It’s funny to me that even here in HN people don’t get this at all. They fall behind simple truisms “automation only increases jobs”. It’s almost as if they’ve forgotten Trump got elected because vast swathes of America were deindustrialised and that led to a collapse to the quality of life in those regions.
On research that I’ve read, automation has definitely decreased the number of industrial jobs in America. Those people, some in large numbers, never found other jobs that were as well paying.
But like David Simon always says “American distopia doesn’t sell in America”.
Whether they're worth taking Vs doing something more similar to your current job but for a bit less money is an individual's choice, of course.
New histories of the period think of it as potentially as one of the few times we know where there was an enormous economic boom alongside a general collapse of quality of life.
Ir could be we are looking at something similar at the moment with the digital revolution.
Yes eventually we all retrain and the effect will be nil, but in the in-between time, a lot of people might suffer immensely.
We're talking about things that can be eased into, by white collar workers. And the numbers affected are nothing like the industrial revolution's either.
Driving seems like a tough nut to crack, but what if we suddenly start obliterating multiple areas of human employment one after the other? Ones we haven’t even thought of?
I’m using AI to aid development of a game engine with a baked in model to replicate and help the user evolve the game world style, and rules, to their curiosity and tastes. Games will be even easier since familiar experiences are heavily constrained through painstaking play test. Game world generation parameters are finite. Even the art work we appreciate most is often constrained to a handful of style patterns; consider how flat web design was suddenly everywhere with only colors differing. Whole lot of the same goes into game asset production.
Gabe Newell called content creating AI an extinction level event for multimedia business. Of course politics as usual will be leveraged to create private monopoly of such technology unless open sourced.
Our best bet is such software is open source and thus aristocrats cannot lock it up behind artificial scarcity and copyright maximalism.