[sokoloff]

It is certainly possible that AI is the one great disruptor that we can’t adapt to. History over millenia has me taking the other side of that bet, seeing the disruptions and adaptations from factory farming, internal combustion engines, moving assembly lines, electrification, the transistor, ICs, wired then wireless telecommunications, the internet, personal computing, and countless other major disruptions.

[techblueberry]

Have we though?

1. Fundamentals do change, Yuval Noah Harari made this point in the book Sapiens, but basically there are core beliefs (in fact the idea that things do change for the better is relatively new, “the only constant is change”. Wasn’t really true before the 19th century.

What does “the great disrupter we can’t adapt to” mean exactly? If humans annihilate themselves from climate change, the earth will adapt, the solar system will shrug it off and the universe won’t even realize it happened.

But like, I am 100% sure humans will adapt to the AI revolution. Maybe we let 7 billion people die off, and the 1% of the rest enslave the rest of us to be masseuses and prostitutes and live like kings with robot servants, but I’m not super comfortable with that definition if “adaptation”.

For most of human history and most of the world “the rest of us” don’t live all that well, is that adaptation? I think most people include a healthy large, and growing middle class in their definition of success metrics.

[sokoloff]

Isn’t this “healthy, large middle class” a reality that is less than 100 years old in the best of cases? (After a smaller initial emergence perhaps 100 years prior to that.) In 250K years since modern humans emerged, that’s a comparative blink of an eye.

There might be slight local dips along the timeline, but I think most Westerners (and maybe most people, but my lived experience is Western) would not willingly trade places with their same-percentile positioned selves from 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 10K, 50K, or 250K years ago. The fact that few would choose to switch has to be viewed with some positive coefficient in a reasonable success metric.

[techblueberry]

Yes, my point was, if AI and automation in general are the start to the end of all that (and I do think there are some signs that these technologies could be leading us towards a fundamentally less egalitarian society) I think many would consider that a devastating impact that we did not adapt to, the way we did the Industrial Revolution, which ultimately led towards more middle class opportunities.