Comment by zozbot234
1 day ago
Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It also doesn't destroy food. Right now, we have enough food. After the AI revolution we have more food and more free labour and fundamentally more effective administrators to run a welfare system. I don't want my society to be the first one to try it, but if we can move the average administrator from an ordinary human to something that is a little better at math than Gauss with infinite clones to get into the details ... there is a chance that we can run an effective centrally planned welfare system.
It is really hard to see how the AI revolution would lead to any issues with food shortages. It looks more like previously unthinkable upside than anything else.
Datacenters are competing with agriculture for both land and water.
Your analysis is greatly under estimating the risk that the capitalists that control the system use it to build cheap, automated weapons to guard their cheap robots and lock everyone of us out, just because they can. They're far more likely to be narcissists and sociopaths than the average population, empathy isn't their strong suit.
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> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food.
Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.
Such as? AI can't do my laundry, wash my dishes, clean my house, do my food shopping for me. AI can't care for me if I'm sick.
> The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions
But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.
How is this a benefit?
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> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.
Not yet. Like, not at all and there is a constantly expressed threat we will all become poorer and unemployable because of it. I dont believe it, but AI did not made life better ... and its creators claim it will make life worst for most of us. That is their literal sales pitch.
Food isn't "incredibly cheap" to a lot of people
The worry with AI is not "productivity is bad." It's whether the displaced labor has anywhere comparable to go
Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.
Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.
Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
The emphasis there should be on "marketing". The actual state of things is that white-collar work is alive and well, and if anything is being helped by AI.
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Interesting there is a possible implication here. If salaries drop from more people doing physical labor instead of white collar work then the automation of physical work may be delayed even longer. It may be cheaper in the short term to pay humans than machines due to an oversupply in physical labor.
Automation is a boon when it automates away tedium, but also a curse for the people that subsist by enduring that tedium.
> Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
Says the knowledge workers, who have collectively spent the last 50 years talking down to the physical laborers with a smug "should have gone to college!" attitude.
You'll be fine. Automation of any kind is a boon for everyone. We massively over-allocated human talents to office jobs over the past few decades and stopped building anything in the physical world (like houses, infrastructure, etc), this is only the pendulum swinging back to reality. Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay, long before AI was a thing.
How many people do we actually need sitting in meetings about meetings about powerpoint presentations for future meetings....or implementing react components into a dashboard UI in a slightly different way for the 3,000,000th time? Even without AI, this was bound to happen.
In the early 1900s there were literally hundreds of different automobile manufacturers globally. We didn't need that many, just as we don't need 1,000,000 people working on 100 slightly different versions of the same CRUD project management software. Humans will human. We'll find new stuff to do, as we have done since the dawn of humanity.
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The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.
I don't see what the big worry is unless you're heavily invested. Plenty of investments go bust.
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Sounds like that other great destroyer of lives and capital - war.
> The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing?
Honestly? That's the best case scenario for humanity.
When AI can replace knowledge-based work, capital has no need for humans anymore. That's almost an ELE.
There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.
Just because they weren't paid doesn't mean women were not doing economically valued labour. The washing machine is probably the greatest productivity unlock since the steam engine.
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There's also the worry whether productivity is real.
If you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.
There is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
Do you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.
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> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death.
not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
While you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom.
But also a precipitous drop in life expectancy. Life in industrial towns in 1800s England was grim. Make of that what you will.
Pollution.
In the towns yes. A wealthy city man could expect to live fewer years than a labourer in the countryside.
Surely a factor, but hardly the sole explanation; malnutrition rose, that should give you some pause.
Pollution, malnutrition, maiming by industrial or mining equipment (huge percentage at the start).
> more efficient agriculture meant a population boom
More efficient agriculture meant a more efficient population. In cases where environmentally possible this obviously encourages a population boom but they're not necessarily synonymous.