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Comment by jasomill | Hacker News Reader

Or not. Significant shifts in the nature of emplyoment are undoubtably disruptive, but there's no particular reason to believe this one will result in mass unemployment any more than previous shifts have done so.

Especially if we're talking about jobs in creative industries that require customers with the means to support and consume their output.

Besides, an overabundance of surplus labor, if properly managed, is as likely to lead to a better world than a worse one. There's no ironclad rule that everyone, or even the majority, need to work to live or live to work to be happy. And many creatives, in particular, would be happy and productive working on personal and noncommercial projects if funding were no longer an issue.

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A surplus of labor, by definition, reduces the value of labor. Most people are labor, so this means their earning potential is reduced, which means their social mobility, ability to take care of themselves, is reduced.

When you consider that this conversation assumes we are talking about the US and not the rest of the world? It is sobering.

The AI bet hinges entirely on the new types of work that arise from it.

> there's no particular reason to believe this one will result in mass unemployment any more than previous shifts have done so.

Of course there is. Permanently replacing labor is quite obviously and quite literally the point of AI. No previous tech shifts are comparable.

> No previous tech shifts are comparable.

That's why the tall bank buildings that dot ~every small town (and plenty of big ones) in the US are full of bankers tending to paper ledgers, and with a secretary in front of every office. We still get milk delivered every day, as well as a block of river ice from last winter every 2 or 3 days (or more often if it's been particularly hot). We dig our ditches by hand, with hand-made shovels and pickaxes. The material for the clothes on our backs was woven on manual looms, from cotton that was harvested by hand, and carded by hand, and spun into thread by hand. We wear them in homes made with iron nails that were cut by hand, from ores that were mined by hand and smelted the only way we know how: With charcoal, in clay furnaces that were made with hands and that are stoked by hand.

Very glib, but you're missing my point.

No, you're missing his.

Technology progresses. You're playing to an end-state of AI that assumes labor disappears entirely because you have yet to see what the new labor system looks like.

Yes, because the "smarter tasks" that can't be automated and that become the new job sources don't exist.

We survived fine as a species when IBM's automatic machines replaced the ledger clerks of yore. That wasn't even such a long time ago.

We'll survive this transition as well.

Are you conveniently forgetting about all the tech shifts from the past that did replace labor permanently? The printing press, steam machine, electricity, electronic computers,... even something banal like an elevator used to need a skilled laborer to operate it and now no longer does.

> No previous tech shifts are comparable.

Oh please, do tell.

You people realize businesses used to have rooms full of humans who clacked away at typewriters right?

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

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