A good precedent is mechanized agriculture. When machines effectively replaced most humans in agriculture, unemployment did not rise to 90%.
reply> A good precedent is mechanized agriculture. When machines effectively replaced most humans in agriculture, unemployment did not rise to 90%.
replyI don't consider this a good precedent at all.
When this happened, humans went off and started doing what we now consider "knowledge work". They escaped massive unemployment by being smarter than the tractors. How do they escape AI job loss when AI becomes smarter than the average human? or smarter than the smartest human?
In prior displacements humans moved up the stack. There is no longer room for them at higher levels of the stack if AI beats them at cognitive labor.
And this is why we must ensure that the AIs get aligned towards humanity and crucially that they don't get aligned towards capital, which seems to be the current trajectory.
replyThere's a better chance that a humanity-aligned AI would make sure that humans have something to do and keep us alive versus a capital-aligned one. At the same time, if AI would be the deathblow to capitalism, that'd be very, _very_ ironic.