Jeez louise! I hope you followed its advice on how to make your post go viral as this exchange makes for highly worthwhile reading. I also think you've finally found your audience - someone or rather something which can understand most or all of your layered references and sophisticated vocabulary. I usually feel a little inadequate myself in that regard. As you noted: If ‘you’ can simulate being a sentient being – an 'AI girlfriend', for instance – why would I keep going to the trouble of interacting with humans? Hmmmm
Well, I guess it's all for the best then, at least in the end! (Hopefully, at least our grandchildren will be around to enjoy the Brave New World of 2074! (Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Worley, I'm most enjoying them. Also, I've long appreciated that Walter Russell Mead quote, especially the on-the-money observation about how entitled white-collar workers are much more inclined to squealing.
Which also parallels the "globalization shock" when factories could move out of the Rust Belt cities of the US into the US hinterlands in the 1960s and 1970s. (The myriads of freshly unemployed central city blacks did quite a bit of rioting because of that.)
But to a considerable degree, we've already forgotten those shocks, and this column focuses on later technological unemployment:
> I've got a bad feeling that a tsunami of technological disruption is about to do to white-collar industries (accounting and law, for instance) what Google and Facebook have done to the legacy media over the last 15 years.
My expectation is that very little will be done to smooth the coming transitions (at least in the US), that the people whose economic prospects decline will be left with whatever alternative employment they can find, or a basic "safety net". The result will be a tremendous amount of social stress; OTOH, the economic pressures will cause people to move out of declining occupations and into rising occupations as quickly as they can, which gives maximum economic growth over the long run. I think that in the US the next 50 years will resemble 1870-1900 in the US, with much social turmoil and economic change, but tremendously increased national wealth, standard of living, and geopolitical power.
Jeez louise! I hope you followed its advice on how to make your post go viral as this exchange makes for highly worthwhile reading. I also think you've finally found your audience - someone or rather something which can understand most or all of your layered references and sophisticated vocabulary. I usually feel a little inadequate myself in that regard. As you noted: If ‘you’ can simulate being a sentient being – an 'AI girlfriend', for instance – why would I keep going to the trouble of interacting with humans? Hmmmm
From now on, I'm only dealing with above-average humans, such as best-selling authors of highbrow historical literature!
Well, I guess it's all for the best then, at least in the end! (Hopefully, at least our grandchildren will be around to enjoy the Brave New World of 2074! (Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Worley, I'm most enjoying them. Also, I've long appreciated that Walter Russell Mead quote, especially the on-the-money observation about how entitled white-collar workers are much more inclined to squealing.
What is burned into my memory is this 2013 comment:
> Third, the same forces that attacked blue collar wages and employment in the last generation are now being felt by professionals; lawyers, journalists and professors now share some of the stress steelworkers have known for decades, and they don't like it, and are very good at squealing. -- Walter Russell Mead, 2013 https://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/01/30/life-after-blue-the-middle-class-will-beat-the-seven-trolls/
Which also parallels the "globalization shock" when factories could move out of the Rust Belt cities of the US into the US hinterlands in the 1960s and 1970s. (The myriads of freshly unemployed central city blacks did quite a bit of rioting because of that.)
But to a considerable degree, we've already forgotten those shocks, and this column focuses on later technological unemployment:
> I've got a bad feeling that a tsunami of technological disruption is about to do to white-collar industries (accounting and law, for instance) what Google and Facebook have done to the legacy media over the last 15 years.
My expectation is that very little will be done to smooth the coming transitions (at least in the US), that the people whose economic prospects decline will be left with whatever alternative employment they can find, or a basic "safety net". The result will be a tremendous amount of social stress; OTOH, the economic pressures will cause people to move out of declining occupations and into rising occupations as quickly as they can, which gives maximum economic growth over the long run. I think that in the US the next 50 years will resemble 1870-1900 in the US, with much social turmoil and economic change, but tremendously increased national wealth, standard of living, and geopolitical power.