Comment by ekidd
8 hours ago
> We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs.
The difference this time is that the thing they're trying to automate is intelligence. The goal is a machine that's as smart as a Nobel Prize winner or a good CEO, across all fields of human intellectual endeavor, and which works for dollars an hour. The goal is also for this machine to be infinitely copyable for the cost of some GPUs and hard drives.
The next goal after that will be to give that machine hands, so that it can do any physical labor or troubleshooting a human can do. And again, the goal is for the hands to be cheaper to produce and cheaper to automate than humans.
You may ask yourself, who would need humans in a future where all intellectual and physical tasks can be done better and cheaper by a machine? You may also ask yourself, who would control the machines? You may ask yourself, what leverage would ordinary humans have in a future that no longer needed them for anything? Or perhaps you would not ask those questions.
But this is the future investors are dreaming of, and the future that they're investing trillions of dollars to reach. That's the dream.
This author is pointing out that the fraction of the tech dream du jour that is actually realized is consistently about 1%, so taking tech dreams du jour seriously is guaranteed to give you a false world model. Which is unhelpful and maladaptive, unless perhaps your goal is to make money off of other people with that false world model.
I believe that full automation of the mundanities of human life is coming in the fullness of time. But for that insight to be helpful to me, I have to get the timing right, and the data suggests I should be extremely skeptical about excitable tech guys predicting big things in short time frames.
Talking heads reference?
Part of me thinks that we're already reaching peak stuff/employment/the current system.
We are currently churning out graduates who work in coffee shops. More and more employment is make work. The issue is can we carry on requiring work, making it a moral requirement.
I suspect it'll be like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum, they were worse off. It took time for the conditions of the working class to improve.
Basic income is touted as the solution, but then globalisation means workers are moving much more and I'm not sure the 2 are compatible. Not that I have a better idea.
I do think we need a cultural change decoupling work from self worth. It's becoming less and less defensible to require everyone to work to be 'deserving'.
All that being said, there will still be jobs, there will always be demand for hand made, or something that isn't soulless corporatism. Although I'm starting to sound like Star Treks view of the future, which may not achievable
> like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum, they were worse off.
They actually were better off, which illustrates how bad rural poverty was at that time.
> Although I'm starting to sound like Star Treks view of the future, which may not achievable
Also worth noting that even in Star Trek, which is viewed as a utopian vision of the future, the sort of societal changes you are talking about only came after humanity almost wiped itself out in a third world war (which coincidentally happened to start in 2026)