We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI

Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by PeterisP on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @04:07PM (#35445215)

Steam engines and their descendants largely replaced the jobs which were done by horses and mules, and they did that successfully - there are some jobs for horses still remaining, and initially many new jobs were created for horses in cooperation with the engines (peak-horse was at 1920-0ish), but the total number of jobs for horses has collapsed to nearly zero compared to what it used to be.

So the analogy of steam engines suggests that this can be quite dangerous indeed.

Also, we do have historical evidence at how fast human society reacts to changes when technology causes great shifts in needed jobs - not fast at all. Even getting to terms with decades-long changes caused significant social upheaval and strife, as in, for example, the automation of textile industry; If the current speed of technological change would cause a disruption in jobs which happens over the course of just a few years, it will be hectic and violent even if there is the same number of new, different jobs created.

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by kgwgk on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @04:34PM (#35445528)

> Steam engines and their descendants largely replaced the jobs which were done by horses and mules

> for example, the automation of textile industry

How many horses and mules were working in the textile industry again?

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by PeterisP on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @04:59PM (#35445800)

As you have noticed, the last paragraph is about other types of automation during the industrial age than the steam engine.

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by kgwgk on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @05:02PM (#35445829)

What do you think that was powering that automation exactly?

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by PeterisP on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @05:15PM (#35445935)

In the textile industry many of the major changes were from better devices, not neccesarily of how they were powered.

The cotton gin revolutionized the industry while it was still people-powered, including by slave labor (edit: and also horse-powered); and the Luddites (some decades after Ned Ludd) rebelled not against the looms being powered by steam but rather against the Jacquard loom - an add-on to the exiting looms which allowed complex products to be weaved by unskilled people, removing their bargaining power despite not changing a thing about how the loom was powered.

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by kgwgk on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @05:46PM (#35446278)

The "how they were powered" was quite important in the magnitude of many of those changes though.

"Although some were driven by animal power, most early mills were built in rural areas at fast-flowing rivers and streams using water wheels for power.[3] The development of viable steam engines by Boulton and Watt from 1781 led to the growth of larger, steam-powered mills allowing them to be concentrated in urban mill towns, like Manchester, which with neighbouring Salford had more than 50 mills by 1802.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_mill

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by calvinmorrison on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @06:37PM (#35446794)

Or worse some silly French commanders throw legions of frogs over the dugout, this time not against mechanized machine guns, but literal sentient death machines. How high the toll would be

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