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Comment by vFunct | Hacker News Reader

Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit. It's just what people do. They don't sit around doing nothing because AI took their job- they'll figure out something else, to fill a new hole in the economy.

Moore's law applies to people's productivity as well, not just transistors on a chip.

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> Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit. It's just what people do.

It's not “just what people do” in some kind of simple, automatic, no-conscious-action-required sense, it’s a difficult process that often requires violent conflict between those empowered by the new development and those they exploit (that was certainly the case after the Industrial Revolution), a major part of which is people looking for and publicly calling out the problems.

It's like 80 years happen and people forget that we go to war in our own countries as well. Conflict is not just something that happens in the middle-east.

The stability has to be cherished and nurtured.

Yah the Industrial Revolution wasn't a direct cause of any war. There are zero wars that are a result of economic efficiency. And, no, colonialism isn't economic efficiency. Economic efficiency is a very specific thing. It doesn't mean "whatever unfair thing I don't like".

Really? None of the British invasions of the African interior would have been possible without industrialized. "We've got the Maxim gun and they've..." etc. People died, societies were conquered -- you might not consider those to qualify as wars, but the people conquered certainly did.

Warfare exists independently of economic efficiency. Colonialism would have happened regardless of technological advancement.

This is completely false. Colonialism depended on an incredible technological and economic gap between the colonizers and the colonized. Without that gap, colonialism would not have happened -- it's as simple as that.

I am not convinced that's true. Rome colonized vast swathes of the world long before the industrial revolution, without an incredible technological gap between them and the regions they conquered. It is not hard to imagine that a similar thing could have occurred with the European nations which colonized other parts of the world later on. Having a massive technology edge certainly helped a great deal, but I think that it was not necessarily required.

That is an impossible point to argue. What we can say is that historically they have been linked. The Danish slave trade was, as an example, fueled by weapon technology exports to African warlords in exchange for enslaving the population they defeated.

As the story goes, no Dane set foot in the african interior. We instead assisted the already warring factions with technology allowing them to subject more people to their war.

I think it's hard to envision how any of this could have happened without those wars.

What hole will they fill if AI is already filling it? There is no knowledge based work that won’t get replaced. There is no physical based work that won’t be replaced. Sure humans can and will adapt to a post human labour world, but the process of getting there is going to be brutal without some major political paradigm shifts. If AiAccountantBot3000 makes all accountants obsolete tomorrow, what is going to happen? Nothing, except for a lot of unemployment and poor former accountants.

That's their job to figure it out, not yours.

Are you really betting that the person to replied to isn't a knowledge worker? This is HN, it's more likely than not

>If AiAccountantBot3000 makes all accountants obsolete tomorrow,

It won't. This just reflects the diminished view technologists have of work rather than any actual reality. It's a category error as absurd as asking, "what if a debugger makes programmers obsolete".

90% of being an accountant, just like 90% of being any knowledge worker has nothing to do with actual knowledge, but with mundane personal and organizational work. If you're a programmer, were you ever concerned that a smarter programmer replaces you? If you think of reasons to be fired, that's the first one? Look at the 20 most common professions in any country, if it came down to just automating their literal tasks they'd all be gone 30 years ago.

> Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit

I can't imagine how you believe this when everything says otherwise. Climate change, the oligarchs hoarding all the wealth, the collapsed middle class, widespread hunger and homelessness, the many wars, and genocides. Generally, everything points to the fact that people will not respond to changes in technology for the benefit of everybody.

I think their post was libertarian satire.

Has there ever been a time where economic efficiency reduced the GDP instead of growing it?

Same with AI.

GDP has nothing to do with the quality of life of your citizens. This is the same logic as people who say the market is up so the economy is good while there is rampart homelessness and no middle class. You will never see the problem while you look at people as GDP.

It literally does. Billionaires don't exist without everyone else also becoming wealthier.

It's why China was able to eliminate extreme poverty while creating hundreds of billionaires.

You may think this inequality is unfair, but economics isn't concerned about inequality. Why? Because inequality doesn't matter. What only matters is poverty, and the elimination of it.

And I always find it hilarious that socialists can never say "I want to eliminate poverty"

I would love to eliminate poverty and traditional economist are wrong, income inequality matters. Norway has a lower GDP than US but a significantly higher quality of life cand longer life expectancy. Income distribution is much better in Norway than it is in the US with the top 10% only holding 25% of the wealth in Norway compared to 70% in the US with the top 1% having 30% of that. You mention China but the top 10% of earners in China have 40% of the income which is still less than the 70% in the US.

Doesn’t matter. A billionaire’s existence doesn’t take away from the poor, since wealth isn’t zero-sum.

Focus on the poor, not the rich.

The two are intertwined. You cannot give to the poor without the rich paying what they owe.

I wish you interesting time!

No, don't do that. We all live in the same time. Please take it back before the Gods notice.

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