Feelings aside[1], a large part of it is about having management above you. Take that plus the ever-present online nagging about productivity. If the latter is true then, well, it’s not like there is a choice.
I was relieved to read (skim) through all of that without it reaching some LLM conclusion like, “of course we have a better vantage point to understand now than thirty years ago... the LLMs can understand for us”.
What doesn’t make sense to me about the AI Inevitabilism Embrace Or Die trope is how there’s going to be a sudden trap door which will eliminate all the naysayers which can be avoided by Embrace. Because that doesn’t cohere well with how autonomuous AI is or will be.
I could understand if all the naysayers doing old fashioned stuff like work all of a sudden have no more work to do. But the AI Embracers will have what, in comparison? Five years of experience manipulating large language models that are smarter than them by a thousand fold?
1870 is not a great span of time when OP is comparing to some idyllic village life unencumbered by urbanism. Late 19th century had many people in a “rat race” in the city, like work twelve hour days six or seven days a week in a factory type of dead-end race.
But there was something that happened later:
> For those countries with long-run data in this chart, we can see three distinct periods: From 1870 to 1913 there was a relatively slow decline; then from 1913 to 1938 the decline in hours steepened in the midst of the powerful sociopolitical, technological, and economic changes that took shape with World War I, the Great Depression, and the lead-up to World War II; and then after an uptick in hours during and just after World War II, the decline in hours continued for many countries, albeit at a slower pace and with large differences between countries.
The god knows what “sociopolitical changes” could have been about.
While there was a rat race in the city, typical farmlife was more brutal: work from early childhood and then from dawn to dusk. City dwellers had at least one day off per week, while working with animals is a job without holidays.
Businesses need, or at the very least strongly want, to increase profits. There’s not like there’s any end to that supposed algorithm. And it gets harder and harder as time goes on.
And as usual the cart is put before the horse. Businesses just don’t answer to consumer demand. They very strongly set the terms for it. And if consumer demands go down? That’s what the marketing industry is for. To create new demands.
Some Hank Hill person isn’t the one who designed e.g. America to be car dependent. The car lobby did. But typically Hank Hill gets blamed when he chooses to live two hours from his workplace because home prices are too high, taking the bus takes twice as long and train does not exist so he uses a car to commute, and he consumes beer in his freetime to unwind from the job he chooses to work at, and he isn’t great at recycling. (This might have deviated a little from the real-life Hank Hill.)
A lot of growth activity in businesses is zero sum, if it isn't increasing the efficiency of production. Businesses can't create demand from thin air with marketing.
Total productivity of the world is number_of_people * productivity_of_human. There's growth whenever these terms grow. People want to produce at least as much as they want to consume. So, growth is caused by more people being born, or people adopting more efficient methods of production, up to a limit where their all needs are met.
> Businesses can't create demand from thin air with marketing.
I would never suggest ex nihilo demand. There’s always some seed.[1]
Women back in the day didn’t smoke. Untapped market. A marketing campaign convinced a lot of women that smoking was something that liberated women did.
I’d say convincing people that replacing clean air with carginogenic fumes gets pretty close to a manufactured want.
[1] For cigarettes: maybe stress relief from nicotine.
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