>The untold promise of [tractors] is to replace labor. [...] Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment.

How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

> How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

Regarding US agricultural labor displacement.

* It happened over a period of 200 years or so in the USA. [0] That's a key difference.

* Starting in the late 1800s manufacturing rose to a peak of 38% in 1944. [1] This absorbed a lot of the available labor, often at better rates of pay than farm work. It's a common pattern in industrializing nations where manufacturing absorbs labor freed up by more productive agriculture. Manufacturing labor is no longer growing, so that cannot help with employment.

That's not to say it was pleasant for all concerned. I would argue, however, that black swan events like the Dust Bowl caused more disruption and trauma than the steady displacement of farm labor by technology.

[0] https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-ag...

[1] https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work...

Edit: clarity

How do people still conflate “sectoral changes in the labor market” with “humans become zoo animals”? The scale just seems fundamentally different.

Tractors and looms displaced labour. Those people got other jobs. In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work.

The pitch for AI is that it's affordable at the insane valuations because it replaces labour.

It takes work out of the labour market entirely — fewer salaries means more money can be freed up that can go to the giant intelligence tap.

Not just some sectors — really all non-manual work sectors at once. Isn't that what the e/acc guys were open about at the beginning? Learn AI or you won't have a job?

Sam Altman was so open about this that he funded a UBI study.

If comparing past industrialisation and automation events with hypothetical LLM dominance in the workforce, some of my questions would be: (0) how limited is the change to a specific industry (e.g., weaving vs. most of intellectual and creative work by everyone starting from children as soon as they can read and type to the elderly)? (1) how many people are affected—in absolute terms not just percentages that ignore population growth? (2) how quickly are they affected? (3) what can people do—where can people move to where they can keep working (e.g., operating/maintaining/manufacturing tractors and looms, intellectual/white collar work, etc.)? (4) what are the organised reskilling processes in place that facilitate said migration? (5) how competitive and diverse, vs. monopolistic and regulated, are the new industries that power the change? how concentrated is created wealth and how many new jobs do they create? (6) what laws (in letter or in spirit) are violated as the change is happening? (7) if it is shown that the current change is about similar to the past in above aspects, does that imply it’s OK that it happens all over again and we have not learned a lesson to go ahead with these things more carefully so that the majority doesn’t suffer as much?

It’s different because those were singular technological advances, each in their own niche. They spread out change between time, geography, and industries.

The fear is this will replace engineers, scientists, accountants, lawyers, service workers, etc, etc all within a small time window.

Investment types have shown repeatedly that their primary concern is money, not workers. There is no reason to believe that those currently in power are open to sharing their wealth or influence.

Well the Industrial Revolution was objectively a worse deal for the average worker. The average preindustrial peasant worked 8-12 hour days, but had Sundays off and at least 120 rest days and holidays. Depending on how good wages were at the time, they may have only had to work between 120 and 180 days per year. Compare that to the 70+ hour weeks workers were made to work all year in factories during the period immediately following the Industrial Revolution. It took over 100 years of collective struggle through the labor movement, as well as technological advances, before labor conditions improved to be something along the lines of what they were in the preindustrial period (at least going by hours worked/year). If you're arguing that AI is going to be similar to this, I do not want to be a wage worker in the period where this takes place, just like I would not have liked to be a wage worker during the Industrial Revolution.

> After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today

And how many years did that take to happen? 3 or 4? That's what the AI companies are promising. 89% of you will be unemployed in the next couple years. All that wealth you'd be making from working will now be going to the company owners and you're out on your own. Good luck!

We're talking about ALL labor.

Sure, here's a direct answer:

Even after the mechanical loom was created, figuring out the next most important problem to work on was a job that humans did.

Unless you believe there's some hard limit on AI intelligence that will constrain it below the intelligence of a particular earthbound hairless ape, then eventually AI will be perfectly sufficient and probably better at figuring out the next most important problem to work on.

Ta-da, humans are completely removed from the value chain. Neither the loom nor the tractor could not do such a thing.

Are you suggesting we can make this comparison because there are no meaningful differences in society from the early 20th century to today?

I reject this argument as bad faith from the start.

I think the technology industry has a long track record of selling false promises, dead ends, and over-hyped solutions.

AI is an interesting experiment with some real-world applications, but it’s no tractor or mechanical loom... not yet, at least, and it’s far from clear that it ever will be.

As things stand today, AI is not the future. It’s a tool with genuine uses that is being marketed as a revolution.

Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it?

The industrial revolution came along with massive production of goods that people need and desire. Even then, there was still a huge amount of pushback (it still echoes in a lot of communities today!).

Do you see any differences compared to the AI revolution we're being sold?

1. It is to replace humans, or at least the majority of them, especially if they can get into Robotics as well, but that's a long shot I think.

2. If 1 happens, it is foreseeable that they don't even need that many slaves to tend to the machines, so not many "new" jobs created I'm afraid.

Comparing that to the computer -- yes if you are a typist you are doomed -- but they still need someone to type -- just not on a typewriter. And there are suddenly countless new requirements (e.g. video games, CGI, etc.) getting created from thin air. I don't really see this happening for AI -- like, do you see any NEW requirements getting created? Sure we are getting endless AI slop games/videos/fictions, but are they new? People can only consume that many products and pumping 100x into the system doesn't work -- except to make profit drop to ZERO for every ordinary creator out there.

BTW I do think there will be new requirements -- robotics combined with AI (e.g. who doesn't want a handsome husband or a beautiful wife?) -- but again it is to replace humans.

3. Apparently, accountability has dropped to a new low, since the end of the Cold War. So naturally cattle and sheep (I mean, us, ordinary people) are scared. Back then at least the elites were willing to make gestures and put up facades. Nowadays they simply don't GAF.

I don't know how tractors were sold initially, but AI is sold with open goal of making majority of the people unemployable, "obsolete" and keep it that way. That is literal rhetoric of those companies.

Tractors are tools to make hard boring labor easier.

The end goal is to mechanize and automate everything to "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." They are literally telling you this; it's written in stone. Once this is achieved, everyone else can turn into compost.