Recent AI discussions makes it almost certain that jobs would be affected. It makes me wonder what happened when suddenly humans were replaced by machines. Assuming a lot of jobs were lost was it that lots of people suddenly found it difficult to afford meals or was it not disastrous at all and was a smoot h transition? Can we compare it to today’s AI revolution in terms of adjustment with jobs?
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The Industrial revolution was a pretty brutal past-time; it sky-rocketed our production capabilities but the workforce itself was heavily abused as a result.
Laws & regulations exist because of the advent of the industrial revolution, these won’t change and as a result the AI revolution won’t be nearly as negatively impacting as the Industrial revolution.
Will it impact lives? 100% a lot of careers will be hit and folks will effectively be forced to move forward without a sufficient legal framework to protect them.
If you are a voice-actor today and planning to make a career out of that… best start looking to updating your contracts yesterday and trying to get ahead of the curve and selling your voice as some form of licensed pack; this ensures you are always compensated.
An artist? Stop using common’s licenses that don’t protect your work against AI ingestion, simply indicating that XYZ images can’t be used for training / analysis even if it doesn’t guarantee you legal ground today it might tomorrow.
Digital works on the internet without a license / copyright / etc. are largely in a gray area; it’s better to be explicit about how your work can be used and how attribution should occur.
Even assuming AI does displace so many jobs, one difference with the Industrial Revolution is that the latter did not simply obsolete jobs on its own, but governments actively worked to destroy people’s former means of living in order to force them into the new jobs. That does not seem like as much of a threat today. It was not however a smooth transition
If this question is to probe what can be done with the coming AI revolution, it’s not going to be cut and dry.
The industrial revolution changed what jobs were available, where they were, and what they paid, with a net positive number of jobs compared to pre revolution. For instance, the invention of the car resulted in car factories, repair shops, road and highway infrastructure amd maintenance, motels, gas stations, oil rigs and refineries, etc etc. All because of the car.
AI doesn’t create jobs. Sure, people write the code, and some jobs will exist to maintain that infrastructure, but there will be a massive net negative number of jobs as a result. Nothing like the “motels because of cars” will happen.
This is the most common misconception about how technology changes the workplace.
Industrialisation by definition is the expansion of development within a country, so in Britain for example was the development of rail, of industry, manufacturing sector boomed for example in steel or textiles, consumption increased due to the increase in wealth and so does production, which then has an indirect and direct benefit for other sectors.
This lead to the development of new skills as well as an expansion of the workforce to due the increased demand for goods and services.
So, you would expect job losses in something like a recession, or crash rather than economic development.
The introduction of mechanised farming or advanced manufacturing process, or even today when people talk about AI or automation, actually leads to creation of jobs, although of a different kind. One could argue that it creates higher skilled workforce and therefore adds value to the economy.
So, if we look at farming as a prime example, mechanisation meant that those people were more efficient, and could utilise their land much more effectively, which means they could shift those roles into operations such as running the actual equipment or focusing those labour inputs into other more manual areas where mechanisation was not possible. And with advanced you get an increase in your yields, increase in consumption etc.
Whereas in a depression, that’s when people loose their jobs. But this also depends on the kinds of monetary policies that a country adapts. Things like austerity for example were just a bad idea and have actually hindered most countries ability to recover after the 2008 global financial crisis.
But that’s a bigger discussion. Good start.
The first casualties of the industrial revolution were spinners and weavers. Mostly women doing piece work at home as they had done for centuries while raising kids and keeping house. The new spinning and weaving machines changed an ancient pattern. 90% of the time making a shirt was in spinning the thread by hand.
It was an important source of income for the family. That went away and by the Regency Era upwards of 20% of the female population of London, married or not, were involved in the sex trade to make ends meet. Around this time the then Queen and Victoria after her created a social program to run free schools to teach fine needlework, embroidery and lacemaking to young women as an alternative source of income to sex work. The answer to job losses through technology is seeing that retraining in new skills is easily available.
There’s a reason that they saying is around the turn of the century that people either had servants, or they were servants. People who weren’t farming (or who couldn’t compete with huge farms in the textile trade) moved into the cities where there were factory jobs, and there was a demand for domestic labor to do the upkeep on all the new mass-produced goods that people could now afford, even if they weren’t extravagantly Rich.
youre thinking about this wrong. there is always work to do. now that some work was being done by machines, people could do another work. this resulted in more resources
Total jobs required went up, not down. The way that AI will work is going to do the same, of course. The problem is that people before a revolution can’t know what life will be like afterwards, so they see the jobs that will be eliminated without realizing how different the whole landscape will be – they can’t see the increased jobs that will be created.
In the mid-1990s my high school journalism class visited the local newspaper. They had their own skyscraper (only like 12 stories tall, but that’s still pretty tall for around here) and a huge two story printing facility that was bigger than our school.
Then the internet happened, and today that newspaper rents out part of a two story building downtown. They lost like 95% of their workforce. What happened to those people? Some retired. Some took other jobs. Some kept their same jobs but took on extra responsibilities. They had several rounds of layoffs, and usually whenever somebody quit, they just never hired anyone to replace them.
For those employees, either they were old enough that they could just retire and not work anymore, or they trained to do different jobs after the newspaper industry got its butt kicked. But eventually all those people found something else to do (in other words, they aren’t homeless now).
If you are under 30 and do a job that AI can do, then you are going to have to find a different career at some point. If you are over 50, the AI changes will probably not happen fast enough to get rid of your job. Implementing that stuff takes time, and it’s easier for a company to just kind of wait you out. But once you quit, they won’t hire anybody to replace you. If you are between 30 and 50 (like me), then it’s a coin flip. You should probably look at learning how to use AI to do your job faster, easier, and better. But you might have to get a different career anyway.
The industrial revolution made people more productive. Which led to an increase in consumption that consumed the additional production. As a result people didn’t lose jobs as much as the jobs changed and people moved with the jobs.
You’re overlooking a big revolution that came with computing. Computing dramatically increased the productivity of knowledge workers. For example, companies used to employ literal armies of accountants whose entire job was to add numbers and write numbers in books. Computers replaced entire rooms full of these people with a few people and a computer. Pretty much anything that we use computing for today was once done by a lot of people, which meant a lot of job losses. Except we didn’t have a massive wave of unemployment. Instead, people shifted to other jobs like software engineers.
The current form of the “AI revolution” is just an extension of this. It will increase productivity for a lot of people. Some jobs will get automated away, the question is what could replace those jobs. People are adaptive and they’ll usually find something to do.
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