This one is different because it will pass the threshold of "normality".
Just as we woke up with DALL. E 2 one morning in April 2022 and with ChatGPT one morning in November 2022, one day in the future, perhaps in the next 3-5-10 years, we will wake up with some 5, 10, 100 terabytes of neural weights fully able to drive a car from a single camera under any circumstance, millions of times safer than a perfect human driver ever could.
On that day, which in my view definitely looms in the near future, ~200 million jobs will vanish instantly [1] and hundreds of millions of jobs will be gone forever a few months/years after that. For those 0.7-1.5+ billion people there will be no "alternative careers", not because they won't be able to learn or adapt, although most of them are already tired and sick, but because the system will simply no longer need them, they became not even useless, a burden.
Our current system, no matter how you call it, is socio-pathic, literally: the socius, the fellowship [2], is suffering [3]. The phase transition will come; the question is what we, whoever we are, will do: will we still hold dear the protestant work ethic [4] and believe the probably Los Angeled-invented Chinese fortune cookie message "there is no free lunch" [5] [6], or we will adhere to a metaphysics better suited for a galaxy with trillions of trillions of whatever natural resource we might ever need and enough energy even in our local star to build whatever kind of civilization we would ever want.
[1] Answered by ChatGPT: "According to the International Transport Forum (ITF), there were approximately 107 million commercial vehicles in use worldwide in 2015, which includes trucks, buses, and taxis. This suggests that there are likely many millions of people who earn a living as drivers.
Additionally, the World Bank estimates that the transportation sector, which includes driving, employs approximately 10% of the global workforce."
This is like saying in 1700 that the invention of farming automation will displace 90%+ of farmers, what ever will they do?
Automation is helpful, but it’s also scary. I guarantee that nobody 300 years ago thought that many of the 90%+ of displaced farmers would end up sitting in front of screens, moving data around. And I also guarantee that farmers in the 1700s were just as tired and sick as the driving industry today.
Yeah it’ll suck for the people who don’t/can’t adapt. But the world that is created by removing unnecessary labor ends up being better for everyone eventually. Should we deprive the people of the future from the technology of never needing to drive, just because the transition is scary?
The point is that there will be no more "new jobs": once we have successfully managed to externalize in silico basic human decision-making (accelerate, brake, make a left, make a right in 2/3D space, but also decisions in other spaces: decisions in the space of language, of images, and so forth) it's game over for 99+% of all the jobs across all the industries. All that remains are the entertainers (very few), the brains (even fewer), and the owners (even fewest) †.
The transition will not be scary: it will be criminal. The governments and general policy decisional factors are so out of touch it's laughable, just look at the French government as they try to raise the retirement age to 64 [1].
† Because this is the crux of the matter: are we able to build a civilization where everyone is an owner, or will only the few of the fewest be the owners. And today, for instance, only those with 50 million USD and above are owners [2], because first of all you must own your life, and if you can't afford a lifesaving $3.5 million gene therapy [3] if you need it (not to mention a 100 USD eye surgery), you don't own your life.
Just as we woke up with DALL. E 2 one morning in April 2022 and with ChatGPT one morning in November 2022, one day in the future, perhaps in the next 3-5-10 years, we will wake up with some 5, 10, 100 terabytes of neural weights fully able to drive a car from a single camera under any circumstance, millions of times safer than a perfect human driver ever could.
On that day, which in my view definitely looms in the near future, ~200 million jobs will vanish instantly [1] and hundreds of millions of jobs will be gone forever a few months/years after that. For those 0.7-1.5+ billion people there will be no "alternative careers", not because they won't be able to learn or adapt, although most of them are already tired and sick, but because the system will simply no longer need them, they became not even useless, a burden.
Our current system, no matter how you call it, is socio-pathic, literally: the socius, the fellowship [2], is suffering [3]. The phase transition will come; the question is what we, whoever we are, will do: will we still hold dear the protestant work ethic [4] and believe the probably Los Angeled-invented Chinese fortune cookie message "there is no free lunch" [5] [6], or we will adhere to a metaphysics better suited for a galaxy with trillions of trillions of whatever natural resource we might ever need and enough energy even in our local star to build whatever kind of civilization we would ever want.
[1] Answered by ChatGPT: "According to the International Transport Forum (ITF), there were approximately 107 million commercial vehicles in use worldwide in 2015, which includes trucks, buses, and taxis. This suggests that there are likely many millions of people who earn a living as drivers.
Additionally, the World Bank estimates that the transportation sector, which includes driving, employs approximately 10% of the global workforce."
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/socius
[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pathos
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_cookie
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as...