[cwb]

Perhaps, I might be missing something. The way I understand it is that "the Luddite fallacy is not a fallacy" is an assertion (OED: "a confident and forceful statement of fact or belief"). The reason, I claim, is that humans will not be able to compete with robots for much longer (in large numbers) which means unemployment is likely to go up (I understand that that's not a strict implication since governments could ban robots). The reason humans won't be able to compete with robots is that technology is gaining more and more of the abilities that humans use in their jobs (like reasoning and visual recognition). Those reasons consists of (a set of) assertions that could be wrong, but they are reasons and an argument is (OED again) "a reason or set of reasons given in support of an idea, action or theory". Thus, I thought that what I did qualified as an argument, or am I mistaken?

In any case, if you agree with the assertion, what would be your argument for it?

[marcosdumay]

Yes, the Luddite "fallacy" is also an assertion. It's based on strong historical data and weaker economical theory.

Your comment does make sense, but "we are losing the edge" does not automatically mean that we'll ever be completely defeated. And even a small victory is good enough to avoid a crisis, because of Jevon's paradox (that's also not a paradox).

To argue that we are headed to a crisis where humans won't be able to compete with capital, one needs evidence supporting that there'll be absolutely no economical activity where humans will outcompete machines (at least for a reasonably big share of the humans).

I do think that'll happen because there's no feature of a human that a good enough machine could not emulate, and machines are inherently cheaper (because we are "wasteful" from a production perspective), but my argument is fundamentally a repeat of materialism, for what the only possible evidence is the lack of evidence of the alternatives.

Also, the timing is iffy, there's little evidence that we'll have that crisis soon (there's little evidence either way, but it mostly points into a crisis soon). I happen to think we will because our current machines started to do lots of tasks that we learned that were very hard at the last AI explosion. But there's no guarantee that there aren't even harder tasks, that we just didn't try yet. Also, our computers are approaching the same capacity that people estimate that our brains have. But those estimations have lots of assumptions, that could easily be wrong.

[mcguire]

"...that humans will not be able to compete with robots for much longer..."

Do you have any convincing reasons to believe that?

[cwb]

You might not find them convincing, but the reasons I believe that is the case are:

- Human hardware is fairly fixed (unless we go the cyborg route) whereas robot hardware (at least the computation part) evolves roughy exponentially and I don't see reasons for that to stop.

- As robot behaviour evolves (whether through deliberate design, genetic algorithms, or other types of learning) improvements can be replicated quickly and approximately for free. Improvements to human behaviours is notoriously hard, expensive, and time-consuming to replicate.

- We can rewrite many of our wealth creation recipes to make use of more specialised robots instead of flexible humans, which means robots won't need to get close to general AI before this has significant effects on jobs.

- We are starting to see robots perform the most sophisticated human skills: visual recognition, acting on and producing language, and decision making under uncertainty. Granted, robots don't do most of these things very well yet compared with humans, but I don't see fundamental reasons for why the development will stop short of human abilities.

- Robots can work 24/7, won't go on vacation, won't quit on you, don't play political games with the other robots, won't sue you, don't require food and bathrooms, and they'll make fewer mistakes.

- If you're mostly questioning the timing, I don't have a particularly good answer, but given how I understand the state of things I believe we're talking low single-digit decades rather than centuries for a significant proportion of people to look around and not find a job they could do better than a robot for a liveable wage (without government subsidies). If you disagree on the timescale I think we'd need to have a detailed discussion about how we understand technological developments and the jobs people do. You may well be able to convince me that I'm off on the timing.