Why? Should we demand that Ford shuts down its assembly lines and instead hires tens of thousands of people to manually machine and assemble all of the parts of the car? If not, why is that labor unimportant, but other labor is vital and supremely valuable?
There’s this weird place some of you have ended up, wherein all prior automation is good and fine, but future automation must cease immediately, solely to preserve people’s current work exactly as is.
I think the question is what do we do when everything is automated - that’s the main “threat” of AI.
People have always been able to find other work when displaced by automation - unpleasant task though. What happens when there are no more “other work” or there aren’t enough remaining jobs to support the population?
I feel like this comment and the other child comment are missing that we continue to innovate.
Automating the printing press, building the cotton gin, widespread use of combines to harvest wheat (or whatever) - none of these led to mass unemployment. They all created change and churn, for sure, but people will always find new things to do.
I’m always struck by this discussion - should we continue to operate coal mines, and refuse to move off fossil fuel? Those are massive job displacements across, for instance, Appalachia. The common argument is that those people should retrain to new skills. Why is that not the argument for people whose job can be automated?
One of the first groups that will likely lose big to LLMs is lawyers - how hard should we fight to make sure that the law remains incomprehensible and inaccessible in order to preserve those jobs?
Why is anyone’s job a sacred cow?
Sorry, the number of questions read more aggressively than I intend them - I’m earnestly interested in the answers.
> Automating the printing press, building the cotton gin, widespread use of combines to harvest wheat (or whatever) - none of these led to mass unemployment.
All the automations you have mentioned all automate a very specific task.
AI on the other hand can potentially become the do-it-all automation. A universal automation.
> but people will always find new things to do
That’s no longer true if you have a machine that can do it all - that can match (or even surpass) humans in all (or even the vast majority of) activities.
The fundamental challenge of life is striking the right balance, inhabiting an ecological niche. Too cold - die out. Too hot - die out. Too dry - die out. Too wet - die out. Etc. Why would automation be any different?
