Lots of great observations here. The motivations of early movers to entrench and moat their competitive advantages certainly resonate. Some jobs are truly lost - phone operators, gaslamp lighters, pony express - but those don't tend to be high value-added roles.
However, I think two things can exist at the same time. While I agree with Ted Cruz that the way to beat China is the old-fashioned American way of rapid innovation, there are other things to consider. There is no point innovating to keep an edge over China if we keep letting them steal our technology as they have done for decades. So security, which requires some legislative guardrails, is important. I don't want North Korea using our advanced AI to generate synthetic untraceable bio weapons. I don't want Iran to have access to sophisticated targeting technologies. Companies like Meta already have WAY too much information about our kids. I don't want them using AI to manipulate their users, especially kids. And effective sentience is years away, not decades. We need to have some guardrails around what AI is/is not allowed to do.
So I think there needs to be a balanced approach with a LOT of transparency. Two things Washington is not historically good at.
I do not pretend to be an expert in the field of economics, although should I wish to announce such a pretense, I would be vying for attention among a group that includes Paul Krugman as one of its members, so I figure my opinion is just a good as his. Qualifications aside, I can certainly state with undeniable accuracy that the amount and nature of goods that people in the developed countries not only enjoy, but take for granted today is orders of magnitude above those which our great-grandparents had access to a mere hundred years ago. Where to start? Automobiles, trains, airplanes, telephones, televisions, electrical wiring, indoor plumbing, it is exhausting to even list everything! And where did all these things come from, you ask? Technology and industry is the answer. Whereas Presidents Harding and Cooledge did not have a telephone in their White Houses (one was not installed until Hoover's tenure) and only 20% of American households had indoor plumbing, we have access to a plethora of gadgets, doo-dads and whatchamacallits that were not even in the imagination of people a hundred years ago. All because of technology and the industrialization of production. Sure, this put a lot of "artisans" and "craftsmen" out of work, but it put thousands more people to work in jobs that technology and industry brought into existence. Were there social disruptions as a by-product? Certainly; ask the wagon wheelwright who lost his job when automobiles made horse-drawn transportation outmoded, or the telegraph operator who was fired when individual telephones made telegraphy unnecessary. But on the whole, I think people would rather not give up the things that technology and industrialization have provided and go back to the hardscrabble life of a century ago. And although the jobs have changed, the amount of jobs has exponentially increased to make available many more opportunities for productive work for more people. And so it shall be.
"The first is the press, which committed to the “AI kills jobs” storyline in late 2022 "
The key fact here is the date. By then, Bidumb's immigration and inflation was really starting to bite, and they needed an excuse for him that essentially couldn't be refuted.
Lots of great observations here. The motivations of early movers to entrench and moat their competitive advantages certainly resonate. Some jobs are truly lost - phone operators, gaslamp lighters, pony express - but those don't tend to be high value-added roles.
However, I think two things can exist at the same time. While I agree with Ted Cruz that the way to beat China is the old-fashioned American way of rapid innovation, there are other things to consider. There is no point innovating to keep an edge over China if we keep letting them steal our technology as they have done for decades. So security, which requires some legislative guardrails, is important. I don't want North Korea using our advanced AI to generate synthetic untraceable bio weapons. I don't want Iran to have access to sophisticated targeting technologies. Companies like Meta already have WAY too much information about our kids. I don't want them using AI to manipulate their users, especially kids. And effective sentience is years away, not decades. We need to have some guardrails around what AI is/is not allowed to do.
So I think there needs to be a balanced approach with a LOT of transparency. Two things Washington is not historically good at.
I do not pretend to be an expert in the field of economics, although should I wish to announce such a pretense, I would be vying for attention among a group that includes Paul Krugman as one of its members, so I figure my opinion is just a good as his. Qualifications aside, I can certainly state with undeniable accuracy that the amount and nature of goods that people in the developed countries not only enjoy, but take for granted today is orders of magnitude above those which our great-grandparents had access to a mere hundred years ago. Where to start? Automobiles, trains, airplanes, telephones, televisions, electrical wiring, indoor plumbing, it is exhausting to even list everything! And where did all these things come from, you ask? Technology and industry is the answer. Whereas Presidents Harding and Cooledge did not have a telephone in their White Houses (one was not installed until Hoover's tenure) and only 20% of American households had indoor plumbing, we have access to a plethora of gadgets, doo-dads and whatchamacallits that were not even in the imagination of people a hundred years ago. All because of technology and the industrialization of production. Sure, this put a lot of "artisans" and "craftsmen" out of work, but it put thousands more people to work in jobs that technology and industry brought into existence. Were there social disruptions as a by-product? Certainly; ask the wagon wheelwright who lost his job when automobiles made horse-drawn transportation outmoded, or the telegraph operator who was fired when individual telephones made telegraphy unnecessary. But on the whole, I think people would rather not give up the things that technology and industrialization have provided and go back to the hardscrabble life of a century ago. And although the jobs have changed, the amount of jobs has exponentially increased to make available many more opportunities for productive work for more people. And so it shall be.
"The first is the press, which committed to the “AI kills jobs” storyline in late 2022 "
The key fact here is the date. By then, Bidumb's immigration and inflation was really starting to bite, and they needed an excuse for him that essentially couldn't be refuted.
The future is now. Amen.
We will see.