Automation

[Goodspeed]

Country list had me rollin'.  Just watched the episode tonight - he makes some good points (I love his show.)

Still, I think a core part of this discussion is not being fully addressed - John kind of let it trail off a bit in his sketch.  I'm still not convinced that it's entirely correct to equate the Industrial Revolution & other instances with automation/AI as we know it today.  Back in the day, animals plowing or machines making widgets often caused more people to be hired, not less - more plow horses meant more people plowing more land & industry expanded.  Machines & computers grew existing industries & created new ones because they were tools for the people workforce to use.  And, anyone who did lose a job in Industry A had a wealth of still-extant opportunity in the still-human-worker-centered Industries B-Z.

Automation as we talk of it today is more about replacing people entirely.  Implementations of it will certainly be used as tools for people who remain in their jobs to make their jobs easier, yes (as has already occurred), but eventually the possibility is there that the technology will advance to the point that jobs will be augmented -> changed -> replaced as maturation occurs.  Who's to say that at least some of the jobs that are created anew, won't be automated themselves?

He's definitely right that we can't fathom what new jobs may come about in 50, 75, 100 years.  I have no idea either, and yet I'm not exactly comfortable with the idea that if you don't just say three Hail Mary's and go along with comfortably thinking that many new jobs will just appear to serve all who need them, you're categorized as a fear-mongering anti-AI luddite.  It's a very complicated question, but the answer is often a suspiciously-simple "there will just be". Which often loops back to a comparison with history that as I mentioned above may not be totally correct.

To that point though, and to his credit as well he references having to re-examine what a career is...maybe we'll all become Renaissance people going about making a living via our introspective art projects in some new economy that's totally devoid of anything we understand of today's world order.  But I think the trap here is that lots of people think automation starts and stops at a robot that screws on 10,000 bolts a day, without considering something akin to Moore's Law as AI gets more powerful, and without yet having a serious discussion about what the world of work becomes past a point that is possibly probably rapidly approaching.