The good AI can do for humanity is increasing our productivity.
It should be the goal of every human to eliminate as many jobs as possible.
Every job that is eliminated frees up that person and the people who would have done that job in the future to do other work.
Humanity gain the productivity of that other work.
If we had not forced painful job losses on people, we would still be 97% subsistence farmers, as we were at the time of the American Revolution in the 1770's.
If you oppose progress due to the job losses, please at least be consistent and become a subsistence farmer.
> It should be the goal of every human to eliminate as many jobs as possible.
I mean this is exactly what Drew is disputing.
The capital class will remove the jobs, capture the value of whatever labor is saved, and the workers who lose their jobs will be left with fewer resources and no realistic path to replace their lost income. They won't glide towards some utopian vision where everybody ends up working one day a week on their passion projects.
In some kind of abstract way these ML techniques provide potentially useful tools, but workers will not be the ones to see the benefits of more "productivity" that these tools enable.
The US can't even agree that, despite its vast wealth, health care is something everybody should receive regardless of employment. This country lacks the imagination to handle this situation in a way that improves lives for workers.
Not every worker is so good that they will just get free from the job and they would instantly turn into mega entrepreneur god creating 12 companies in a month. Most of them will struggle to put food on the table, resorting to crimes and eventually ending up in worse jobs
Most of us have had to adapt, with nothing guaranteed. Look at the population under 50, very few in that group have ever had any kind of job security, except for the highly paid specialists. That's been the reality for decades. Thousands of people have lost their jobs because of the hackers on here making effective software solutions. Where was the solidarity then? It's only now when the hackers themselves are threatened that we suddenly have to think about the poor human.
With that said, we should do all to eliminate jobs, but not eliminate workers. Technology can also be used to produce more services for more people, not just producing the same more effectively.
Subsistence farming is more difficult physical labor, but at least it's more meaningful than being a spam artist or an adtech data engineer or a health insurance denier or any number of soul-sucking bullshit jobs.
The problem is not unemployment, it is raising the bar for valuable labor. Arguably the standard of living has already declined for the average human individual. A factory job used to afford a single worker with modest education a house and a family. That said, generative AI will have far less impact here than, say, a robot arm.
That seems like a different (and real, but modern) problem compared to "we never would have left subsistence farming without a massive unemployment period (painful job loss) brought about by new technology" the the OP suggested.
It should be the goal of every human to eliminate as many jobs as possible.
Every job that is eliminated frees up that person and the people who would have done that job in the future to do other work.
Humanity gain the productivity of that other work.
If we had not forced painful job losses on people, we would still be 97% subsistence farmers, as we were at the time of the American Revolution in the 1770's.
If you oppose progress due to the job losses, please at least be consistent and become a subsistence farmer.