alt Hacker NewsWe have "disappeared" ~97% of jobs since the Industrial Revolution started, and no increased unemployment has materialized.
Until you understand how something that counter intuitive happened, you should not speculate on how AI replacing current jobs will play out!
Replies
I suspect that the reason might be that the Industrial Revolution happened over 200 years ago. That provides a lot of time for 97% of jobs to progressively disappear without disrupting society too much (except for all the revolutions and world wars). That would be quite different than if AI caused any significant percentage of jobs to disappear in a much shorter period of time.
This analogy happens a lot, and it might be true, but it's not clear to me that they're comparable.
The Industrial Revolution mostly ate mechanical labor and created more 'thinking' and knowledge worker jobs closer to the top of the stack. AGI goes after the information / decision-making layer itself. And it's unclear how much remains once those are automated.
If you're so sure that new jobs will appear (and -- critical omission -- that they will be any good), surely you would be willing to ask the capital interests for whom these arguments are self-serving to put money where their mouth is and backstop a guarantee?
No?
Hmmmmmm.