It won't be one large one, it will be thousands of little ones.
Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy).
The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement.
What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.
Note that several of your historical examples didn’t involve humans, and presumably most future occurrences of better work enablers won’t involve humans either. The contention isn’t whether there will be an increase in diversity and amount of work done, it’s whether any of it will be done by us. Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.
Communism, or more accurately, mechanised collective farming practices in the early 1900s in Russia resulted in revolutions and world wars. When tens of millions of inefficient farmers were replaced by tractors needing only a fraction of the labour force the excess population was disposed of.
Sorry, bad phrasing!
They were put to work in new roles enabled by technological advancements:
wielding mass manufactured rifles and operating artillery.
This has played out over and over throughout history whenever a large fraction of the population suddenly becomes surplus to requirements.
They never get to enjoy utopia. They are expended in warfare or low value forced labour until the labour pool once again matches the requirements.
You don't even need to look at the Soviets. Life for the average person in Britain became worse between 1760 until about 1920. That meant about 3 generations of people were lost.
I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...
If anything, it will be the trades. We're still a solid time away from being able to replicating what muscles and skin do - and fundamentally, there will always be a need for someone to run cable, terminate wiring and unclog a sewer pipe. At the same time, the trades are desperate for staff after the "academization" push of the last decades.
That's true for a while. But shelf restocking and order picking will probably start to go robotic within a few years. That's a manipulation problem within reach. All those mass produced humanoid robots have to do something, and that's something they can do.
It won't be one large one, it will be thousands of little ones.
Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy).
The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement.
What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.
Note that several of your historical examples didn’t involve humans, and presumably most future occurrences of better work enablers won’t involve humans either. The contention isn’t whether there will be an increase in diversity and amount of work done, it’s whether any of it will be done by us. Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.
Communism, or more accurately, mechanised collective farming practices in the early 1900s in Russia resulted in revolutions and world wars. When tens of millions of inefficient farmers were replaced by tractors needing only a fraction of the labour force the excess population was disposed of.
Sorry, bad phrasing!
They were put to work in new roles enabled by technological advancements: wielding mass manufactured rifles and operating artillery.
This has played out over and over throughout history whenever a large fraction of the population suddenly becomes surplus to requirements.
They never get to enjoy utopia. They are expended in warfare or low value forced labour until the labour pool once again matches the requirements.
You don't even need to look at the Soviets. Life for the average person in Britain became worse between 1760 until about 1920. That meant about 3 generations of people were lost.
I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...
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If anything, it will be the trades. We're still a solid time away from being able to replicating what muscles and skin do - and fundamentally, there will always be a need for someone to run cable, terminate wiring and unclog a sewer pipe. At the same time, the trades are desperate for staff after the "academization" push of the last decades.
That's true for a while. But shelf restocking and order picking will probably start to go robotic within a few years. That's a manipulation problem within reach. All those mass produced humanoid robots have to do something, and that's something they can do.
Just never desperate enough to actually pay well.
Trades actually pays pretty well. The problem is that the academization push has ruined the image of manual labor.
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