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by notahacker 589 days ago
In this case, there isn't much substance to engage with . The original argument made in passing in an interview covering a range of subjects is essentially [answering your question which presupposes that AI takes over all jobs] I think it'll be bottom up because [in my opinion] being a visionary CEO is the hardest thing to automate

The fact that similar, often more detailed assertions of the imminent disappearance of work has been a consistent trope since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (as acknowledged in literally the next question in the interview, complete with an interestingly wrong example) and we've actually ended up with more jobs seems far more like a relevant counterargument than ad hominem tu quoque...

1 comments

Again, my comment is not about AI, it is about the faulty construction of the argument in the sentence I quoted. X and Y could be anything, that is not my point.
My point is also not really about AI, my point is that pointing out that the same arguments that X implies Y could (and have been) applied to virtually every V, W, Z (where X and V/W/Z are both in the same category, in this case the category of "disruptive inventions") and yet Y didn't happen as predicted isn't ad hominem tu quoque fallacy or anything to do with hypocrisy, it's an observation that arguments about the category resulting in Y have tended to be consistently wrong so we probably should treat claims about Y happening because of something else in the category with scepticism...
> where X and V/W/Z are both in the same category, in this case the category of "disruptive inventions"

This is my point, it is not known whether those are all in the same category. The survivorship bias part is that we only know if something were disruptive after the fact, because, well, they disrupted. Therefore, you cannot even compare them like that, never mind the fact that all disruptive technologies are not the same, so you shouldn't be comparing between them anyway.