It’s funny because the shift from handmade goods to automated factories didn’t seem so bad. Same for mechanized farming instead of mules and people.

Shifting from “human calculators” to machines for arithmetic is also hard to argue against.

I think what makes the AI transition difficult is it impacts a wide range of high-value activities that would have been implicitly assumed to always remain human.

I do have great trouble seeing how a pile of matrices is ever going to be capable of innovation. Maybe with sufficient entropy and scale, it will… The day that becomes practical will be a turning point in history.

Economically, goods and services are often priced based on labor/“value added” aspects. Lawyers’ fees aren’t driven by paper costs! If AI takes a huge bite out of intellectual labor, the future could become very different…

BTW, your book description reminds me of the 2025 movie “A.I”. I thought it was quite good.