While it is very cool...I cannot help thinking how many sorters are going to lose their jobs because of this. Scary.
But what seems different with the AI "revolution" is that we may be seeing a hockey-stick rate to these changes that simply has no historical precedent. In which the "progress" (read: forced obsolescence) that might hitherto have happened over the course of 1-2 generations may soon be happening in the space of 5-10 years, for large categories of job descriptions, planet-wide.
So guess it's not that scary.
Unless you're the one whose job is threatened -- or as is apparently the case of this "success story", eliminated already. Do you really think all these displaced cucumber sorters can find work as Machine Learning engineers at some hot startup?
Or in the near term, any kind of job at all, without significant difficulty?
But the parent wasn't actually suggesting that progress be stopped, merely observing that it was going to cause social problems.
And not everybody would need to have a horse, the same way not everybody needs to drive (and most don't) in cities designed for humans.
If the solar installer can't get to the customer's house because he's traveling by horse...
Or the biofuel engineer spends an extra 2 hours a day commuting on his horse, rather than developing new technologies in his lab...
Then it's not better for the environment for us to all move to horse and cart.
Cars took at least a generation to become mainstream. This time around it seems technology will destroy jobs almost at the flick of a switch.
Unless you're arguing that the adoption rate will not be significantly quick, which I think most would disagree with.
I personally don't think it's incremental and that we're at a point where we just had the idea of collecting seeds and planting them in the ground. The resulting aftermath of that simple idea produced civilization. The resulting aftermath of computation is yet to be seen.
> that might hitherto have happened over the course of 1-2 generations may soon be happening in the space of 5-10 years
It's been happening in that shorter timespan for a while now, so really, what have those people who have already lost their jobs done?
1) Either technology is truly revolutionary, which means that it has a revolutionary change on society by producing an entirely different dimension of techniques and ideas that make everything in the past irrelevant.
or
2) The technology is incremental and will only make tasks more efficient, and only has a marginal change on society by producing newer linear techniques.
If it's (1) then in the long term there is definitely a huge benefit, but in the short term there's bound to be a great social upheaval. Ones that change the shape of governments, and throw society in chaos. Just look at the industrial revolution, or agriculture.If it's (2) then really it's merely a gradual process that almost goes unnoticed, save for in retrospect. Which makes it very straightforward to change and redirect people through education.
So pick either case. You can't have both revolutionary technology, and gradual social change. Either the tech is truly revolutionary which in that case will result in social revolution, or it's incremental and will result in merely incremental changes.
And besides, no one was arguing that the technology was "truly revolutionary", so I'm not sure what point you're making?
Not really. I would the opposite is true. Most people don't like change and appreciate stability as they get older. You cannot eliminate people's jobs, tell them to adapt and expect them to take that. And when a lot of people use their jobs during a short period of time, guess what? Extremist government/ideology will emerge, and we are already seeing some signs of it.