People Do Not Yearn for Automation

I want us to automate food production and distribution. I want us to automate creation of building materials and creation of buildings. I want us to automate power generation, and see the marginal cost of power drop to zero. I want us to automate clean transport. I want us to automate cleaning up the planet.

I want to automate scientific research. There are too many problems, too much data and not enough scientists. We could find cures to cancer, rare genetic diseases, new forms of energy, better batteries, better every thing.

Take finding cures for cancer. You could automate finding the drug candidates, automate the manufacture of the experiment and preparing the drug candidates, automate the testing and automate the analysis on a massive scale. The limit won't be the number of scientists but physical barriers like energy and materials.

Automation has the potential to make us lead wonderful lives and we should not deny that from happening. The implementation matters though. There is going to be massive disruption to society and that needs to be handled carefully.

People totally do want to offload the drudgery. That's why there is such a thing as dishwashers, and why OpenAI has 90 million users. But they also want the drudgery to be done reliably and not require as much work checking as it would have doing it in the first place.

Personally, it depends. If I could automate taking the trash out, I would do probably want to do it (not sure though). But what remains when everything is automated ?

Well, so far we have been automating many things, and we are still busy working and living as always. It's of course impossible to automate everything - we always have things to do, by necessity by also by choice ; do we really want to be idle and contribute nothing to society ? I don't, and I am sure nobody does. Being useful is an essential need.

Is it pointless then, to automate more and more ? No. It's a way to move forward, and not necessarily a "bad" way. Just not the only way.

A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life. The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")

Obviously not.

People don't care about the tech, they care about the second-order effects like cheaper prices, and more flexibility.

Also, the article is way too broad, you can't treat automation and it's applications in law along with just "vibes" about how people feel about AI.

Maybe a nitpicky HN comment, but why are we lumping the term automation with very recent grievances about certain kinds of automation

The dream of automation will never die

[dead]

Ahh yes. AI is polling worse than ICE. Doesn't mean much since ICE would be polling quite well with much of the country. Typical low-quality journalism.