[haxiomic]

You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest. We have analogs we can compare to: massive wealth injections through a natural resource such as oil. Now what happens to that wealth is not obvious; for some countries it's a curse with radical inequality and pernicious and robust power structures, in fewer it has been bestowed to the heritage of the people (think Norway)

Now, the nature of AI is to change the balance of the labour trade. We have a notion of the “economic value of the average person” which is presently very high in the western world.

What happens when the median figure drops through 0 thanks to AI?

Do the remaining wealth owners share their wealth? How often does this occur in existing systems we can compare against?

The cost of primary resources to products also goes toward 0, perhaps this offsets the decreasing economic power of the average person. But what forces protect them if their bargaining power is lost?

[Terr_]

> _why_ the gains must diffuse out

Especially because there's no a priori reason to expect it to occur "naturally". Strong inequality arises automatically in mathematical models.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inev...

[fragmede]

> You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest.

Late 18th century France has a historical point of view as to why the gains will diffuse out if the median person has no food.

[ajross]

> You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest.

Do we? I mean, isn't "because they always have" enough of an argument on its own?

I am hardly a libertarian ideologue nor AI-first LLM jockey. But I do think people tend to catastrophize too much. Blacksmiths were killed dead by the industrial revolution. "Secretary" is a forgotten art. It's been decades since an actuary actually calculated a sum on an actual table. And the apocalypse didn't arrive. All those jobs, and more, were backfilled by new stuff that was previously too expensive to contemplate. We're eating at more restaurants. We can find jobs as content creators and twitch streamers.

Life not only goes on after rapid technological change, it improves. That's not to say that every individual is going to appreciate it in the moment or that regulation and safety net work needs to happen at the margins. But, we'll all be fine.

AGImageddon is, at its core, just another economic phenomenon driven by technology. And that's basically always worked to society's benefit over the long term.

[_DeadFred_]

The 1880s blacksmith didn't become a 1950s American suburbanite. They moved to shared housing in Manchester and a shorter lifespan working for poverty wages, lost fingers/arms in machines, maybe ended up on skid row, the section of town for failures who couldn't 'adapt' to the new modern world. Their children died in WW1 in a trench to industrial produced gas. Their children's children were transported around the world to die storming a beach in WW2. And their children's children's children lived on meager 1940-60 diets as the world rebuilt it's food stocks destroyed by industrialized war, eating new industrial food replacements like margarine and SPAM. There were hundreds of millions of industrial enabled deaths. There was industrial enabled famine and near famine.

That all gets waived away with 'always worked to society's benefit'. It took almost 70 years and the post WW2 destruction of the rest of the worlds economies/infrastructure to create that 1950s American suburbanite world. 'always worked to society's benefit over the long term' is just handwaving not based on the reality of adapting, or if those societies even wanted to join in.

Because not all peoples/nations even had a choice. Japan among many originally opted out. But they were forced to 'modernize'. Peoples around the world were forced into the industrial world by railroads and machine guns and the industrial need for rubber/banana whatever plantations or lumber or strip mines. Once one nation passed through the door, every nation had to follow or be subjugated.

[Terr_]

To highlight one of your points: Adaptation is very different than dying and being replaced with a new cohort.

We have to be very careful about fallacies of division.

[ajross]

> The 1880s blacksmith [...] moved to shared housing in Manchester and a shorter lifespan working for poverty wages, lost fingers/arms in machines, maybe ended up on skid row

That's... just not remotely true, unless you're talking about it as a maybe-it-happened-to-someone story. In fact it's basically a lie.

Every income group in the US (and recognize that "blacksmiths" represent skilled trades workers who earned well above median and had for thousands of years!) saw huge, huge, HUGE increases between 1880 and 1950. I mean... are you high?

> It took almost 70 years and the post WW2 destruction of the rest of the worlds economies/infrastructure to create that 1950s American suburbanite world.

Again, big citation needed on this one. Western Europe was very close to US quality-of-life numbers by the 60's, and the more successful nations started to pass it in the 90's. (Also recognize that the US had already pulled ahead in the 30's, Germany and France were lagging even before the war). You're looking at something along the lines of a decade to rebuild, tops.

[_DeadFred_]

You need to tighten up before you call someone a liar. Manchester is the poster child city for the industrial revolution. The blacksmith moving to Manchester had a lower lifespan/quality of life, it's not in question or up for debate. He is who we will be in the AI disruption, not the person in 1950.

https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stor...

https://healthinnovationmanchester.com/cottonopolis-to-metro...

You don't think there are 70 years between 1880 and the end of WW2 and the real start of suburban American prosperity we think of when we think of the end results today? And I need a citation? Or are you saying I should use 1960 not 1950s as the point, since it took a decade to rebuild in much of the world?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb#Postwar_suburban_expans...

Or are you arguing that butter use recovered over margarine before the 1970s? https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/july/butter-and-ma...

[ajross]

> Manchester is the poster child city for the industrial revolution.

Which is to say, you cherry picked the data rather than looking at aggregates. Manchester industrialization being terribly managed isn't an indictment of steel machining or electrification, it means the government fucked up.

What you are claiming (that the industrial revolution led to lower quality of life generally) is simply false, period. And it won't be true of AGImageddon either, no matter how deeply you believe it. Economics just doesn't work that way.

[_DeadFred_]

Oh look, I didn't lie. No apology? Nope, just more attacks.

I picked THE Industrial Revolution city. THE CITY where it all happened. Did your high school not have a history class? I picked where it went wrong, the first go live site. That's what you do for analyzing things. You don't pick go live 500. That isn't cherry picking, that's what we do when we discuss scenarios that INITIALLY came up so they don't happen again. We don't just whitewash like you would like.

I claimed the industrial revolution led to lower quality of life for the blacksmith. The modern narrative when talking about AI implies they just turned into 1950s style suburbanites and waives away any thought/planning/discussion like you are trying to do. The reality, as it factually happened, was a much worse life and it is worth considering when implementing something that could be just as impactful.

People like you want to just handwave away the inconvenient fact that I am more likely to be the blacksmith in Manchester than to be born in some post-work AI Utopia that may exist in 70 years after things settle. why can't we even discuss this? Why do we have to stumble blindly into it, to the point you call me a liar/cherry picker for pointing out basic history taught in high school and basic root cause analysis concepts?

The reason that Manchester is taught about in American high schools is so that we learn from it and we understand our current world didn't just magically happen. Good and bad happened along the way, and that we have to work within that reality. Good can come in the end, be positive IF progress IS being made. Bad will happen, fix it don't just accept it, challenge it. Think about it. Look to history to prevent the easy things to prevent.

[haxiomic]

This pattern continuing indefinitely without the need for analysis would be certainly nice but we do need to confront recent data. In the US, multiple metrics of quality-of-life peaked around 2015 and have declined since then, with some showing 11% decline while US total wealth has doubled! (with the majority of that decline pre-covid and pre-AI) [0][1][2].

What forces act on this trend? How can we make predictions? An interesting metric, which tracks the aggregate of many complex factors is the distribution of wealth, which could be seen as proxy for the distribution of power or agency of a person in their society. Median income as a fraction of total wealth decreased nearly 50% in real terms over this same period. [3]

Now inversely, during the period where life quality increased most the last century (1920 - 1980) inequality was _falling_.

How is super-human AI advanced through 2030, 2040, 2050 likely to affect things? Will it sharpen the inequality or relax it?

With AI the cost of raw resources to products goes down, but it's likely inequality increases. It's not obvious which force has a bigger impact on human quality of life as things shake out. However, I think the strongest argument – which also explains the steady improvements in QoL through previous changes you mentioned – has been to follow inequality, or median share of power in society.

- [0] https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/indices_explained.jsp

- [1] https://www.socialprogress.org/social-progress-index

- [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q

- [3] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58533

[gruez]

>This pattern continuing indefinitely without the need for analysis would be certainly nice but we do need to confront recent data. In the US, multiple metrics of quality-of-life peaked around 2015 and have declined since then, with some showing 11% decline while US total wealth has doubled! (with the majority of that decline pre-covid and pre-AI) [0][1][2].

>- [0] https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/indices_explained.jsp

It's hard to take that metric seriously when the top city is Raleigh, NC. If that were the best city you'd expect people to vote with their feet and move their in droves.

[piva00]

There's an argument about the speed of change though, a society going through the technological evolution from blacksmithing to industrial metallurgy didn't experience it happening in the short-medium term (1-10 years), it had a gradient of change.

Over time with the speed of technological development compounding on itself, the rate of change becoming much more acute, there's a debate to happen on the "what if this change happens over 5-10 years"? Can you imagine a world where in 10 years most well-paid office jobs are automated away, there's no generational change to re-educate and employ people, there would be loads of unemployable people who were highly-specialised to a world that ceased to exist, metaphorically overnight in the span of a human life.

Pushing this concern away with "it happened in history and we're fine" leaves a lot of room for catastrophising, at least a measured discussion about this scenario needs to be had, just in case it happens in a way that our historical past couldn't account for. No need to be a doomer, nor a luddite, to have the discussion: can we be in any way prepared for this case?

[ajross]

I mean, arguably AI is faster (but it's equally arguably oversold, certainly we aren't seeing that kind of change yet). But the stuff I cited was faster than you think. In the rural US, in 1900, most routine transport was still done with horses. By the 20's it was basically all in trucks, and trucks don't need hand-forged shoes that the blacksmiths were making[1]. Likewise professional typists were still clacking away in 1982 but by the mid 90's their jobs[2] had been 100% automated.

[1] "Blacksmithing" didn't disappear, obviously, but it survives as an expert craft for luxury goods. That's sort of what's going to happen to "hacking" in the future, I suspect.

[2] Likewise, some of the best positions survived as "personal assistants" for executive staff too lazy to learn to type. Interestingly these positions are some of the first being destroyed by the OpenClaw nonsense.

[k32k]

Your example is flawed.

The professional typist' role evolved - to serving through other ways, as you say - by become executive assistants. Much like a Bank Tellers' role also evolved.

And its not because they (executives) are too lazy to type. They actually need people to manage their calendar, monitor emails etc. Moreover, the personal computing revolution led to an expansion of firms that needed more of said people.

Could this be disrupted by things like OpenClaw? Maybe. Personally I doubt it. Trust is a huge element that LLMs have yet to overcome and may never over come. Its the same reason Apple pulled "Apple Intelligence". I know this place is full of doom and gloom, but I am not a SWE by trade so I can see the bigger picture and not get bogged down by the fact it might affect my income.

Moreover, work is more 'fun' with people around. So to you it may seem irrational to keep employed for that basis (call it Culture) but to others, and in particular the executive class - nope. People will start realising things like this once the hysteria dies down.

[ajross]

> The professional typist' role evolved

The "role" might have evolved, but the jobs disappeared. There are, what, maybe two or three orders of magnitude fewer "executive assistants" than there were typists in the 70's? I was making an argument about economics, not job classification.