By this logic we should just forbid the wheel. Imagine how many untrained people could work in transport and there would always be demand.

So why did the wheel not result in mass unemployment?

And factories neither?

Certainly it should have happened already but somehow it never did...

Past technological breakthroughs have required large, costly retools of society though. Increasingly, those retools have resulted in more and more people working in jobs whose societal value is dubious at best. Whether the next breakthrough(or the next five) finally requires a retool whose cost we can't afford is an open question.

Is there a time period in the past you would have preferred to live instead and why?

No, and I have no idea what I said that makes you think I do.

> Increasingly, those retools have resulted in more and more people working in jobs whose societal value is dubious at best.

This implies to me that in the past more people had worked in jobs with good societal values which would mean it was better for them I assume, and better for society. So I’m genuinely curious when that was and why. It sounds like a common romanticized past misconception to me.

An increasing number of people being unproductive doesn't rule out an increase in total production. It does suggest that for those whose jobs are now obsolete, there is increasingly no alternative to subsidizing their entire existence. We've kept pace so far, but a majority of people being in a situation where their labor is worthless is a huge potential societal fault line.

The point isn't forbidding anything, it is realizing that technological change is going to cause unemployment and having a plan for it, as opposed to what normally happens where there is no preparation.

Yup. Likewise, a key variable in understanding this is .. velocity? Ie a wheel is cool and all, but what did it displace? A horse is great and all, but what did it displace? Did it displace most jobs? Of course not. So people can move from one field to another.

Even if we just figured out self-driving it would be a far greater burden than we've seen previously.. or so i suspect. Several massive industries displaced overnight.

An "AI revolution" could do a lot more than "just" self-driving.

This is all hypotheticals of course. I'm not a big believer in the short term affect, to be clear. Long term though.. well, i'm quite pessimistic.

I think the argument here is that we are losing the _good_ jobs. It's like we're automating painting, arts and poetry instead of inventing the wheel. I don't fully agree with this premise (lots of intelectual work is rubbish) but it does sound much more fair when put this way.

anyone can make a wheel.

only a handful of (effectively unaccountable) entities have SOTA AIs, and it's very unlikely for others to catch up.

I doubt the people who experienced the technological revolution of locomotives and factories imagined the holocaust either. Of course technology has and can be used for evil

Wasn't this supposed to happen when PCs came out?

>> Exactly. The rational fear is that they will automate many lower middle class jobs and cause unemployment, not that Terminator was a documentary.

> Wasn't this supposed to happen when PCs came out?

Did it not?

PCs may not have caused a catastrophic level of unemployment, but as they say "past performance is not a guarantee of future results." As automation gets more and more capable, it's foolish to point to past iterations as "proof" that this (or some future) iteration of automation will also be fine.

Occupations like computer (human form), typist, telephone switcher, all became completely eliminated when the PC came out. Jobs like travel agents are on permanent decline minus select scenarios where it is attached with luxury. Cashier went from a decent nonlaborious job to literal starvation gig because the importance of a human in the job became negligible. There are many more examples.

Some people managed to retrain and adapt, partially thanks to software becoming much more intuitive to use over the years. We don't know how big the knowledge gap will be when the next big wave of automation comes. If retraining is not feasible for those at risk of losing their careers, there better be welfare abundance or society will be in great turmoil. High unemployment & destitution is the single most fundamental factor of social upheavel throughout human history.

Yeah but then capitalism breaks down because nobody is earning wages. One of the things capitalism is good at is providing (meaningless) employment to people because most wouldn’t know what to do with their days if given the free time back. This will only continue.

I do hope that will be the case. Certainly far better than the alternatives.

To some degree. Certainly the job of "file clerk" whose job was to retrieve folders of information from filing cabinets was made obsolete by relational databases. But the general fear that computers would replace workers wasn't really justified because most white-collar (even low end white-collar) jobs required some interaction using language. That computers couldn't really do. Until LLMs.

In the grand scheme of human history PCs didn’t come out all that long ago.

And the Loom

Things did become worse at first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Condition_of_the_Working_C...

Then new ideologies and social movements emerged with the explicit purpose of making things better, which caused changes to happen for the better.

The working class in England (working in my factory. To fund Marx’s life.)