Comment on People are worried that AI will take everyone’s jobs. We’ve been here before.
Womble@lemmy.world 5 months agoThen Compton abruptly switched perspectives, acknowledging that for some workers and communities, “technological unemployment may be a very serious social problem, as in a town whose mill has had to shut down, or in a craft which has been superseded by a new art.”
Did you even read the paragraphs I pulled out, not even the article itself?
Then Compton abruptly switched perspectives, acknowledging that for some workers and communities, “technological unemployment may be a very serious social problem, as in a town whose mill has had to shut down, or in a craft which has been superseded by a new art.”
His whole point was technology does not reduce the amount of employment as a whole, but it can focus pain on particular communities that get displaced by technology. I just don’t buy into the tech bro singularity cult that AI will grow at an exponential rate and replace everyone, AI will be a tool like any other, extending human capabilities but not replacing them entirely.
tabular@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Humans were the best chess players until computers brute forced the solution with uninteligent computational power. Humans were the best at Chinese Go for longer as brute forcing would take too long. Humans were no longer the best at Go when machine learning beat pros consistently. This is one-way, hunans don’t win back ground. If we assume AI doesn’t get better than this saying “technology does not reduce unemployment” is still short sighted.
The alignment problem should be taken seriously even if wealthy assholes agree, but AI killing humans is a seperate issue.
Womble@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Humans were the best at weaving until looms came along, humans were the best at welding components together until industrial robots came along. Humans were the best at doing double entry accounting until digital computers came along.
I just don’t see this current wave of AI of being any different that previous technological advances that became tools better at specific tasks than humans.
tabular@lemmy.world 5 months ago
When you know the goal but do not know how to functionally get there then an artificial neural network can be useful. To get Chinese Go artificial opponent working was done by making the program run many games against many iterations of itself to adjust itself towards the correct moves for any situation. The biggest difference is the scope of problems this type of tool is capable of solving.
Technology creating more jobs in the industrial revolution isn’t a valid argument that automating intelligence will create more jobs. Even if we grant that it does, are you assuming that it will create more jobs that it nullifies forever? If we can agree there’s a point where it stops being positive then we just disagree on the time it will happen.
Societal issues happens even if more jobs are created if we assume those jobs are too complex to be suitable for the majority of people (who mostly work in transport). If we’re to take the industrial revolution as gospel then most people leave the workforce when they’re jobs are automated.