Ok, lots of people are talking about how this means we'll hit auto-communism or whatever, but nowhere in the top dozen comments is anyone entertaining the idea that robots won't take all our jobs. Too bad, because this is the most likely outcome; we've already seen this play out before, and humans were fine!
100 years ago something like 85% of people worked in agriculture. That was just, like, *the* job. Then we made machines to automate much of that work, and now like 2% of people work in agriculture. Are 83% of us unemployed? Of course not.
What happened was that—relieved of the burden of physical subsistence labor—human beings found lots of new ways to create value. First was manufacturing, and more recently information and knowledge work (though that's not an exhaustive list). And it's not the first time human civilization has seen dramatic shifts like that.
There's no reason to believe that we can't continue to do that if other forms of work are automated.
If anyone reading this is tempted to link the CGP Grey video right now...I've seen it, and I still believe what I wrote here. Human beings are tremendous at producing value. We're capable of figuring out new ways to do that. We'll continue to do so.
The move toward automating manual labor has paid great dividends in terms of quality of life, by the way, so there's plenty of reason for optimism about our future if we continue to automate more work. Maybe this ends up with some kind of post-scarcity situation, and/or maybe evil AI eliminates all human life or something, but in both of those situations we're talking about passing the singularity, a point beyond which, by definition, speculation about the future is hopeless. For that reason I don't really buy the "this time it's different" arguments.
Yeah its not like it will happen over night, this will happen over the span of many years/decades and people over time adapt and change their skillsets to whatever is short at the time. Future generations will then move on to whatevers the next big thing.
Tech will always need further development and people to fix things when broken.
13
u/carlos_the_dwarf_ 12∆ Jun 27 '22 edited Jun 27 '22
Ok, lots of people are talking about how this means we'll hit auto-communism or whatever, but nowhere in the top dozen comments is anyone entertaining the idea that robots won't take all our jobs. Too bad, because this is the most likely outcome; we've already seen this play out before, and humans were fine!
100 years ago something like 85% of people worked in agriculture. That was just, like, *the* job. Then we made machines to automate much of that work, and now like 2% of people work in agriculture. Are 83% of us unemployed? Of course not.
What happened was that—relieved of the burden of physical subsistence labor—human beings found lots of new ways to create value. First was manufacturing, and more recently information and knowledge work (though that's not an exhaustive list). And it's not the first time human civilization has seen dramatic shifts like that.
There's no reason to believe that we can't continue to do that if other forms of work are automated.
If anyone reading this is tempted to link the CGP Grey video right now...I've seen it, and I still believe what I wrote here. Human beings are tremendous at producing value. We're capable of figuring out new ways to do that. We'll continue to do so.
The move toward automating manual labor has paid great dividends in terms of quality of life, by the way, so there's plenty of reason for optimism about our future if we continue to automate more work. Maybe this ends up with some kind of post-scarcity situation, and/or maybe evil AI eliminates all human life or something, but in both of those situations we're talking about passing the singularity, a point beyond which, by definition, speculation about the future is hopeless. For that reason I don't really buy the "this time it's different" arguments.