AI proponents claim that the history of increasing automation and productivity is that they result in more jobs, not less.
I'm not going to argue with that in general, though clearly automation has at many times caused difficult or impossible job displacement that many people have struggled to deal with. So, while in the long run there may be more jobs, in the short run many people lose theirs, and as Keynes famously quipped:
“In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”
But even if past automation has ultimately been in some ways beneficial to most people (probably not to the natural environment including most other species, and even many people, but in terms of 'jobs' and obscene wealth for the wealthy with a bit for some others near the top) and is often felt to be that way overall, I'm also going to argue that AI is Different. Surely that is also what AI proponents claim.
I just argued for this essential difference in my previous post. Previous automation systems have dealt with the heavy, awful, boring, and repetitive work, not the creative and thinking parts which people like and benefit from doing. I have also argued that the Limits to Growth mean there is not enough there for AI to achieve the better world proponents imagine, and instead we'll be left with a cruel and sloppy world with most people making do with less. Finally it seems that AI related layoffs are already occurring, the only this is probably the only way--replacing most rather than augmenting people--that the vast investment and justify itself to investors.
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