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Ned Ludd led weavers to smash looms. It didn’t save the weaver’s jobs, but their great-granddaughters were far wealthier.
Just based on history, large productivity increases will raise wages. I’m looking into a cushy union sinecure that will never be automated but AI is a minor factor compared to the money. Yes, some fintech roles will be curtailed(and the remainder will be more client-and-customer heavy), but meh. These people’s high salaries is not fundamental to our social model.
My guess is that they had a lot fewer great granddaughters than they otherwise would have.
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The whole point is that it would be a grave error to naively extrapolate from history. The increase in productivity came from humans being freed from physical labor (mostly), and their cognitive labor augmented and multiplied.
Now we're at approaching replacement rather than augmentation. The economy might boom, but that's doesn't mean the humans in it will see the benefit. This is would take intentional action to prevent ~everyone who isn't independently wealthy from being laid off and without a revenue stream that wasn't welfare, as the free market value of their work would be lower than the minimum required to keep them housed and fed.
There have been previous large increases in intellectual productivity due to computers. Job prospects for nerds have gotten better, not worse.
We don’t live in a free market. We live in a regulated society. Do you think doctors, lawyers, teachers will get replaced by machines just because those machines will do a better job?
Yes? It's going to be harder than someone working for a faceless corporation with at-will employment, but eventually, people are going to wonder: "Hey, those AI thingies seem super smart, they're giving me the same advice (or better) as the doctor I'm paying all that money for, why can't they prescribe too?".
If not individuals, then governments and politicians. That's where the incentives lie for hospitals, for the owners of law firms who haven't had to handle an actual case in years, for bureaucrats looking at how expensive the NHS is and wondering if they really need that many doctors.
Even if licensed professionals continue to play a token role, it might just be a polite fiction that they're necessary. You could have one bored, disinterested doctor signing off on AI recommendations, assuming the liability with ease because he knows the AI is almost never wrong. He's now doing the work of ten doctors, and the hospital, happy to save costs, fires the rest. Even if he's not happy about it, it beats being unemployed.
Controversial statement, but from my perspective, 90% unemployment rates for doctors is almost as bad as 100% unemployment.
It could be easy to instigate. An AI company, or its lobbyists, publish a few papers that (truthfully) claim that AIs outperform human physicians. This is used as ammunition by lobbyists and governments to begin gradual replacement, boiling the water slowly and saving a lot of money.
The average Joe, who once trusted human doctors, is collecting unemployment. He thinks, hey, the AI took my job, why should I believe that doctors are any better? It saves him money and time, leaving aside the scope for resentment.
We don't seem to live in a world where the average Joe is protected very much, which would have been the point to try and stem the tide. How many people support UBI for artists and journalists? All it takes is a single nation or smaller polity to try this experiment, see that it works well (which I expect) and then it's easy to bring others on board. They'll be left in the dust otherwise.
Artists and journalists aren’t the average Joe. They’re poor members of the upper classes.
Most people have a lot of sympathy for laid off coal miners and factory workers, and one of the terminal values of western regimes is raising the LFPR. The jobs must flow, and flow they shall. There may not be universal six figures for nerds, but that isn’t a necessity.
In any case, AI isn’t taking everyone’s job. There will be fewer software engineers, sure, but we don’t need so many of them. They should learn to fix toilets or dig coal or something. Previous increases in the productivity of white collar work have not led to the elimination of white collar employment.
If the US is actually going to reindustrialize seeing mass exodus of basically intelligent people from email jobs could be extremely beneficial.
Well yes, the US Burgher class has been hollowed out by the promise of extremely high salaries in white collar jobs that I am told have a purpose, but which seem to be mostly featherbedding(not that unions manage to avoid this).
That being said, entry into the burgher class is itself not open to the general public; it normally takes connections or years of grinding out experience, and you can't switch over to it at thirty.
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I think calling artists and journalists "poor members of the upper classes", while not entirely wrong, isn't my preferred framing. They're semi-prestigious, certainly, but my definition of upper class would be someone like 2rafa. They're often members of the intelligentsia, and have a somewhat disproportionate impact on public affairs, but they're not upper class by most definitions. Poor but upper class is close to a contradiction in terms.
I've already explained my stance in this thread that the previous expectation about the state of affairs for automation doesn't hold. Cognitive automation that replaces all human thought is a qualitatively different beast when compared to the industrial revolution or computers.
A tool that does 99% of my work for me? Great, I'm a hundred times as productive! There might even be a hundred times more work to do, but I'll probably see some wage growth. There might be some turmoil in the employment market.
A tool that does 100% of the labor? What are you paying me for?
The whole point is that AI is approaching 100%, might even be there, or is so close employers don't care and will fire you.
Perhaps a more accurate description would be members of an upper class in the same way that samurai were in Edo society, literati were in China since essentially the Warring States, or Brahmins in India?
To be honest the pessimistic case of the AI "only" being able to do 99% or even 90% of human cognitive work scares me in terms of social upheaval. It might be better off in the long run, but it sure looks like it'll be a bumpy ride...
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