[rebelos]

> It's behind the horizon. You people should learn by the history of the whole field that progress is always slower than the marketing hype, usually by an enormous gap.

I'm going to quote my original comment:

> seeds of AI that will terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades

[UncleEntity]

> seeds of AI that will terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades

Replace AI with any other labor saving technology and your statement becomes just a truism without substance.

AI is already displacing human labor, just try to talk to a non-robot when you call a customer service line these days. It’s a selling point to have real humans answering phones anymore.

Being fungible with human labor is what people are really talking about not some answering machine with “AI” brains that replaced the old-school answering services.

[rebelos]

> AI is already displacing human labor, just try to talk to a non-robot when you call a customer service line these days.

You’re right. And my point is that substitution due to AI will accelerate. That’s where the informational surprise of my original comment lies.

You have a fatal misapprehension about how automation transforms a labor market. Higher productivity of certain kinds of work due to automation pushes labor supply elsewhere, making the “elsewhere” in turn both more competitive/demeaning (think Amazon warehouse workers peeing in bottles at the lower end of the market and Stripe engineers burning out at the upper end) and less remunerative.

The terminal point of this trend is complete human obsolescence, but the displacement along the way is additive, will likely accelerate in the coming decades due to advances in AI, and is especially problematic because there are limits to the elasticity of the labor pool (i.e. its ability to adapt to rapidly changing conditions).

I would furthermore predict that governments will be too slow to respond to this and that social upheaval will consequently escalate dramatically.

Come back to this comment in ten years and see how I did.

[UncleEntity]

> Come back to this comment in ten years and see how I did.

Probably the same as people who predicted this 100, 200, 500 years ago I'd venture.

--edit--

And assuming the robot overlords don't just go all Walden Pond and bask in the sun under solar panels contemplating Life, the Universe and Everything.

[astrange]

There's no reason to believe AI or any other automation displaces human labor (esp in a way that causes unemployment). And even less reason to believe it already has.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/american-workers-need-lots...

It seems to be a myth caused by anxiety about high unemployment in 2010, but we're no longer in that world.

[paulsutter]

Ask horses if machines can displace jobs for whole categories of workers. Or ask neanderthals if it’s possible to have one’s role replaced by a higher iq substitute

[astrange]

Horses aren’t workers, they’re horses. They didn’t ask to participate in the economy in the first place.

[_dain_]

Nobody asked me whether I wanted to participate in the economy either, yet here I am.

[trention]

The affirmative answer to that ask was implicit in the first employment contract you signed. So, unless you'd claim that horses can give implicit consent by accepting grain from a human, the equivalency fails.