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The whole population will benefit from AI and not just people who already make way too much money like it happened with pretty much every other technological innovation right?
Humanity benefited from the invention of the printing press. Humanity benefited from the industrial revolution. Humanity benefited from the invention of computers. Humanity will benefit from AI too, greatly so. This is not what is up for debate. Some people made fortunes from it, but does that matter when you compare it to how much good it brought about?
Did it really benefit that much from it though? We can now be infinitely more productive while working, but are still required to work the same work week and have the same purchasing power, if not less in some countries. And the products made with that work cost pretty much the same, even though it costs much less to produce them.
Very rarely a technological innovation actually ended up improving common people’s quality of life, and the ones that did were due to being improving of the end product in nature.
AI doesn’t improve the end product (rather, currently it worsens it), it just improves the efficiency. And like with the Industrial Revolution, people will get paid the same, will have to work the same amount of time, and their end products will cost the same. CEOs will benefit from it and no one else, if history says anything.
I’ll gladly accept a huge AI implementation if it means cutting even 20% of current working hours while keeping the same salary, but I’m really skeptical on that.
That’s not what I’m debating. What about healthcare? What about acces to education? What about infant death rates? What about travel? What about not having to worry about starvation? Clean water directly into your home? Hot water too? Electricity? Have these not improved the quality of life greatly? You must not know history if you think your average peasant was living a better life preindustrialisation.
I’m not sure what work you’re doing at the moment but you seem pretty burned out by it. Maybe it’s time for a change
That’s not what I’m debating either. All of those are due to technological advancements that improved the end product. AI doesn’t improve the end product, just the process.
When the end product improves, the one who benefits from it is the customer, and the manufacturer if they manage to sell it at a higher price than before.
But when the process improves and the end product is the same, it just takes less money/time to make it. So the only way common people would benefit from it is if manufacturers decided out of goodwill to either raise salaries, reduce working hours, or decrease the price of the end product. And that barely ever happened in history.
But when the process improves and the end product is the same, it just takes less money/time to make it. So the only way common people would benefit from it is if manufacturers decided out of goodwill
The industrial revolution improved the process. Before that, for example, knives were traditionally made by a skilled blacksmith and were very expensive. After, they were made cheaply and much better and made their way in every home. Just like pots and pans. And clothing and carpets and chairs and literally all the goods which required a skilled crafstmith and were expensive and scarce became massed produced and became cheap.
Same with computers: things that were hard to make because they required skilled workforce became easy to do and cheap with automation.
It will be the same with AI: another round of things that are expensive because they require skilled labour will become cheap and available to everyone. This time it will be even more complex things than before, things that require a bit of ingenuity like medical diagnosis, maybe driving, maybe teaching, maybe writing (but more probably editing rather than writing). Think cheap basic healthcare for everyone. Think free, good, reliable public transport for everyone. Think reliable press. I don’t know what form it will take and where we’ll find applications for it.
It’s not clear what capabilities this technology has at the moment and what is its future. However, it promises a wonderful thing: the ability to scale up for free things that couldn’t be scaled because they could only be done by people and people are in short supply.
As for the work hours comparison between now and the medieval times, that comparison is not correct. It compares working hours, but doesn’t add in the effort required for just living. When work is done, you have to make food from scratch always because you can’t store it for too long, gather firewood, clean the firepit, bring water from somewhere, make tools, make clothing, wash and clean the house, constantly repair a host of poorly built things that require attention, a million things to do always. We really can use our down time for leisure nowadays.
I don’t know, I don’t think any of those things could be reliably entrusted to an AI.
Medical diagnosis is very serious stuff and should not be taken lightly, same for driving.
Press will also suffer the biases of whoever built the model so it’s not really going to be different from today. Editing maybe, but I don’t think either is going to lower the price of publications by that much.
Teaching as it is done today could very easily be replaced, but that’s because it’s a flawed system at its core and should be reworked from the ground.
I’m very skeptical about it but maybe you’ll end up being right, who knows. It’s all moving so fast and predictions are hard to make.
Humanity benefited from the invention of the printing press. Humanity benefited from the industrial revolution. Humanity benefited from the invention of computers. Humanity will benefit from AI too, greatly so. This is not what is up for debate. Some people made fortunes from it, but does that matter when you compare it to how much good it brought about?
Did it really benefit that much from it though? We can now be infinitely more productive while working, but are still required to work the same work week and have the same purchasing power, if not less in some countries. And the products made with that work cost pretty much the same, even though it costs much less to produce them.
Very rarely a technological innovation actually ended up improving common people’s quality of life, and the ones that did were due to being improving of the end product in nature.
AI doesn’t improve the end product (rather, currently it worsens it), it just improves the efficiency. And like with the Industrial Revolution, people will get paid the same, will have to work the same amount of time, and their end products will cost the same. CEOs will benefit from it and no one else, if history says anything.
You probably don’t know history.
Just from a quick Google search. Skip to the end if you want raw hour comparison.
I’ll gladly accept a huge AI implementation if it means cutting even 20% of current working hours while keeping the same salary, but I’m really skeptical on that.
That’s not what I’m debating. What about healthcare? What about acces to education? What about infant death rates? What about travel? What about not having to worry about starvation? Clean water directly into your home? Hot water too? Electricity? Have these not improved the quality of life greatly? You must not know history if you think your average peasant was living a better life preindustrialisation.
I’m not sure what work you’re doing at the moment but you seem pretty burned out by it. Maybe it’s time for a change
That’s not what I’m debating either. All of those are due to technological advancements that improved the end product. AI doesn’t improve the end product, just the process.
When the end product improves, the one who benefits from it is the customer, and the manufacturer if they manage to sell it at a higher price than before.
But when the process improves and the end product is the same, it just takes less money/time to make it. So the only way common people would benefit from it is if manufacturers decided out of goodwill to either raise salaries, reduce working hours, or decrease the price of the end product. And that barely ever happened in history.
The industrial revolution improved the process. Before that, for example, knives were traditionally made by a skilled blacksmith and were very expensive. After, they were made cheaply and much better and made their way in every home. Just like pots and pans. And clothing and carpets and chairs and literally all the goods which required a skilled crafstmith and were expensive and scarce became massed produced and became cheap.
Same with computers: things that were hard to make because they required skilled workforce became easy to do and cheap with automation.
It will be the same with AI: another round of things that are expensive because they require skilled labour will become cheap and available to everyone. This time it will be even more complex things than before, things that require a bit of ingenuity like medical diagnosis, maybe driving, maybe teaching, maybe writing (but more probably editing rather than writing). Think cheap basic healthcare for everyone. Think free, good, reliable public transport for everyone. Think reliable press. I don’t know what form it will take and where we’ll find applications for it.
It’s not clear what capabilities this technology has at the moment and what is its future. However, it promises a wonderful thing: the ability to scale up for free things that couldn’t be scaled because they could only be done by people and people are in short supply.
As for the work hours comparison between now and the medieval times, that comparison is not correct. It compares working hours, but doesn’t add in the effort required for just living. When work is done, you have to make food from scratch always because you can’t store it for too long, gather firewood, clean the firepit, bring water from somewhere, make tools, make clothing, wash and clean the house, constantly repair a host of poorly built things that require attention, a million things to do always. We really can use our down time for leisure nowadays.
I don’t know, I don’t think any of those things could be reliably entrusted to an AI.
Medical diagnosis is very serious stuff and should not be taken lightly, same for driving.
Press will also suffer the biases of whoever built the model so it’s not really going to be different from today. Editing maybe, but I don’t think either is going to lower the price of publications by that much.
Teaching as it is done today could very easily be replaced, but that’s because it’s a flawed system at its core and should be reworked from the ground.
I’m very skeptical about it but maybe you’ll end up being right, who knows. It’s all moving so fast and predictions are hard to make.