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> How about job loss? This is called creative destruction, and it's not even remotely a new problem created by this particular technology, it's a constant and
by kyledrake 3y ago
> How about job loss?
This is called creative destruction, and it's not even remotely a new problem created by this particular technology, it's a constant and ongoing mechanism of market capitalism by which technology streamlines or improves something that then requires less labor to accomplish.
When the 400k+ telephone switch operators lost their jobs to digitization, it didn't cause a mass die off of humans, and while I won't say it was a zero bad consequences event, they mostly found other work, work that was probably more interesting and more productive. We certainly could have regulated telephone digitization to prevent this "danger" and instead employed 4.5 million people, or about 3 percent of the labor force, to operate the phone network today as it would have existed technologically in the 1970s, but I'm happy we skipped the scare mongering and went the digitization route, which probably also was a prerequisite for the internet to be able to be used by.. users (which mostly used digital phone services via modems to connect). Would even consumer internet access exist today if they decided to regulate the "danger" of losing analog phone operator jobs?
Either way, I fail to see how allowing only licensed and government regulated companies to work on machine learning will do anything to improve anyone's job prospects moving forward, as increasingly onerous requirements created by people that like to say things like "the internet is a bunch of tubes" make it so only a few rent-seeking monopolies will be able to do anything (legally) with the technology.
I'm not 100% against government regulation, but it's early, things are relatively benign so far (sans self driving cars), let's wait until there's some actual non-sci-fi concerns that emerge and then tackle them as specific things to regulate, rather than wrapping the whole thing into a giant regulatory framework that incorrectly calls it AI before we even learn what the problems are going to be.
- JohnFen 3y ago> it's not even remotely a new problem created by this particular technology True. But this technology (again, if the proponents are correct) threatens to do it on a truly unprecedented scale. It was bad enough -- barely tolerable in some cases -- in history. Getting it even worse seems like something nobody would want, let alone cheerlead. I am deeply, deeply concerned that there are people willing to gamble with the lives of innocent others (not to mention society itself) like this. It's something we need to be addressing now, before it happens.