“We’ll replace tons of jobs really fast and it will probably be good for anyone who’s smart and cares” is counterintuitive, for good reasons. I’m a good libertarian capitalist like most folks here, but markets embedded in societies aren’t magic.
New technologies have been net beneficial over the long run, not the short run. Job disruptions have taken up to a hundred years, by some good-sounding arguments, to return to the same average wage. I think that was claimed for industrial looms and the steam engine; but there’s a credible claim that the average time of recovery has been very long. And those didn’t disrupt the markets nearly as quickly as drop-in replacements for intellectual labor would do.
Assuming that upsides of even a relatively slow, aligned AI progress are likely to outweigh the negatives, without further argument, seems purely optimistic.
AI will certainly have prosaic benefits. They seem pretty unlikely to outweigh the harms.
Civilizations have not typically reacted well enough to massive disruptions to be optimistic about the unknowns here. Spreading the advantages of AI as broadly as the pains of job losses seems like threading a needle that nobody has even aimed at yet.
I am an optimist by nature. The more closely I think about AI impacts, the less optimistic I feel.
I don’t know what to say to young people, because uncertainty is historically really bad, and the objective situation seems to be mostly about massive uncertainty.
“We’ll replace tons of jobs really fast and it will probably be good for anyone who’s smart and cares” is counterintuitive, for good reasons. I’m a good libertarian capitalist like most folks here, but markets embedded in societies aren’t magic.
New technologies have been net beneficial over the long run, not the short run. Job disruptions have taken up to a hundred years, by some good-sounding arguments, to return to the same average wage. I think that was claimed for industrial looms and the steam engine; but there’s a credible claim that the average time of recovery has been very long. And those didn’t disrupt the markets nearly as quickly as drop-in replacements for intellectual labor would do.
Assuming that upsides of even a relatively slow, aligned AI progress are likely to outweigh the negatives, without further argument, seems purely optimistic.
AI will certainly have prosaic benefits. They seem pretty unlikely to outweigh the harms.
Civilizations have not typically reacted well enough to massive disruptions to be optimistic about the unknowns here. Spreading the advantages of AI as broadly as the pains of job losses seems like threading a needle that nobody has even aimed at yet.
I am an optimist by nature. The more closely I think about AI impacts, the less optimistic I feel.
I don’t know what to say to young people, because uncertainty is historically really bad, and the objective situation seems to be mostly about massive uncertainty.