This hoary take irks me. There were still places for human endeavour to go when the looms were automated.
That is no longer the case.
Think of it instead as cognitive habitat. Sure, there has been habitat loss in the past, but those losses have been offset by habitat gains elsewhere.
This time, I don't see anywhere for habitat gains to come, and I see a massive, enormous, looming (ha!) cognitive habitat loss.
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EDIT:
Reply to reply, posted as edit because I hit the HN rate limit:
> Your job didn't exist then. Mine didn't, either.
Yes, that was my point. New habitat opened up. I infer (but cannot prove) that the same will not be true this time. At the least, the newly-created habitat (prompt engineer, etc.) will be miniscule compared to what has been lost.
Reasoning from historical lessons learned during the introduction of TNT was of course tried when nuclear arms were created as well. Yet lessons from the TNT era proved ineffective at describing the world that was ushered into being. Firebombing, while as destructive as a small nuclear warhead, was hard, requiring fantastic air and ground support to achieve. Whereas dropping nukes is easy. It was precisely that ease-of-use that raised the profile of game theory and Mutually Assured Destruction, tit-for-tat, and all the other novelties occurrent in the nuclear world and not the one it supplanted.
Arguing from what happened with looms feels like the sort of undergrad maneuver that makes for a good term paper, but lousy economic policy. So many disanalogies.
> This prediction has occurred with every technology revolution. It hasn't been borne out yet.
So what? You are performing 'induction from history', which is possibly the hand-waviest possible means of estimating what is next to occur.
Discontinuities occur. Fire gets tamed. Alphabets get invented. What went before is only a solid guide to the future absent any major disruption to the status quo. There is no a-priori reason to think that this time will be the same, either. Burden of proof is yours.
> It's a variation of the broken window fallacy.
I appreciate parsimony as much as the next academic but I'd appreciate you fleshing out your position here, so I can take it apart at the joints, in the custom and manner of my people >:)
You still haven't stepped away from historical induction -- your argument still depends on this time not being radically different than last time. There are good reasons -- presented everywhere, right now -- to suppose that this time is substantively different. Sundar Pichai called the invention of AI the most important thing humanity has worked on -- more important than fire, or the alphabet -- and I share his view. It's out there, commonly, in the intellectual wild; you cannot, on pain of being unconvincing, simply ignore it. "Big, if true," and it very well might be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqd516M0Y5A
I propose that you invest in a more convincing line of argument. The burden of proof lies heavy upon you.
Secondly -- for the life of me -- I don't see how we got from "prosperity doesn't come from jobs that are little more than make-work" (a claim, by the way, that Keynes would take exception to) to the view that automating most of the intellectual work on the planet will have nugatory impact, or that we'll all just vy to become celebrated Twitch streamers or influencers or whatever (assuming that synthetic influencers don't take off -- oh, wait, they did: https://www.synthesia.io/glossary/ai-influencer)
Even were you correct (and Keynes wrong), the instantaneous conversion of meaningful labour --- journalism, counselling, engineering -- into, as you say, "make-work" (the position I infer you are taking) would have tremendous cost.
At minimum, the psychological impact of such a transition would make the developed world's COVID hangover look like a day at the zoo.
Finally, the Parable of the Broken Window specifically refers to destructive work. Non-productive work is not covered. https://finshots.in/archive/dig-holes-and-get-paid-to-fill-t.... And that is to say nothing about how economic fruits are distributed -- a whole other matter, upon which, I again infer, you have no further comment.
Allow me to indulge in my own historical induction.
Up until Louis Pasteur invented the germ theory of illness, it was broadly understood, across many different cultures, that disease had its origins in one or all of: witchcraft, possession, loose morals, blocked meridians, etc.
Were you to do historical induction on the spawning of illness theory, you might well conclude that no theory of illness would be scientifically verifiable. You might have argued that anyone claiming a radical change in medicine was deluded, alarmist, or simply excitable.
And you would have missed out on the multiple decades of extra health that you've had on account of antibiotics, sterile procedure, and disinfectant. Your induction from history would have caused you to miss the disanalogy.
Something to think about next time you're at the doctor.
Non-productive work is exactly what breaking a window and then fixing it is, as well as doing work that is far better done by machine.
As to distribution of economic fruits, as I mentioned before, replacing labor with machines made the US the most prosperous country in history, along with the richest poor people.
> Non-productive work is not destructive work -- again, Keynes ditches.
Sorry, but breaking a window and then fixing it is non-productive.
> Your country, the USA, is very close to system collapse because of its inequal distribution of fruits.
Hardly. If the US will collapse, it's because of the current leftist swing of the government engaging in ever-increasing wealth redistribution.
> I daresay it makes good popcorn-time.
It's the equal distribution of income countries that repeatedly collapse. France is in the news currently because they've discovered that the math of redistribution does not work, and the people who cannot accept the math are rioting.
Competition still has potential for infinite growth. Even if ai is better than humans at everything, humans will be finite and will likely be better at making people with money feel important. Potentially the future economy is everyone just competing to make the wealthy feel important whether fighting their wars, worshiping at their cults, or working at their “startups”
That is no longer the case.
Think of it instead as cognitive habitat. Sure, there has been habitat loss in the past, but those losses have been offset by habitat gains elsewhere.
This time, I don't see anywhere for habitat gains to come, and I see a massive, enormous, looming (ha!) cognitive habitat loss.
-- EDIT:
Reply to reply, posted as edit because I hit the HN rate limit:
> Your job didn't exist then. Mine didn't, either.
Yes, that was my point. New habitat opened up. I infer (but cannot prove) that the same will not be true this time. At the least, the newly-created habitat (prompt engineer, etc.) will be miniscule compared to what has been lost.
Reasoning from historical lessons learned during the introduction of TNT was of course tried when nuclear arms were created as well. Yet lessons from the TNT era proved ineffective at describing the world that was ushered into being. Firebombing, while as destructive as a small nuclear warhead, was hard, requiring fantastic air and ground support to achieve. Whereas dropping nukes is easy. It was precisely that ease-of-use that raised the profile of game theory and Mutually Assured Destruction, tit-for-tat, and all the other novelties occurrent in the nuclear world and not the one it supplanted.
Arguing from what happened with looms feels like the sort of undergrad maneuver that makes for a good term paper, but lousy economic policy. So many disanalogies.