Chris Urmson, who is one of the most authoritative voices in self-driving cars doesn't expect autonomous vehicles to be widely available in America for 3-5 decades, which is much slower than the rate at which automobiles swept the nation in the first half of the 20th century.
The Spinning Jenny made it possible to do more spinning with fewer people employed as spinners, but no advances on the Spinning Jenny would deplete the newly created jobs of maintaining this machine or inventing further machines.
In contrast, a meta-applicable machine can automate not only a task it was set, but also meta-tasks such as maintaining and further optimising the machine itself or finding better tasks to do.
The Spinning Jenny is also illustrative because what actually ended up happening was not only that many spinners became unemployed, but that fabric production shot up and prices collapsed so that most people would now own more clothing. That's why you own lots of clothes. But as you may have noticed, us purchasing lots of clothes is itself an environmental disaster, and so we probably need to cut back. If a machine makes it possible to create ten times as much stuff for the same labour, yes, it's possible we'll just make ten times as much stuff, but it's also possible we'll refrain and cut the labour to one tenth...
This terrifies me. Uber is a very good source of income for a lot of people. So google is going to run Waymo at a loss out of their endless pockets and starve thousands of people of essential income? And we are all supposed to dangle on the edge of our seats while we wait to see whether or not this task is within the capabilities of our current technology, with all these people’s livelihoods at stake? This is fucking bullshit. There aren’t good jobs to transition into at the same skill level because of automation and outsourcing. Expecting everyone to go to college, let alone go to college and become programmers, is mental gymnastics levels of rationalization. Rationalizing away the difficult and uncomfortable question of whether or not technology is leading is to a place we want to be and what we can do a about it.
One job after another will disappear and don’t believe for a second that programming is safe. They used to say it about lots of writing tasks that are now automated by gtp2. I would bet most “journalists” could be automated by gtp2 because most of their readership doesn’t look for or recognize high-level order or coherency or even truth anyway. And don’t for even one split second try to tell yourself that high level order and logic are off the table for robots.