Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia, and especially in the last 150 years. A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable.

And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life.

Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.

▲

giacomoforte 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

AI would be able to clue you in on the logical fallacy you're committing.

▲

microtonal 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable.

A bit of a tangential anecdote from my dad, who is a retired a biologist. He was one of the first in the department to use a computer in the 1970s and wrote some programs to do tedious calculations that had to be done by hand before and took days of human labor. Even a 1970s computer could finish the calculations with his programs in a few minutes.

His boss, an older tenured professor, could not believe that 'these damn computers' can possibly be right. Doing the same calculations in a few minutes? Impossible. So for a few weeks (or months, I forget), he did all the calculations done on the computer by hand to prove that the computer must be wrong.

One day he comes to my dad and says "can you show me how to use one of these computers?"

▲

SecretDreams 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

If you can't see the difference between prior technological jumps and this current jump, you are part of the problem.

The world is changing quickly. Our most coveted defining traits - our minds - are under attack. This is a technology that seeks to replicate your thought processes and critical thinking and then to execute it at machine speeds.

If you think this is like the industrial revolution, you're actually right. We're still replacing animals with machines. But now we are the animals.

Anything other than a serious discussion about UBI or a post-labour economy is a joke. This is technology that aims to displace most of us.

▲

twoodfin 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

The motorized tractor and other agricultural technologies aimed and did, in fact, “displace most of us” once upon a time. And now, because I’m not a farmer, I get to spend much more time with my family, in recreational pursuits, sleeping, …

	▲	SecretDreams 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> And now, because I’m not a farmer, I get to spend much more time with my family, in recreational pursuits, sleeping, … You'll have even more time with your family when you are no longer a SWE, e.g. When automation displaced farmer manual labour, it also led to new jobs opening up for that labour to flow into. What new jobs/fields do you see developing out of AI tools and how they've been marketed so far? Every step of automation across the history of humanity has led to a "concentration of power" in jobs/fields which required brainpower. AI is the technology coming for brainpower. Where do we go from there? Back to farming? And when I say AI is coming for the brainpower, it's coming for it in two ways: directly where it takes our jobs and indirectly where a lot of people using it are seemingly getting dumber. Both are quite dangerous to our combined futures.