Ask HN: Will AI take over the world?
However I recently stumbled across Jerry Kaplan's talk at Google (Also named Humans Need Not Apply, or maybe "Artificial Intelligence: Think Again", it's not entirely clear, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoDxcO2EOHM) in which he describes how our standard of living increases in proportion with automation, i.e. the only thing AI will do is shift the types of jobs we work in. He describes the notion of ~95% of the US population working in agriculture 100 years ago whereas today it's less than 4% even though the population has increased dramatically. Conversely 70% of Americans shower once per day where the same number used to be once ever 7 days 100 years ago.
CGP Grey's argument agains this is that of horses being unemployable today since they simply are not needed any more to perform the tasks they used to, most jobs that used to require a horse are done by a machine today.
To me both of these arguments seem equally reasonable so to get more insight I'm asking HN are we (As in the people of today in general and people in the software industry in particular) horses or the farmers?