Technology has always displaced workers. And then the society adjusts. Plenty of people will lose their jobs to AI, but most workers will be redeployed elsewhere.

The agricultural revolution displaced farm workers with machines. There was unrest and migration to cities, and eventually that fed the Industrial Revolution and created a working class.

Change is tough, but we will all be fine.

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samiv 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah and it took about 150 years until industrial revolution started to actually benefit the common people and the workers started to have their working conditions improved.

What it took was social democracy and unions and other social movements.

Saying that "it's happened before, it'll be alright" is a bit naive and short-sighted.

	▲	inigyou 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It took a literal civil war, which you don't read about in history books so much because it's not beneficial for the owners of those publishing houses to have more people hear about it. Lots of people died on both sides.

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smallmancontrov 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Last time inequality cooked up it took a lifetime to go back down. It did so very painfully through capital incineration on a monumental scale: a great depression, where the incineration was metaphorical, and two world wars, where it was very literal. In both cases it was economical and in both cases it fixed the problem but at enormous cost. We should aim to do better.

	▲	inigyou 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Plus all the union violence. The ones where owners used guns to break strikes so striking workers also started bringing guns and using them. I don't think we want that, do you?

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sumeno 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Easy to say it all worked out fine when you aren't one of the people who was displaced. They might feel differently.

It may have worked out fine for humanity as a whole, but it ignores the suffering of a lot of people.

	▲	Esophagus4 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mentioned in my other comments that I did support welfare programs as safety nets. Progress will result in better standards of living for many, and then we take care of the people left behind. I’m in software - in all likelihood, I will be displaced at some point. But I’ll figure it out (I hope). When I started out, I was writing Perl. Then I had to learn Python.