https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/7/18/23794187/telephone-operator-switchboard-automation-att-feigenbaum-gross
How automation wiped out a whole career for young women — and how young women adapted.
Which is wonderful - we got much cheaper telephone calls, and eventually women were able to learn more useful skills and work on more critical work where they're required.
Automation is fantastic.
Stopping wealth accumulation, high barriers of entry and risk for entrepreneurs (e.g. hassle and bureaucracy filing extra taxes, getting separate bank accounts, data privacy protections, high cost of living / properties, high interest rates, etc.) and providing free, widespread access to education are the real problems that need to be solved.
As someone who's started a couple businesses, the separate taxes and bank accounts weren't that bad. The biggest barrier to entry is your first point, which is wealth accumulation. The ultra wealthy have cornered so many markets it's virtually impossible to get a start in most industries.
Sure. Except the wealth and productivity increases will not benefit society but the few wealthy capitalists that own it
We have 3 paths forward:
I'd advocate for the socialist one, it sounds like you might be more in line with Tucker Carlson's thinking here?
Not at all. I support, from your options, the socialist solution.
AI should free people to do other things. It should benefit the people - if AI can automate 50% of all jobs, rather than just throwing all of those people to the street, we should expect to have to work less without a reduction in income. Thats AI benefiting society. Instead, that 50% reduction in labour and costs just fills the pockets of CEOs and shareholders, without any care for people now out of work.
Also - fuck carlson. guy is a cunt
This is a black and white fallacy and a loaded question. There are more options, blends of options, and circumstances that make different options better for some groups. The two first options are also "bullshit" or "dying," which doesn't give the party making a decision a rational choice.
One nice thing about the "alternative liberal capitalist solution" is that it morphs into the "socialist solution" when the excess workers eat the wealthy AI owners. Hopefully they'll realize this and choose the more graceful exit that at least leaves them with some of their wealth.
Everything benefits wealthy capitalists that own everything. The solution is not to keep people in shitty jobs.
I absolutely agree, but it isn't an issue with automation in itself, but rather the political system that doesn't allow to correct that issue.
“We had authors and artists, but AI is so much more efficient they’re unnecessary.”
LLMs are coming for artistic and creative functions first. Is human creativity and artistry unnecessary?
Historically automation was on rote/repetitive tasks. This is a bit different.
Historically automation was on rote/repetitive tasks. This is a bit different.
"Historically" it did, but only because those were easiest to automate, however this LLM stuff is really not any different. It turns out that human creativity is pretty easy to convincingly fake with software. I don't really believe this is the end of human art, but it might be the end of human work-for-hire art.
If the LLMs are capable of filling the economic role that human artists filled, then yes, human creativity becomes "unnecessary." But so what? We do plenty of unnecessary things for fun. We have machines that can transport us around or that can show us images of pretty forests and yet we still go on hikes. We could build machines that shoot baseballs at whatever velocity we want and with extreme accuracy, but we still play baseball.
It used to be that an evening's entertainment required actors on a stage. They mostly got replaced by movie projectors. For a while the movie cinema would have live musicians playing accompaniment to the silent film, but then recorded music replaced those too. In neither case did humanity lose its soul or whatever. The artistry just moved to other niches or continued on as a hobby.
So, racism, misogyny, radical christian nationalism. Got it.
"The company refused to hire Black operators until 1944, immigrants rarely got hired, and some exchanges barred Jewish women too. But for white, gentile, American-born women, especially young and unmarried women (as women often left the labor force after marriage, and married women faced discrimination in hiring), connecting calls at the switchboard was a common way to make a living."