[hackerlight]

> it's okay to hurt people for the sake of technical progress

That's a strawman. The real view is that protecting jobs that are made extinct by technology and automation is historically a bad idea because it leads to stagnation and poverty. It's better to let people lose their jobs, and for those people to find other jobs, while supporting them with a social safety net while they make the transition. Painful for them but unfortunately very necessary for a prosperous society.

[throwanem]

> for those people to find other jobs, while supporting them with a social safety net while they make the transition

This is the part that no one is expecting to see actually happen, though. Without that addressed, your argument is sound but footless.

[Eisenstein]

Instead of using this outrage and energy to push a political will to grant something that benefits everyone forever, we should use it to grant something that helps prop up a few people in dying industries so that they can stifle innovation which would lead to a creative revolution?

What no one is asking is: 'it this makes it easy for anyone to be an artist, a director, a musician... what are we going to get, and will it be worse than what we have now?

[throwanem]

> What no one is asking is: 'it this makes it easy for anyone to be an artist, a director, a musician... what are we going to get, and will it be worse than what we have now?

Everyone is asking this.

But that's also not the only question. The one you're ignoring here is: If these tools enable one artist to do the work of a hundred, what happens to the other 99?

AI boosters have as yet offered no satisfactory answer for this question. Given the intimate involvement some of them have with politics at the national and global level, this absence constitutes reasonable grounds for suspicion that no answer is intended or forthcoming, and that suspicion is what's asking here to be addressed.

[Eisenstein]

> If these tools enable one artist to do the work of a hundred, what happens to the other 99?

Not really -- as people have gotten more efficient at their jobs, we tend to just produce more/better things, not impoverish a bunch of people. If one person can day (8 hours) making a shoe by hand, and one person can make a shoe in an hour using a shoe making machine, then we don't have one less shoe maker, we have two people making 16 shoes a day. As an effect, shoes are now much cheaper, so they aren't only worn by rich people. If the one-shoe-per-day maker refuses to use a shoe making machine, he or she can upsell their 'hand crafted' shoes to rich people who want to distinguish themselves.

Believe me, I am not a 'free market fixes everything' person, at all, but in these cases, that is how it has worked since the industrial revolution. This is not a new process (automation making a task much more accessible/efficient) and this is not a new complaint (what happens to the people who made a living doing task).

Change is scary -- and everyone has the right to be afraid of an uncertain future, but I can't recall an instance of the regressive approach actually working to allay the fears of those who imposed it. Yet, we all see huge reminders of how our lives have been improved by making hard things easier and accessible to more people.

[throwanem]

The argument as presented so omits even the possibility of harm being done anyone in this process as to seem as if it seeks to foreclose the thought at root.

It would not surprise me if anyone called this pollyannaish, or even Panglossian.

[Eisenstein]

Can you explain yourself differently please? I have no idea what you mean.

[diputsmonro]

The social safety net component of your idea is both extremely important and not at all likely in the modern ultra-capitalist, "even healthcare is socialist extremism" political atmosphere.

Maybe mass unemployment will create a sea change in that mentality, but most of the people who's opinions need to be changed will probably just laugh at "the elites" getting screwed over.

[cabalamat]

It's a shame Andrew Yang isn't running this year, as his 2020 platform of UBI because of AI is looking very prescient.