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.