I'd like to make the distinction between text, indeed, word/command based interfaces and "terminal".
It so happens that right now one is synonymous with the other but there's no instrinsic requirement.
There's probably something to be said for the inherent constraints imposed by the terminal protocol, but, again, we can build the same things without that.
It is a “joke” insofar as it’s an asinine undertaking.
It’s not a “joke” in the sense of being lighthearted or unserious: there was a press conference at the White House. Official US maps have been updated. Google Maps has been updated.
> Techies are angsty because they are the small minority who will be disrupted. But let's not pretend most of the economy is even amenable to this technology.
Think of all the jobs that do not involve putting your hands on something that is crucial to the delivery of a service (a keyboard, phone, money, etc does not count). All of those jobs are amenable to this technology. It is probably at least 30% of the economy in a first pass, if not more.
> in the industrial revolution there was a migration from hard physical labor to cushy information work.
The industrial revolution started in the early 1800's. It was a migration from hard physical labor outdoors, around the home and in small workshops to hard physical labor in factories.
Our moral and political development severely lags our technological development. I have very little confidence that it will ever catch up. Looking back over the post-WW2 era, we have seen improvements (civil rights, recognition of past injustices, expansion of medical care in many countries) but also serious systemic regressions (failure to take climate change seriously, retreat to parochial revenge-based politics, failure to adequately fund society's needs, capture of politics and law by elites).
My main concern about AI is not any kind of extinction scenario but just the basic fact that we are not prepared to address the likely externalities that result from it because we're just historically terrible at addressing externalities.
Are average hours worked decreasing because we have more abundance and less need to work, or are they decreasing because the distribution of work is changing?
I find it hard to accept your claim because at the start of the industrial revolution there were far fewer women in the formal labor market than there are today.
Well there were also barely any men in the formal labour market. Most people were peasants working their family farm + sharecropping on estates of the landed gentry. But that doesn't mean they weren't working hard - both sexes worked well over 3000 hours per year, to barely scrape by.
Also, presumably if you have AGI you can have it address a physical problem at a higher level of abstraction. "Design a device to make any water heater installable by a single person in 20 minutes" would result in a complex system that would make a lot of blue collar labor redundant (the last water heater I had installed took 3 guys over an hour to complete).
It would not even necessarily result in a human-like robot - just some device that can move the water heater around and assist with the process of disconnecting the old one and installing the new one.
Setting aside time, is money not downstream from quality of life? Meaning, in a better world one might not need to care as much about money? I believe that time and quality of life are congruent - good quality of life means control over one’s own time.
The Luddite analogy is apt, however its sense is opposite to the way that it’s usually presented.
The Luddites were skilled artisans in the textile industry. They often worked from home, owning spinning and weaving equipment and acting as what we’d call independent contractors today.
The mechanization of the textile industry resulted in work that required less skill and had to be performed in a dangerous factory for suppressed wages that were determined by a cartel of factory owners rather than a robust market of small makers.
Sitting here 200 years on from the Industrial Revolution it seems to be an obvious good. But it sure did not sound like an appealing thing to live through if you weren’t one of the few owners of the means of production.
The pollution and waste of textiles brings into question the obvious good. Yes, we have $5 shirts. But also yes, we "donate" old clothes and those donations end up clotting the beaches of impoverished nations.
Scrub through this report from ABC so your stomach can do backflips on how bad externalities are not tracked in modern prices:
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