Comment by ggffryuuj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggffryuuj | Hacker News Reader

This is like reading a global warming denier. The earth has heated up and cooled down before. Global heating has never been catastrophic before so why would it be now?

This guy literally uses graphs and charts from the industrial revolution and and generalizes the results over to automation as a concept. And then he confidently states that this proves that the concept of automation benefits the highly educated. Yeah, well when high level signal processing is automated that won’t be true will it?

Just like global warming, this isn’t a problem that can be understood by looking at localized effects in the recent past. It’s a problem that can only be understood through first principles reasoning. Greenhouse gasses heat the planet. Therefore global warming is a thing. Humans are high level signal processing machines. Therefore the automation of high level signal processing will displace humans in the global market. It’s just inescapable. And yet people mental-gymnastic their way out of it.

And whenever I see “alarmist” in someone’s argument, it’s never a strong argument. The alarmists are right.

> This is like reading a global warming denier.

It's the opposite. The reading from the consensus experts is that the labor effects of automation aren't unemployability, it's worsening job prospects and increasing inequality.

Those are different things which require different solutions.

> And then he confidently states that this proves that the concept of automation benefits the highly educated.

I'm the author. I linked to 30 or so sources in the article, most of them academic publications from the most respected researchers in the field (David Autor, Daron Acemoglu, etc.)

The article is basically a literature review and vulgarisation for laypeople audiences. It's not some theory I just came up with.

> It’s a problem that can only be understood through first principles reasoning.

3 papers by Daron Acemoglu linked to in the article do that and test their theory against recent trends to see if it holds.

Wow, hello. I’m about to clock In the for the day so I’m afraid I can’t address your sources until later tonight. But in the meantime, saying that other people think this is true doesn’t advance your argument in my mind. I don’t care what “experts” say, although I have no problem picking it apart, because there are no experts in AI that doesn’t exist yet. Nobody has first hand experience studying a real world example of what we are talking about. High level signal processing is the only thing that humans monopolize. The more of that that gets automated, culminating with AGI, the closer we are to the obsolescence of humans. It’s just blindingly simple. And please don’t call me an alarmist. I’m genuinely concerned here. I don’t ruminate in this because it’s fun.

> Humans are high level signal processing machines.

True, but that's not all humans are. They are also social. They are also creative. At least some of them are also deep logical thinkers. So...

> Therefore the automation of high level signal processing will displace humans in the global market.

That might not be the catastrophe you make it out to be, because humans are more than just that. Humans that have jobs that only expect them to be high-level signal processors are, I suspect, rather rare, maybe even nonexistent.

Social intelligence and creative tasks are signal processing tasks...

Again: They are not only signal processing tasks. Not even primarily signal processing.

You seem to have a very reductive view of humans. I reject the view that humans are only signal processors.

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