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Comment by colinmhayes | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily disagree but that's really not a good analogy. Horses aren't people. When their jobs disappear no one gives a fuck. No one speaks up for their interests. People will not go so easy. They are able to create amazing things if given the opportunity. No one wants mass human unemployment.

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We already have mass human unemployment. What's the average daily wage? It's not that low because everyone is gainfully employed.

Pre-covid, Global wages and employment levels have never been higher. Global poverty levels have never been lower. Either way, I don't disagree that AI will replace some jobs, I'm just not sold on the horse story.

and? We still have people dying of starvation world wide. We have scads of homeless in the richest country on earth. Why do you think anyone will care at all?

You have to be willfully ignorant to believe a proposition that no one cares, and willfully naive to believe everyone will.

Look at https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth and take 5 minutes to look at the data on the rest of the site and you will understand how much life has improved not just in raw numbers (there are more people living above the poverty line than existed 100 years ago), but more importantly in percentage terms - a far smaller fraction of people live in poverty today than in 1880.

In fact, the number last time I ran it was that less people live in abject poverty in 2019 than did so in 1880 - despite a 7-8 fold increase in population.

People have an advantage that horses don't have: people can own property, and they have legal rights, like the ability to vote in elections. When we're talking about AI, though, it's not too hard to imagine computer programs eventually being allowed to legally own things and accrue wealth. It's harder to imagine them being allowed to vote (how would that even work?) but something like it could happen. We can also imagine this going the other way: economically "useless" people losing the right to own property or the right to vote. Or if the rights continue to exist in theory, in practice they become poor and disenfranchised. And then "the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must." It happens all the time.

I think in the long run we need to figure out a reasonable economic system that can deal with abundance of the things people want/need, and scarcity of work. Maybe it's as simple as making a 30, or a 20 hour work week the norm. The default alternative seems to be to have more and more people fighting for fewer and fewer jobs, to the point where everyone who has a job has to work extremely hard under long hours and bad conditions for low pay because if they don't there's ten more people ready to take their place at the drop of a hat.

> It's harder to imagine them being allowed to vote (how would that even work?)

They don't have to actually vote, anymore than corporations or wealthy humans do, in order to exert their will on the political process.

That's what campaign contributions, PACs, lobbyists, astroturfing, think-tanks, etc. are for.

You realize it's an allegory, right?

It's fine to reply to an allegory with "you're right, that solution doesn't work, but it doesn't preclude other solutions because of these reasons, so don't use it to make decisions".

That's very different from a comment which suggests he doesn't realize it's an allegory.

The comment directly says it's not a good analogy. Complaining that they didn't specifically say "allegory" is really nitpicky. The terms are very close and overlap.

If someone says Animal Farm is a good story, but it wouldn't work if the animals were humans, I would say they didn't get the message.

Depends on what reason they gave. If they misunderstand something about humanity, that's a great jumping point toward discussion.

But if they said "yes, those politics would happen in humans, but some of these other factors are more important toward the eventual outcome[...]" then that's perfectly compatible with understanding the story. And that's roughly what the earlier commenter did! They accepted the argument that jobs will go away, while saying the secondary and tertiary effects would be different.

Fair, I'm sure it doesn't seem like it but I really don't want to argue. We're obviously reading that comment differently.

Cheers.

Animal farm is a fictional story about humans disguised as animals. The horse allegory is a non-fictional story about the downfall of horses which are very much not human-like.

The horse allegory is a fictional story involving talking horses. It is hardly any more fictional than a symbolic retelling of communism spreading. Both are intended to prove a point, not accurately portray the details of history.

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