> If AI evolves at the same pace, and replacing labor (robots) and services (AI), I am not sure that human would turn around? How do you think we can turn things around ?
I see no indication that we are close to building a GAI, or that we are close to solving the hallucination problems that severely limit the utility LLMs without human managers. We don't understand how our own intelligence works, or even an ant's. The notion the we are close to replicating or exceeding it seems far fetched to me.
> What activity would require human involvement ?
Nurses, bar tenders, barbers... Hasn't anyone read Player Piano? :)
> How do you think we can turn things around ?
I dunno. Did anyone know how dangerous fire or deadly spear points world work out?
I get what you are saying, and I don't think you are wrong, but it has been like 100 monumental changes in 200 years. The demographic shift of the industrial revolution was particularly painful, to be sure. But we seem to be pretty good at coping with them, overall.
And again, I remain skeptical that general artificial intelligence is actually that close at hand.
> I was talking about the issues with comparing it to singular inventions like the cotton gin or jacquard loom
Ok, appreciate the clarification. But in that time frame there have been a number of really tectonic inventions that changed pretty much everything: steam power, ICE power, electrification, refrigeration, computing and the internet, just to name a few off the top of my head.
> There's plenty of space to think it just won't happen (where I'm personally at, at least on the current LLM driven versions)
Same. I am both optimistic about human ability to find new jobs, and skeptical that "AI" is going to make that necessary in the new future.
There is likewise no indication that it won't. And if I am looking at a pattern where a thousand careers were destroyed by the advance of technology and were swiftly replaced by tens of thousands of new ones, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the pattern is likely repeat.
200 years ago, 95% of the workers in my country worked in subsistence farming. Today, only 2% are farmers. The whole spectrum of labor has turned upside down and upside down again, in that time. It has certainly not been a singular industry.
I grew up in a small town in rural Alaska that would have been completely under glacier ice when Columbus landed in North America. In the time between Captain Cook exploring the area in the 18th century and the next western survey a hundred years later, the coastline had been transformed by glaciers receding and revealing inlets hadn't been there for Cook to map. The glacier that was directly in between my town and the highway to Anchorage when I was a child is all but gone now, and there is a road.
You miss the point. A 50 cent army is feasible when you are paying third world wages. If Chinese wage increases price them out of the market, then you can just hire people from somewhere else. But it's the low wages that make such an attack possible. Low wages vs high wages don't matter much when you are spending $200/hr per soldier on Reddit account fees.
If China wants to launch a state-level attack on Reddit they are probably better off pressuring Tencent to pressure Reddit to just do what they want.
This doesn't work well. How do you pay the $2? With a credit card? Tens of thousands of accounts all with the same one? Tens of thousands of credit cards?
In a 50 army, one individual can be paid a third world wage to register free accounts all day long to post comments. The cost of $2 per comment would massively outweigh their wages.
> maybe an unintentional experiment in unintended consequences
Just charging $2 might be a huge improvement over reddit because it makes sock puppets cost too much to scale.
Paying out for upvotes, I fear will incentivize lowest-common-denominator content. If you go to a quality tech subreddit and sort by "Top" comments, they will mostly be memes. They won't be from an expert solving your very specific problem. And more generally, I worry it will reward that twitter-style, shrill political dunking, binary thinking, maximalism and in-group point scoring. This may be a recipe for an even more toxic r/politics.
Very interesting trying to puzzle out how a given incentive structure will play out in practice.