[Taywee]

We've had big advancements before that allow people to do more with less, but this is a staggering leap. The jump from "you need to get a whole bunch of people together to practice and play music together" to "one person can make skilled music in their bedroom" isn't even comparable to "Hey AI, make me a reggaeton darkwave album performed by Kurt Cobain and Tiny Tim".

We're not talking just more art here, or some people losing jobs who then have to retrain. We're talking with possibly very near advancements, entire industries completely emptying, with hundreds of millions of people who now have nothing to do and nowhere to retrain to.

Other advancements have caused job losses and opened many more. I'm not understanding where all the potential displacements from AI are supposed to go, or how we're going to balance an economy when you need an order of magnitude fewer employees than ever to pump out more content than anybody could hope to consume.

[JumpCrisscross]

> but this is a staggering leap

More than industrialization? Come on. It's staggering because it's impacting us.

[Taywee]

Absolutely more. This takes very hard and challenging work and turns it into nearly nothing. This reduces decades of skilled labor and education into an algorithm. I'm not undervaluing industrialization, but the improvement in productivity wasn't on the same scale. We're talking reducing weeks of work to seconds in some cases, and that's not even being optimistic with what improvements we might still see in the coming years.

[JumpCrisscross]

> takes very hard and challenging work and turns it into nearly nothing. This reduces decades of skilled labor and education into an algorithm

Read up on Luddism. These were multi-generational trades undone by the loom alone. The Industrial Revolution required millions of people to not only retrain, but also relocate. It changed political structures, often violently.

Even in the 1980s, skilled spreadsheets were done in by Excel. Does that mean we should ban Microsoft Office so folks can sketch out models by hand?

[Taywee]

The scale is different by a grand margin. If 50% of US jobs are replaced by AI in the next 20 years, and those jobs aren't replaced by other jobs, and people depend on income to survive, what happens?

I'm not saying to ban it. I think the productivity gain could be a gift. Everybody being freed from the need to work would be amazing.

But without actually dealing with it, what's the proposal for dealing with the majority of the population of your country being completely without employment? What do we do for money when there's no work left to be done? The whole country can't trade stocks for a living.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If 50% of US jobs are replaced by AI in the next 20 years, and those jobs aren't replaced by other jobs, and people depend on income to survive, what happens?

Which 50% are you seeing replaced? We can, and have, always imagined mass income eradication.

I'm not arguing we do nothing. But zero problems surfaced so far are even remotely actionable, as they're all well within the realm of hypothesis versus evidence.

[Taywee]

Potentially? Most artists, programmers, musicians, most teachers, huge amounts of finance, marketing, legal and especially paralegal, most journalism and technical writing positions, stock trading (most traders don't do anything that AI can't fully replace), and even more of customer service.

The majority of those will probably be staffed at 10% what they are now at best. Some, like stock trading, will probably be almost completely erased as a human job.

[nullsense]

>The Industrial Revolution required millions of people to not only retrain, but also relocate. It changed political structures, often violently

Can't wait for my political system to be violently up ended by AI. I can imagine it will only change for the better, right? Right??

[DougN7]

Industrialization was slow - it took many decades to happen, so people could adapt. I don’t see us having that luxury of time.

[zugi]

AI is slow, it's been coming since the 1980s and still has decades to go.