Comment by buu700
6 months ago
Okay. Well I'm not an "elite" or misrepresenting my experience with AI in any way. My perspective as a founder is that AI empowers entrepreneurs to launch and scale cheaply, thereby providing greater value to the public while disempowering venture capitalists as gatekeepers of the startup ecosystem. The fact that some rich people may become richer at the same time is incidental, and not a bad thing in and of itself.
As far as the industrial revolution, your take is ahistorical. We're clearly more prosperous now than we were before industrialization. Let's not forget that the pre-industrial American economy relied on literal enslavement of 15 - 20% of the population.
Pre-industrial English and German economies did not rely on enslavement of the population, so the fact US economy was built on enslavement just means its elites were rotten to the core since the very beginning,
The fact that rich people get richer is exactly the goal of the US' economic system, not an accident. Despite the abolition of slavery, the US remains extremely hostile to the poor. its lower-than-livable wages forcing its people to be more miserable than medieval surfs.
So, no, the industrial revolution did not bring prosperity, what brought prosperity was the blood shed by common men daring to keep a portion of the fruits of their labour. The history of unionization on the US and the plight of miners clearly shows how much prosperity was brought by technological innovation.
You're appealing to an implicit counterfactual in which America was built in a more egalitarian way. I'd love to live in that timeline, but unfortunately we can only evaluate history as it actually exists, and in this timeline American industrialization and abolition are inseparable because the latter doesn't happen without the former. For all its faults, industrialization provided both the economic luxury of pursuing abolition and the practical means to fight and win.
For Europe's part, the continent was physically developed over millennia on the backs of imperial slaves and feudal serfs, while its wealth was the product of atrocities comparable to those of the US. They certainly don't get a pass here.
If we're looking to the past for guidance, the historical precedent is clear: greater efficiency increases prosperity, and greater prosperity increases liberty. The first industrial revolution heralded the end of actual slavery; the AI industrial revolution could herald the end of "wage slavery". If some rich people happen to get richer at the same time, I say good for them. Rather than cutting off our nose to spite our face, we should look at concepts like UBI or universal educational stipends as an ultimate offramp from mandatory employment.