purple_hamster66 t1_j0qx9kx wrote on December 18, 2022 at 7:18 PM

In 1980 it took 1000 people to build a car. Now it takes 250, due to automation (eg, robots). What happened to the other 750 people? They moved on to other fields. Retrained.

Your worth is what you are, not what you do. People are extended by automation, not replaced.

AbobusSusSusNekker t1_j11l3tx wrote on December 21, 2022 at 12:16 AM

Oh I love made up analogies (which are not inherently arguments, look up formal logic) with made up statistics. Thanks to your sheer perspicacity I'm now completely sure that after having honed my craft and suffered through intensive formal education for years on end I'll just "retrain" or "move on to other (which ones exactly remains a mystery) fields".
Surely, even the 750 people from your imagination all successfully retrained to become professionals in completely novel fields of work in their 30s-40s-50s. None of them drank themselves to death out of the feeling of utter uselessness; none of them lost their families, which they couldn't support anymore; none of them turned to crime, thus ruining communities, lives of other people; none of them committed suicide after becoming homeless. If you love car analogies so much, maybe take a look at the fine city of Detroit and its recent history, what an absolute fairy tale.

All the robotics that have been implemented throughout a very narrow range of industries and locales have been heavily regulated, which prevented a lot of manufacturing facilities going all robot.
"But the big daddy from OpenAI/Microsoft told us that we will all receive 13k as basic income, I'll buy all the funkopop superhero toys on Earth with that money, while not doing anything at all!"

They sure can't just exploit their property rights on this technology, or just get rid of those pesky mediocre humans, as whatever their hearts desire could be fulfilled by one very advanced AI model and a bunch of specialised robots, instead of thousands of hard-working interns, seasoned professionals and laborious technicians.

Humankind has always been about suffering through life. Our entire knowledge systems, works of art and world cultures are built by and around people who sacrificed their comfort, well-being and time on this planet to discover something, achieve a goal, become a source of wisdom, knowledge and mastery. No matter how unique their field of work is. Automation of all work that has a sliver of creativity element to it culls the entire human population to the left of 2nd standard deviation above the mean, leaving only a very limited number of geniuses (who got to be born, raised an educated in the best combination of circumstances) still necessary to advance knowledge and oversee the work of whatever AI system that will end up performing the best.
Who will the future children look up to? Some abstract mathematical concept known as a transformer machine learning model?
That is if there will be any children in the future anyway...

purple_hamster66 t1_j14kfu3 wrote on December 21, 2022 at 4:56 PM

I’m not following most of your rant, like why you think a car factory worker in 1980 was skilled labor that took years to learn. Most simply bolted fenders on cars.

What you got right is that life is hard, and we all do what we can to improve our lot in life. Automation simply replaces the stuff no one wants to do (bolt fenders in place) with stuff we do want to do (design a better bolt). In the 1800s, few people could read; today, due to the industrial revolution, most people can read (in the US) — that’s a good thing, right? The 2nd standard deviation of 1800 doesn’t even exist in modern times, because the entire curve shifted. Yet you think that stopping the curve from shifting again is a good thing? Would you give up your electronics & software, much of which was designed by automated processes?

There is no social contract for labor.