Comment by com2kid
3 years ago
Semantics are nice, but it doesn't matter what name you give to technology that shatters economies and transforms the nature of human creative endeavours.
An AI's ability to contemplate life while sitting under a tree is secondary to the impact it has on society.
>technology that shatters economies and transforms the nature of human creative endeavours
one pattern in modern history has been that communication and creative technologies, be it the television or even the internet, had significantly less economic impact than people expected. Both television and the internet may have transformed business models and had huge cultural impact, but all things considered negligible impact on total productivity or the physical economy.
Given that generative AI seems much more suited to purely virtual tasks or content creation than physical work I expect that to repeat. Over past cycles people have vastly overstated rather than underestimated the impact tech has on the labor force.
> but all things considered negligible impact on total productivity or the physical economy.
It is obscenely hard to measure those sorts of things.
OK, here is one example.
It used to be that engineers (the physical kind, not the software kind) had their own secretaries to manage meetings and fetch documents.
Those secretaries are all out of work now, replaced by Outlook and PDFs.
Modern farms are wired with thousands upon thousands of IOT sensors, precisely controlling every aspect of the fields and crops. Soil is maintained in perfectly ideal conditions. The internet is what made this possible.
The Internet has allowed for individuals to easily trade stocks, which has had who knows how large of an impact on the economy, but I am willing to guess it isn't a small one.
The Internet also enabled all sorts of algorithmic trading to pop up.
Television is of course a huge source of economic output in its own right.
6.9% of the US GDP is Media and Entertainment, not sure if that includes video games or not.
The tech industry is at least 10% of the US GDP, remove the Internet and that drops dramatically.
What, the internet had negligible impact on the productivity or the economy?
Are you only talking about consumer products like YouTube or are you including everything related to the unparalleled exchange of data globally?
I cannot imagine the impact of a global information network for businesses having less impact than a few x2’s on just about every relevant axis you can imagine.