5 ms·

Most people who use this argument forget about the scale and duration of this transformation back then and now. Back in 1800s there were merely ~1 billion peopl

by pzo 7y ago

Most people who use this argument forget about the scale and duration of this transformation back then and now. Back in 1800s there were merely ~1 billion people, then in 1900s it was ~1.6 billion. Lets say even if 50% of people back then lost jobs you had to find new jobs for 'only' ~0.8 billion people and you had more than 100 years for that transition. WWI and WWII at the beginning of 20 century 'helped' to reduce population and keep other busy to rebuild what got destroyed during the war. I guess we would like to avoid that scenario. Now we have 7.7 billion people and it is estimated we will have 10 billion by 2050. Pace of current technical development is much faster than in 1800s and education for acquiring new skills probably takes even longer than in 1800s. Will we be able to hypothetically reskill 5 billion of people in the next 50 years? Personally I doubt it. EDIT: source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

leoedin 7y ago
Absolute numbers are a distraction. Retraining 1 person in a population of 10 has the same net demands as retraining 100,000 in a population of 1,000,000. Human society is massively parallel by default.
darkmighty 7y ago
I think most people don't imagine properly the world as automation increases at all levels. The first expectation is perhaps that mass unemployment would abide; clearly we don't have mass unemployment in most places (most of the world has a relatively high employment), so the phenomenon must not be occurring or there's the oft-mentioned effect of workers moving to high level tasks. Since Quantum Supremacy was en vogue, let me coin another term: Robotic Supremacy. That is when a robot (i.e. some kind of automatic machine, not necessarily a humanoid robot) will be able to perform each and every task a human can do more economically. Humans will become unemployable. My hypothesis is that Robotic Supremacy is still far away (maybe a century); and also that this milestone doesn't matter as much as it appears. The scenario of unemployability is highly unlikely; there's almost always something you can get a human to do that'll pay their food and shelter (we're fantastic machines evolved for billions of years; robots are still far away from domination in many niches). The question is how much this person will earn -- perhaps increasingly less, not more; because it has more competition and the tasks are not as essential as before. So a natural manifestation would be rise in income/wealth inequality. That's precisely what we're seeing. If left unchecked, most places will see a spiral of a tiny elite concentrating all wealth.

by pzo 7y ago

leoedin 7y ago

Absolute numbers are a distraction. Retraining 1 person in a population of 10 has the same net demands as retraining 100,000 in a population of 1,000,000. Human society is massively parallel by default.

darkmighty 7y ago

I think most people don't imagine properly the world as automation increases at all levels. The first expectation is perhaps that mass unemployment would abide; clearly we don't have mass unemployment in most places (most of the world has a relatively high employment), so the phenomenon must not be occurring or there's the oft-mentioned effect of workers moving to high level tasks. Since Quantum Supremacy was en vogue, let me coin another term: Robotic Supremacy. That is when a robot (i.e. some kind of automatic machine, not necessarily a humanoid robot) will be able to perform each and every task a human can do more economically. Humans will become unemployable. My hypothesis is that Robotic Supremacy is still far away (maybe a century); and also that this milestone doesn't matter as much as it appears. The scenario of unemployability is highly unlikely; there's almost always something you can get a human to do that'll pay their food and shelter (we're fantastic machines evolved for billions of years; robots are still far away from domination in many niches). The question is how much this person will earn -- perhaps increasingly less, not more; because it has more competition and the tasks are not as essential as before. So a natural manifestation would be rise in income/wealth inequality. That's precisely what we're seeing. If left unchecked, most places will see a spiral of a tiny elite concentrating all wealth.