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If Scott was in the 1800s, he'd be telling us the sky was about to fall in because of Ford Motor Company inventing the automated horse. Luddites must be reject

by 0xy 4y ago

If Scott was in the 1800s, he'd be telling us the sky was about to fall in because of Ford Motor Company inventing the automated horse. Luddites must be rejected because they're simply never right. Extreme poverty has never been lower in history thanks to automation driving the price of food to the raw cost of production. Remember, 90% of the population used to work in agriculture toiling away. Now it's ~2% and yet poverty has absolutely plummeted. A significant portion of the population today is toiling away in manual jobs, tedious jobs and pointless jobs. This will all be automated away leaving those people free to pursue their most human pursuits. I work in software, and I cannot wait until AI does 90-99% of my job. I can't wait until I rarely write software manually. To me, writing software is the most boring part of my job. The best part is outcomes, and I can achieve 100x better outcomes if all the grunt work is taken care of by AI. Luddites have never been right, and they've consistently been proven dead wrong. This is no exception.

DangitBobby 4y ago
Literally in the first paragraph: > As someone who has been warning about the impacts of automation for a decade now, and trying to get people to understand that automation has already been impacting us for decades, I can tell you that this nuanced conversation basically gets boiled down to "Technology is going to end all jobs" versus "Everything will be fine." Both of those are wrong. The truth as usual, exists somewhere in the middle, and comes with a lot of "it depends" asterisks. Address the content of the article, and argue whether this basic premise is true or not. Conversations about "luddites" have been had to death and are basically worthless. > This will all be automated away leaving those people free to pursue their most human pursuits. Citation needed. This is all _very arguable_ and incredibly arrogant to assert over and over that things are going to be fine because in the past it was fine (for flexible definitions of fine).
- 0xy 4y ago
  If you make a claim about mass poverty and unemployment, you are making the extraordinary claim. The fact remains that extreme poverty has been trending down and is at record lows. If you argue for a dramatic change, you must provide evidence. Claiming new automation and new technologies will affect poverty negatively is an extraordinary claim. Everyone can agree that AI will dramatically lower food prices until they near the price of raw production, therefore it's pretty laughable to claim that the lowest food prices ever will coincide with more poverty. It's a fundamentally Kaczynski-esque argument, that AI is evil and must be curtailed. Moreover, it's an argument that humans should be enslaved to agri fields, enslaved to cubicles and enslaved to dangerous oil rigs forever. Humans don't want to destroy their body toiling forever, they want to live.
  - chimpanzee 4y ago
    > Everyone can agree that AI will dramatically lower food prices until they near the price of raw production Please provide some sources supporting the existence of this mythical treasure, this economic prediction on which “everyone can agree”.
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    On the other hand I live in a place where people absolutely love farming and there’s not really a ridiculous amount of toiling going on so maybe that’s a little story we’re told or like to tell ourselves ?
komali2 4y ago
Luddites weren't anti technology, they were opposed to the improvements the technology brought about, being borne only by factory owners. https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/ https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-i... > In truth, the Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of technology – no more than the Boston Tea Party’s cause was the elimination of tea, or Al Qaeda’s cause was the end of civilian aviation. Smashing looms and stocking frames was the Luddites’ tactic, not their goal. > What were they fighting about? The social relations governing the use of the new machines. These new machines could have allowed the existing workforce to produce far more cloth, in far fewer hours, at a much lower price, while still paying these workers well (the lower per-unit cost of finished cloth would be offset by the higher sales volume, and that volume could be produced in fewer hours). > Instead, the owners of the factories – whose fortunes had been built on the labor of textile workers – chose to employ fewer workers, working the same long hours as before, at a lower rate than before, and pocketed the substantial savings. I think this is an important conversation to be having around AI. Deeper in the thread someone argues that AI will make farming cheaper and then drive down food costs. But, food isn't expensive because it's expensive to produce. Food is cheap and easy to produce these days. Food is expensive because Monsanto copyrights seeds, because John Deere won't let you fix your own tractor, and because the usa government pays subsidies to keep production down to avoid the market being flooded and crop costs plummeting. The advancement in farming technologies didn't lead to the conclusion some of us find quite natural: one more thing we don't really have to pay for, like water or roads to walk on. Something so cheap to produce and distribute that our taxes can just take care of it, and we can always buy fancier versions of if we want. For me I think this will be the effect industry to industry that AI knocks on the door of. The technology itself isn't the important change, it's how those improvements trigger redistribution of wealth, if at all. I'm working on a blog post right now about how this might affect propaganda, when AI is turned to that purpose, and the risk therein of very effective propaganda written that convinces people that it's good that AI is being applied in a way that makes their lives objectively worse (as it drives down the value of their labor to almost nothing).
- zirgs 4y ago
  The market is being flooded with cheap food already. Look how much food your average grocery store is throwing out every day. The obesity epidemic is also a huge problem. We need way less food that is currently being produced in the West.

by 0xy 4y ago

DangitBobby 4y ago

Literally in the first paragraph: > As someone who has been warning about the impacts of automation for a decade now, and trying to get people to understand that automation has already been impacting us for decades, I can tell you that this nuanced conversation basically gets boiled down to "Technology is going to end all jobs" versus "Everything will be fine." Both of those are wrong. The truth as usual, exists somewhere in the middle, and comes with a lot of "it depends" asterisks. Address the content of the article, and argue whether this basic premise is true or not. Conversations about "luddites" have been had to death and are basically worthless. > This will all be automated away leaving those people free to pursue their most human pursuits. Citation needed. This is all _very arguable_ and incredibly arrogant to assert over and over that things are going to be fine because in the past it was fine (for flexible definitions of fine).

0xy 4y ago
If you make a claim about mass poverty and unemployment, you are making the extraordinary claim. The fact remains that extreme poverty has been trending down and is at record lows. If you argue for a dramatic change, you must provide evidence. Claiming new automation and new technologies will affect poverty negatively is an extraordinary claim. Everyone can agree that AI will dramatically lower food prices until they near the price of raw production, therefore it's pretty laughable to claim that the lowest food prices ever will coincide with more poverty. It's a fundamentally Kaczynski-esque argument, that AI is evil and must be curtailed. Moreover, it's an argument that humans should be enslaved to agri fields, enslaved to cubicles and enslaved to dangerous oil rigs forever. Humans don't want to destroy their body toiling forever, they want to live.
- chimpanzee 4y ago
  > Everyone can agree that AI will dramatically lower food prices until they near the price of raw production Please provide some sources supporting the existence of this mythical treasure, this economic prediction on which “everyone can agree”.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  On the other hand I live in a place where people absolutely love farming and there’s not really a ridiculous amount of toiling going on so maybe that’s a little story we’re told or like to tell ourselves ?

komali2 4y ago

Luddites weren't anti technology, they were opposed to the improvements the technology brought about, being borne only by factory owners. https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/ https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-i... > In truth, the Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of technology – no more than the Boston Tea Party’s cause was the elimination of tea, or Al Qaeda’s cause was the end of civilian aviation. Smashing looms and stocking frames was the Luddites’ tactic, not their goal. > What were they fighting about? The social relations governing the use of the new machines. These new machines could have allowed the existing workforce to produce far more cloth, in far fewer hours, at a much lower price, while still paying these workers well (the lower per-unit cost of finished cloth would be offset by the higher sales volume, and that volume could be produced in fewer hours). > Instead, the owners of the factories – whose fortunes had been built on the labor of textile workers – chose to employ fewer workers, working the same long hours as before, at a lower rate than before, and pocketed the substantial savings. I think this is an important conversation to be having around AI. Deeper in the thread someone argues that AI will make farming cheaper and then drive down food costs. But, food isn't expensive because it's expensive to produce. Food is cheap and easy to produce these days. Food is expensive because Monsanto copyrights seeds, because John Deere won't let you fix your own tractor, and because the usa government pays subsidies to keep production down to avoid the market being flooded and crop costs plummeting. The advancement in farming technologies didn't lead to the conclusion some of us find quite natural: one more thing we don't really have to pay for, like water or roads to walk on. Something so cheap to produce and distribute that our taxes can just take care of it, and we can always buy fancier versions of if we want. For me I think this will be the effect industry to industry that AI knocks on the door of. The technology itself isn't the important change, it's how those improvements trigger redistribution of wealth, if at all. I'm working on a blog post right now about how this might affect propaganda, when AI is turned to that purpose, and the risk therein of very effective propaganda written that convinces people that it's good that AI is being applied in a way that makes their lives objectively worse (as it drives down the value of their labor to almost nothing).

zirgs 4y ago
The market is being flooded with cheap food already. Look how much food your average grocery store is throwing out every day. The obesity epidemic is also a huge problem. We need way less food that is currently being produced in the West.