Comment by comfysocks
2 years ago
The Industrial Revolution devalued manual labor. Sure, new jobs were created, but on the whole this looked like a shift to knowledge work and away from manual labor.
Now AI is beginning to devalue knowledge work. Although the limits of current technology is obvious in many cases, AI is already doing a pretty good job at replacing illustrators and copy writers. It will only get better.
Who owns the value created by AI productivity? Ultimately it will be shareholders and VCs. It’s no surprise that the loudest voices in techno-optimism are VCs. In this new world they win.
Having said all this, I think Ilya’s concerns are more of the existential type.
> The Industrial Revolution devalued manual labor.
Only some types. It caused a great number of people to be employed in manual labour, in the new factories. The shift to knowledge work came much later as factory work (and farming) became increasingly automated.
>In this new world they win.
If history is any indication not really. There's an obvious dialectical nature to this where technological advance initially delivers returns to its benefactors, but then they usually end up being swallowed by their own creation. The industrial revolution didn't devalue labor, it empowered labor to act collectively for the first time, laying the groundwork for what ultimately replaced the pre-industrial powers that were.