3 ms·
> I guess it was low-hanging fruit because I mean, I feel like tech should solve problems, not introduce new ones like massive unemployment. Just how ignorant
by TulliusCicero 3y ago
> I guess it was low-hanging fruit because I mean, I feel like tech should solve problems, not introduce new ones like massive unemployment.
Just how ignorant is this person? Because wow, you'd have to have pretty much zero knowledge of modern history to think this.
Like, just think about farming. A quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that 50% of workers in the US were farmers in 1870, and now it's less than 2%. One guess as to what caused the collapse in agricultural employment.
- skavi 3y agoI think people tend to enjoy creating art more than farming. So technology that makes it less feasible to be an artist is more worrying than agricultural automation.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoWhat were the chances of being an artist before the industrial revolution compared to today? Assuming you didn't die of starvation before reaching adulthood.
- gus_massa 3y agoCinema killed a lot of jobs of live theater actors. Phonograph records killed a lot of jobs of live musicians. ...
- thesagan 3y agoMy great grandmother and her family traveled across the U.S. doing bit pieces in vaudeville. They loved it, so I was told. A life of adventure, for them at least. Taking trains everywhere, often along with the circus. By the time my grandparents were children, those days were over and they had to become farmers in Michigan. The family tried to stay in the performing arts but ever-increasing division of labor and modernization made that difficult. I wish I had seen the days of vaudeville. The scrapbooks are amazing.
- jowea 3y agoLess feasible to be a professional artist with a good chance of having a large audience yes. But I wonder if it will be like with hand-sewing and become a hobby. Or there will be a sizeable audience that will demand human made art for whatever reason. We still have live music and theatre despite recordings existing. Or maybe AI will never become good enough to replace the best humans.
- TulliusCicero 3y agoSo like movies/TV shows, and recorded audio playback? Those sorts of things?
- whyenot 3y ago> One guess as to what caused the collapse in agricultural employment. Cheap oil and the rise of mechanized agriculture that it has allowed. Petroleum products have made human lives immensely better over the last century or so. ...but there are also costs such as climate change and microplastic pollution. How great these costs may be and how they may impact us, that we are only beginning to understand.
- TulliusCicero 3y agoOil was already around, it was technology that both allowed for the extraction and use of it, and more generally for the development of farm machinery.
- quonn 3y agoBut the change happened over a few generations. Hardly a farmer became unemployed, but their kids might have taken up something different. But this change may happen comparatively fast - perhaps over 10-30 years. So it might affect people in the middle of their career.