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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

We've transitioned from "most people were farmers" to "most people make stuff" to "most people are in services". Both transitions eliminated the majority of jobs. By corralary I'd be willing to bet that robots increase employment rather than decrease it.

But i wouldn't give very great odds.

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>* By corralary I'd be willing to bet that robots increase employment rather than decrease it.*

I guess that begs the question - how? The transitions you mentioned, as you said, eliminated a ton of jobs. This appears to be no different in the sense that computers and robots will do more both traditionally "skilled" and "unskilled" jobs alike. Perhaps the notion of what a job actually is, or how people view work. I don't know.

I imagine each time the next step was obvious. This time not so much.

It was far from obvious. The first transition spawned a huge amount of philosophical treatises on what to do when a lot of the jobs go away. Marx being the most well known.

And even today the second transition is still not obvious to everybody. There are still a lot of people today who think jobs making stuff are "real jobs" and service sector jobs are lesser.

These transitions also enable new forms of mass killing until society figures out the new equilibrium. The genocidal regimes of the 20th century wouldn't have been possible without multiple technologies (train lines to orchestrate, long-distance mass media to bind a group of people around a single narrative). We may have to go through another wave of mass death or dictatorship enabled by AI. It's hard enough to escape a dictatorship as is, but when they get their hands on the asymmetric power of robots and AI surveillance, they're probably impossible to remove.

Military/police power that doesn’t depend on actual humans following orders does sound like a scarily stable system. Can’t exactly carry out an insurrection if all humans are outgunned 100 to 1. At least today, the threat of a coup or mass uprising exists.

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