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Comment by TheLostOne | Hacker News Reader

Economy will crash in the next 5 years either way with mass replacement of people by AI (call centers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, ...).

Edit: Plus German car industry will crash either way because most people work not in building cars, but motors, electronics, transmission etc. which are mostly redundant with electric cars.

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This isn't sound logic. "The economy is going to crash because of reason X, so it's fine to make it crash worse because of reason Y".

No the argument is:

A. No cars, clean air!

B. Don't do this, economy will crash

A. Doesn't scare me, economy will crash either way, keeping cars will not prevent a crash.

I'll take either bet. €1000 says the German economy will not crash in the next 5 years due to the mass replacement of people by AI. Another €1000 says that the transition to electric vehicles will not crash the German vehicle industry. (I've changed your wording from cars to vehicles because I do not see the point of the needless restriction.) Let's say as well if the same person wins both bets they get a bonus €1000.

Sound reasonable and good to you? I mean you do believe in what you're saying, yes?

What's your email address so that I can mail you the contract?

AI is far from solving these problems to the extent of being deployed world wide.

No it's five years. As the internet changed everything in 10 years, mobile internet changed everything in 5 years. Change will come rapidly not slow.

Also if you're a lawyer

"An AI just beat top lawyers at their own game" https://mashable.com/2018/02/26/ai-beats-humans-at-contracts...

That lawyer thing is like saying "a calculator just beat top mathematicians at their own arithmetic" and expecting it to generate replace maths professors within 5 years.

AI is great but it's hilarious to think much will have changed in 5 years. Have a look at the results from the Stanford Question Answering Database if you want to see how far there is still to go.

90% of lawyers do are not top notch defence lawyers. Most of lawyers work in companies and do NDA work.

This comment does not parse, and the second part of it makes very little sense. NDA -> Non Disclosure Agreement, that's a fairly standard legal device which definitely does not employ the majority of lawyers in corporations.

Just like it did during the industrial revolution with mass replacement of people by machines.

No, during the industrial revolution jobs were mostly created. This was at the same time the agricultural sector lost most jobs. With industry 2.0 and people being replaced, these moved into the service industry. Now the service industry is replaced with no where to go.

Quite a few Luddites starved during those times.

One can derive argument for both sides from industrial revolution (not many horses working around), but generalizing from one datapoint isn't the most intellectually robust way to analyze the issue.

Most of the farmers were able to get jobs in factories, with little downtime or retraining necessary. What are today's factory workers going to do that's comparable? Remember, they still have rent to pay, food to buy, families to support.

50 years, you mean? The technology may be moving fast, but the social/political/financial changes won't.

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