[MontyCarloHall]

>Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living

The two biggest labor displacements in human history were the agricultural and industrial revolutions, both of which resulted in enormous gains in human living standards. Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.

[underlipton]

The Industrial Revolution increased labor hours by two or three times, depending on circumstances. In the sense that they reduced the time for life (leisure) versus the time spent being a cog in the wheel of an industrial system (labor), it certainly eroded living standards.

For a very specific example: the cotton gin likely increased the demand for slave labor in the American South, leading to harsher conditions for slaves, increased acrimony between slaveholders and abolitionists, and eventually the Civil War (the decimation of the Southern economy, the pivot of Northern society to a war footing w/ associated disruptions, and 600,000 Americans dead).

[subw00f]

The agricultural and industrial revolutions "weren't labor displacement", they were technological and social changes that happened unevenly and gradually in time and space and which resulted in labor displacement, but they were not the only cause, and they didn't happen BECAUSE of labor displacement. I would argue the subsequent labor displacement caused a minor part of the social gains to be later distributed and realized through class struggle, but that's beside the point. Most wars cause mass labor displacement and military technological advancements that later translate into society as a whole. Are you prepared to argue for wars? If you are American, you are experiencing firsthand the effects of what once was a major part of your industrial labor being absorbed by China. It has led to massive inequality and erosion of standards of living in the US. Not so much for the Chinese working class, which has increasingly improved their standards of living. Are you going to argue for it? I think if we only look at things from a limited perspective, and in this instance a technocratic and teleologic view of history, as in history has a designed finality and this finality will be achieved through unrestrained development of production forces, you are bound to quietly take part in the destruction of society and nature, now viewed as externalities, and accept the worst of atrocities in the name of "advancement", while most of any gains are captured in the short term by a minority.

[danans]

> Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.

The mass evictions of the Scottish Highlands [1] in which peasants were driven at the point of bayonets to the lowland city slums to make way for the British government to transform Scotland into a mass sheep/wool production monoculture economy.

The use of kidnapped Africans as slaves in the Americas was also an example of a labor displacement - by introducing a source of mass human labor with absolutely no human rights - to scale the agricultural commodity economy (cotton, tobacco, sugar), which resulted in horrendous living standards for the enslaved, and an erosion for the poor paid peasants whose labor they replaced. Slavery was a very "efficient" way to use labor.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

[PontifexMinimus]

AI is different. It promises to be able to do everything humans can, but better and more cheaply. When AIs can do every human job cheaper than the subsistence cost of employing a human, humans will be economically obsolete and worthless.

Then there's the minor issue of AI deciding to just wipe us out because we're in the way.

Taking everything together, AI more powerful than that which currently exists must not be created. This needs to be enforced with an international treaty, nuking data centers in non-compliant states if need be.

[MontyCarloHall]

Before the industrial revolution, approximately 90% of people worked in agriculture. In fully industrialized countries, that figure is now <2%. That decrease constituted a nearly full replacement of everything humans were doing, better and more cheaply. While this time might be different, I don't think this is a given.

[ccortes]

Maybe it’s not a given, but it is part of the sales pitch for CEOs. A few others have announced layoffs due to AI being better and more efficient than humans.

How much truth there is to it we don’t know for sure. But it’s not something to be ignored.

[MontyCarloHall]

CEOs have been saying the exact same thing for the entire history of automation. Take computing, for example, an industry that's always been unusually amenable to automation:

— in the 1960/1970s, when compilers came out. "We don't need so many programmers hand-writing assembly anymore." Remember, COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) were marketed as human-readable languages that would let business professionals/scientists no longer be reliant on dedicated specialist programmers.

— in the 1980s/1990s, when higher-level languages came out. "C++ and Java mean we don't need an army of low-level C developers spending most of their effort manually managing memory, and rich standard libraries mean they don't have to continuously reimplement common data structures from scratch."

— in the 1990s/2000s, when frameworks came out. "These things are basically plug-and-play, now one full-stack developer can replace a dedicated sysadmin, backend engineer, database engineer, and frontend engineer."

While all of these statements are superficially true, the result was that the world produced more software (and developer jobs) than ever, as each level of abstraction freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level solutions. Mel's intellect was freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common.

While this time with AI may truly be different, I'm not holding my breath.

[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

[Ray20]

> AI is different

Literally the same thing.

> humans will be economically obsolete and worthless

Only if we are talking about a socialist system (and they are making pretty small progress in the field of AI). A human's value under a capitalist system is equal to their ability to create goods and services. And AI cannot make this ability smaller in any way.

A people's well-being is literally the goods and services created by that people. How can it decrease if the people's ability to produce those goods and services is not hindered in any way?

So, when it comes to the entire nation benefiting from AI, the most important thing is to preserve capitalism, and then the free market will distribute all the benefits. The main danger is a descent into socialism, with all these basic incomes, taxation out of production, and other practices that would lead to people being declared economically obsolete and mass executed to optimize their carbon footprint or something.

[PontifexMinimus]

> A human's value under a capitalist system is equal to their ability to create goods and services. And AI cannot make this ability smaller in any way.

Yes they can. Your ability to produce goods and services depends on the infrastructure around you. When that's all run by AIs for AIs, humans won't be able to compete.

See that land over there producing food you need to eat? It turns out it's more economically efficient to pave it over with data centers etc.

Under a US-style capitalist system the rich (i.e. the AIs and AI-run businesses) control politics, the courts, etc, so the decisions the system makes will favour AIs over humans.

> So, when it comes to the entire nation benefiting from AI, the most important thing is to preserve capitalism, and then the free market will distribute all the benefits

...to the AI-run companies!

> The main danger is a descent into socialism, with all these basic incomes

Without UBI most people (or maybe everyone) would starve.

[Ray20]

> depends on the infrastructure around you

Yeah, and who is creating those infrastructure? Jesus? This is the same part of goods and services.

> When that's all run by AIs for AIs, humans won't be able to compete.

So what? The ability to produce goods and services (and therefore general well-being) will not decrease because of that.

> It turns out it's more economically efficient to pave it over with data centers etc

By the way, a good argument against your position. Agricultural land is very cheap, but the vast majority of people who believe AI will put people out of work and worsen overall well-being are for some reason reluctant to buy this asset, which would see a catastrophic increase in value under such a scenario. So these people are either incapable of analyzing the economic processes, and their predictions are worthless, or they don’t really believe in such a scenario.

> will favour AIs over humans

Let me repeat: it does not reduce the ability to create goods and services. Under capitalism, this is the only characteristic that determines people's well-being.

> ...to the AI-run companies!

I think this is a fairly unlikely scenario. But even in this very unlikely case, people's well-being will not be reduced. Simply because of the mechanisms of creating well-being.

> Without UBI most people (or maybe everyone) would starve.

Economic theory (and 20th-century economic practice) demonstrates the exact opposite. In every country that attempted to effectively implement UBI, it led to a sharp decline in production and mass starvation. Literally every single time.

[littlexsparkee]

the loom hurt English weavers (flat wages for 50 years) and decimated India's textile trade. also, Rust Belt deindustrialization.