I'm confused. What's the difference between outsourcing and automation in your mind? They are both driven by a desire to lower costs. Automation isn't yet "there" in terms of being able to implement a model/robot/system as effectively or cheaply as sending it to a lower labor cost country, but that's a temporary state of affairs. As soon as automating things is cheaper than paying low-cost labor, companies opt for automation. We've already seen this happen with manufacturing "coming back" to or staying in the US, when what actually comes back is highly automated factories with few blue collar jobs [1].

You seem to be arguing that the issues I brought up are tied only to globalization and outsourcing when they are, in fact, tied to underlying economics that strongly favors automation in the long run. Over the next 10-20 years as automation becomes cheaper and more practical, it makes sense that the same problems will accelerate, even as globalization and outsourcing decline.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2016/12/08/news/companies/carrier-jobs...

Outsourcing means a country losing jobs to another country. Loss in one country, but not inevitable. It is just fair market competition.

Automation is global reduction of available jobs, which we might be doing (with agricultural mechanization mostly). But nowhere are we close to a mass change in society worldwide, not due to AI, and specially not to be given the blame of rising inequality, wages, debt, and unemployment.

Funny you mention horses, as it is a common analogy in these discourses. The horse population actually declined as they became less necessary thanks to transportation innovations. CGP Grey explained this well: https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU?t=212

Everyone in the world used to be a farmer. Now, only 1% of the population in developed countries farm. This time it's different?

Actually, I can agree that there had been reduction in global jobs as world gets slowly automated. But there won't be a sudden takeover of all jobs by some super sentient AI leading to mass unemployment. And neither are the current problems of inequality, debt, low wages a result of an increasing productivity, but rather increasing globalization.

It's the exact same thing that is going to occur with the human population. The current popular calculations for global population growth and the reduction of that growth, are wildly wrong. The reduction in growth and eventual decline is going to happen sooner and will be far more aggressive. The horses were replaced, the humans will be replaced.

>The horse population actually declined

No shit. There's fewer typewriters these days too.

Here is a true beauty that people should read..

https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKCAMP1960...

John F Kennedy talking about how automation is going to change America in 1960.

What I really want to read about is why otherwise intelligent people lazily default to pattern matching when changing facts suggest they should change their mind.

And I think the red zone is a century away. We have no understanding of how our brains work, yet alone making devices as smart as we are in causal reasoning.

That's the misconception. AGI is very unlikely to happen in our lifetimes due to prohibitive physical limits. But you don't need AGI to disenfranchise more or less 90+% of humans.

I find smarter people tend to broadly overestimate human potential. We are unreliable, tire, are often untrustworthy, make mistakes, are subject to emotions, prone to illogic and irrationality, etc. We're a very suboptimal entropy-reducing machine relative to the forms of purpose-built AI and robotics that will be possible within the next 20 years. It's a shame people aren't more alarmed about this.