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Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking of this recently from the perspective of AI as the new mechanization. Not a brilliant idea, but the reason luddites destroyed the looms was because they saw themselves as mechanical beings. Most of the work done in society was mechanical. We made things. Very few people were responsible for thinking.

Now, society is information based, and we see ourselves as the thinking machines.

Just as the industrial revolution didn't remove humans from all mechanical work, AI won't remove us from all knowledge work, but I believe it will uncover the next level of humanity. If we're not only mechanical, and we're not only cerebral, what are we?

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The luddites did not destroy the looms because they objected to the idea of mechanized looms, but because they objected to the politics and exploitation pushed by those introducing the looms: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/brian-merchant/bl...

You realize we are mechanical, thinking beings. What else is left for us to do?

Social engagement. There has always been a small segment of people able to make a life that way, but with the other two concerns out of the way it opens the floodgates.

This is the conclusion I've been coming around to as well.

> There has alwasy been a small segment of people able to make a life that way

This is the same with the move from mechanical to thinking. There was always a small segment of "thinkers" for everyone else, it was secondary to their mechanical abilities.

What has me thinking now is, if this is true, when we figure out how machines can be social, do we unlock another element of humanity which we don't recognize or appreciate yet?

We can legally own things. Maybe in the future, our income is derived from farming our AI servers. Just hook them into a broader network and allow people to hire them out for AI tasks. We just focus on building our bot army.

But you're not building that AI server from the chip level, you're buying it.

If most of the money is made from renting servers, the manufacturers will only rent servers. They have nothing to gain by cutting themselves out of the revenue stream and introducing a secondary market.

We are also feeling beings with desires and aversions - we can judge things as that which we want vs that which we don't.

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