I realize you're kind of suggesting this later in your comment, but HN'ers really think prosperity is a default output of technological advancement.
A monarch in feudal time in the best of cases wants his people well off, but they never want them so well off that the caste directly below him in the system gets nervous, as such people stay poor unless they give the monarch a good reason to support them. The hierarchy needs to be maintained. Of course the aristocrats can afford more when they extract more of the people. Louis XIV's finance ministor on that part:
> The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.
The part where the people got their share of prosperity was called the French Revolution.
Similar dynamics happend for slightly different reason under capitalism, where during the industrialization people were exploited by the capital class — not because they needed to maintain a hierarchy, but simply because they get more if their workers get less. In that case prosperity only reached the people once they started to organize in unions and similar structures and fought for their rightful piece of the cookie. To underline how this was the opposite of what would automatically happen, here a quote by Jay Gould, a ruthless American railroad magnate of the 19th century:
> I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
On the eve of the French Revolution, the top 1% of French society owned roughly 50% of the wealth. Today in the US you're closing in on 40% with a very clear trend of this proceeding forward,especially under the current administration.
Only that today the wealthy have more tools to keep the poor in check by feeding them stories (e.g. the american dream) or having them fight amongst themselves (e.g. culture wars) and the cost of such propaganda should go down with LLMs.
I think short-term suffering, or at the very least disruption (as we're seeing) is essentially inevitable, but with all of these preemptive frameworks being implemented, or at the very least discussed (though just the latter isn't really good enough at all, of course) in turnaround times that are unprecedented, I really do not foresee a techno-dystopia; however, again, perhaps that's just wishful thinking.
Quite honestly, I think a pragmatic place to start, outside of theology and moral philosophy, is to make AI development necessarily adherent to some consortium of standards outlined by governments and implemented by boards within industries - like what we see with many engineering professions in the US and other countries.
It’s easy for us to be optimists and shrug nonchalantly about the short-term (?) suffering when we don’t face the worst or even median pain that these changes bring. Very strong “you will suffer but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” vibes.
Is this really true though? Being an agricultural feudal society is much much worse than the dreamy view we have of farming these days, and almost everyone even today chooses to work in a factory rather than a farm if they have that choice, in china, Africa, everywhere.
We have this image of gloomy coal powered cities being the worst place possible but in fact it was still better than the alternatives
Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.
this is exactly the point. Your children might only starve every 10 years, but when they do, a consistent factory work seems like a much better life. Just because you had 9/10 non-starving years doesn't mean the starving year is ok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act has an OK overview but is a bit thin and just a starting point. The political upheavals still echo in British politics today. I think it's fair to say that some of the changes were driven by the lure of profit (and associated national revenue) and some out of a desire to avert a domestic repeat of the American and French revolutions.
They were so angry about their fall in circumstance they revolted (and have been slandered by capitalists since).
In that same time period wages also rose for the third/second world workers. In no small part due to China’s one billion people (which is not neoliberal).
We’re still in the neoliberal phase, the backlash against the New Deal and other reforms of post-WWII. Then we now have within this order the AI boom/hype.
> Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life.
Here’s the difference between the perspective that “progress” is inevitable and we will (out of our generosity) try/hope for reducing the inevitable suffering of those (other) people. Another perspective is that progress that doesn’t serve people is not progress.
The root problem is the inequality that never was fixed.
Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life. Getting ahead of the problem, from the social side, could reduce the short-term suffering.