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by 3beard 4170 days ago
I don't understand why AI eliminating jobs is considered a problem. If any job can be done by a computer program it simply means that humanity has outgrown this kind of work and that nobody should do that mindnumbing crap anymore. Let's forget that the word "computer" used to mean "guy who sits in an office of an accounting firm, and adds numbers all day long".
4 comments
AlisdairO 4170 days ago
That's fantastic, as long as there are alternative jobs for those people to go to that they can feasibly perform. This has historically been the case with technology replacing work, but it's not clear whether it's the case this time.

If there's no (or insufficient) jobs for people to go to, in a society that predicates your ability to live a pleasant life on having one, you have a huge social problem. Our current system is not set up to cope with 40% of the population being out of work.

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jimbokun 4170 days ago
Because with our current economic model, all the benefits will go to the people supplying the capital to develop and deploy the AI.

In the long term, we may discover more sophisticated AI has different goals and priorities than us, and we won't be able to control it or turn it off.

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programminggeek 4170 days ago
Because there are too many people and people need to feed themselves and their families.

For example, consider if your job was made obsolete in 20-30 years. That there was no longer a need to program or manage computers any longer. All of a sudden all of this knowledge in your head is now basically useless and you have not likely developed any other meaningful skillset.

What do you do and what does society do for you?

THAT is why eliminating jobs is a problem. At some point the jobs simply aren't replaced by other things, or the other things are menial tasks, not meaningful tasks. If you eliminate enough jobs there isn't enough money to keep the consumer based economy afloat, and then the companies that own the robots go out of business because people who buy their products no longer have jobs or money to afford their product.

There are no clear solutions to this problem either.

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atrilla 4170 days ago
I agree. In fact, this is a recurrent piece of criticism that also appeared on an MIT Tech review, which I commented here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866253

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