I am comparing suffering, not death. Death is not necessarily suffering.
> You're not thinking logically here. Humans have a limit, we all fall somewhere on a bell curve. If we push the jobs up and up and up the bell curve, as we have, we reach a tipping point!
> If we automate any more than we currently have, I fear we won't have jobs left that people can do. Even you, too, have a limit. You are not the smartest human alive I take it. Prepose you must be in order to work. What will you do?
You are still thinking that the amount of "knowledge" or "skill" that a human can hold is fixed, which is simply wrong. If you still believe that, then there really is nothing I can say that would disabuse you of this notion, in spite of the evidence to the contrary that the millennia of progress by, yes, humans, have led to more humans educated than ever. Why must there be a limit to the "jobs left that humans can do?" Please seriously ponder this question as to why, as it has not happened before in human history when other advances came.
I can tell by this conversation that you're very young, that you seem to see things in terms of black and white, yes and no, and I promise you, I have seen the same way years ago, but it is simply not reality. There are more shades of gray in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I don't think it is, or maybe we're thinking of this differently.
The quantity of knowledge is not fixed, it's infinite. The kind of knowledge IS fixed - this is your potential. I can learn to read, and to write, and to engineer. But I can't learn how to make a quantum computer, I simply don't have that potential.
But that's me. It varies from person to person, along a bell curve in my mind.
> Please seriously ponder this question as to why, as it has not happened before in human history when other advances came
Because the average potential is relatively high, and we already got the low hanging fruit out of the way.
For the vast, vast majority of human history, the average person could not read or write - they didn't need to. Eventually they did, but IMO the average human definitely has the potential to read and write, and I was proven right by that.
Some humans did not. We may consider them disabled. And yes, they were fucked and are fucked. I mentioned bandaids earlier, we provide help to these people. But the underlying problem exists, those that cannot read or write pretty much can't work any job, so they're fucked. 100 years ago they could be fine.
When other advancements came, we pushed human jobs up the bell curve of potential, and it was fine because there was SO much potential left.
But do you, honestly, think the average person can be an astrophysicist? If you answer no, as I would, then clearly there is a tipping point. We're not there yet, the average person does not need to be an astrophysicist. But they do need to graduate college, and some percentage of people can't, and they're simply fucked in our current society.
Of course. The difference is the level of education. Otherwise, do you really believe that those, all across the world, become astrophysicists? Everyone has the capacity to change, grow, and become more than they once were.
I know this applies to other people too because I've personally met people who can't read and never will. I've met people who couldn't graduate high school, and not from a lack of trying, and everyone in between. Based on that, and my own limits, I'm concluding there are limits to how "smart" someone can get and it varies. For me personally, I felt as though if I continued my education higher I would really be pushing it.
Perhaps you should speak for yourself then. It is not useful to extrapolate your experiences onto everyone else as it's comparable to someone with an IQ of 50 thinking everyone else is the same, not realizing that others might be much more intelligent than them. I simply do not agree that we have reached anywhere near the limit of human potential yet, as evidences by thousands of years of adaptation of work in the face of new technology that hunter gatherers could not have dreamed of, yet we are anatomically identical to them. To think that only today are we reaching the limits is a prime example of recency bias; it was famously said that in the early 1900s that everything that could've been invented had already been.
I feel I don't need to speak for myself when I say something so obvious as "not everyone can be an astrophysicist"
Rather, perhaps you should think more reasonably of yourself? I admire the confidence to believe you can truly do anything, but I'm definitely more confident in saying, no, you can't.
For the vast, vast, VAST majority of human history you could live simply by performing labor. This is no longer the case in modern societies.
Only KNOWLEDGE jobs now provide, IMO, an adequate income.
We have ALREADY left a lot of people behind. People who cannot read, or write, are completely fucked.
We are LUCKY that most people are able to read and write. As time goes on and this trend continues and we continue to cut off the bottom X% of jobs, what happens to those people?
Imagine a hypothetical secretary. This is all she is capable of doing, and she barely passed high school, and not from a lack of trying. Her job is then automated.
What does she do? This isn't a hypothetical question - spell it out for me. There are no jobs below her. What does she do?
To expand further, assuming some automate X removes the bottom Y percent of jobs, the lowest hanging of fruit, that means the jobs left MUST BE > Y. If someone can only do up to Y, then they cannot work a job. As Y approaches infinity, nobody on planet Earth will be able to work.
You're able to work right now because you happen to be smart enough to perform the average jobs available. When some automation, AI or not, doesn't matter, eliminates the bottom 90% of knowledge jobs, only the top 10% will be left. You will not be able to work one of those jobs, because you aren't working one right now and I'm assuming you've already pushed your brain to its limits. If you haven't, you're leaving money on the table, and you should be a rocket scientist.
It has nothing to do with automation here, it's actually everyone's fault here in starting a race to the bottom. Personally I'd rather do a lottery after basic competence but that's more of a regulation issue.
If SWE were to fully automated, I'd be busy running my own startup to implement all the ideas in my head. I think many also would. As a result, there would a boom of startups and an increase of job demand for lawyers, IBs or accountants. That's the thing with automation, as it improves the cost of running a business should decrease proportionally that everyone could eventually transition to the capitalist class themselves. Those who aren't would be working lucrative jobs.
This doesn't work, we go right back to "economy imploding"
The capital class only exists because it can harvest the resources of the non-capital class. If everyone is in the capital class, that means there's no extraction, nobody is buying. House of cards falls down.
We can make it work, don't get me wrong. But not in our current economic system, we would need something novel. And that's really my entire point here.
You're correct - the amount of death we deal with now is so much less it's not even comparable. I'm not comparing an abstract here like "suffering" - although, if I wanted to, it would be easy to argue that has also gone down.
It's truly undebatable that less people die now.
> it is an emergent problem in the field
Correct, it's a simple consequence of our economic systems that we haven't solved. It's a fundamental flaw. In order to survive, you must work. What happens to those who cannot work? We have put bandaid after bandaid, but the fundamental problem remains.
I get the feeling you don't see this as a real problem because nobody is causing it directly. But it is real. It's real right now, and it's been getting progressively worse and nobody knows what to do.
If 10% of people cannot earn a college degree, what happens to them? This isn't a hypothetical. As time goes on, those people are reserved to a life of poverty. 50 years ago, they would be just fine, there was plenty of labor jobs that paid well.
Now peer 50 years into the future. 30% cannot get a master's degree or some hypothetical equivalent benchmark. And so 30% live in poverty? And now 100 years into the future. 70% cannot earn a phd or some hypothetical equivalent benchmark. And...? Our economy? They cannot buy. What happens then?
> There have always been trials and tribulations to consider
You're not thinking logically here. Humans have a limit, we all fall somewhere on a bell curve. If we push the jobs up and up and up the bell curve, as we have, we reach a tipping point!
If we automate any more than we currently have, I fear we won't have jobs left that people can do. Even you, too, have a limit. You are not the smartest human alive I take it. Prepose you must be in order to work. What will you do?
Sure, we can look at something like automatic phone directories replacing secretaries and say "well they can skill up and get a different job". What happens when AI replaces the entire bottom half of knowledge jobs? Can those people "skill up"? They barely passed school to be an accountant and now that job is automated, they're already at their limit. Or, at least, some of them are.
What if YOUR own job is automated? What will YOU do? What if the only way to progress is to be a top 10% engineer? Well, are you? If not, will you ever be? It's possible the answer is no, and you're just fucked. There's no other way to put it, a large amount of people are just fucked. Until the majority is fucked, and then the system implodes on itself because the bold assumptions it made can no longer be fulfilled.
No work, no capitalism, no economy, no humanity. We've gotten very lucky that initial assumption has held true. I don't believe it will hold true forever.