Posted by WillDaSilva 12 hours ago
It's a bit like discovering when a corrupt country is not purely corrupt due to its leadership but the whole thing is a fabric throughout society.
It all starts from individual decisions and it applies to small companies and consumers alike. If a small company needs translations, and AI is good enough to do it, they won't hire someone from the goodness of their hearts for human dignity reasons. If you're a regular person and want to do taxes or want fina cial advice or have some accounting tasks and it's way cheaper to do with AI than hiring someone, you won't hire accountants out os solidarity. Just like you don't buy artisanal shoes and handmade furniture.
We see this in many other things too, such as abundant entertainment and food delivery replacing social connections. People will take the path of least resistance.
Everyone wants to be needed and to have purpose, but also everyone in actual preferences do accept the machine version in the end if its more convenient and cheaper.
I don't see anything inevitable about "new jobs" or everyone discovering artistic passions to spend their time. That has not happened either when the Internet opened up all knowledge and you could suddenly talk to people anywhere on the planet. The optimists said that all this will lead to people learning and reading and everyone doing courses or talking to others and reconciling differences once they can directly interact, leading to more peace and understanding, that social media will give a voice to people and inevitably strengthen democracy etc.
It's very possible that all the Earth's population ends up like the Aboriginal Australians, addiction, lack of purpose, the ground pulled out under our feet. Essentially sedated with AI generated VR content to bear our existence and any small Epsilon change in the local neighborhood will have too much activation energy to happen. People all in their own generated worlds, polarized, angry at each other, seeing no value in each other, or perhaps even in their real selves, as opposed to their projection in the VR stories.
Some strange groups like the Amish will hang on, but even they are dependent on trade with broader society.
We will be told this is all for the greater good. Humanity was anyway not going to last forever, it was just one step on a cosmic drama, and the important thing is the future light cone and immense numbers of galaxies and whatnot.
It seems like the author is attributing a 'standard' recessionary spiral to AI. I am not sure that AI is causing the layoffs, but it does seem like the AI investments are the only thing that have kept us from a deep recession (until now).
Historically, inequality is only significantly reduced through events of extreme destruction, like the Black Plague and the world wars.
In other words, a society that ever lets massive inequality happen is just doomed. High inequality reliably stays that way until insane global black swans mildly correct it.
So you wouldn’t mind going from 6 figure salary to working as a cashier at Walmart, figuratively speaking? Because I sure as hell mind, given mortgage and family obligations.
The trajectory of the West has been good for a long time and the rate of improvement is increasing.
most people arent making a six figure salary, and have mortgage and family obligations
> most people arent making a six figure salary, and have mortgage and family obligations
Maybe not most, but there’s sure lot of white collars making six figures. I don’t know what kind of teenage big tech bubble you’re in for the rest, but more than 70% of my colleagues have mortgage and families.
How many insurance policies does anyone need to contract, how much legal advice does anyone need to hear, how many movies does anyone need to watch, and how much software does must support that demand, so that everyone can stay employed in an AI accelerated service sector?
The new opportunities could well be that labor costs go down so much that the minimum wage is lowered and sweatshops return to developed countries.
I'm sure some aspiring sweatshop owners could be excited by that possibility, I don't think a lot of software developers or TV show writers are eager to be sewing sneakers for a pittance.
However, AI is coming for them too. This time it really is different. The whole business pitch is the elimination of any safe harbor. All human labor to be automated. Why have 8 billion humans in that environment? Scary times ahead. We will probably end up culled by the machine.
Russell's Turkey Parable:
"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."
This isn't an argument and it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of risk and game theory.
Besides, it's always been different, in the sense of boiling frog temperature going up. The present case is more different because this time, the rate of rising is high enough to make the frogs uncomfortable... and you're trying to calm them down and keep them in the water:
> Look frogs, the temps've always been rising, "many times I've heard the phrase "This time it really is different" for it to turn out that it really wasn't all that different."
> Maybe this time it is, but I'd put my bet on isn't.
Bro, it's not about betting... you have to try hard to learn something about risk.