>The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work
you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc.
if you look at the growth industry before that, it was mercantilist overseas trade.
The big productivity gains of the Agricultural Revoution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... started considerably before the Industrial Revolution, though naturally the Industrial Revolution in turn fed back into agricultural productivity, in time.
Yea, the first few percentage points are underrated.
Dropping from 90% of the population being ~farmers to 80% of the population being farmers doubles the amount of time people can spend doing everything else including research, manufacturing, education etc.
In many ways it was equivalent to the drop from 51% being farmers all the way down to 2%. However, it wasn’t nearly as obvious because 90% farmers looks a lot like 80% of the population being farmers and the transition was relatively slow and unevenly distributed.
Seems like this and parent are referring to two different waves of improvement. Pre-IR improvements in plowing and cultivation (still draft and human traction), followed by post-IR mechanization for harvesting and transport?
Farm labor demands wax and wane with the seasons with harvest typically being the most labor intensive; so, it was actually stationary motors that did the most to reduce labor demands. Tractors mostly helped farmers eliminate the need for horses on a farm.
One of the leading economic history theories of why the industrial revolution happened was that it was largely a result of the Black Plague.
The theory is roughly that before the Black Plague, the population was stuck in Malthusian dynamics at the top of the logistic curve - population had expanded to the level that land could support.
The massive deaths allowed the remaining population to only farm the most productive land, leading to a massive surplus. The elite were able to capture that surplus and fund things like art, science, etc. Some of those scientists were able to create technology that led to further efficiency gains, so that technology could make the economy grow faster than population growth could catch up.
There are a ton of things that allowed that surplus to translate into technology and economic growth. But AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.
The first technology wasn't the steam engine, it was eating beef instead of just grain, and having cattle pull plows. We don't think of that as a huge technological revolution, but it was a dramatic efficiency gain at the time. It wasn't a new invention, but there wasn't enough surplus to deploy it widely before that.
Anything can be anything if you stretch definitions far enough. But normally industrialization is seen as distinct and antagonistic to artisanal culture.
There was a very marked change in the growth rate, which is why economic historians focus on that.
Yes, there were multiple further steps that needed to happen, as you note. But the black plague got the population "unstuck" from a local minimum that they could not grow from, to being able to have cattle plow the fields and eat meat that allowed them to have some surplus to capture the further gains.
It's not that the later gains were inevitable, but that they never would have otherwise happened, and the growth rate started with the plague.
It's like saying the current AI boom started recently, there's no way the steam engine was related. It is a clear causal chain, even though many things had to happen in between.
But before the black plague, at least the "western world" was stuck in Malthusian dynamics where there was no growth in technology or income.
The economy went from 0% growth for 100s of years to 3% growth that lasted many hundreds of years.
Yes, at each step keeping the 3% growth needed things to keep going, but the big thing was unleashing the nonzero growth rate, to get unstuck from the local minimum.
I will try to steelman watwut, a lot of people presume compound exponential economic growth is basically inevitable as a law, so you can always go back to some point in time.
However, economic growth was basically flat before the Black Plague, and increases were basically random events that went back to Malthusian dynamics.
Only since the Black Plague has the world enjoyed exponential economic growth.
Most people talk about the industrial revolution, a lot of other comments talk about the british agricultural revolution before that, but economic historians have identified the inflection point at the black plague - that's where compound interest really started to be a driver of growth, it barely existed before that, at least on long time scales.
The Justinian Plague was as bad or worse, but rather than result in flourishing it ushered in the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the so-called Dark Ages. So maybe the Black Plague was an important element, but if so also had to have happened at the confluence of other critical events.
According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.
<quote>
One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications.
</quote>
That's a super interesting question and I agree! I am only saying the modern period of compound economic growth clearly started at the black plague with good explanations as to why.
Why other events did not have the same effects are very interesting questions for economic history.
Doesn't this article contradict your earlier comment? It claims that wages increased (elite were unable to capture the surplus) and as a result, workers were able to move from growing crops to farming animals, with resulting efficiency gains (i.e. they were able to acquire capital rather than pay all their surplus as rent).
It's a long arc, and as sibling comments say, there are many books about it.
The elites being able to capture some of it was what allowed for science and the enlightenment to happen, which eventually led to the technology that inspired the industrial revolution.
The big picture was it was the beginning of compound interest. This was a many step process over hundreds of years.
The events happened, but the mechanisms are subject to debate. Every school of economic thought has strong opinions on this time period. You've actually listed a source that contradicts your original argument (which came from where, out of curiosity?)
Basically, one common version is 'pro-elite' and blames the stagnation prior to this period on 'Malthusian dynamics' (over population beyond the productivity of the land). Another version is 'anti-elite' and blames the stagnation on the capture of all surplus by the landowning elite (who are not motivated to invest it other than the bare necessity to maintain status quo).
While there is considerable room for nuance and disagreement, Malthus is considered largely discredited by modern economics. As the population increased, so did the productivity of the land. Regardless, the fact people lived bare subsistence lives under feudalism does not imply the max population had been reached - they are still paying excess as rent. Peasants paid 1/2 their crop in rent, consumed 1/4 and replanted a 1/4 (crude approximation). This is very similar btw to modern US - there are 100M renters and the median rental household pays 50% of gross income to rent + tax.
Compound interest and capital investments predate the medieval period by thousands of years. There are cuneiform tablets documenting these kinds of financial arrangements.
'AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.' This is highly dubious/contentious.
Societal changes are slow beasts, they may very well take several centuries to develop. Nation-states were a direct consequence of the printing press, yet they didn't arrive until XIX century.
I thought the aftermath of the Black Plague also allowed people to charge a lot more for their labor and services, since most of the laborers, well, died.
I mean all part of the surplus - you weren't struggling to barely survive so could do other things with your time, and some of the people used that surplus to invest in efficiency.
Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It also doesn't destroy food. Right now, we have enough food. After the AI revolution we have more food and more free labour and fundamentally more effective administrators to run a welfare system. I don't want my society to be the first one to try it, but if we can move the average administrator from an ordinary human to something that is a little better at math than Gauss with infinite clones to get into the details ... there is a chance that we can run an effective centrally planned welfare system.
It is really hard to see how the AI revolution would lead to any issues with food shortages. It looks more like previously unthinkable upside than anything else.
Your analysis is greatly under estimating the risk that the capitalists that control the system use it to build cheap, automated weapons to guard their cheap robots and lock everyone of us out, just because they can. They're far more likely to be narcissists and sociopaths than the average population, empathy isn't their strong suit.
> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food.
Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
> But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.
Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about. It may be immensely valuable even if some details are off. That's what made the XVIII's Encyclopedia such a valuable tool for civil society.
By the time you get to the point where those wrong details become relevant, you have gotten a basic understanding of what the overall topic is about, so you're prepared to get a second opinion from a different source - and this time you may know enough to start asking relevant questions, rather than starting from full ignorance.
> Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about.
Perhaps, but we already had that in the form of search-engines and primers and how-to guides and Wikipedia. The actionable questions already had answers.
Adding an obsequious device that dynamically hallucinate half of a conversation with not-necessarily-true dialog is (if not a detriment) only a marginal improvement.
Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong. They don't help anyone to get a "basic understanding". All they "help" with is getting a wrong understanding, that the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
When humans do this, we call them "bullshit artists", and we don't view them favorably. Why should AIs get a pass?
> Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong.
This is no worse than Wikipedia, or the original encyclopedia for that matter. Those contain dubious claims that you'll need to verify on your own too.
LLMs help because they have a gigantic amount of compressed knowledge, and they are able to find relevant information and present it incredibly fast. You wouldn't trust the ten first results of a Google search either, but you wouldn't say that having a search engine is totally useless and in no way an improvement over your local library, would you?
> the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
True, but having to learn how to use a tool properly doesn't make the tool useless, even if it can hurt those who use it carelessly.
> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.
Not yet. Like, not at all and there is a constantly expressed threat we will all become poorer and unemployable because of it. I dont believe it, but AI did not made life better ... and its creators claim it will make life worst for most of us. That is their literal sales pitch.
Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.
Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.
Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
The emphasis there should be on "marketing". The actual state of things is that white-collar work is alive and well, and if anything is being helped by AI.
Interesting there is a possible implication here. If salaries drop from more people doing physical labor instead of white collar work then the automation of physical work may be delayed even longer. It may be cheaper in the short term to pay humans than machines due to an oversupply in physical labor.
> Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
Says the knowledge workers, who have collectively spent the last 50 years talking down to the physical laborers with a smug "should have gone to college!" attitude.
You'll be fine. Automation of any kind is a boon for everyone. We massively over-allocated human talents to office jobs over the past few decades and stopped building anything in the physical world (like houses, infrastructure, etc), this is only the pendulum swinging back to reality. Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay, long before AI was a thing.
How many people do we actually need sitting in meetings about meetings about powerpoint presentations for future meetings....or implementing react components into a dashboard UI in a slightly different way for the 3,000,000th time? Even without AI, this was bound to happen.
In the early 1900s there were literally hundreds of different automobile manufacturers globally. We didn't need that many, just as we don't need 1,000,000 people working on 100 slightly different versions of the same CRUD project management software. Humans will human. We'll find new stuff to do, as we have done since the dawn of humanity.
Funny you make this statement without giving examples of timeframes, what this looked like in real terms for real peoples lives living back then, nothing. Just 'between 1880 and 1950 we found new stuff to do'. It's all selling magic and hopium based on nothing.
Real example: 75% of the global workforce were farmers in 1880, most on a subsistence basis. The people who left the farm for the factories during that time period weren't forced to. They chose to, because working in a factory was better than staying on the farm. Just like a generation of rural Chinese people made the same choice more recently.
In fact, there's nothing stopping you from buying a farm and living like its 1880 today.
You can quite literally go out and start living a subsistence farmer lifestyle tomorrow. The average person in 1880 did not have the tools needed to cultivate a large parcel of land, so you'd approximate their lifestyle quite easily with a tiny parcel of arable rural land which is extremely cheap to acquire in most countries.
It's not magic and hopium, its simply automation and increased productivity via leverage. AI is the assembly line of the digital revolution.
You need 0.5 to 1.5 acres per person for non-mechanized industrial argriculture. Nowhere with land that is truly arable enough for that is going to _sell_ you 1 acre at a time. In the U.S., you buy at least 40 acres at a time. In the U.S. Midwest, that's going to set you back (on average) $379,000. That's before you buy the equipment you need to be able to farm the land in the first place. Unless you industrialize and grow crops to sell to other people, you will not be able to afford the property taxes on the land to be able to keep it, either.
So, no, you cannot just go out and buy an acre and garden.
What? Yes, you absolutely can buy half an acre. You think in 1880 people went on Zillow to buy land?
You're just going to have to do this the 1880 way.
Knock on the door of a land owner and offer to buy/rent half an acre so you can farm. You'll find takers. My extended family literally has this arrangement with many people who farm different crops during different seasons.
Too hard to to do it that way? Welcome to 1880! Most people weren't land owners on the land they farmed back then and didn't have 'Perfectly arable' plots, and this was pre-fertilizer.
Oh and you'll have to use horse and buggy to get around to find land owners (no evil automobiles from those evil factories full of automation!) who will allow you to farm their land, just like 1880. So good luck.
I don't know how many times I need to explain this to tech doomers: nobody forced people out of subsistence farming. They chose to leave it. It was not a utopia.
Why is you're 'real example' 100% hypothetical? Give me real examples. Or at least real information from places like Manchester at the time. Not this hypothetical stuff the implies much ignoring things got worse for generations.
If you read up on the industrial revolution, those people that moved became less healthy, less happy, forced into dorm style housing. Give me real examples of what 'working out' looked like in the past. Because from my research, 'things worked out' meant worse outcomes for quite a long time (like generational timeframe). Give me examples please of what this successful transition in the past looked like for real individuals.
The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.
Fiber buried in the ground in 1996 is still useful. Servers from 1996, not so much outside of the retrocomputing community. The bulk of those trillions of dollars on AI is not going into useful long term infrastructure. It's going into equipment that will only be useful to scrappers after its initial life is over in three to five years as the sorts of places that can handle the heat load of 25 clothes dryers on high stuffed into 3.5 cu ft of space aren't going to run second hand machines. They aren't useful as in-office developer machines unless your office has 1000A of power to dedicate to that one single machine and the air conditioner need to keep the room the server is in from bursting into flames.
> The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing?
Honestly? That's the best case scenario for humanity.
When AI can replace knowledge-based work, capital has no need for humans anymore. That's almost an ELE.
There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.
Just because they weren't paid doesn't mean women were not doing economically valued labour. The washing machine is probably the greatest productivity unlock since the steam engine.
If you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.
There is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
Do you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.
Changing the tax system to tax capital rather than labour would probably get you 90% of the way there without great societal upheaval (capital would fight back though).
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death.
not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
While you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.
> more efficient agriculture meant a population boom
More efficient agriculture meant a more efficient population. In cases where environmentally possible this obviously encourages a population boom but they're not necessarily synonymous.
Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years?
In most developed countries even someone who has been never worked in their life will get enough to live on (although they might get less than someone who has worked all their lives).
This is a false dichotomy, brother. People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less. Most humans aren't so cold hearted that they are ok with others starving. So no, the options aren't just "trade for food" or "force people to give you food".
> People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less.
Voluntarily, yes. If you want to make my list complete, you can add charity as a third option: if people judge that you're worth helping, they can voluntarily choose to help you.
But charity only works if the people doing it have things to give. Which means those things were produced. Somebody produced them. And the people who have them to give, through charity, got them one of the two ways I described. So it all still bottoms out to those two ways. Yes, some people can be helped out with charity. But you can't have an entire society all being helped with charity, because then nobody is producing anything that can be used to help them.
I am shocked you think letting people starve is OK. The word you are looking for is "revolution" or "uprising" - people will fight for the right to live if you deny them food.
If my family isn't eating and society is cool with that I could not care less about a label that such a society gives me.
Again, society can get ahead of things, or let it be decided later. The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1. Society can figure out how to keep option 2 working if society prefers that. If society fails to do so it will deservedly get option 1.
> The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1.
I think you have the options mixed up. Option 1 is voluntary trade. Option 2 is violence.
You appear to be saying that people would prefer voluntary trade, but that they will resort to violence if they see no other option. Which historically I think is largely true.
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.
I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.
I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?
The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.
It is still extremely common today, if you look at the demographics along the Atlantic Coast of the US. The richest zip codes always have poor ones nearby.
By the standards of underdeveloped countries today or historical poverty in general, these "poor" people are nonetheless living in outright opulence: their genuine plight is mostly one of social marginalization, that can't really be solved by purely economic means. That's partly the effect of new technology (developed by capitalism) but partly redistribution in action.
Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.
It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.
This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
UBI has been tried experimentally around the world many places including the US and did not have that effect "the money people had received was not squandered on frivolous products such as drugs and luxury goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
Which experiments were successful depends on what your desired outcomes were, but none were as bad a you suggest, I would say many succeeded.
I do not know how COVID support worked in the US, but one of the things you refer to seems to be loans to businesses, which is very different from UBI. Were people given a fixed and guaranteed income stream not linked to earnings during COVID?
I wouldn't use the COVID economy to understand anything except "What happens to an economy during a pandemic?" People had more money, but there was a lot less to spend on for a while. Not to mention the psychological effects of lockdowns, restrictions, or quarantining.
My impression is that China has a pretty high standard of living. They have been extremely successful in reducing poverty over the last few decades. You should see how shiny even some of the third tier cities are.
The fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation.
So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
I don’t think that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and that statement is doing a lot of load-bearing in your argument. You’re going to need to back it up somehow.
> it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power
> taking power away from the capitalist class
An obvious and apparently irresolvable contradiction.
Capitalist power is inherently anarchic and isn't power at all. It's simply order emerging from the anarchy of the market. But the ability to take that power away from them, no matter how you measure it, itself falls into the category of "too much power" with wide margin. And with this amount of power there will be no change of hands that hold it.
You fundamentally misunderstand UBI. it does not stop anyone working, and where it has been tried people continue working because they want more than a minimal income. its not a universal high income, its a universal BASIC inome.
No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
The post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
I chose the denominator of a society of 70 million to match the data link I posted.
It’s possible the unemployment rate among you adults is historically high, but I haven’t seen data on that. I doubt it, based on the overall unemployment rate.
edit: looked up the current data. Age 16-24 unemployment excluding trainees and students is 12.8% which is about double the current overall unemployment rate. Haven't found historical data on this cohort yet. We might expect youngsters to be less employed than experienced people, but double does seem high on the face of it.
I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis.
Youth unemployment sucks for the people involved and the people around them. Every one of them has my sympathy. We are not in a period of unusually high youth unemployment, according to the UK government data.
> Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years.
It is currently there. The economy doesn't seem to be getting friendlier to the youth though. That median also seems pretty heavily skewed by a seven-year jump in youth unemployment after 2008, which seems like a bad omen.
>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death
false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.
doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Someone who attempted to support themselves by hand knitting sweaters almost certainly WOULD be impoverished. So doesn't that support what you are calling "doomers"?
I said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives".
I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product.
I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.
Comparative advantage falls flat on its face in the circumstances being described, though. It’s based on an assumption of opportunity cost that no longer holds true.
the principle of comparative advantage does not ever fall flat on it's face. An entire country can be worse at manufacturing/growing everything compared to the US, but they can still manufacture and grow things, and engage in trade.
an individual can be inferior to other individuals at every single job skill, but can still get a job and live a full life with family.
you don't know what you are talking about, at all.
Yes, that is a description of comparative advantage. You must ask yourself this, though: why can a country be worse at manufacturing/growing yet still trade with the US? The answer is, of course, opportunity cost, as I said above. And, as above, then you must ask yourself what would happen to comparative advantage if there were no opportunity cost?
That is indeed an absurd example, as any number of failed Etsy stores - and failed businesses in general - confirms.
Trad econ makes no distinction between creative profit, which produces new jobs and new opportunities, and extractive profit, which destroys jobs and opportunities while trashing the planet's carrying capacity.
Both can make stonks go up, but one has a predictably limited life before it ends in catastrophe.
Unfortunately that life is defined in centuries, not years. In the meantime everyone gets used to normalcy bias, the extractive types own the main social communication systems, and when their backs are against the wall they will simply lie about what's really happening.
The collapse is always a huge surprise to most of the population when it finally happens.
And in the lead up to that it gets harder and harder to start a viable small business, because the resources needed to make it work keep going up, and the resources that are actually available to most people keep going down.
Etsy is a successful business, and the people who engage with it come back and reengage, and separately read up on Schumpeterian creative destruction
when you learn physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) you idealize concepts like "frictionless" because it teaches you valid concepts that you can carry forward, and you don't soil your diapers at every step of learning. Do the same with economics if you want to actually learn it, don't think "what's wrong with this", think "what's right with it, what can I learn from it?" Look at history, what economics explains is what happened.
you can't learn classical mechanics from a few paragraphs, but that's how long an HN comment needs to be. I will promise you this, if you reject what I wrote and remember most of the doomer dreck here, you will not learn economics at all.
The problem with Newtonian mechanics, especially idealized frictionless versions, is that it gives you a wrong impression of how the world works. Much better to understand and accept friction, because it leaves you with an accurate understanding, instead of an easy-to-learn version supported by fundamentally flawed concepts.
Within physics, there are much, much, much better models than Newtonian mechanics for conceptualizing economics.
they never ever teach physics the way you describe, they teach it the way I describe, and they never stop at the frictionless assumption. I am intellectually advantaged over you in every possible way, yet you do have a comparative advantage; unfortunately it's at spewing tendentious argumentative not-even-interesting nonsense.
Man. You live in a world of fantasy driven by a pathetically shallow knowledge of some mainstream economic cliches that people like you love to repeat as if you really even knew the mathematical models, much less their limitations.
That's not how things have been happening for quite some time. Productivity gains have been absorbed almost by the capital for the last 40 years. Wages have mostly estagnated and whole industries and their jobs disappeared without a direct replacement for the ones who lost their jobs now for more than 20, 30 years. Auto industry automation jobs? Gone, and the people who had those jobs? Mostly in worst jobs if lucky.
Why the fuck do you think Detroit is a hell hole? Why the whole rustbelt is a hellhole of poverty and opioid addiction?
And don't you dare think you're immune just because you are a little above the masses. A few millions, even a few tens of millions in the stock market and on a cardboard/gypsum McMansion could vaporize in a trading afternoon if we end up in a 29s style crash.
It won't be one large one, it will be thousands of little ones.
Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy).
The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement.
What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.
Note that several of your historical examples didn’t involve humans, and presumably most future occurrences of better work enablers won’t involve humans either. The contention isn’t whether there will be an increase in diversity and amount of work done, it’s whether any of it will be done by us. Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.
Communism, or more accurately, mechanised collective farming practices in the early 1900s in Russia resulted in revolutions and world wars. When tens of millions of inefficient farmers were replaced by tractors needing only a fraction of the labour force the excess population was disposed of.
Sorry, bad phrasing!
They were put to work in new roles enabled by technological advancements:
wielding mass manufactured rifles and operating artillery.
This has played out over and over throughout history whenever a large fraction of the population suddenly becomes surplus to requirements.
They never get to enjoy utopia. They are expended in warfare or low value forced labour until the labour pool once again matches the requirements.
You don't even need to look at the Soviets. Life for the average person in Britain became worse between 1760 until about 1920. That meant about 3 generations of people were lost.
I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...
If anything, it will be the trades. We're still a solid time away from being able to replicating what muscles and skin do - and fundamentally, there will always be a need for someone to run cable, terminate wiring and unclog a sewer pipe. At the same time, the trades are desperate for staff after the "academization" push of the last decades.
That's true for a while. But shelf restocking and order picking will probably start to go robotic within a few years. That's a manipulation problem within reach. All those mass produced humanoid robots have to do something, and that's something they can do.
Having to do manual labor ruined three image of manual labor. Fathers and mothers with broken bodies. Backs, knees, just physically wrecked after decades of laying tile and into crawlspaces and sweating all day out in the heat or freezing in winter. There's something to be said for an honest days work, but let's not over romanticize it.
>The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work
you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc.
if you look at the growth industry before that, it was mercantilist overseas trade.
The big productivity gains of the Agricultural Revoution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... started considerably before the Industrial Revolution, though naturally the Industrial Revolution in turn fed back into agricultural productivity, in time.
Yea, the first few percentage points are underrated.
Dropping from 90% of the population being ~farmers to 80% of the population being farmers doubles the amount of time people can spend doing everything else including research, manufacturing, education etc.
In many ways it was equivalent to the drop from 51% being farmers all the way down to 2%. However, it wasn’t nearly as obvious because 90% farmers looks a lot like 80% of the population being farmers and the transition was relatively slow and unevenly distributed.
From 1000 to 1300 the population of Europe doubled, mostly from improvements in agriculture.
The first London coffeehouse opened in the 1650s and the industrial revolution started in ~1760. It just took a while for the habit to catch on.
The mechanization of the ag industry took place 100 years after the industrial revolution. Try again.
The Cotton gin was created in the 1700s.
Maybe you mean this one, Green Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Other way round
> mechanization of the ag industry
... was not what produced the British Agricultural Revolution.
Seems like this and parent are referring to two different waves of improvement. Pre-IR improvements in plowing and cultivation (still draft and human traction), followed by post-IR mechanization for harvesting and transport?
Farm labor demands wax and wane with the seasons with harvest typically being the most labor intensive; so, it was actually stationary motors that did the most to reduce labor demands. Tractors mostly helped farmers eliminate the need for horses on a farm.
One of the leading economic history theories of why the industrial revolution happened was that it was largely a result of the Black Plague.
The theory is roughly that before the Black Plague, the population was stuck in Malthusian dynamics at the top of the logistic curve - population had expanded to the level that land could support.
The massive deaths allowed the remaining population to only farm the most productive land, leading to a massive surplus. The elite were able to capture that surplus and fund things like art, science, etc. Some of those scientists were able to create technology that led to further efficiency gains, so that technology could make the economy grow faster than population growth could catch up.
There are a ton of things that allowed that surplus to translate into technology and economic growth. But AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.
Black Plague ended in 14th century while industrial revolution started in the 18th. There is no connection.
The growth started in the 14th. It was awhile before the industry happened, but the change in growth rate is strongly connected with the Black Plague.
One of the many, many descriptions of this is here (many because this is the mainstream theory): https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/black-death-and-industrialisa...
The first technology wasn't the steam engine, it was eating beef instead of just grain, and having cattle pull plows. We don't think of that as a huge technological revolution, but it was a dramatic efficiency gain at the time. It wasn't a new invention, but there wasn't enough surplus to deploy it widely before that.
Anything can be anything if you stretch definitions far enough. But normally industrialization is seen as distinct and antagonistic to artisanal culture.
There was a very marked change in the growth rate, which is why economic historians focus on that.
Yes, there were multiple further steps that needed to happen, as you note. But the black plague got the population "unstuck" from a local minimum that they could not grow from, to being able to have cattle plow the fields and eat meat that allowed them to have some surplus to capture the further gains.
It's not that the later gains were inevitable, but that they never would have otherwise happened, and the growth rate started with the plague.
It's like saying the current AI boom started recently, there's no way the steam engine was related. It is a clear causal chain, even though many things had to happen in between.
But before the black plague, at least the "western world" was stuck in Malthusian dynamics where there was no growth in technology or income.
If "multiple steps" take 400 years, then the cause is something else.
The economy went from 0% growth for 100s of years to 3% growth that lasted many hundreds of years.
Yes, at each step keeping the 3% growth needed things to keep going, but the big thing was unleashing the nonzero growth rate, to get unstuck from the local minimum.
Several other places have had non-zero growth in history, yet only one had an industrial revolution.
And that is super interesting!
This is history not science so it is super incomplete.
We definitely know that the trajectory of the industrial revolution was kicked off at the plague.
We don't fully understand why there major growth periods at other times that quickly fizzled out, and what is different.
What separates those periods from the plague to the industrial revolution is a super interesting question for economic theory.
Yet, the causal chain is clear that the plague kicked off a period where investment and compound interest began to pay off, that continues to today.
What makes that a rule? Can causal chains not last more than X amount of time? What is the cutoff?
I will try to steelman watwut, a lot of people presume compound exponential economic growth is basically inevitable as a law, so you can always go back to some point in time.
However, economic growth was basically flat before the Black Plague, and increases were basically random events that went back to Malthusian dynamics.
Only since the Black Plague has the world enjoyed exponential economic growth.
Most people talk about the industrial revolution, a lot of other comments talk about the british agricultural revolution before that, but economic historians have identified the inflection point at the black plague - that's where compound interest really started to be a driver of growth, it barely existed before that, at least on long time scales.
The Justinian Plague was as bad or worse, but rather than result in flourishing it ushered in the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the so-called Dark Ages. So maybe the Black Plague was an important element, but if so also had to have happened at the confluence of other critical events.
According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.
<quote> One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications. </quote>
That's a super interesting question and I agree! I am only saying the modern period of compound economic growth clearly started at the black plague with good explanations as to why.
Why other events did not have the same effects are very interesting questions for economic history.
A small increase in exponential growth will have a huge effect after 400 years
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Doesn't this article contradict your earlier comment? It claims that wages increased (elite were unable to capture the surplus) and as a result, workers were able to move from growing crops to farming animals, with resulting efficiency gains (i.e. they were able to acquire capital rather than pay all their surplus as rent).
It's a long arc, and as sibling comments say, there are many books about it.
The elites being able to capture some of it was what allowed for science and the enlightenment to happen, which eventually led to the technology that inspired the industrial revolution.
The big picture was it was the beginning of compound interest. This was a many step process over hundreds of years.
The events happened, but the mechanisms are subject to debate. Every school of economic thought has strong opinions on this time period. You've actually listed a source that contradicts your original argument (which came from where, out of curiosity?)
Basically, one common version is 'pro-elite' and blames the stagnation prior to this period on 'Malthusian dynamics' (over population beyond the productivity of the land). Another version is 'anti-elite' and blames the stagnation on the capture of all surplus by the landowning elite (who are not motivated to invest it other than the bare necessity to maintain status quo).
While there is considerable room for nuance and disagreement, Malthus is considered largely discredited by modern economics. As the population increased, so did the productivity of the land. Regardless, the fact people lived bare subsistence lives under feudalism does not imply the max population had been reached - they are still paying excess as rent. Peasants paid 1/2 their crop in rent, consumed 1/4 and replanted a 1/4 (crude approximation). This is very similar btw to modern US - there are 100M renters and the median rental household pays 50% of gross income to rent + tax.
Compound interest and capital investments predate the medieval period by thousands of years. There are cuneiform tablets documenting these kinds of financial arrangements.
'AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.' This is highly dubious/contentious.
You might regard the Renaissance as the prelude to the industrial revolution.
Lots of serious historians disagree. There are whole books on the topic. Here's just one paper as an example
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demograph...
Societal changes are slow beasts, they may very well take several centuries to develop. Nation-states were a direct consequence of the printing press, yet they didn't arrive until XIX century.
I thought the aftermath of the Black Plague also allowed people to charge a lot more for their labor and services, since most of the laborers, well, died.
I mean all part of the surplus - you weren't struggling to barely survive so could do other things with your time, and some of the people used that surplus to invest in efficiency.
The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death.
Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It also doesn't destroy food. Right now, we have enough food. After the AI revolution we have more food and more free labour and fundamentally more effective administrators to run a welfare system. I don't want my society to be the first one to try it, but if we can move the average administrator from an ordinary human to something that is a little better at math than Gauss with infinite clones to get into the details ... there is a chance that we can run an effective centrally planned welfare system.
It is really hard to see how the AI revolution would lead to any issues with food shortages. It looks more like previously unthinkable upside than anything else.
Datacenters are competing with agriculture for both land and water.
Your analysis is greatly under estimating the risk that the capitalists that control the system use it to build cheap, automated weapons to guard their cheap robots and lock everyone of us out, just because they can. They're far more likely to be narcissists and sociopaths than the average population, empathy isn't their strong suit.
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> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food.
Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.
Such as? AI can't do my laundry, wash my dishes, clean my house, do my food shopping for me. AI can't care for me if I'm sick.
> The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions
But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.
How is this a benefit?
> But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.
Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about. It may be immensely valuable even if some details are off. That's what made the XVIII's Encyclopedia such a valuable tool for civil society.
By the time you get to the point where those wrong details become relevant, you have gotten a basic understanding of what the overall topic is about, so you're prepared to get a second opinion from a different source - and this time you may know enough to start asking relevant questions, rather than starting from full ignorance.
> Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about.
Perhaps, but we already had that in the form of search-engines and primers and how-to guides and Wikipedia. The actionable questions already had answers.
Adding an obsequious device that dynamically hallucinate half of a conversation with not-necessarily-true dialog is (if not a detriment) only a marginal improvement.
> a starting point overview
Which an unreliable answer is not.
> even if some details are off
Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong. They don't help anyone to get a "basic understanding". All they "help" with is getting a wrong understanding, that the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
When humans do this, we call them "bullshit artists", and we don't view them favorably. Why should AIs get a pass?
> Which an unreliable answer is not.
> Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong.
This is no worse than Wikipedia, or the original encyclopedia for that matter. Those contain dubious claims that you'll need to verify on your own too.
LLMs help because they have a gigantic amount of compressed knowledge, and they are able to find relevant information and present it incredibly fast. You wouldn't trust the ten first results of a Google search either, but you wouldn't say that having a search engine is totally useless and in no way an improvement over your local library, would you?
> the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
True, but having to learn how to use a tool properly doesn't make the tool useless, even if it can hurt those who use it carelessly.
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> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.
Not yet. Like, not at all and there is a constantly expressed threat we will all become poorer and unemployable because of it. I dont believe it, but AI did not made life better ... and its creators claim it will make life worst for most of us. That is their literal sales pitch.
Food isn't "incredibly cheap" to a lot of people
The worry with AI is not "productivity is bad." It's whether the displaced labor has anywhere comparable to go
Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.
Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.
Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
The emphasis there should be on "marketing". The actual state of things is that white-collar work is alive and well, and if anything is being helped by AI.
Helped or overworked?
Interesting there is a possible implication here. If salaries drop from more people doing physical labor instead of white collar work then the automation of physical work may be delayed even longer. It may be cheaper in the short term to pay humans than machines due to an oversupply in physical labor.
Automation is a boon when it automates away tedium, but also a curse for the people that subsist by enduring that tedium.
> Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
Says the knowledge workers, who have collectively spent the last 50 years talking down to the physical laborers with a smug "should have gone to college!" attitude.
You'll be fine. Automation of any kind is a boon for everyone. We massively over-allocated human talents to office jobs over the past few decades and stopped building anything in the physical world (like houses, infrastructure, etc), this is only the pendulum swinging back to reality. Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay, long before AI was a thing.
How many people do we actually need sitting in meetings about meetings about powerpoint presentations for future meetings....or implementing react components into a dashboard UI in a slightly different way for the 3,000,000th time? Even without AI, this was bound to happen.
In the early 1900s there were literally hundreds of different automobile manufacturers globally. We didn't need that many, just as we don't need 1,000,000 people working on 100 slightly different versions of the same CRUD project management software. Humans will human. We'll find new stuff to do, as we have done since the dawn of humanity.
"Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay"
I wouldn't take his word too seriously. According to him, corporate lawyers, administrative assistants and compliance officers shouldn't exist.
Uhhh...what jobs do you think AI is going to be tasked with automating?
The most valuable non-foundation-model AI companies are...legal apps. This means he was right, not wrong.
Funny you make this statement without giving examples of timeframes, what this looked like in real terms for real peoples lives living back then, nothing. Just 'between 1880 and 1950 we found new stuff to do'. It's all selling magic and hopium based on nothing.
Real example: 75% of the global workforce were farmers in 1880, most on a subsistence basis. The people who left the farm for the factories during that time period weren't forced to. They chose to, because working in a factory was better than staying on the farm. Just like a generation of rural Chinese people made the same choice more recently.
In fact, there's nothing stopping you from buying a farm and living like its 1880 today.
You can quite literally go out and start living a subsistence farmer lifestyle tomorrow. The average person in 1880 did not have the tools needed to cultivate a large parcel of land, so you'd approximate their lifestyle quite easily with a tiny parcel of arable rural land which is extremely cheap to acquire in most countries.
It's not magic and hopium, its simply automation and increased productivity via leverage. AI is the assembly line of the digital revolution.
You need 0.5 to 1.5 acres per person for non-mechanized industrial argriculture. Nowhere with land that is truly arable enough for that is going to _sell_ you 1 acre at a time. In the U.S., you buy at least 40 acres at a time. In the U.S. Midwest, that's going to set you back (on average) $379,000. That's before you buy the equipment you need to be able to farm the land in the first place. Unless you industrialize and grow crops to sell to other people, you will not be able to afford the property taxes on the land to be able to keep it, either.
So, no, you cannot just go out and buy an acre and garden.
What? Yes, you absolutely can buy half an acre. You think in 1880 people went on Zillow to buy land?
You're just going to have to do this the 1880 way.
Knock on the door of a land owner and offer to buy/rent half an acre so you can farm. You'll find takers. My extended family literally has this arrangement with many people who farm different crops during different seasons.
Too hard to to do it that way? Welcome to 1880! Most people weren't land owners on the land they farmed back then and didn't have 'Perfectly arable' plots, and this was pre-fertilizer.
Oh and you'll have to use horse and buggy to get around to find land owners (no evil automobiles from those evil factories full of automation!) who will allow you to farm their land, just like 1880. So good luck.
I don't know how many times I need to explain this to tech doomers: nobody forced people out of subsistence farming. They chose to leave it. It was not a utopia.
Why is you're 'real example' 100% hypothetical? Give me real examples. Or at least real information from places like Manchester at the time. Not this hypothetical stuff the implies much ignoring things got worse for generations.
If you read up on the industrial revolution, those people that moved became less healthy, less happy, forced into dorm style housing. Give me real examples of what 'working out' looked like in the past. Because from my research, 'things worked out' meant worse outcomes for quite a long time (like generational timeframe). Give me examples please of what this successful transition in the past looked like for real individuals.
Again, it's magic and hopium.
The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.
I don't see what the big worry is unless you're heavily invested. Plenty of investments go bust.
Did you see the news about the shennanigans of the SpaceXaiXsocialmediasite IPO and the consequences of that?
Because of the huge amounts involved.
As people have pointed out - this also happened during the DotCom bust. Eventually all that infra got used.
Fiber buried in the ground in 1996 is still useful. Servers from 1996, not so much outside of the retrocomputing community. The bulk of those trillions of dollars on AI is not going into useful long term infrastructure. It's going into equipment that will only be useful to scrappers after its initial life is over in three to five years as the sorts of places that can handle the heat load of 25 clothes dryers on high stuffed into 3.5 cu ft of space aren't going to run second hand machines. They aren't useful as in-office developer machines unless your office has 1000A of power to dedicate to that one single machine and the air conditioner need to keep the room the server is in from bursting into flames.
The data centers are the reusable infra. Not the servers.
And I suspect those GPUs don't even have video outputs so cannot be used as video cards.
Fun fact!
During the DotCom crash, about $5 trillion in market cap disappeared.
NVidia's market cap is currently around $5 trillion.
Sounds like that other great destroyer of lives and capital - war.
> The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing?
Honestly? That's the best case scenario for humanity.
When AI can replace knowledge-based work, capital has no need for humans anymore. That's almost an ELE.
There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.
Just because they weren't paid doesn't mean women were not doing economically valued labour. The washing machine is probably the greatest productivity unlock since the steam engine.
The Washing Machine Project (https://www.thewashingmachineproject.org/) is trying to provide this benefit to people without ready access to mains electricity, by providing hand-cranked, portable washing machines. Hopefully it's more of a success than OLPC was: https://bathsdr.org/resources/the-washing-machine-project-in... shows mixed results.
There's also the worry whether productivity is real.
If you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.
There is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
Do you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.
Changing the tax system to tax capital rather than labour would probably get you 90% of the way there without great societal upheaval (capital would fight back though).
Obligatory land value tax mention
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death.
not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
While you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom.
But also a precipitous drop in life expectancy. Life in industrial towns in 1800s England was grim. Make of that what you will.
Pollution.
In the towns yes. A wealthy city man could expect to live fewer years than a labourer in the countryside.
Surely a factor, but hardly the sole explanation; malnutrition rose, that should give you some pause.
Pollution, malnutrition, maiming by industrial or mining equipment (huge percentage at the start).
> more efficient agriculture meant a population boom
More efficient agriculture meant a more efficient population. In cases where environmentally possible this obviously encourages a population boom but they're not necessarily synonymous.
No, people must be given food or they starve to death. Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal.
> Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal.
No, it's not, because food requires work to produce. Someone has to do that work.
If you yourself are not one of the people who works to produce the food that we all need, you have only two ways of getting it:
(1) Trade something else of value for it;
(2) Force the people who do produce it to give it to you.
Option #1 is a free market. Option #2 is tyranny. There are no other choices.
Which do you pick?
Is it tyranny that my 84 year old parents get free food (via the state pension)?
Did they earn the pension by working for many years?
Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years?
In most developed countries even someone who has been never worked in their life will get enough to live on (although they might get less than someone who has worked all their lives).
Not really. Their generation never paid enough to cover what they receive now.
This is a false dichotomy, brother. People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less. Most humans aren't so cold hearted that they are ok with others starving. So no, the options aren't just "trade for food" or "force people to give you food".
> People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less.
Voluntarily, yes. If you want to make my list complete, you can add charity as a third option: if people judge that you're worth helping, they can voluntarily choose to help you.
But charity only works if the people doing it have things to give. Which means those things were produced. Somebody produced them. And the people who have them to give, through charity, got them one of the two ways I described. So it all still bottoms out to those two ways. Yes, some people can be helped out with charity. But you can't have an entire society all being helped with charity, because then nobody is producing anything that can be used to help them.
If you don't feed people, they will pick for you.
The real question is do we figure it out with intention now, or let it be randomly figured out by people with nothing to lose?
> If you don't feed people, they will pick for you.
Do you mean they will pick option 2? "Give me food or I'll mess you up?" We have a name for that kind of behavior, and it's not a pretty one.
Or might there be some possibility that they will realize that option 1 is there and try it?
I am shocked you think letting people starve is OK. The word you are looking for is "revolution" or "uprising" - people will fight for the right to live if you deny them food.
> I am shocked you think letting people starve is OK.
I never said any such thing.
> The word you are looking for is "revolution" or "uprising" - people will fight for the right to live if you deny them food.
In other words, you're saying people will choose option #2.
What an odd response given the scenario put forth. I’m very curious what you think that starving people with no jobs are expected to trade with here?
If my family isn't eating and society is cool with that I could not care less about a label that such a society gives me.
Again, society can get ahead of things, or let it be decided later. The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1. Society can figure out how to keep option 2 working if society prefers that. If society fails to do so it will deservedly get option 1.
> The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1.
I think you have the options mixed up. Option 1 is voluntary trade. Option 2 is violence.
You appear to be saying that people would prefer voluntary trade, but that they will resort to violence if they see no other option. Which historically I think is largely true.
Option one is always violence. It is the only option always on the table.
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.
I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.
I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?
The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.
I’m not sure what the solution is.
who will redistribute stuff?
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.
All that wealth people are bitchin about is ephemeral, its mostly unrealized gains on stocks that balloned.
People want to overtax Elon, but he doesn't sell his stocks. Its all imaginary numbers propped up by the federal reserve.
It is still extremely common today, if you look at the demographics along the Atlantic Coast of the US. The richest zip codes always have poor ones nearby.
By the standards of underdeveloped countries today or historical poverty in general, these "poor" people are nonetheless living in outright opulence: their genuine plight is mostly one of social marginalization, that can't really be solved by purely economic means. That's partly the effect of new technology (developed by capitalism) but partly redistribution in action.
Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.
ask yourself why did US not become like Norway, despite having new deal until 1970s?
is there something structural that prevents it from becoming Norway ??
Unwillingness to embrace socialism?
Unwillingness to engage with social policy for fear of reds under the bed (ginned up by cynical self serving robber barons).
It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.
This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
we had this UBI experiment during COVID lockdown and PPP loans, and what happened??
People splurged all government given money on luxury items and unnecessary stuff, or just gambled it way on stock market or betting.
UBI does NOT work in the US and will never work. More sensible approach is what China does: low prices.
Just massively lower prices for basic cost of living items, so that even Uber driver could live normal life
UBI has been tried experimentally around the world many places including the US and did not have that effect "the money people had received was not squandered on frivolous products such as drugs and luxury goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
Which experiments were successful depends on what your desired outcomes were, but none were as bad a you suggest, I would say many succeeded.
I do not know how COVID support worked in the US, but one of the things you refer to seems to be loans to businesses, which is very different from UBI. Were people given a fixed and guaranteed income stream not linked to earnings during COVID?
I wouldn't use the COVID economy to understand anything except "What happens to an economy during a pandemic?" People had more money, but there was a lot less to spend on for a while. Not to mention the psychological effects of lockdowns, restrictions, or quarantining.
Standard of life for avg uber driver is much higher in us compared with china.
My impression is that China has a pretty high standard of living. They have been extremely successful in reducing poverty over the last few decades. You should see how shiny even some of the third tier cities are.
Shiny bits in some cities do not prove anything. Lots of countries have bits with a high standard of living despite a low national average.
The fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation.
So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
I don’t think that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and that statement is doing a lot of load-bearing in your argument. You’re going to need to back it up somehow.
Funnily enough, Asimov tackles this in his short stories. The power goes to...the robots ( AI basically )
> it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power
> taking power away from the capitalist class
An obvious and apparently irresolvable contradiction.
Capitalist power is inherently anarchic and isn't power at all. It's simply order emerging from the anarchy of the market. But the ability to take that power away from them, no matter how you measure it, itself falls into the category of "too much power" with wide margin. And with this amount of power there will be no change of hands that hold it.
You may be confusing some abstract unachievable ideal with the reality of the world we live in.
In reality, being superwealthy absolutely comes with a tremendous amount of power.
It is also pretty much the opposite of anarchic, given effects like regulatory capture and politicians pandering to the desires of the wealthy.
If you follow UBI out a few generations, there will be nobody left to tax, which funds it.
The end result is total system collapse or forcing people to work through total government control, which is where all communist systems end up.
UBI creates a slave class. It's just a dressed up and renamed system that's been tried many times before, and failed.
I'm not sure why every new generation thinks they discovered something new.
You fundamentally misunderstand UBI. it does not stop anyone working, and where it has been tried people continue working because they want more than a minimal income. its not a universal high income, its a universal BASIC inome.
No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
Not necessarily. In the UK:
> Over one million young people in this country are now neither employed, in education nor in training...
yet no starvation. I'm not sure it's a good situation but it is what it is.
For context, the UK unemployment level is pretty low compared to the last 55 years of history.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
One million is a lot of people, but that's from a population of ~70 million.
The post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
I chose the denominator of a society of 70 million to match the data link I posted.
It’s possible the unemployment rate among you adults is historically high, but I haven’t seen data on that. I doubt it, based on the overall unemployment rate.
edit: looked up the current data. Age 16-24 unemployment excluding trainees and students is 12.8% which is about double the current overall unemployment rate. Haven't found historical data on this cohort yet. We might expect youngsters to be less employed than experienced people, but double does seem high on the face of it.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05...
edit 2:
Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis.
Youth unemployment sucks for the people involved and the people around them. Every one of them has my sympathy. We are not in a period of unusually high youth unemployment, according to the UK government data.
> Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years.
It is currently there. The economy doesn't seem to be getting friendlier to the youth though. That median also seems pretty heavily skewed by a seven-year jump in youth unemployment after 2008, which seems like a bad omen.
> I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis.
But that would spoil some good click bait for the media, and ad hominem attacks from political opponents.
Only if we tie being fed to "working" which is a rather inhumane and untenable thing to do
In unrelated news, we are expelling our agricultural and service industry workforces at the moment.
>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death
false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.
doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Someone who attempted to support themselves by hand knitting sweaters almost certainly WOULD be impoverished. So doesn't that support what you are calling "doomers"?
I said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives".
I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product.
I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.
Comparative advantage falls flat on its face in the circumstances being described, though. It’s based on an assumption of opportunity cost that no longer holds true.
the principle of comparative advantage does not ever fall flat on it's face. An entire country can be worse at manufacturing/growing everything compared to the US, but they can still manufacture and grow things, and engage in trade.
an individual can be inferior to other individuals at every single job skill, but can still get a job and live a full life with family.
you don't know what you are talking about, at all.
Yes, that is a description of comparative advantage. You must ask yourself this, though: why can a country be worse at manufacturing/growing yet still trade with the US? The answer is, of course, opportunity cost, as I said above. And, as above, then you must ask yourself what would happen to comparative advantage if there were no opportunity cost?
That is indeed an absurd example, as any number of failed Etsy stores - and failed businesses in general - confirms.
Trad econ makes no distinction between creative profit, which produces new jobs and new opportunities, and extractive profit, which destroys jobs and opportunities while trashing the planet's carrying capacity.
Both can make stonks go up, but one has a predictably limited life before it ends in catastrophe.
Unfortunately that life is defined in centuries, not years. In the meantime everyone gets used to normalcy bias, the extractive types own the main social communication systems, and when their backs are against the wall they will simply lie about what's really happening.
The collapse is always a huge surprise to most of the population when it finally happens.
And in the lead up to that it gets harder and harder to start a viable small business, because the resources needed to make it work keep going up, and the resources that are actually available to most people keep going down.
Etsy is a successful business, and the people who engage with it come back and reengage, and separately read up on Schumpeterian creative destruction
when you learn physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) you idealize concepts like "frictionless" because it teaches you valid concepts that you can carry forward, and you don't soil your diapers at every step of learning. Do the same with economics if you want to actually learn it, don't think "what's wrong with this", think "what's right with it, what can I learn from it?" Look at history, what economics explains is what happened.
you can't learn classical mechanics from a few paragraphs, but that's how long an HN comment needs to be. I will promise you this, if you reject what I wrote and remember most of the doomer dreck here, you will not learn economics at all.
The problem with Newtonian mechanics, especially idealized frictionless versions, is that it gives you a wrong impression of how the world works. Much better to understand and accept friction, because it leaves you with an accurate understanding, instead of an easy-to-learn version supported by fundamentally flawed concepts.
Within physics, there are much, much, much better models than Newtonian mechanics for conceptualizing economics.
they never ever teach physics the way you describe, they teach it the way I describe, and they never stop at the frictionless assumption. I am intellectually advantaged over you in every possible way, yet you do have a comparative advantage; unfortunately it's at spewing tendentious argumentative not-even-interesting nonsense.
Man. You live in a world of fantasy driven by a pathetically shallow knowledge of some mainstream economic cliches that people like you love to repeat as if you really even knew the mathematical models, much less their limitations.
That's not how things have been happening for quite some time. Productivity gains have been absorbed almost by the capital for the last 40 years. Wages have mostly estagnated and whole industries and their jobs disappeared without a direct replacement for the ones who lost their jobs now for more than 20, 30 years. Auto industry automation jobs? Gone, and the people who had those jobs? Mostly in worst jobs if lucky.
Why the fuck do you think Detroit is a hell hole? Why the whole rustbelt is a hellhole of poverty and opioid addiction?
And don't you dare think you're immune just because you are a little above the masses. A few millions, even a few tens of millions in the stock market and on a cardboard/gypsum McMansion could vaporize in a trading afternoon if we end up in a 29s style crash.
Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model
What is the next large labour-absorbing sector supposed to be?
It won't be one large one, it will be thousands of little ones.
Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy).
The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement.
What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.
Note that several of your historical examples didn’t involve humans, and presumably most future occurrences of better work enablers won’t involve humans either. The contention isn’t whether there will be an increase in diversity and amount of work done, it’s whether any of it will be done by us. Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.
Communism, or more accurately, mechanised collective farming practices in the early 1900s in Russia resulted in revolutions and world wars. When tens of millions of inefficient farmers were replaced by tractors needing only a fraction of the labour force the excess population was disposed of.
Sorry, bad phrasing!
They were put to work in new roles enabled by technological advancements: wielding mass manufactured rifles and operating artillery.
This has played out over and over throughout history whenever a large fraction of the population suddenly becomes surplus to requirements.
They never get to enjoy utopia. They are expended in warfare or low value forced labour until the labour pool once again matches the requirements.
You don't even need to look at the Soviets. Life for the average person in Britain became worse between 1760 until about 1920. That meant about 3 generations of people were lost.
I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...
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If anything, it will be the trades. We're still a solid time away from being able to replicating what muscles and skin do - and fundamentally, there will always be a need for someone to run cable, terminate wiring and unclog a sewer pipe. At the same time, the trades are desperate for staff after the "academization" push of the last decades.
That's true for a while. But shelf restocking and order picking will probably start to go robotic within a few years. That's a manipulation problem within reach. All those mass produced humanoid robots have to do something, and that's something they can do.
Just never desperate enough to actually pay well.
Trades actually pays pretty well. The problem is that the academization push has ruined the image of manual labor.
Having to do manual labor ruined three image of manual labor. Fathers and mothers with broken bodies. Backs, knees, just physically wrecked after decades of laying tile and into crawlspaces and sweating all day out in the heat or freezing in winter. There's something to be said for an honest days work, but let's not over romanticize it.
What's the point of this comment? It's just a basic fact that everyone agrees with that wasn't put into contention by parent comment.
In industrial revolution analogy we are more like the horses and oxen. How did being replaced by machines go for them?