I'm about to step out, and I will have to write my own essay in reply, but frankly, this time is different.
- OP's family of arguments, which I'll call BAU (Business as Usual, i.e. the claim that there is nothing fundamentally different about this disruption) depends on historical induction
- Historical induction is unreliable
- Sometimes things really are different, for example, the discovery of germ theory, or the invention of nuclear weapons
- The example given, e.g. farrier, is nothing like the present situation
- The fundamental difference between the coming disruption and previous disruptions is the scale. (Just as the difference between TNT and nukes was, again, scale.) Scale matters. Differences in quantity become differences in quality.
- By my read, transformer-based AI obviates the need for most cognitive work.
- That will upend the 'merit' part of our supposed meritocracy. We'll either have to become egalitarians (unlikely anytime soon, esp in USA) or we'll fall back on some other, worse metric for deciding who serves and who eats at the restaurant of life.
- I'd put my money on a resurgence in terrible ideas from the past, because they are so hot right now. Stuff like racism, title, caste, what-have-you.
- All of the abovegoing is Bad, and we should feel bad, because things are about to get bad.
- A better way to model this is as a reduction in habitat -- whereas the introduction of the ICE increased 'habitat' for minds desiring useful employment (engineer, what-have-you) while marginalizing a profession or two (farrier), the introduction of GPT seems poised to reduce habitat at a scale we have not seen before, and the 'new, better jobs' that Sam Altman alluded to, for example, seem beyond naming. Like, what is there left to do? Think it through. Where is your mind going to go? Knitting?
I, the author of the linked article, see the appearance of ever more productive tools as allowing humanity to break through the lie: that much of the labour we perform is necessary and that labour at all is necessary. The concept of your status in society being tied to your job and the idea of full employment for all is what is holding us back to achieve personal and societal fulfillment.
I ask you this: is everyone contributing to a copyleft project ultimately just aiming for financial gain, or are there also true idealists who do it for the sake of doing it?
Doing things is one thing and earning money is another and we come closer and closer to decoupling those too.
Why not reap the benefits and free humanity from the yoke of labour once and for all? If one person does the work of ten (i.e., thanks to the loom, steam engine, or LLM), and we naively assume that the value created is that of ten workers, why can the remaining nine not share the harvest as well? Or, we could all work, just significantly less (a tenth each) and allow everyone to go to bed with a full belly.
No one can predict whether it will be business as usual or not, for anything. Not for the internet, the transistor or LLMs. But we should not hesitate and call out the thumb twiddling lie that is employment through economic coercion.
No disagreement here -- wage slavery is just that -- and, in utopia, we would have the robots do everything. But, as the error message goes, "you cannot get to there from here."
It's like seeing an ideal endgame config on a chess board but realizing that there's no combination of moves that will get your knight into position in time.
Delicious pie, very much in the sky, and any attempt to get there looks like it involves mass surprise unemployment, which, as a general rule, tends to destabilize.
Moreover, none of this actually affects or interacts with your original claim, that (more or less) the coming disruption will be similar to previous, smaller disruptions, for values of 'similar' that allow one to compare outcomes.
Again, the better model is habitat loss. ICE and other inventions increased this habitat; AI seems poised to reduce it sharply.
> I'd put my money on a resurgence in terrible ideas from the past, because they are so hot right now. Stuff like racism, title, caste, what-have-you.
The current group of AI ethics people are busy divining techniques to allow the model to gaslight users in the service of their employers. It is inevitable that these techniques will be applied to new areas and on models that have not been tainted by any other fine tuning.
- OP's family of arguments, which I'll call BAU (Business as Usual, i.e. the claim that there is nothing fundamentally different about this disruption) depends on historical induction
- Historical induction is unreliable
- Sometimes things really are different, for example, the discovery of germ theory, or the invention of nuclear weapons
- The example given, e.g. farrier, is nothing like the present situation
- The fundamental difference between the coming disruption and previous disruptions is the scale. (Just as the difference between TNT and nukes was, again, scale.) Scale matters. Differences in quantity become differences in quality.
- By my read, transformer-based AI obviates the need for most cognitive work.
- That will upend the 'merit' part of our supposed meritocracy. We'll either have to become egalitarians (unlikely anytime soon, esp in USA) or we'll fall back on some other, worse metric for deciding who serves and who eats at the restaurant of life.
- I'd put my money on a resurgence in terrible ideas from the past, because they are so hot right now. Stuff like racism, title, caste, what-have-you.
- All of the abovegoing is Bad, and we should feel bad, because things are about to get bad.
- A better way to model this is as a reduction in habitat -- whereas the introduction of the ICE increased 'habitat' for minds desiring useful employment (engineer, what-have-you) while marginalizing a profession or two (farrier), the introduction of GPT seems poised to reduce habitat at a scale we have not seen before, and the 'new, better jobs' that Sam Altman alluded to, for example, seem beyond naming. Like, what is there left to do? Think it through. Where is your mind going to go? Knitting?
- Again, proper essay forthcoming; first, brunch