[whodidntante]

+1

50% of the workforce was in farming near the end of the 1800's. Today, 2% 40% of the workforce was in manufacturing early to mid 1900's. Today 8% 60+% of the current workforce is white collar. What will it be in 20 years ?

LLM's are only a couple of years old, we have no idea where this will go. Maybe it will be a big hallucination, maybe we are looking at the very early version of farm and manufacturing machines.

The ENIAC was larger than a person, we now have watches that are significantly more powerful. Maybe in the future, your Apple watch will have more compute than several racks of H100's.

When they came for the farmers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful food. When they came for the manufacturers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful products. Now they are coming for the white collar workers, and their highly paid laptop lifestyles.

Who is left to care ? The billionaires ?

[keybored]

There’s over a century of history of workers “caring” and fighting back.

[whodidntante]

Yes, that is true. However, each time this happens, those people are eventually labelled as getting in the way of progress, luddites, etc, and it is easy for those that benefit (cheap food, cheap products) to simply go on with their "better" lives.

I don't think there was a lot of support, outside the farming industry, to prevent machines from taking over peoples jobs even though 1/2 of the workforce were farmers. Similar for manufacturing.

And I do not believe the answer to those changes was to do farming or manufacturing by "hand". I also do not believe that the answer to AI is to not use it.

But, in the same way, I also do not believe that people will really care that call center workers will be replaced, that designers will be replaced, that many programmers will be replaced, that most admins and middle managers (anyone who pushes paperwork, creates reports, that just communicate and report on work "progress") will be replaced.

I also believe that these workers will get retrained and find better jobs is a fallacy - because it has not happened in the past. Farmers may have done this, but those who lost their well paid manufacturing, most lost their place in society. Blue collar workers in Detroit are not today's laptop warriors.

We will be undergoing a fundamental change in how society functions. It is quite possible the end result will be good, or at least looked at as good. But there was a lot of pain in the previous transitions, and the distribution of "winners" and "losers" will undergo significant change.

[keybored]

> Yes, that is true. However, each time this happens, those people are eventually labelled as getting in the way of progress, luddites, etc, and it is easy for those that benefit (cheap food, cheap products) to simply go on with their "better" lives.

Is that a historical fact?

> I don't think there was a lot of support, outside the farming industry, to prevent machines from taking over peoples jobs even though 1/2 of the workforce were farmers. Similar for manufacturing.

Is that a historical fact?