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I think the main fear is that AI is a companion that keeps getting better, rather than a tool that is nothing on it's own. We've never had that before.

pixl97 1y ago
And really it's a whole bunch of things we've never had before at the same time. Factories can scale to the point that a single factory for a lot of products can meet the needs of all of humanity. Add in economies of scale and the number of actual work on the actual product jobs decreases for any one product over time. Information technology can scale to the point that any one company can manage vast oceans of data about processes and conditions in the business exercising large amounts of control over economies. Shipping and transport are fast, cheap, and ubiquitous. That huge factory from above can make anything then ship it anywhere cheaper than you can make it right next door. Robots and further AI automation can insure the investor class gets even wealthier by not having to pay things like the 16 hours a day you don't work in health insurance. More so there is never a labor shortage by pesky striking workers asking for more pay or better conditions. All the above setup conditions for the consolidation of control of almost everything by a very small number of entities.
keeda 1y ago
Another thing we never had before is the huge skill differential between the jobs that will be automated away and the jobs that replace them. In the past, automation created new jobs that were higher-skilled, but still relatively easy for any of the displaced workforce to upskill to. E.g. if a machine replaced the work you did manually, it was not too difficult to learn to operate that machine. But with AI the skills gap is huge. Taking software engineering as an example, previously a motivated bootcamp graduate could start churning out basic CRUD apps and be useful. Now a motivated senior engineer with AI agents could churn out an app a day. So the minimum useful skill-level is now at the level of a senior engineer. And this is possible because of yet another thing we never had before: A "universal" knowledge worker machine. Knowledge work was "safe" because it was a relatively high-skill category and automation was only possible through software, which was expensive and slow to build, largely due to a shortage of software developers. Now we potentially don't even need software for a huge range of cognitive tasks! Of course, the stochastic nature of AI probably means we will be writing software for a long time yet, but as above, existing (senior) developers can scale themselves up much, much faster.
ACCount37 1y ago
The list of advantages human labor holds over labor of machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing.

pixl97 1y ago

And really it's a whole bunch of things we've never had before at the same time. Factories can scale to the point that a single factory for a lot of products can meet the needs of all of humanity. Add in economies of scale and the number of actual work on the actual product jobs decreases for any one product over time. Information technology can scale to the point that any one company can manage vast oceans of data about processes and conditions in the business exercising large amounts of control over economies. Shipping and transport are fast, cheap, and ubiquitous. That huge factory from above can make anything then ship it anywhere cheaper than you can make it right next door. Robots and further AI automation can insure the investor class gets even wealthier by not having to pay things like the 16 hours a day you don't work in health insurance. More so there is never a labor shortage by pesky striking workers asking for more pay or better conditions. All the above setup conditions for the consolidation of control of almost everything by a very small number of entities.

keeda 1y ago

Another thing we never had before is the huge skill differential between the jobs that will be automated away and the jobs that replace them. In the past, automation created new jobs that were higher-skilled, but still relatively easy for any of the displaced workforce to upskill to. E.g. if a machine replaced the work you did manually, it was not too difficult to learn to operate that machine. But with AI the skills gap is huge. Taking software engineering as an example, previously a motivated bootcamp graduate could start churning out basic CRUD apps and be useful. Now a motivated senior engineer with AI agents could churn out an app a day. So the minimum useful skill-level is now at the level of a senior engineer. And this is possible because of yet another thing we never had before: A "universal" knowledge worker machine. Knowledge work was "safe" because it was a relatively high-skill category and automation was only possible through software, which was expensive and slow to build, largely due to a shortage of software developers. Now we potentially don't even need software for a huge range of cognitive tasks! Of course, the stochastic nature of AI probably means we will be writing software for a long time yet, but as above, existing (senior) developers can scale themselves up much, much faster.

ACCount37 1y ago

The list of advantages human labor holds over labor of machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing.