I think your windows are larger than mine. The Industrial Revolution did not improve standard of living for the people crushed in the gears, both metaphorical and physical. Remember: it was not until the modern age, almost but not quite within living memory, where cities were not a sink for population. Cities were places where normal people died and died ugly for most of human history, and much of the migration to them has historically been out of desperation.
Eventually, improvements through both technological means but also political ones (worker action says hi) did make things on-net better, but we live in the now and the now is going to simply vaporize an impossibly large set of jobs, particularly in developing countries. Turning one person into an LLM driver to lay off four or nine is not a net benefit.
As just one example: with modern text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and AI parsing, how much of every call center can just go away? Eight of ten? Nine? I have no idea, but it's a lot, and we have neither time nor inclination to prepare, globally or locally, for this.
(edit to add: the most appalling part of this oncoming train, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is just how shitty a future this one wants so desperately to be. A LLM-driven chatbot or phone system doesn't get tired. It doesn't get "too expensive" to continue to obstruct you and to stiff you. Not only is this primed to seriously hurt people who are below the API, but it's going to make the world suck more for the rest of us, too. Like, sure, "it makes writing code marginally easier"--it's going to make getting a refund for a messed-up Comcast bill an exercise in pain. That doesn't remotely net out, code's already easy enough.)
> Cities were places where normal people died and died ugly for most of human history, and much of the migration to them has historically been out of desperation.
I think that captures some of the contradiction in your claims. Yes, cities could be terrible places to live and work. Yet people have moved to them throughout recent history because the alternative is worse.
That said, I don’t disagree with your point that there will be pain associated with this technological jump. I dont know of there will be more or less than with previous jumps. There are some interesting considerations.
One, this one hits knowledge workers who are in the middle class, instead of hitting those who use muscle or hand labor. That may change the outcome.
Two, governments are much more sophisticated and have much better policy tools to deal with disruption. While that doesn’t fix the root, it can help to prevent compounding problems and soften the impact.
Three, the tools that are doing the disrupting appear to be near zero marginal cost, which is different than say a factory which improved efficiency with a large up-front capital investment. This factor probably will make it worse, but I can see possibilities of it making this change less painful too.
Fourth, it isn’t really clear how this will play out. It kinda feels like we have seen the first demonstrations of a steam engine, and are trying to predict the course of the Industrial Revolution.
> I think that captures some of the contradiction in your claims. Yes, cities could be terrible places to live and work. Yet people have moved to them throughout recent history because the alternative is worse.
I think this is a misreading. People who had options didn't urbanize until they had to. When a family had too many sons to split and or when Roman aristocrats or English magnates pushed people off their land or when a bad climate situation made farming impractical, people moved--but it's a very, very recent historical development to urbanize (en masse) when other choices exist.
Yes, the alternatives have been worse and so industrial urbanization became more appealing than starving. Who the hell made them worse and whose progenitors now control the capital needed to destroy ever more labor?
(Don't take not addressing the rest as dismissal--your other points are all within a coherent universe, they're just techno-optimism that I have no reason to share so I have nothing to say to them.)
Based on this and other posts, I think you are saying not that technological progress is bad, but that we as a society fail to take full advantage of the opportunity that could come from the advances.
And of course you are right. But that’s a societal problem, not a technology problem. I would call if societal-optimism to hope that human nature will go away and collective action problems will suddenly disappear, and all boats will be lifted equally.
Depends. How do you measure it and how much further back? Because, in the short term and in some ways, yeah, it was, insofar as small agriculture was kinda collapsing and large agriculture was starting to consolidate. A big driver of the move to cities in the Industrial Revolution was both climate and political/economic forces making even subsistence farming much harder to do than before, which incentivized urban migration. (The political/economic drivers of urbanization are as old as civilization; Roman indigents flocked to Rome because farming was hard and getting harder, when their lands weren't being seized and they weren't being outright turfed out. Egyptian grain becoming the dole of Rome attracted people without any other options. Again--cities as population sinks.)
So in some ways, and in the short term, the Industrial Revolution was better than just-plain-starving, sure. But most of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution accrued to everyone else and the mangled limbs accrued to the poor. It wasn't without significant worker action (and the requisite workers-getting-beat-to-shit-and-killed) that their lot improved materially.
Is subsistence or subsistence+ farming hard? Absolutely. Mind-bogglingly so. But the Industrial Revolution was fucking bad for the people caught at the bottom. Like--read Dickens.
I tend to think we have such global largesse that we could do better. But we won't, and a lot of the commentariat here cheers for never doing better.
This is entirely untrue. People left their share cropping farms to work in the factories precisely because it improved their standard of living. Just because it isn’t an improvement over yours doesn’t make it an improvement over theirs. Factory owners paid enough to incentivize people to work there, just like in any other capitalist structure. AFAIK there were no forced labor conditions in industrial England.
Eventually, improvements through both technological means but also political ones (worker action says hi) did make things on-net better, but we live in the now and the now is going to simply vaporize an impossibly large set of jobs, particularly in developing countries. Turning one person into an LLM driver to lay off four or nine is not a net benefit.
As just one example: with modern text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and AI parsing, how much of every call center can just go away? Eight of ten? Nine? I have no idea, but it's a lot, and we have neither time nor inclination to prepare, globally or locally, for this.
(edit to add: the most appalling part of this oncoming train, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is just how shitty a future this one wants so desperately to be. A LLM-driven chatbot or phone system doesn't get tired. It doesn't get "too expensive" to continue to obstruct you and to stiff you. Not only is this primed to seriously hurt people who are below the API, but it's going to make the world suck more for the rest of us, too. Like, sure, "it makes writing code marginally easier"--it's going to make getting a refund for a messed-up Comcast bill an exercise in pain. That doesn't remotely net out, code's already easy enough.)