The Economy

Meh to the "corporate theft / goal is to impoverish workers" nonsense. You may has well be listening to horse buggy makers demonize automobiles.

But these stories from yesterday should be getting some notice:

‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.

 

Something like that has the potential to create a lot of disruption. So I am not minimizing how unsettling it must feel to a lot of people. If something that costs less than the price of your labor can do the work you do better and more efficiently than you can do it, your skillset becomes obsolete. You lose the leverage you have to demand what you get paid, and that is scary because older people don't handle change well and it is difficult to restart or develop new skills quickly.

But to answer your question about what happens to our economy. ... just like every groundbreaking technological disruption, it also has great potential to make our lives that much better by increasing our standard of living. Things that were difficult to accomplish -- making it so a lot of people can't have them -- will become easy and more people can have them. Which makes lives better, not worse, in the long run. In the long run, the workers who are displaced are then freed up to do newer things that we couldn't have imagined there having been a need for, because they were never a possibility before. 150 years ago, nobody would have conceived of people making their livings as computer programmers. And they couldn't have conceived of a world where there would be no need for ice cutters or scissors grinders.

In the case of AI. ... imagine a world in which technology is so much more efficient than humans that the technology frees up people to largely live lives of leisure instead of having to work? It's sort of the promise that is the flip side to the fears people like Hinton are warning about, because what if we end up in a 2001 Space Odyssey environment where machines become more powerful than people and decide that we're not necessary?

That actually feels like an existential threat. ... but the Byzantine idea that we need to prevent progress because people are scared of the displacements it might cause is an age old thing, and it's always futile anyhow.

 

Fair share.