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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

An AI revolution is not required to eliminate jobs. Robots are already doing the work of millions. You can see it everywhere you look. Was your laptop hand milled out of aluminum? Nope, a CNC machine did it. Do you see 12 cashiers manning 12 checkout lanes at the grocery store? Nope, 1 cashier is manning 12 self-checkout lanes. Do you have a secretary that schedules your meetings? No, you just use Google Calendar. That is what automation is. The 1970s sci-fi robot is just a distraction.

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Yes, technology enhancements (which are not “AI”) have increased productivity, allowing less people to create more value. Where is the widespread unemployment?

The fear is, like the agricultural and industrial revolutions, that change will suddenly spring forward at a rate that society can’t adapt fast enough.

And people are unemployed, or worse they are employed but at a rate they can’t afford to live, so are one of the tens of thousands of homeless in LA alone. They work 18 hours a day 7 days a week, so are dangerous as they drive to their third job at 3 in the morning which causes a crash which means massive traffic problems all day.

Even if you are a cold blooded Victorian thetr are benefits to keeping your customers alive and with enough free time to buy the crap you peddle.

There is a notion in economics of complements and replacements. The plow was a complement to horse labour, while the gas engine was a replacement. The former increased demand for horses while the latter basicly eliminated it. If we truly had human-level AI, labour models predict human wages would decline below subsistence. However, applying these labour models in a regime where we have AGI makes little sense, as all that will matter for human welfare is the objective functions of the AIs.

>An AI revolution is not required to eliminate jobs.

Yes it is. If you have tasks that cannot be automated, people's labour will have value. It would require AI that is as good as any human, and that is cheaper of course, to eliminate all jobs. And even then rich people may prefer human labour for nostalgic or signalling reasons. Eliminating all jobs is a tall order.

You don’t need to eliminate all jobs to create a problem. By simply automating trucking, and you’ve put about 15% of our workforce out of work. What jobs could we easily retrain that 15% for, that are not already being filled?

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