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We're all in for some hurt but just think how screwed some countries are going to be. India comes to mind, they will miss this whole cycle of using manufacturin

We're all in for some hurt but just think how screwed some countries are going to be. India comes to mind, they will miss this whole cycle of using manufacturing to bring the majority of folks out of poverty, it will pass right by them. As AI replaces call centers, automation replaces the factory worker, what's left for them? Interesting times...

toyg 10y ago
India is actually better positioned than most, what with their sea of IT infrastructure outsourcers and maintainers. It's Africans who will likely get screwed again.
philipkglass 10y ago
Poor Indians lack a lot of things that people in the developed world take for granted: sanitary water and sewage infrastructure, toilets, electrical infrastructure, lighting, refrigerators, washing machines, clean heat sources for cooking... All of these things can, in principle, be manufactured by AI instead of by human labor. The Indian government currently aids the rural poor by providing (e.g.) water pumps and electricity to farmers below cost. In the future the Indian government could import AI systems to build pumps and solar panels faster, better, and cheaper than human labor, thereby accelerating the provision of useful goods to low-income Indians. The main purpose of a refrigerator factory isn't to provide people with jobs, it's to provide them with refrigerators. If manufacturing goods becomes a lot easier and faster due to AI, that's going to raise India's material standard of living faster than if manufacturing still required a lot of human labor. Poor agricultural workers can skip over that whole generation-or-two process of leaving their villages for the city to work in export-driven factories starting from the low end of economic value. They can just enjoy the latest and greatest output from AI systems (assuming that their government cares at least a little about them, and I think India's government clears that low bar). In countries that industrialized in the past a lot of rural-laborers-turned-factory-workers preferred the landscapes and social ties of the countryside and only came to urban factories because of desperate poverty. If low-income nations have a chance to raise the material standard of living for the rural poor without mass migration to cities, because AI means you can provide abundant goods with very little human labor, that's a blessing for the global poor, not a curse. You might as well mourn for all the economy-growing switchboard operator jobs that low-income nations are being deprived of by going straight from "no rural telephone service" to "automated cellular networks for rural telephone service." Why don't they first wire the countryside for landline service and employ humans to manually connect calls, following a strict historical reproduction of the USA's development path? Because a strict historical imitation of the USA's development would slow rather than accelerate the overall process of raising the standard of living, that's why!

toyg 10y ago

India is actually better positioned than most, what with their sea of IT infrastructure outsourcers and maintainers. It's Africans who will likely get screwed again.

philipkglass 10y ago

Poor Indians lack a lot of things that people in the developed world take for granted: sanitary water and sewage infrastructure, toilets, electrical infrastructure, lighting, refrigerators, washing machines, clean heat sources for cooking... All of these things can, in principle, be manufactured by AI instead of by human labor. The Indian government currently aids the rural poor by providing (e.g.) water pumps and electricity to farmers below cost. In the future the Indian government could import AI systems to build pumps and solar panels faster, better, and cheaper than human labor, thereby accelerating the provision of useful goods to low-income Indians. The main purpose of a refrigerator factory isn't to provide people with jobs, it's to provide them with refrigerators. If manufacturing goods becomes a lot easier and faster due to AI, that's going to raise India's material standard of living faster than if manufacturing still required a lot of human labor. Poor agricultural workers can skip over that whole generation-or-two process of leaving their villages for the city to work in export-driven factories starting from the low end of economic value. They can just enjoy the latest and greatest output from AI systems (assuming that their government cares at least a little about them, and I think India's government clears that low bar). In countries that industrialized in the past a lot of rural-laborers-turned-factory-workers preferred the landscapes and social ties of the countryside and only came to urban factories because of desperate poverty. If low-income nations have a chance to raise the material standard of living for the rural poor without mass migration to cities, because AI means you can provide abundant goods with very little human labor, that's a blessing for the global poor, not a curse. You might as well mourn for all the economy-growing switchboard operator jobs that low-income nations are being deprived of by going straight from "no rural telephone service" to "automated cellular networks for rural telephone service." Why don't they first wire the countryside for landline service and employ humans to manually connect calls, following a strict historical reproduction of the USA's development path? Because a strict historical imitation of the USA's development would slow rather than accelerate the overall process of raising the standard of living, that's why!