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This argument is so common and I don’t get it. It lacks any context to historical advancements of technology. This will only be good for our economy, any argum

by qudat 3y ago

This argument is so common and I don’t get it. It lacks any context to historical advancements of technology. This will only be good for our economy, any argument against is arguing against the entire trajectory of human technological advancements and its benefits to economic growth. As such, this argument requires a lot more evidence than the plainly obvious: that jobs will be lost. Seriously, who wants to work a job that a machine can do better, cheaper, and more efficiently? Work for the sake of work is not meaningful. This is creative destruction and it is the engine that drives economic growth. It can only be a good thing.

bbzealot 3y ago
Unfortunately, in the current economic system having a bullshit job is way better than having no job (unless you're rich of course).
- ganoushoreilly 3y ago
  I think this is the bigger problem. There are a lot of Bullshit jobs.. plenty of jobs where the tasks performed are menial for the sake of that's just how we do it. Do we need to actively engage an employee that's copying and pasting one excel sheet to another? What modern AI is going to do is pull back that veil and say, no you really shouldn't be doing it this way. That's going to be hard and hurt, but it's necessary to force reallocation of human capital and hopefully improve conditions for everyone.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >but it's necessary to force reallocation of human capital and hopefully improve conditions for everyone. You say this in a manner like you're ripping off a bandaid. Meanwhile we have no idea if this is tourniquet that if moved incorrectly will cause us to bleed to death. At the start of the 20th century there was massive technological change, and this growth of technology lead to two world wars. The big issue is humanity may not be able to survive any further wars along those lines. By the end of the war we created civilization ending weapons. Our capability for destruction has only grown since then. Attempting to move to a new economic paradigm without having war starting authoritarian fascist leaders destroy the world is, I feel, going to be a very difficult task to achieve.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Unless a huge social change also follows this up, you will just create a huge hungry crowd that will overthrow the current regime that way. The harsh truth is, with more automation many people simply won’t be able to productively contribute to the economy. Yet we all deserve to live a comfortable life (hopefully that’s not controversial).
dathos 3y ago
I think the historical context is there, but even then it's not that relevant. Achievements obtained in the past are not indicative of the future, and if you take the current social climate into context we have a right to be afraid.
yifanl 3y ago
I mean, let's take a step back and ask how we ended up in a society where there's a large portion of people who reacts with fear rather than excitement when presented with a button that does their work for them.
athenot 3y ago
Both can be true. On the one hand, I welcome the ability to leverage machines to automate work that I find boring, with ever-increasing complexity and cleverness. This frees me up to remain in the creative thinking headspace, and interpersonal relationships which are oh-so-necessary to build products. From a team perspective, this also allows a fixed-size group of engineers to take on ever increasing scopes and scale. At the same time, society at large operates in a very different mode. I would argue that it has not finished "digesting" the previous technological advancements. While disruption is something to be celebrated on a personal level, in a society, it starts out as a net negative before benefits start to be realized. And as usual, it is the most vulnerable members who suffer the most, and the most powerful who gain the most. I am optimistic in the short term for myself and in the long run I think it will be beneficial for society. But there will be a lot of pain born by the vulnerable.
boesboes 3y ago
The reason this comes up so often, is that this kind of advancement is mostly owned by the few and used to further increase the wealth/power gap. For instance, at my current employer we have about 30 content marketeers. Their job could be made much mor efficient with AI, leaving them room to do more creative work instead of toiling with crappy tools. This could create a lot of value, for our customers too if the quality increases. Yet every single 'manager' just sees AI as an opportunity to oust these people. They see workers as tools that should be replaced as soon as possible. They would rather have worse quality content, just more and cheaper. While this kinda holds for all technologies, the reach and impact of AI seems pretty vast. I feel some skeptisism is waranted tbh
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  >Yet every single 'manager' just sees AI as an opportunity to oust these people. They see workers as tools that should be replaced as soon as possible. They would rather have worse quality content, just more and cheaper. Yep, I once wrote an app that cut the time needed to process medical claims by half. I asked the manager what was going to happen to the medical claims staff. Were they going to be retrained? 'No. Half are getting let go as soon as this goes to prod.' I went from feeling very proud about the app to feeling absolutely terrible.
- qudat 3y ago
  > further increase the wealth/power gap The wealth gap is a distraction, it doesn't measure anything meaningful. We shouldn't care how big the wealth gap is, rather, are more people leading healthy, happy lives. To go further, equal opportunity is more important than equal outcomes.
mindcrime 3y ago
This will only be good for our economy, any argument against is arguing against the entire trajectory of human technological advancements and its benefits to economic growth. But that's not as big a deal as one might think. In many ways this is just restating the Problem of Induction[1]. We don't know that the future will always resemble the past, or that trajectories will remain the same over time. An exponential function, for example, looks linear if you zoom in sufficiently. Without the broader perspective, how can you know you're on an exponential curve (or whatever). It's not so different from how you can't easily tell that the Earth is spherical by just glancing out of your window. This is creative destruction and it is the engine that drives economic growth. It can only be a good thing. Don't get me wrong... I'm a Libertarian and very pro-Capitalism and generally agree that Creative Destruction has been and likely will continue to be a force for productive change. But even I won't go as far as saying that it can only be a good thing. Who knows what kind of Black Swans[2] are waiting around the corner? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
dahart 3y ago
It’s bold to claim that automation is only good, and I don’t think it’s really true historically. Speaking personally, I don’t think it’s good or accurate to use total economic output or economic growth as your sole metric, that’s a way to justify ignoring many small bad things. For example I would say that large scale farming is doing lots of bad things to local economies, lots of bad things for the environment, lots of bad things to our food supply, and creating a more precarious dependence on a more centralized distribution system that can fail more easily. Similar things are true about our total dependence on cars, despite the economic growth. I’d agree that work for the sake of work is not fulfilling or meaningful, but that doesn’t necessarily justify obliterating local economies as fast as we can just to make someone more dollars. We need time for the economy to adjust. I’d also counter that economy for the sake of economy is not meaningful either, we don’t need to have unending economic growth at all costs, and we probably can’t. If we expect to continue growing at recent historical rates, we’re more or less guaranteed to cause a large scale economic crash when we hit the wall.
pixl97 3y ago
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch If you think things can only get better, you might have deluded yourself.
jodrellblank 3y ago
> "Seriously, who wants to work a job that a machine can do better, cheaper, and more efficiently? Work for the sake of work is not meaningful." You think Buzz Aldrin didn't want to go to the Moon because a probe with a camera would have been cheaper? I think this claim is flawed; people want to contribute and work. People don't want to be exploited, overworked, underpaid, set in contest with machine production levels. > "This will only be good for our economy" Having two trillionaires who swap fortunes every day, and half a billion starving peasants would be great for the economy on paper and awful for the humans. Forget the economy, will this be good for the people? What kind of work is lacking now which a large number of people made unemployed could do to earn a living and stay alive? A hundred years ago houses were cold and empty, pantries were bare, communication was expensive and slow, people walked everywhere in their one suit and drank well water. Now houses are warm, food is refridgerated, comms is cheap and fast, even the quite poor have cars, clothing, and as much clutter as anyone needs, the hungry are not lacking for food production they are lacking for access to food. Are we not nearly saturated with music, books, films, streamers, YouTubers, TV shows, documentaries on anything and everything? Take a vacuum cleaner, first it didn't exist and people had rugbeaters. Then it existed as a horse drawn vehicle which came around and let rich people vacuum occasionally. Then it became an engine driven thing out in a shed with pipes to every room in a big house and an oil trap. Then it became electric and movable, plugged into light sockets overhead. Then it became small and portable and using mains power, plastic instead of metal, bagged, then upright and light, then bagless, then then quieter, then cyclonic, now cordless or Roomba. And manufactured far away. How much more development can the vacuum cleaner take which an ordinary person could do - it probably won't be ten million truck drivers, marketing managers, paralegals, or janitors developing the faster charging battery chemistry or the newer automated production line or the fluid dynamics simulation for making it quieter or the more intelligent Roomba software. All household goods are in a similar position; what's the equivalent of the last 100 years of development for the next 100 years? It's looking pretty likely that it's not flying cars, spaceships, space elevators, jetpacks, teleporters, Star-Trek replicators, silver jumpsuits, food pills, and so far it's looking like it isn't even Blu-Ray, 3D TV, VR headsets. It's all very well to talk about unlimited greed, but at "enough stuff for a lifetime" and then at "hundreds of times more stuff than a lifetime" we have to be approaching some practical limits, don't we?
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Reminder that the Luddites all lost their job at the fabric mill and at least in the short run were measurably worse off due to automation. Their kids and certainly grandkids were better off, but their life was undoubtedly worse.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
It might ultimately be good for our economy, and be bad for certain workers. Economists are always harping on about how disruptions are temporary, how 'good jobs' will replace 'bad' ones. What they don't say is those disruptions can be permanent and dire for those disrupted. There are many rust belt towns that are a hollow husk of the places they once were due to the loss of good paying factory jobs. A lot of those people never found 'good' jobs ever again. Same thing happened in the south with NAFTA. Apparently our economists are all to happy to leave people to rot if it means we can increase gdp a few more percent. I'm not saying that we should resist automation or ai, I'm saying given our history it's pretty plain to see that we suck at protecting and helping those harmed by it.
kaba0 3y ago
Technology used to have a trickle-down effect, but that is no longer true. The difference between the ultra-rich and the middle class has never been close to this pronounced. People need a job to earn money they can later pour back into the economy which is just supposedly keeps on growing (as if continuous growth could be sustainable). A 100 years ago a village was working hard at harvest, now a GPS-guided combine harvester does the job. Sure, we could made up a few new jobs, but many office jobs never made sense (did we really ever need that many layers of middle-management? Their personnel alltogether are not needed). Unless some UBI-like system gets implemented, there will be revolts. “Every society is three meals away from anarchy”
- pulvinar 3y ago
  Yes, some say 90 percent of jobs have been replaced by technology in the last 150 years. And why don't we see all those people out of work? Clearly technology has also opened up new fields and freed up more workers to fill the new jobs. For example all computer-related jobs just didn't exist before 1945, and they're certainly not all middle-management jobs. You can say it's different this time, but that's what's been said every time.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Extending trend lines is a logical fallacy.
    - pulvinar 3y ago
      Call it a very good bet, based on inductive reasoning.

by qudat 3y ago

bbzealot 3y ago

Unfortunately, in the current economic system having a bullshit job is way better than having no job (unless you're rich of course).

ganoushoreilly 3y ago
I think this is the bigger problem. There are a lot of Bullshit jobs.. plenty of jobs where the tasks performed are menial for the sake of that's just how we do it. Do we need to actively engage an employee that's copying and pasting one excel sheet to another? What modern AI is going to do is pull back that veil and say, no you really shouldn't be doing it this way. That's going to be hard and hurt, but it's necessary to force reallocation of human capital and hopefully improve conditions for everyone.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >but it's necessary to force reallocation of human capital and hopefully improve conditions for everyone. You say this in a manner like you're ripping off a bandaid. Meanwhile we have no idea if this is tourniquet that if moved incorrectly will cause us to bleed to death. At the start of the 20th century there was massive technological change, and this growth of technology lead to two world wars. The big issue is humanity may not be able to survive any further wars along those lines. By the end of the war we created civilization ending weapons. Our capability for destruction has only grown since then. Attempting to move to a new economic paradigm without having war starting authoritarian fascist leaders destroy the world is, I feel, going to be a very difficult task to achieve.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Unless a huge social change also follows this up, you will just create a huge hungry crowd that will overthrow the current regime that way. The harsh truth is, with more automation many people simply won’t be able to productively contribute to the economy. Yet we all deserve to live a comfortable life (hopefully that’s not controversial).

dathos 3y ago

I think the historical context is there, but even then it's not that relevant. Achievements obtained in the past are not indicative of the future, and if you take the current social climate into context we have a right to be afraid.

yifanl 3y ago

I mean, let's take a step back and ask how we ended up in a society where there's a large portion of people who reacts with fear rather than excitement when presented with a button that does their work for them.

athenot 3y ago

Both can be true. On the one hand, I welcome the ability to leverage machines to automate work that I find boring, with ever-increasing complexity and cleverness. This frees me up to remain in the creative thinking headspace, and interpersonal relationships which are oh-so-necessary to build products. From a team perspective, this also allows a fixed-size group of engineers to take on ever increasing scopes and scale. At the same time, society at large operates in a very different mode. I would argue that it has not finished "digesting" the previous technological advancements. While disruption is something to be celebrated on a personal level, in a society, it starts out as a net negative before benefits start to be realized. And as usual, it is the most vulnerable members who suffer the most, and the most powerful who gain the most. I am optimistic in the short term for myself and in the long run I think it will be beneficial for society. But there will be a lot of pain born by the vulnerable.

boesboes 3y ago

The reason this comes up so often, is that this kind of advancement is mostly owned by the few and used to further increase the wealth/power gap. For instance, at my current employer we have about 30 content marketeers. Their job could be made much mor efficient with AI, leaving them room to do more creative work instead of toiling with crappy tools. This could create a lot of value, for our customers too if the quality increases. Yet every single 'manager' just sees AI as an opportunity to oust these people. They see workers as tools that should be replaced as soon as possible. They would rather have worse quality content, just more and cheaper. While this kinda holds for all technologies, the reach and impact of AI seems pretty vast. I feel some skeptisism is waranted tbh

wing-_-nuts 3y ago
>Yet every single 'manager' just sees AI as an opportunity to oust these people. They see workers as tools that should be replaced as soon as possible. They would rather have worse quality content, just more and cheaper. Yep, I once wrote an app that cut the time needed to process medical claims by half. I asked the manager what was going to happen to the medical claims staff. Were they going to be retrained? 'No. Half are getting let go as soon as this goes to prod.' I went from feeling very proud about the app to feeling absolutely terrible.
qudat 3y ago
> further increase the wealth/power gap The wealth gap is a distraction, it doesn't measure anything meaningful. We shouldn't care how big the wealth gap is, rather, are more people leading healthy, happy lives. To go further, equal opportunity is more important than equal outcomes.

mindcrime 3y ago

This will only be good for our economy, any argument against is arguing against the entire trajectory of human technological advancements and its benefits to economic growth. But that's not as big a deal as one might think. In many ways this is just restating the Problem of Induction[1]. We don't know that the future will always resemble the past, or that trajectories will remain the same over time. An exponential function, for example, looks linear if you zoom in sufficiently. Without the broader perspective, how can you know you're on an exponential curve (or whatever). It's not so different from how you can't easily tell that the Earth is spherical by just glancing out of your window. This is creative destruction and it is the engine that drives economic growth. It can only be a good thing. Don't get me wrong... I'm a Libertarian and very pro-Capitalism and generally agree that Creative Destruction has been and likely will continue to be a force for productive change. But even I won't go as far as saying that it can only be a good thing. Who knows what kind of Black Swans[2] are waiting around the corner? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

dahart 3y ago

It’s bold to claim that automation is only good, and I don’t think it’s really true historically. Speaking personally, I don’t think it’s good or accurate to use total economic output or economic growth as your sole metric, that’s a way to justify ignoring many small bad things. For example I would say that large scale farming is doing lots of bad things to local economies, lots of bad things for the environment, lots of bad things to our food supply, and creating a more precarious dependence on a more centralized distribution system that can fail more easily. Similar things are true about our total dependence on cars, despite the economic growth. I’d agree that work for the sake of work is not fulfilling or meaningful, but that doesn’t necessarily justify obliterating local economies as fast as we can just to make someone more dollars. We need time for the economy to adjust. I’d also counter that economy for the sake of economy is not meaningful either, we don’t need to have unending economic growth at all costs, and we probably can’t. If we expect to continue growing at recent historical rates, we’re more or less guaranteed to cause a large scale economic crash when we hit the wall.

pixl97 3y ago

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch If you think things can only get better, you might have deluded yourself.

jodrellblank 3y ago

> "Seriously, who wants to work a job that a machine can do better, cheaper, and more efficiently? Work for the sake of work is not meaningful." You think Buzz Aldrin didn't want to go to the Moon because a probe with a camera would have been cheaper? I think this claim is flawed; people want to contribute and work. People don't want to be exploited, overworked, underpaid, set in contest with machine production levels. > "This will only be good for our economy" Having two trillionaires who swap fortunes every day, and half a billion starving peasants would be great for the economy on paper and awful for the humans. Forget the economy, will this be good for the people? What kind of work is lacking now which a large number of people made unemployed could do to earn a living and stay alive? A hundred years ago houses were cold and empty, pantries were bare, communication was expensive and slow, people walked everywhere in their one suit and drank well water. Now houses are warm, food is refridgerated, comms is cheap and fast, even the quite poor have cars, clothing, and as much clutter as anyone needs, the hungry are not lacking for food production they are lacking for access to food. Are we not nearly saturated with music, books, films, streamers, YouTubers, TV shows, documentaries on anything and everything? Take a vacuum cleaner, first it didn't exist and people had rugbeaters. Then it existed as a horse drawn vehicle which came around and let rich people vacuum occasionally. Then it became an engine driven thing out in a shed with pipes to every room in a big house and an oil trap. Then it became electric and movable, plugged into light sockets overhead. Then it became small and portable and using mains power, plastic instead of metal, bagged, then upright and light, then bagless, then then quieter, then cyclonic, now cordless or Roomba. And manufactured far away. How much more development can the vacuum cleaner take which an ordinary person could do - it probably won't be ten million truck drivers, marketing managers, paralegals, or janitors developing the faster charging battery chemistry or the newer automated production line or the fluid dynamics simulation for making it quieter or the more intelligent Roomba software. All household goods are in a similar position; what's the equivalent of the last 100 years of development for the next 100 years? It's looking pretty likely that it's not flying cars, spaceships, space elevators, jetpacks, teleporters, Star-Trek replicators, silver jumpsuits, food pills, and so far it's looking like it isn't even Blu-Ray, 3D TV, VR headsets. It's all very well to talk about unlimited greed, but at "enough stuff for a lifetime" and then at "hundreds of times more stuff than a lifetime" we have to be approaching some practical limits, don't we?

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Reminder that the Luddites all lost their job at the fabric mill and at least in the short run were measurably worse off due to automation. Their kids and certainly grandkids were better off, but their life was undoubtedly worse.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

It might ultimately be good for our economy, and be bad for certain workers. Economists are always harping on about how disruptions are temporary, how 'good jobs' will replace 'bad' ones. What they don't say is those disruptions can be permanent and dire for those disrupted. There are many rust belt towns that are a hollow husk of the places they once were due to the loss of good paying factory jobs. A lot of those people never found 'good' jobs ever again. Same thing happened in the south with NAFTA. Apparently our economists are all to happy to leave people to rot if it means we can increase gdp a few more percent. I'm not saying that we should resist automation or ai, I'm saying given our history it's pretty plain to see that we suck at protecting and helping those harmed by it.

kaba0 3y ago

Technology used to have a trickle-down effect, but that is no longer true. The difference between the ultra-rich and the middle class has never been close to this pronounced. People need a job to earn money they can later pour back into the economy which is just supposedly keeps on growing (as if continuous growth could be sustainable). A 100 years ago a village was working hard at harvest, now a GPS-guided combine harvester does the job. Sure, we could made up a few new jobs, but many office jobs never made sense (did we really ever need that many layers of middle-management? Their personnel alltogether are not needed). Unless some UBI-like system gets implemented, there will be revolts. “Every society is three meals away from anarchy”

pulvinar 3y ago
Yes, some say 90 percent of jobs have been replaced by technology in the last 150 years. And why don't we see all those people out of work? Clearly technology has also opened up new fields and freed up more workers to fill the new jobs. For example all computer-related jobs just didn't exist before 1945, and they're certainly not all middle-management jobs. You can say it's different this time, but that's what's been said every time.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Extending trend lines is a logical fallacy.
  - pulvinar 3y ago
    Call it a very good bet, based on inductive reasoning.