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"We don’t have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don’t seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painf

"We don’t have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don’t seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painful than all the others." We don't need AGI to eliminate 200+ million jobs. The output of a network driving a car can be literally two signed floating points, left-right/accelerate-brake; in hindsight we will understand there is little intelligence in going from A to B without crashing, a bee does it, in 3D even. To eliminate 1+ billion jobs you take the driving network and give it hands: flipping burgers, feeding a CNC machine, handling packages, all these jobs will be gone forever, as they should. The only question is what will politicians do when their solutions so far have been to raise the retirement age.

benedictevans 3y ago
The entire point of the essay is to debate this assertion, and it provides a great many very basic reasons to think is wrong.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  The article speaks more about the "knowledge workers", the CC Baxters of the world performing more or less bullshit jobs [1]. The 2-3 billion unemployables of the next 10-20 years are not knowledge workers and will all be replaced forever by embedded robotics with good enough networks and statistical learning for following given goals while generating sub-goals. Boston Dynamics' Spot costs $75K today and Atlas is around $150K, once the price gets closer to $10K there is very little reason to ever employ persons as assembly line workers, construction workers, warehouse workers, machine operators, truck drivers, janitors and cleaners, agricultural workers, security guards, food service workers, garbage collectors, and so on. And even if 3 billion people could be forced to do spreadsheets to "earn" a living, "by the sweat of [their] brow", that would be an even sadder world than our currently sad world. My argument is that we need a new metaphysics for what work and life means, one where the right of a person to have food and shelter is not tied to the economic value they produce. But I have no hope for this world: the trillionaires of tomorrow will share even less than the billionaires of today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

benedictevans 3y ago

The entire point of the essay is to debate this assertion, and it provides a great many very basic reasons to think is wrong.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
The article speaks more about the "knowledge workers", the CC Baxters of the world performing more or less bullshit jobs [1]. The 2-3 billion unemployables of the next 10-20 years are not knowledge workers and will all be replaced forever by embedded robotics with good enough networks and statistical learning for following given goals while generating sub-goals. Boston Dynamics' Spot costs $75K today and Atlas is around $150K, once the price gets closer to $10K there is very little reason to ever employ persons as assembly line workers, construction workers, warehouse workers, machine operators, truck drivers, janitors and cleaners, agricultural workers, security guards, food service workers, garbage collectors, and so on. And even if 3 billion people could be forced to do spreadsheets to "earn" a living, "by the sweat of [their] brow", that would be an even sadder world than our currently sad world. My argument is that we need a new metaphysics for what work and life means, one where the right of a person to have food and shelter is not tied to the economic value they produce. But I have no hope for this world: the trillionaires of tomorrow will share even less than the billionaires of today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs