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"Electricity will steal all your jobs! " "You don't need to worry about electricity, but about other people knowing to harness electricity better than you!" R

"Electricity will steal all your jobs! " "You don't need to worry about electricity, but about other people knowing to harness electricity better than you!" Ridiculous and at the same time actually true.

tgv 4y ago
It did make many jobs and people redundant, though. But because the world was growing, the economy grew with it and replaced that with other jobs. If growth stagnates, there's no guarantee for job replacement. And any parallel with AI/GPT is completely absurd, even though it's the reason why this is upvoted.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  The parallel may well be wrong, but I would go as far as calling it absurd.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    It's unfounded regardless of what you believe will happen. We are still months / years too early to see how transformative exactly GPT based AI opportunities will be. We are clearly beyond the "Neat academic resarch" phase and well into the product building phase of this new technology but some things are only clear in hindsight. The spectrum goes from "useful niche tools" to "industrial revolution" and we must not forget that even very successful technological breakthroughs are usually marketed way beyond their actual capabilities. People in the second row who are now betting hard on AI may as well be the billionaires of tomorrow or they will be forgotten and swallowed up by confirmation bias.
- dalbasal 4y ago
  >>If growth stagnates, there's no guarantee for job replacement. No guarantees, but no hard rules euther. PCs are the ultimate clerical and administrative machines. You don't need secretaries or typists. Don't need memos and mailrooms. Stuff gets filed automatically. We put one on every desk. Typists and secretaries went away, but administration went on a growth spurt. Whether it's school admin, corporate HR or hospital billing.. Administrative work became much more plentiful once PCs proliferated. We write, more letters, file more forms, sign more agreements. Maybe that stuff is valuable, and since we can do more of it with computers, we do. Maybe it has nothing to do with efficiency or value. Whatever the case, it demonstrates that the "progress Vs luddites" debate can't be solved with a simple model. Absurdity assume a reasonable world. Sometimes the world is weird.
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    Could be a case of Jevons paradox? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Sometimes when things look weird to us, it just means that it's counterintuitive and necessarily irrational
deleted 4y ago
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notahacker 4y ago
I'd say the opposite: electricity actually did see fantastical predictions of automation ending work altogether which despite it being an enormously useful enabling technology still haven't come to pass, it enabled people to get jobs more than it cost them jobs
- ithkuil 4y ago
  Your not saying the opposite of what I said :-) I literally said that indeed electricity did cause many jobs to go away. My point was more about the way these predictions are phrased and that they may sound absurd, regardless of how they would pan out
  - notahacker 4y ago
    No, I'm saying electricity didn't "steal people's jobs" even taking into account roles that ceased to exist altogether, because it phased in slowly, created far more jobs than it took away and people whose roles were "replaced" by it simply adapted to different (usually better) jobs, and the absurd predictions of the time were all wrong not because of how they were phrased but because as a simple matter of fact electricity neither heralded a post-work utopia nor forced workers wages to stay at subsistence level.
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      Ah I see what you mean. I don't think "stealing jobs" means that there will be less jobs in absolute. It usually means (at least that's how I usually see it used) that people who current have a job and are trained to do that, will no longer be able to do it, and switching to another job is not easy: it's not just skills, but often also you need to relocate somewhere else etc. The problems with coal miners losing their jobs is not because we don't have other jobs available. It's that the lives of those people will be upended and it's not surprising that people resist that.

tgv 4y ago

It did make many jobs and people redundant, though. But because the world was growing, the economy grew with it and replaced that with other jobs. If growth stagnates, there's no guarantee for job replacement. And any parallel with AI/GPT is completely absurd, even though it's the reason why this is upvoted.

ithkuil 4y ago
The parallel may well be wrong, but I would go as far as calling it absurd.
- arlcode 4y ago
  It's unfounded regardless of what you believe will happen. We are still months / years too early to see how transformative exactly GPT based AI opportunities will be. We are clearly beyond the "Neat academic resarch" phase and well into the product building phase of this new technology but some things are only clear in hindsight. The spectrum goes from "useful niche tools" to "industrial revolution" and we must not forget that even very successful technological breakthroughs are usually marketed way beyond their actual capabilities. People in the second row who are now betting hard on AI may as well be the billionaires of tomorrow or they will be forgotten and swallowed up by confirmation bias.
dalbasal 4y ago
>>If growth stagnates, there's no guarantee for job replacement. No guarantees, but no hard rules euther. PCs are the ultimate clerical and administrative machines. You don't need secretaries or typists. Don't need memos and mailrooms. Stuff gets filed automatically. We put one on every desk. Typists and secretaries went away, but administration went on a growth spurt. Whether it's school admin, corporate HR or hospital billing.. Administrative work became much more plentiful once PCs proliferated. We write, more letters, file more forms, sign more agreements. Maybe that stuff is valuable, and since we can do more of it with computers, we do. Maybe it has nothing to do with efficiency or value. Whatever the case, it demonstrates that the "progress Vs luddites" debate can't be solved with a simple model. Absurdity assume a reasonable world. Sometimes the world is weird.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  Could be a case of Jevons paradox? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Sometimes when things look weird to us, it just means that it's counterintuitive and necessarily irrational

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

notahacker 4y ago

I'd say the opposite: electricity actually did see fantastical predictions of automation ending work altogether which despite it being an enormously useful enabling technology still haven't come to pass, it enabled people to get jobs more than it cost them jobs

ithkuil 4y ago
Your not saying the opposite of what I said :-) I literally said that indeed electricity did cause many jobs to go away. My point was more about the way these predictions are phrased and that they may sound absurd, regardless of how they would pan out
- notahacker 4y ago
  No, I'm saying electricity didn't "steal people's jobs" even taking into account roles that ceased to exist altogether, because it phased in slowly, created far more jobs than it took away and people whose roles were "replaced" by it simply adapted to different (usually better) jobs, and the absurd predictions of the time were all wrong not because of how they were phrased but because as a simple matter of fact electricity neither heralded a post-work utopia nor forced workers wages to stay at subsistence level.
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    Ah I see what you mean. I don't think "stealing jobs" means that there will be less jobs in absolute. It usually means (at least that's how I usually see it used) that people who current have a job and are trained to do that, will no longer be able to do it, and switching to another job is not easy: it's not just skills, but often also you need to relocate somewhere else etc. The problems with coal miners losing their jobs is not because we don't have other jobs available. It's that the lives of those people will be upended and it's not surprising that people resist that.