the Internet Revolution. The AI Revolution won’t be the end of the world either.

I have to say, I disagree. The end of the world doesn't come abruptly but in the form of a slow decline. I look around at young people who go into horrendous debt for a higher education that doesn't even benefit them, which then delays the timeframe they can start house shopping, only to find a housing market that's beyond the reach of even some of our most highly paid professionals. I see articles like "why 125k isn't enough anymore" and then the concepts of being "financially sound" being around 3 times higher than what people actually make.

I look at what you wrote and I'd love to believe in an optimistic future where this elevates us further out of the mundane and makes time for more creative endeavors and satisfying healthy work, but I instead see a bleak future with less opportunity and a higher dependence on public assistance programs for the majority just to get by.

I hope you're right. Something about the scope and type of change we're seeing here feels quite different. It can be mistake too to assume that things will go the way they usually have. I wouldn't advise anyone to be complacent. We had to have something close to a second civil war in the US to get things like an 8 hour day.

The short term effect was a major problem for those laborers who were displaced with a long term effect of creating a more efficient economy, with cheaper products for everyone and most people benefiting from a higher standard of living.

This first part is very understated on retellings. The major problems were not limited to displaced laborers, but also the rising industrialist class which took advantage to them to the extent we had a phase of child workers getting their limbs crushed by machinery and then discarded. The higher standards of living relied greatly on fierce efforts from labor movements to guarantee basic rights and dignity for the workers and their families.

It also comes to mind that for all the wonders of the internet, a lot of people had a better conditions working in brick and mortar stores than they now do in the infamous Amazon warehouses. Maybe we are falling short on this side of progress.

Technology is great, but greed corrupts everything. Since the US has gone all-in on greed, we don't even bother trying to help workers displaced by technology, while the majority of the benefits accrue to a tiny minority of people—mainly just big investors, and to a lesser degree the workers putting technology into practice.

In the longer term, technology mixed with capitalism contributes greatly to wealth inequality, and it creates companies so powerful they become above the law. For example, look at the fossil fuel industry, which has taken on a life of its own and seems to be on track to kill us all, and has definitely done a lot to stifle the adoption of renewable energy while propping up dictatorships in oil-producing countries. Look at plastic manufacturers who are filling the world with toxic garbage for profit. Or look at the automotive industry and how in the US it has shaped the design of whole cities, prevented adoption of mass transit, and even gotten existing mass transit systems dismantled.

I'm a technology worker myself so of course I see it as a worthwhile endeavor, but even I can see that the way we manage the adoption of new technology is incredibly destructive.

The industrial revolution and adoption of computers also introduced a ton of new jobs. We haven't seen any evidence of this happening with AI. AI will eventually come for all of us, it needs to either be curtailed, which is unrealistic and stifling, or we will need to radically shift our economy, which is even more unrealistic. The only other option is collapse. AI has been eating jobs behind the scenes for years without anyone noticing, and there has been no comparable expansion of new jobs like previous revolutions. This was all true ages before the current controversy.