Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

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I wouldn't dismiss an entire field of critical thought out of hand. There are some important points that deserve to be addressed.

Some have likened AI's potential for change to technologies that made the industrial revolution possible. The industrial revolution was a great thing right? Everybody had more of everything after it was over. But what about during the revolution?

The truth is that a lot of people suffered a great decline in quality (and duration) of life during the industrial revolution until social change caught up with technological progress. e.g. In England, early in the revolution, it was still illegal for workers to change jobs. When the choice was stay at your current job or go to jail, it's not a surprise that wages stayed artificially low and worker safety conditions were appalling. The complete lack of environmental regulations and the resulting pollution is another famous example of how social change had to play catch-up with technology.

Right now, there is a lot of potential for AI to increase human suffering in the short term even if it is a net benefit in the long-term. At least some of the "AI ethicists" out there are trying to get ahead of the curve, and that's laudible.

You might want to read "Power and Progress - Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. It's not really an AI focused book, but it will give you an appreciation of why some caution is warranted.

> The truth is that a lot of people suffered a great decline in quality (and duration) of life during the industrial revolution until social change caught up with technological progress. e.g. In England, early in the revolution, it was still illegal for workers to change jobs. When the choice was stay at your current job or go to jail, it's not a surprise that wages stayed artificially low and worker safety conditions were appalling.

Certainly aspects of the Industrial Revolution were quite damaging (albeit ultimately fixed by the law, regulation and, yes, organized labor), but the data doesn't seem to indicate that quality of life or life expectancy decreased. In areas that industrialized the earliest (Britain, the US, Western Europe), life expectancy increased dramatically following the IR, and only recently has it plateaued or even fallen. Leisure activity became a real thing for most people, when before the IR it was reserved only for the highest classes. E.g. organized and even professional sports became popular after the IR.

Compared to agricultural labor, which almost everyone did before the IR, including a large class of poor peasants, industrial work was often paid more and was more stable, and the labor restrictions weren't much different than what these societies had been used to.

The problems with the IR were the edge cases, where these new machines could literally kill and maim people without a thought, something that was almost impossible in the agricultural fields. There was a new level of nuisance that arose from these industrial machines that spewed smoke and emitted stenches and were quite noisy. Further, the concentration of wealth that arose from economies of scale was a problem industrializing societies really had no idea how to tackle. I could go on. But I think the point is that in the average case, the IR was helpful on the whole.

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