Entire industries stand to be gutted, and people's careers destroyed. Even if an AI is only 80% as good, it has <1% of the cost, which is an ROI that no corporation can afford to ignore.
That's not even to mention the political implications of photo and audio deepfakes that are getting better and better by the week. Most of the obvious tells we were laughing at months ago are gone.
And before anyone makes the comparison, I would like to remind everyone that the stereotypical depiction of Luddites as small-minded anti-technology idiots is a lie. They embraced new technology, just not how it was used. Their actual complaints - that skilled workers would be displaced, that wealth and power would be concentrated in a small number of machine owners, and that overall quality of goods would decrease - have all come to pass.
In a time of unprecedented wealth disparity, general global democratic backsliding, and near universal unease at the near-unstoppable power of a small number of corporations, we really do not want to go through another cycle of wealth consolidation. This is how we get corporate feifdoms.
There is another path - if our ability to live and flourish wasn't directly tied to our individual economic output. But nobody wants to have that conversation.
And BTW when people spend less resources to get more goods and services - that’s the definition of prospering society. Of course having some people changing jobs because less manpower is needed to do same amount of work is an inevitable consequence of a progress.
This time is different because AI has the potential to have a similar impact on efficiency across all work. In the past, efficiency gains created totally new spaces of economic activity in which the innovation could not further impact. But AI is a ubiquitous force multiplier, there is no productive human activity that AI can't disrupt. There is no analogous new space of economic activity that humanity as a whole can move to in order to stay relevant to the world's economic activity.
We should make sure that the technology to eliminate scarcity is evenly distributed so that nobody is left poor in a world of exponentially and automatically increasing riches.
I don't see any reason why thing must be different this time. Human demands are still infinite, while productivity is still limited (and btw meeting limited productivity with infinite demans is what economic is about). So no increase in productivity will make humans stop wanting more and close opportunities for new markets.
> Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple.
Could you provide any sources on this topic? This is a new information for me here.
The difference is that AGI isn't a static tool. If some constraint is a limiting factor to economic activity, inventing a tool to eliminate the constraint uncorks new kinds of economic potential and the real economy expands to exploit new opportunities. But such tools historically were narrowly focused and so the new space of economic opportunity is left for human labor to engage with. AGI breaks this trend. Any knowledge work can in principle be captured by AGI. There is nothing "beyond" the function of AGI for human labor en mass to engage productively with.
To be clear, my point in the parent was from extrapolating current trends to a near-term (10-20 years) proto AGI. LLMs as they currently stand certainly won't put 90% of people out of work. But it is severely short-sighted to refuse to consider the trends and where the increasing sophistication of generalist AIs (not necessarily AGI) are taking society.
>Could you provide any sources on this topic? This is a new information for me here.
Graph: https://files.epi.org/charts/img/91494-9265.png
Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...
