[atleta]

There are two problems with this argument. The first, and easier to accept one is that while society might be better off, in the long run , as a result the affected individuals will probably not. We tend to generalize from a single historical example, the industrial revolution and, more specifically, the automatic loom, and in that case the displaced workers ended up doing worse. Better jobs and opportunities only got created later.

The other problem is, of course, is that all the historical examples (the data) are too few to generalize from while we do see how these examples are different from each other. As technological evolution progresses, automation gets more and more sophisticated, it can replace jobs that require more and more skills and talent. In other words, jobs that fewer and fewer people were able to do in the first place. This means that the bar for successfully competing in the labor market gets higher and higher and it will get to a point where a substantial number of people will just be plain uncompetitive for any job.

Or, at least that was one of the morels until LLMs were invented. (Mostly everyone thought that automation would take over the opportunities from the bottom up in general.) Now it seems that indeed white collar jobs are more in danger for now. But I digress.

The point here is that past examples are false analogies because AI (and I moslty mean future AI) is funcamentally different from past inventions. It's capabilities seem to improve quickly but we're mostly stuck with what evolution gave us. (We, as a species, are evolving but it's very slow compared to the rate of technological evolution and also we, as individuals, are stuck with whatever we were born with.)

[Shocka1]

I don't speak for the parent, but what they said seems true - Henry Hazlitt covers this phenomenon pretty well if you are ever interested. Your two points I think are also true. It won't be nice to everyone... Such is life. That being said, my practical mind is telling me to get ahead of it, whether that be learning new skills or whatever it takes to stay competitive. If that means picking another industry/profession entirely, so be it. You do what you gotta do.

[ElevenLathe]

The other problem with the excavator argument is that all that amazing productivity isn't being pulled from thin air by cleverness -- it's burning (limited, polluting) fossilized solar power from a million years ago. We haven't avoided all the work of moving the dirt around, but only transferred the burden from ourselves and our horses to our unsustainable energy sector. AI (and all software, really) is similar in that it tries to do the same to intellectual activities: instead of requiring a cheese sandwich and an afternoon, some tasks can be instead be done with a few cents worth of electricity and a few hundred milliseconds, but I still eat the cheese sandwich for lunch, so in the final analysis we've saved time but no other resource.

We of course wouldn't have to make this explicit calculation if we could incorporate all this knowledge about fossil fuels directly into the prices of goods and services, but this is very difficult thing to do, and so far nobody has managed to do it in a global way.

It may still make material sense to use ChatGPT to create slides for middle management meetings, but that is not at all certain in a world with a significant price on emissions (though, to be fair, almost no human activity from the past fifty years stands up to this test either).

[kolinko]

IIRC, Microsoft, which is hosting OpenAI, has already their server farms on carbon-neutral electricity, and is heading towards full carbon neutrality on the lifecycle of their server farms.

So doing stuff yourself is less carbon efficient than letting ChatGPT do its job.

As for calculating co2 pollution into the prices - we're slowly doing that, e.g. EU is setting up its carbon tax that applies to companies abroad.

The issue is that if we were to instantly include true costs of carbon removal into everything, the economy might collapse at worst, and at the least poor people might not afford food, heating nor other basic necessities any more. It will take time to do it sensibly.

[ElevenLathe]

I'm skeptical that industrial civilization can exist at all (at least on anything like a billions-of-people scale) with priced-in emissions, but I guess we'll see. Widespread famine and suffering are in store one way or the other (either because of climate change, or because of what we will need to do to fight climate change).

[kolinko]

So far we’ve been exceeding the predictions for switching to carbon neutral economy, so I wouldn’t be too sure of that.

[idopmstuff]

I think the other thing people miss is the impact of our existing infrastructure on the speed at which these new technologies can be deployed.

Society had a lot of time to get used to the printing press, the advances of the Industrial Revolution and the internet. This is because the knowledge had to spread, and it's also because a ton of equipment had to be manufactured and/or shipped all over the world. We had to make printing presses, design and build factories, and get a critical mass of people internet-capable computers.

AI is fundamentally different, in that the knowledge of AI can spread instantly because of the internet and because the vast majority of the world already has access to all of the hardware they need to access the most powerful AI models.

Soon we'll have humanoid robots coming, and while they obviously have to be built, we are much more capable now than we were 50 years ago at building giant factories. We also have an efficient system of capital allocation that means that as soon as someone demonstrates a generally useful humanoid robot and only needs to scale production, they'll have access to basically infinite investor money.