Comment by DeWilde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeWilde | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe, but maybe not.

So far advances like these have, historically, improved our life in terms of poverty, living conditions, schooling, and healthcare.

300 years ago, in Europe, most of the population lived as peasantry because somebody had to cultivate the farms. 2000 years ago in some place slaves made up 60% of the population.

Thinking that with AI only one dimension of our lives will change seems highly improbable to me. The printing press took way jobs from the scribes, but the revolution that book printing brought is one of the reason most people have electricity and tap water in their homes now.

So I'm more optimistic, I see AI being democratized and improving life overal in ways we can't imagine. There will be down-sides that we also can't imagine but there are a lot of down sides to how we live today.

And 30,0000 years ago people lived as foragers, the world was much more equitable and people had more leisure time.

Sure, it's true that humans on average are now better than 2000 years ago, but this doesn't mean it was always the case nor that this trend will continue. It's entire possible that the average human will be worse off in 100 years from now.

How do you feel about ant colonies and queen and worker ants ?

Maybe hunter gatherers did live more equitable but their life quality has nowhere near what an average human has today with technology. Even in developing countries.

Depends on how you define life quality. Everything is relative.

And back then you’d break a leg foraging, no way to set it, and be a cripple for the rest if your life. Fab.

And if "the gods" decided your part of the world was to be stricken with drought, well, it was game over for you.

Not true. Foragers were quite resilient to stuff like drought, because they could just move along and ate foods from many different sources. Drought etc. started to become a real problem only once people were dependent on agriculture.

There's also the reality that a lot of the economy is already pretty frivolous if the concern is misallocated resources away from poverty. AI development is a far worthier cause than say, luxury handbags, massive sports stadiums (how much did the Football world cup cost?), video games, etc etc.

AI compared to many other things has a far more plausible path to helping solve those issues.

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