Edit: For the replies, yes, things adjust. It's not, however, instantaneous.

The exception is when the regulatory environment prevents certain jobs from being automated or otherwise competitive, resulting in artificial scarcity of necessities. But then your problem isn't AI, it's market consolidation and regulatory capture.

AI is manifestly not automating away the shittiest jobs like hand-digging for rare earth minerals, subsistence agriculture, sorting through garbage to collect recyclables and so on. It is being very disruptive to cottage industries like graphic design, tech consulting and the like. In some cases it will certainly free up providers to skip the boring stuff and move up market or serve a larger number of customers, but in other cases it's just going to make people redundant. For example, it's entirely practical right now to launch and run a greeting card company without ever hiring an artist.

And then the products they used to make become less expensive because they require less labor to produce, which reduces amount of pay or hours anyone needs to make a living. Meanwhile all of the people who didn't lose their jobs now have that much more disposable income, which they use to buy something else, which creates new jobs doing whatever it is they're buying with the money they saved.

> AI is manifestly not automating away the shittiest jobs like hand-digging for rare earth minerals, subsistence agriculture, sorting through garbage to collect recyclables and so on.

You're describing work that has been under heavy and increasing automation for decades. Farmers use combines and sophisticated irrigation systems. Miners use heavy machinery, not their hands.

> It is being very disruptive to cottage industries like graphic design, tech consulting and the like.

Obviously the people who used to do the thing being automated will have to do something else, but then they do something else. If there is a something else then that's fine (and this has been the historical norm), if there ever comes to be no something else then substantially everything has been automated and the cost of living should be negligible absent some kind of government regulatory dysfunction.

That's textbook deflationary, and mistakenly assumes that consumer products make up the bulk of discretionary spending. A more likely outcome is that whole fields of endeavor will become areas where hardly anyone can make a living, because the marginal cost of the product has fallen to zero. Your argument would have more force if UBI were an established norm, but it isn't. People whose income shrinks drastically or dries up due to AI are not going to have their rent or food costs reduced, they're just going to have to find some other form of work to pay their bills.

You're describing work that has been under heavy and increasing automation for decades. Farmers use combines and sophisticated irrigation systems. Miners use heavy machinery, not their hands.

First, that's not AI - the subject we're discussing. Second, it's not true. The existence of automation and industry does not mean that manual labor under terrible conditions ceases to exist. A huge portion of the food industry is done through manual labor, often illegally hired. Here's a current example of how mining continues to be done by hand, at scale:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...

While I'm very much a tech person and excited about the possibilities for AI, I'm also keenly aware of the downsides and economic dislocation it's likely to inflict, and how these could be worse as well as better. You seem to have a very idealistic view of the world, but not a great deal of experience.

Deflation reflects the value of the currency. This reflects the value of some products and services relative to others. Obviously some things decline in cost over time -- compute is the obvious example, but just look at your own examples:

> For example, it's entirely practical right now to launch and run a greeting card company without ever hiring an artist.

In other words, the cost of commodity art has gone down.

Whether the long-term result is net deflation depends on whether the government is concurrently printing up any new currency, but in general they are, because currency deflation is bad but easy to offset by doing just that.

> mistakenly assumes that consumer products make up the bulk of discretionary spending.

Where does it assume that? What it assumes is that labor is the primary component of the cost of living -- which it is. There are some things with true scarcity in theory, but those are rarely the bottleneck in practice. It's not that we can't grow enough food to feed everyone, or build enough housing etc. -- it's that those things take labor to deliver, so if we automate that labor the cost of living goes down.

> First, that's not AI - the subject we're discussing.

We're discussing automation, of which AI is a subset. The Luddites weren't upset about AI and nobody really expects AI to somehow automate mining, but that doesn't mean mining automation isn't possible. You might even use AI to devise new technology to automate mining.

> People whose income shrinks drastically or dries up due to AI are not going to have their rent or food costs reduced,

The overall economy no longer has to pay them to do something the machine will do basically for free, so that thing will cost less. Now, this might mean that one specific person loses a $50,000 salary and in exchange the average person (including them) has their costs reduced by $50/year, because that job was only done by one in a thousand people.

But that $50,000 in total is still out there in the pockets of those 1000 people, and they're going to spend it on something instead, and that something is going to create some other new job for that person.

The person who was previously making $50,000/year may not like this. They may even end up with a new job paying $45,000/year and the other $5000 goes to someone else, even though their cost of living only went down by the same $50/year as everyone else. But each $50/year, each occupation that gets automated, adds up. And when you automate more of the old jobs it turns into $5000/year per person or more and outweighs the cost not just on average but for even the people who had to change careers.

> they're just going to have to find some other form of work to pay their bills.

But that's just what they'll do, unless there is no other work that needs to be done. Which would imply that everything should be really cheap.

> The existence of automation and industry does not mean that manual labor under terrible conditions ceases to exist.

It ceases to exist to the extent it has been automated. If you automate half of something but not the other half, the problem is not the half you've automated, it's the half you haven't yet.

And it's not as if no one is trying to increase the level of automation in general. If your objection is that nobody has automated parts of agriculture yet then forget about AI and focus your efforts on accomplishing that.

No we're not. This is a discussion about the EU rolling out the first regulatory proposals for AI. You don't get to change to subject to whatever is convenient for your argument at a given moment.

I really can't be bothered engaging with the rest of your post, as you simply ignore facts that don't suit your argument and keep reiterating what you want to happen in the ideal economic world you prefer to inhabit. This is just ideology divorced from reality.

Your argument is the one that has been put forth against every form of automation since the industrial revolution. It's not changing the subject to recognize the parallel.

> I really can't be bothered engaging with the rest of your post, as you simply ignore facts that don't suit your argument and keep reiterating what you want to happen in the ideal economic world you prefer to inhabit. This is just ideology divorced from reality.

I'm not sure which facts you think I'm ignoring.

Suppose that AI automates 20% of jobs, causing everyone's costs to go down by an average of 20%. Meanwhile the people who lost those jobs have to find different ones, which e.g. may not pay as well (after all, there is a reason they didn't take those jobs before).

Your argument is apparently that this is bad for them and a problem -- they might have to take a job at $45,000 when they currently make $50,000. But if the same forces also cause their annual expenses[0] to go from $50,000 to $40,000, this is neither bad nor a problem. And for some other person making $50,000 doing something else who didn't lose their job, their expenses went down from $50,000 to $40,000 too, which is even better.

[0] In real dollars; in practice the Fed might respond to this by increasing the money supply to prevent nominal consumer prices and wages from going down.

Which part of this are you even disputing?

Meanwhile, the quality of life for the unemployed keeps improving due to those same technologies. If unemployment is a problem because of lack of access to things you want (other than status symbols), then it's hardly a problem anymore in developed countries. If the problem is a feeling of shame or uselessness, then maybe we should be building or growing other institutions to make unemployed people feel good about themselves.

Because most people can't do this or even know what you mean by this sentence. There is a reason why developers exist, and it's not because they can code per se. They solve problems that people don't know how to, and the code is just a means to that end.

Another such job that is disappearing in Estonia is food (https://www.starship.xyz/) and package delivery (https://www.dpd.com/cn/en/2022/08/09/self-driving-delivery-r...), which we are also replacing with robots, meaning all those people will soon be unemployed, if not already in some amount.

I have a hard time seeing how automation helps these people. And these people are growing a disdain towards people like me, tech people, who put them out of work. Low-skilled jobs are becoming increasingly scarce to find, and with people not having resources or time to level up their education, they are stuck. I know many people like this myself. Struggling to pay bills, no light at the end of the tunnel.

If the government would give some support to these people misplaced by automation, maybe it would help lift these people out of poverty indeed, but that's not happening. There is no support. These people are on their own.

It's quite possible, for example, that the value of "skilled jobs" and "knowledge work" will go down because it's easier to automate if you don't need to build hardware to manipulate things in the world.

Certain jobs have already been made obsolete practically overnight, and the writing is on the wall for many more. Society needs time to adjust, for new jobs to be created and people to be trained in them. We'll figure it out, but the transition period will be rough for many.

Which jobs are you referring to?

Until a few years ago, this was "knowledge work". Creativity, empathy, imagination, communication, the work you do using your brain. Automation can replace human hands and muscles, you see, but not our minds. That's why education and upskilling is so important to dealing with the impact of automation on workers.

... Except now it's 2023 and AI has its crosshairs on both our minds and our hands. What else do human workers have to offer?

The problem is not that a plan doesn't exist! It's that powerful don't have the goal of enabling the plan, and they use their power to actively fight against it.

I do not see that changing with the advent of more powerful computer systems.

More recently, computers have already automated a huge number of jobs, yet the unemployment rate remains around 3%, proving that people are doing "something". And that something is definitely not doing data copying, manual additions and computations, etc.

Are the salaries comparable to what people were getting for minimum wage jobs in the past?

No, what actually happened is decades of declines in the safety and material condition of workers, children forced into factories, organization and violent rebellion by labor unions, and a peace carved out with mass enfranchisement, the formation of working class political parties, and the passage of labor laws. People who say this kind of stuff always have a “draw the rest of the owl” conception of history.

Funnily enough, there was also a corollary movement to the Luddites in France that almost no one knows about because a. they won more of these battles b. French workers did not face as much of a decline in their standard of living as English workers did in the same period as a result.

The thing that came before the industrial revolution was feudalism. Life expectancy increased dramatically as a result of industrialization.

> children forced into factories

They weren't being kidnapped, they were getting paid. This was a "problem" because it became more lucrative to work in a factory than go to school, so prohibitions on child labor and mandatory school attendance laws became widespread during the industrial revolution.

> organization and violent rebellion by labor unions

This was mainly attributable to governments not enforcing antitrust laws or allowing employers to get away with violence themselves. It was basically gang violence by rival gangs when the real solution should have been trust busting.

> the passage of labor laws

Most labor laws were retroactive legislative enactment of soon to be widespread employment conditions, because once employers had to compete with each other they had to provide competitive working conditions. Legislators opportunistically took credit for changes that were in the process of happening regardless.

Forced.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

> which was accompanied by an increase in widespread disease outbreaks and malnutrition.

And yet average lifespans went up, because what came before was even worse.

And then the world gained the germ theory of disease and penicillin and they went up even more.

> In countries like England, this had an immediate disastrous impact on health and lifespans relative to fairly stable trend under feudalism.

You can clearly see the start of the industrial revolution on this life expectancy chart, and the consequences:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Li...

> Likewise, having been dispossessed of lands they were previously free to exist and work on for many generations, many adult and child were, in effect, kidnapped, as the only other choice was starvation and death.

Dispossessed of the lands? The peasants didn't own the land. They were serfs who genuinely didn't have a choice because the alternative was to be executed or left to "starvation and death."

Industrialization was the first time they actually had a choice. There were still agricultural workers -- somebody was growing the food -- but now you could go into the city, which generally paid better. Or paid at all, contrary to historical norms. And you had a choice of what you did. Working long hours in a factory wasn't as easy as working for a grocer, but it paid better, and people chose it willingly.

This was the thing that truly ended slavery in the first world -- before if you were a slave or a serf and you ran off, you would be left to die alone in the wilderness. Now you could run off to the city and get a job in a factory, and live, and make money. The old system was defunct because the plantation owners were never going to keep people there by force once escape meant profit rather than death.

> unless you somehow think the formation of the Labour Party in England was unrelated to these developments.

This was obviously the period during which unions entered the scene, but notice that unions have significantly declined in the US since then and "labor laws" like the minimum wage haven't kept up with inflation, and yet minimum wage jobs are uncommon because employers still have to compete for labor even in the absence of unions or labor laws.

The place where this falls down is when they don't, i.e. when you have a monopoly or a company town which is the only employer for some occupation or region. Which is a legitimate problem if you have a regulatory environment that allows that to happen, but the solution to it isn't "labor laws" or unions, because a monopoly is a problem for more than just workers. You have to bust them up and prevent them from forming.

At which point the rest of that stuff is just inefficient ways to mitigate the consequences a problem that should be solved properly instead.

This seems like the money quote:

> the broad-based prosperity of the past was not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress… Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably

But this is just the same point I've been making: If you have competitive markets, this is what happens naturally because customers will prefer to patronize businesses that share the gains of technological progress with customers and employees will prefer to work for the ones that share the gains of technological progress with workers. The ones that try to keep all the gains for themselves get outcompeted -- as long as there is competition.

The problem -- which they largely recognize -- is that if you don't have competition, which has been the case in many instances throughout history, the incumbents become abusive. But since this is only possible when they have insufficient competition, that is the problem we have to solve.

The consequence of industrialization was creating new social and political formations (primarily the classes called Labor and Capital and their corresponding representation in nascent democracies vs. prior feudal dynamics). While market economies, really more the birth of Capitalism in general, was necessary for creating those classes and competing interests, it was not sufficient for creating the progress you cite. That had more to do with worker organization against exploitation, specifically in the energy economy, which gave them massive leverage over the emergent political formations (see Timothy Mitchell’s work Carbon Democracy). That’s why the blurb explicitly states: workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.

It’s honestly bizarre to debate someone about the contents of a book they haven’t read, nor seem to even engage with a basic summary of. There are lots of compliant chatbots you can talk to if you only want to be in dialogue with whatever you already believe to be true.

Lots of illuminating examples of how technological progress immediately made life worse for many people, until a revolt/change came about to prevent exploitation/share the newfound efficiency gains etc.

A few memorable anecdotes off the top of my head:

- In one instance, during the Industrial Revolution, they quoted a letter from a lord (owner of a coal mine) who said mines would stop being profitable if children were banned/restricted from working in them. Some new parts of mines accessible thanks to advances in dredging technology were narrow, very suited to children’s small bodies, and digging the tunnels to the size of an adult cost too much. There was a complaint that some children were suffering brain damage due to chronic sleep deprivation and being forced to push mine carts in tunnels with their heads.

- In the period leading up to the Industrial Revolution, there were proven advances in milling and agricultural technology in England, making grain production cheaper and more efficient. However, analysis of peasant skeletons showed signs of more and more malnutrition, as well as signs of damage from work. The author says the prevalent theory is that because the margin-per-hour-worked of a peasant increased, local lords had more incentive to work them harder (not an economist/historian, so can only take this at face value). Not having anywhere else to go (indeed, in multiple instances even during the industrial revolutions, it was either illegal or difficult to change jobs), they just got worse living conditions. Additionally, peasant access to the ever-more-efficient mills was tightly controlled and expensive, to the point where peasants found it better to just mill grain by hand at home. The lords/priests promptly made this illegal and would perform periodic raids to confiscate their equipment.

- Both during the construction of the Panama Canal and in the major industrial cities of England, dense worker concentrations and poor sanitation caused workers to die in droves and decrease the efficiency of the construction/factories. In the England case, diseases that hadn’t been seen in years had resurfaced. It took a long time for workers to finally convince management/government to invest in sanitation/health/sewage, which not only kept people alive and healthy, but increased productivity and completed the canal.

Of course, a lot of this is mixed with differing hierarchies or political scenarios, and isn’t a comprehensive before->after of every advancement etc. However, it certainly put a heavy dose of nuance on the optimism behind technological advancement, and made me wonder if we could have pre-emptively enacted the necessary social/political changes which allowed for the wide-spread benefitting of technology without first going through the preceding periods of intensified suffering.

The question is thus: how do we ensure that the new gains are shared from the start; not "do those gain exist".

The issue with the "Luddistic" approach isn't that it is concerned by the impact of a new technology, it's that it fights progress instead of accompanying it.

This may be tangential - but I’d like to point out, that while the Luddite movement may be painted as espousing the former, my readings have actually suggested the latter. In “Writings of the Luddites” they very much state that they have no problems with the machines, just that they wanted them not to be used in “dishonest” ways. Of course, movements of moderate sizes will include a spectrum of ideas so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the first camp were in the mix, but it’s worth noting!