Also, to state the obvious, humans aren't horses.
The horses never recovered. We kept recovering as we kept moving into higher and higher level intellectual work, or natural language work and customer interaction (like sales teams, service reps, store clerks, tech support, call centers). All this is directly replaced by AI now. Low end and high end.
We have nowhere to run anymore. The idea we'll all be given god-like AI to wield insane leverage, simply because we're humans, is laughable. Think of the intellectual level of an average human. Think what the average voter is like in your country. Now, as Carlin joked, realize half of them are worse than that. Heck even think of our elite, our politicians, think of Trump, think of our top businessmen like Elon Musk. Most humans barely have the discipline to do the jobs they're doing now, where they can do a lot less damage than if being chimp-with-a-machine-gunned by given an army of AIs and robots to control.
We're being obsoleted. And the faster we are the better as we're a danger to ourselves if we actually decide to rule over AI, and we'll be played hard by it (no, AI doesn't have to "want" anything, but drugs also don't want anything and trick people into overdose and death).
ChatGTP came out nine months ago and the US has added two million jobs in that time.
Also "9 months" is kinda ridiculous to expect to see the long-term effects of AI. AI may be evolving fast, and it is, but business, laws, healthcare, regulatory agencies and so on are held back by gigantic inertia and some real safety cocnerns. It is still humans who have to integrate AI in their human processes, so the first few iterations will be slow and cautious to occur (after that... eventually AIs will run systems made by AIs so change will accelerate). For example, a startup tried to offer an "AI lawyer app" for traffic tickets, and lawyers sued the startup. Hollywood is starting to use AI as well, and writers and actors went to strike.
Obviously things like that will hold AI back for a while. But not forever. AI is inevitable.
Do you have a citation for this? I googled around and couldn't find a graph for "number of earners per U.S. household by year".
I am wondering if it was the case that most households in the 70s had one earner or if it was mostly middle class or upper middle class households that had this luxury.
It was easier to be in the middle class then, for myriad reasons.
In the 60s you'd be given kitchenware just for filling up your tank at a gas station...
edit to add: I am not specifically interested in the middle class, which is ill-defined. I am interested in the overall income of households and how that has changed.
My understanding is that throughout history, most households had at least two people working/earning (many homes were farms). Then we get some television shows in the 50s-70s that show how well the upper middle class lived. Now in 2023 we have people thinking that everyone in the past lived as well.
Prior to womens liberation in the USA, it was a very different scene for the ladies my man. The people who lived through this stuff are still alive, just talk to some old folks about it ffs. You're acting like ubiquitous stay at home mothers are a myth promulgated by television. There was a time when that was the primary form of employment for women. Men were paid well, and they supported their wives and families.
I'm a late Gen-Xer who grew up in a pretty average part of a fly-over midwest state. Even then it wasn't too unusual to meet housewives during the whole dating and meeting parents phase of life. We're not talking high class demographics here.
My parents are Italian immigrants with limited means and even they did the traditional patriarchy with her staying home. Mom only pursued employment once when dad got injured so bad he was laid up for an entire year, and it was a big ass deal. Concrete construction worker, blue collar AF. I'd estimate ~50% of the homes on my childhood block were stay at home moms. It was already trending towards dual income everywhere, but it wasn't always that way at all.
Again, if anyone has any data or statistics, I am interested in that, not anecdata from those who were born into the middle or upper middle class.
Except of course LLMs (and any other AI technology even on the farthest horizon) does exactly none of that.
Humans aren't horses, because horses don't participate in the wider economy, but it seems increasingly swaths of people are being laid to pasture, so to speak, effectively becoming horses.
In the longer term, then there's a fairly good argument more jobs, and specifically more roles in newly defined jobs, will be created.
What happens to those currently employed, and I'm not just talking about 23 year olds fresh out of university, in the current job market is the question.
This has arguably _already happened_; I’d be reasonably confident that there are more people working with data now than there were 100 years ago when the business was rather more filing-cabinet-oriented, say.
I don't think that's true. This blogpost [0] says there were 1.3m telephone operators in the U.S. in 1950. This BLS data [1] says that there are about half that many people in the entire telecom industry today.
[0]: https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/02/telephone-... [1] https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag517.htm