Comment by estearum
2 days ago
Your great grandfather was alive during mass industrialization? In the early 1800s?
No one is saying every generation goes through this trough. Obviously. That would make no sense.
The claim is that periods of rapid technological change (i.e. industrialization, potentially AI) produce a trough of horrible conditions that then make room for a climb to conditions better than the pre-change ones.
He had a job he'd worked and mastered his entire life replaced by machinery, leaving a large family with young kids to scramble to pay the "demon mortgage" doing everything they could manage, even as tragedy struck repeatedly: a daughter dead at the breakfast table from the Spanish flu, the eldest son beaten by police after an argument related to unsafe working conditions (he lost a finger to machinery) who died in a hospital later, or the father laid up in traction after falling off a roof who would never be able to work again.
It's not quite the same as the 1800s, but it's not like we're going to relive exactly the same things as then, either. And I do think it'll look like people scrambling, possibly to find entirely different careers.
One place I disagree is that it's going to reduce demand for programmers, I think that will actually increase, as people want more and different things that would currently be impractical. We've already seen what some people can do, cheap tokens will open that up, both for good and ill, not unlike cheap bytes on the internet did.