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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
What we are seeing is very similar to what it must have been like for folks seeing machines take over and greatly simplify labor intensive tasks during the Industrial Revolution. Textile mills moved from hundreds of laborers making cloth on hand driven looms to machines churning out fabrics at a blistering pace. The short term effect was a major problem for those laborers who were displaced with a long term effect of creating a more efficient economy, with cheaper products for everyone and most people benefiting from a higher standard of living.
This sort of disruption happened again as computers took off. The Digital Revolution displaced many office workers. Many manual processes were replaced with digital sensors, switches and machines. For example, it was no longer necessary to have huge floors in an office building where typists manually copied documents. Again, a large number of workers suffered a major short term impact, but the long term outcome has been a net positive for society.
And things got disrupted again with the rise of the internet. Having lived through this one personally, the echoes of it are quite clear. The Internet disrupted a lot of existing systems. The rise of internet commerce was the death knell of brick and mortar businesses. The Internet was going to replace everything from banking to schooling. And ya, it caused a lot of job loss at all the stores it drove out of business. And it did drive stores out of business and continues to do so.
I suspect that, in 50 years or so, we'll look back at this time as the beginning of the "AI Revolution", and see it as an overall net positive. That isn't to say that there won't be people negatively impacted by the change. Writers and artists are very obvious casualties. Many other workers will find their jobs affected by AI as well. However, it's also worth noting that we are nowhere near strong, general purpose AI. And what AI is likely to become, for now, is a tool to increase the productivity of professionals. It will mean that fewer people are needed to perform a task. But, there will still be a need for people to oversee the and direct the AI. The Industrial Revolution wasn't the end of the world, neither was the Digital Revolution or the Internet Revolution. The AI Revolution won't be the end of the world either.
I hope you're right. Something about the scope and type of change we're seeing here feels quite different. It can be mistake too to assume that things will go the way they usually have. I wouldn't advise anyone to be complacent. We had to have something close to a second civil war in the US to get things like an 8 hour day.
It will absolutely be a net positive for everyone above a certain socio-economic threshold. It will also leave everyone below that threshold behind, but it will be a minority of people who, I suspect, will be largely made up of minorities and already marginalized people increasing the divide. But history will look back kindly regardless. Because that’s how history works.
A minority? Advancements in AI could lead to extensive automation in the service industries and desk jobs everywhere, which is what makes up for most of the jobs today.
If history will look back kindly, it's mostly for the whole "written by the victors", but what that will mean for us living through it might be very different. With people already struggling with costs of living, I wouldn't put most people in the threshold of a net positive outcome. Not unless drastic sociopolitical changes take place, at the very least.
It depends.
It could fizzle out a bit, harsh reality is that there are limitations, and those limitations are not trivial to push beyond. For example here they said the results were obviously bad, and the Spanish readers would switch to read English instead.
It could free up opportunities for sorts of work we couldn't previously have done and keep folks utilized.
We may run out of ambitions and end up with a glut of time and resources and give everyone better quality of living with less time lost to labor.
We may end up with a dystopia of people arbitrarily in the winning side enjoy a paradise and the rest suffer or rise up in desperation.
I'm looking at it from an angle of someone who sees the fuctional potential of the technology while being wary of the social repercussions. It may not cut it for now, but it's very possible that in a few years it will be passable enough for most low level work, and as much as may think little of that, there are always far more people employed in low level positions than higher ones.
What exactly?
This is an issue I see with the attitudes around it, this assumption that because previous technological advancements opened new opportunities, that this will be the same. What is not being considered is that this one is already primed to swallow those very same recent opportunities that were opened to us. There's already projects for coding AI, even. It's already approaching human-level capabilities.
Even if I try in good faith to imagine such a future, there is still the matter that, even if someone could start their own AI tech blog, their own AI art career, it doesn't mean there will be demand for that, especially because, assuming a capable AI, any single AI production will be far more productive. There will be less need for creatives behind AI. The needs of AI research will not need anywhere as many people as AI displaces either.
Even calling it "opportunities" seems like the wrong connotation because this is likely to displace people from careers that they were already passionate about. Even given a chance, many artists don't want to move into creating AI art, they want to make their own art. This is not freeing them, it's taking what they love away from them.
Ultimately, what is it that will make up for it? Are we just going to trust that something will show up, without any idea of what it is? Sounds unreliable. As much as you trust that because history turned out fine before it will again, I can't be reassured so easily. It turned out fine because humans had intellectual capabilities that early machinery couldn't handle. What if most people are left with nothing to move to. I don't trust history to play out the same, but I worry about something of it still. The early days of the Industrial Revolution had horrible exploitation and grueling working conditions. I dread to think what would be of the world if most people are left that desperate again.
The only way to prevent that would be a strong popular movement. Technology won't guarantee us a thriving future or we would have gotten that already. But united people can do it.
It's why I speculated different scenarios, we have to prepare for things to go various directions.
There's a chance that possibilities I can't imagine pop up. I suspect my imagination would have been too limited to see modern jobs if I lived in pre industrial times.
It's possible we ultimately run out of new stuff to do. Hopefully we can find a path to increase leisure rather than pointlessly keep people doing tedious work that we could automate because we couldn't think of a better system. There's tough issues around how to do it at all, and tougher, how to do it fairly.
If we get to such a future, I'd want to see reduction in hours worked per person, or some decoupling of livelihood from working. Way easier said than done though...