E.U. Agrees on Artificial Intelligence Rules with Landmark New Law

Deflation reflects the value of the currency. This reflects the value of some products and services relative to others. Obviously some things decline in cost over time -- compute is the obvious example, but just look at your own examples:

> For example, it's entirely practical right now to launch and run a greeting card company without ever hiring an artist.

In other words, the cost of commodity art has gone down.

Whether the long-term result is net deflation depends on whether the government is concurrently printing up any new currency, but in general they are, because currency deflation is bad but easy to offset by doing just that.

> mistakenly assumes that consumer products make up the bulk of discretionary spending.

Where does it assume that? What it assumes is that labor is the primary component of the cost of living -- which it is. There are some things with true scarcity in theory, but those are rarely the bottleneck in practice. It's not that we can't grow enough food to feed everyone, or build enough housing etc. -- it's that those things take labor to deliver, so if we automate that labor the cost of living goes down.

> First, that's not AI - the subject we're discussing.

We're discussing automation, of which AI is a subset. The Luddites weren't upset about AI and nobody really expects AI to somehow automate mining, but that doesn't mean mining automation isn't possible. You might even use AI to devise new technology to automate mining.

> People whose income shrinks drastically or dries up due to AI are not going to have their rent or food costs reduced,

The overall economy no longer has to pay them to do something the machine will do basically for free, so that thing will cost less. Now, this might mean that one specific person loses a $50,000 salary and in exchange the average person (including them) has their costs reduced by $50/year, because that job was only done by one in a thousand people.

But that $50,000 in total is still out there in the pockets of those 1000 people, and they're going to spend it on something instead, and that something is going to create some other new job for that person.

The person who was previously making $50,000/year may not like this. They may even end up with a new job paying $45,000/year and the other $5000 goes to someone else, even though their cost of living only went down by the same $50/year as everyone else. But each $50/year, each occupation that gets automated, adds up. And when you automate more of the old jobs it turns into $5000/year per person or more and outweighs the cost not just on average but for even the people who had to change careers.

> they're just going to have to find some other form of work to pay their bills.

But that's just what they'll do, unless there is no other work that needs to be done. Which would imply that everything should be really cheap.

> The existence of automation and industry does not mean that manual labor under terrible conditions ceases to exist.

It ceases to exist to the extent it has been automated. If you automate half of something but not the other half, the problem is not the half you've automated, it's the half you haven't yet.

And it's not as if no one is trying to increase the level of automation in general. If your objection is that nobody has automated parts of agriculture yet then forget about AI and focus your efforts on accomplishing that.

Because most people can't do this or even know what you mean by this sentence. There is a reason why developers exist, and it's not because they can code per se. They solve problems that people don't know how to, and the code is just a means to that end.

Forced.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

> which was accompanied by an increase in widespread disease outbreaks and malnutrition.

And yet average lifespans went up, because what came before was even worse.

And then the world gained the germ theory of disease and penicillin and they went up even more.

> In countries like England, this had an immediate disastrous impact on health and lifespans relative to fairly stable trend under feudalism.

You can clearly see the start of the industrial revolution on this life expectancy chart, and the consequences:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Li...

> Likewise, having been dispossessed of lands they were previously free to exist and work on for many generations, many adult and child were, in effect, kidnapped, as the only other choice was starvation and death.

Dispossessed of the lands? The peasants didn't own the land. They were serfs who genuinely didn't have a choice because the alternative was to be executed or left to "starvation and death."

Industrialization was the first time they actually had a choice. There were still agricultural workers -- somebody was growing the food -- but now you could go into the city, which generally paid better. Or paid at all, contrary to historical norms. And you had a choice of what you did. Working long hours in a factory wasn't as easy as working for a grocer, but it paid better, and people chose it willingly.

This was the thing that truly ended slavery in the first world -- before if you were a slave or a serf and you ran off, you would be left to die alone in the wilderness. Now you could run off to the city and get a job in a factory, and live, and make money. The old system was defunct because the plantation owners were never going to keep people there by force once escape meant profit rather than death.

> unless you somehow think the formation of the Labour Party in England was unrelated to these developments.

This was obviously the period during which unions entered the scene, but notice that unions have significantly declined in the US since then and "labor laws" like the minimum wage haven't kept up with inflation, and yet minimum wage jobs are uncommon because employers still have to compete for labor even in the absence of unions or labor laws.

The place where this falls down is when they don't, i.e. when you have a monopoly or a company town which is the only employer for some occupation or region. Which is a legitimate problem if you have a regulatory environment that allows that to happen, but the solution to it isn't "labor laws" or unions, because a monopoly is a problem for more than just workers. You have to bust them up and prevent them from forming.

At which point the rest of that stuff is just inefficient ways to mitigate the consequences a problem that should be solved properly instead.

This may be tangential - but I’d like to point out, that while the Luddite movement may be painted as espousing the former, my readings have actually suggested the latter. In “Writings of the Luddites” they very much state that they have no problems with the machines, just that they wanted them not to be used in “dishonest” ways. Of course, movements of moderate sizes will include a spectrum of ideas so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the first camp were in the mix, but it’s worth noting!