[rgejman]

>But if you took someone from 1870 and had them wake up 70 years later, in 1940, the world would look entirely different.

>Now skip forward from 1940 to 2010: apart from our obsession with little glass rectangles, the world would be fundamentally familiar.

Disagree completely. The technology and information economy revolution means that a socially well-adjusted blue collar, white collar or even field-hand in 1940 cannot compete at all in 2010 at the same job.

[jdietrich]

My grandmother was a child in 1940. Despite hours of patient explanation, she has absolutely no comprehension of what I do all day. I sit at a computer, I type some gobbledegook and inexplicably get paid for it. Everything else is a complete mystery. She just doesn't get the fundamental concept of general-purpose computing - that the same physical object can do infinitely many things. To her, the little glass rectangles that I stare at might as well be enchanted amulets.

We occupy the same physical space, but we live in completely different worlds. I can summon a chauffeur-driven car or a hot meal with a few taps on my magic rectangle. A genie in my pocket can answer seemingly impossible questions when I utter the magical incantation "OK Google...". In the eyes of my grandmother, my $200 glass rectangle makes me practically a warlock.

I can imagine a Sumerian sage in 2017 BCE remarking "apart from our obsession with little clay tablets, our society has changed little in a millennium". It might be easy from that perspective to dismiss literacy as a trivial fad; from our perspective, it is easy to take literacy for granted and overlook the transformative impact it has had on our society.

Weak AI is already here and already changing the world, it just suffers from a fundamental perceptual problem - AI that works is just software and software is boring. For decades, playing chess was seen as a grand challenge for AI. After Deep Blue's defeat of Kasparov, chess AI had become merely chess software. Our attitudes flipped almost instantaneously from "of course a computer can't beat a human at something as complex as chess" to "of course a computer can beat a human at something as simple as chess".

Google Search isn't AI, it's just an algorithm. Fully autonomous cars will stop being AI the first time you fall asleep at the wheel and wake up at your destination. Wolfram Alpha isn't AI, Siri isn't AI, content-aware fill isn't AI, Amazon's stock control system isn't AI. IBM Watson is briefly AI when it's winning a gameshow, then quickly reverts to being software.

[le-mark]

Lots of crop types haven't been automated partly due to the presence of cheap labor, and the difficulty in automating. Some fruits are very difficult for mechanical pickers to not bruise, and a human touch has been required up to now. Of course if the economics change or human like mechanical picking hands become common, that would change.

[stevekemp]

It'll be interesting to see if the UK invests in such automation, as apparently migrant workers are less inclined to pick fruit for the UK, post-Brexit:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/brexit-lates...

[captainmuon]

Right, but lets say between 1920 and 1990? The difference would be less pronounced. I would say there was a discontinuity in the 90s and 2000s. But it is entirely possible that once everything has been "internetized", we will reach a plateau for the next decades.

[rgejman]

Just restricting ourselves to the developed world: Being able to call anyone in the world from your home? Not having to worry about food scarcity? Not worrying about being drafted into an army? Political and technological differences have drastically changed life between 1920 and 1990. I bet any 70 year epoch that covers the development of the internet or mobile phones, will have the same features. Who knows what's next.

[ajuc]

Part of the problem is comparing bleeding edge 1940 with average 1870, and average 2010 with bleeding edge 1940.

Most of the world in 1940 wasn't that different from 1870. Industrialization only touched a few countries. Still most people were farmers, and farming was similar to 1870. There were many innovations, mainly cheap artifical fertilizers thanks to Bosh-Faber process, but it wasn't widespread yet.

Nowadays as well we have pockets of sci-fi level technology (fusion, genetic engineering, space stuff, nanomaterials), but the widespread stuff is not on that level.

Don't compare a car in 1940 to mobile phone in 2010, because almost nobody had a car in 1940 when you look at the whole world.

[pcarolan]

Maybe not in the same job, but why does that matter? Are you saying they couldn't learn to drive an Uber or work at Starbucks? An unskilled worker today is a millioniare by 1940s standards but I don't think the work is any more complicated, in some ways I'd argue less because being a field hand takes a lot of knowledge about fields.

[ThomPete]

Factor in cost of living and they dont live the life of milionaires.

[pcarolan]

They'd never feel hungry. They'll live 20 years longer on average. Have access to a diversity of food and entertainment experiences that would make their heads spin and drive a vehicle that by 1940s standards would be considered a marvel. Even the richest people alive in 1940 didn't have access to any of that.

[ThomPete]

A millionaire had way more than someone living in rural america does. Large percentage of the US population does not have 400USD to spare for emergency and again the cost of living is going up while salaries and jobs aren't.

[admax88q]

Just because a field-hand's job got automated doesn't meant the world would look fundamentally different.

[ThomPete]

It would look remarkably different. I don't thing people are realising that AI isn't going to replace jobs as much as they are going to remove the need for those specific jobs.

I.e. it's not like where you used to have company x doing product y you now have AI. AI is transforming the very idea of constitutes a company.

Digitalization is a winner takes most if not all. And more and more things are becoming digitalized to a point were they make no sense as scarce offerings. The supply will heavily out weight the demand.

[kfrzcode]

Sounds like OP is trying to regurgitate Wait but Why.

[skrebbel]

Plus black people now get to sit anywhere in the bus.