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Comment by dogcomplex | Hacker News Reader

We've had a long history of technological improvements being widespread distributed to the people. There's not a particularly bleak reason to believe the latest AI automation won't be too. Look around your desk or your house and just count all the effort-saving devices that have made their way down to you. Look at the price of TVs cratering. Tech that can be recreated easily spreads far and wide. AI can too. It's dropped 1000x in costs the last 2 years. This stuff will be running on old tech everywhere - and speedier and cheaper new chips, bots and other hardware are on their way.

Unless there's a new world war or draconian regulation, we're good. It's pretty much locked in.

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I'm struggling to think of any technological advancement in the past 20 years that's saved me time. The only real change has been a shift to WFH, but that happened independently of technological change in that era. Even things like screen sharing and remote desktop were possible before that time.

25 years ago, sure: online shopping/banking, email and chat -- these are all things my Blackberry or Nokia could handle. The touchscreen smartphone hasn't really moved the needle much in that regard.

This is the core of my original beef, techno-optimism seems divorced from the exact things I think it’s ideologically trying to promote, and instead is just “AI will fix everything”.

And I basically agree about sort of time saving, we got smart phones, which I think was of questionable benefit compared to the invention of computers, the internet, and cell phones in the first place.

Tell me you never called for a taxi and waited two hours for it only not to show up without telling me.

Uber has saved me a remarkable amount of time.

More-generally:

https://gwern.net/improvement

I have waited hours while Lyft driver after Lyft driver canceled and the algorithm kept picking new drivers.

Yeah I actually had an Uber driver show up after like an hour and been like “I’m not taking you there!”

No, I haven't. I live in a city, a cab took 15 mins to arrive after calling the dispatch service. Uber can take just as long, because the request bounces around different drivers in the area, the time to arrive is dependent on which driver accepts the offered rate and how far away they are. I've had to request rides more than once because the Uber-set price was rejected by all nearby drivers.

When I lived rurally (in college) cabs had to be booked in advance, that's just common sense.

You sayin you were capable of ordering any product on earth from your couch and having it delivered within 2 days? Or building an interactive video (modern website) accessible anywhere on earth instantly (all used just to display people's resume and contact details lol)? Or navigate anywhere within minutes from the optimal pathway, without thinking about it? Or research and answer any question you have about anything in the world within a minute? Or hold daily conversations with all your friends in group chats despite vast geographical gaps? Or play games with them in - again - interactive cinematic masterpiece movies accessible anywhere on the planet?

So much time was saved you don't even realize it because most of the above was just practically impossible to do before - and frankly beyond the scope of what any human actually needs. But the scope crept anyway and now they're all normal parts of modern life taken for granted. As for where that time went - capabilities exploded, but any spare time also got eaten by tighter work hours from a more competitive market. That's capitalism for ya baybeeeee

> We've had a long history of technological improvements being widespread distributed to the people. There's not a particularly bleak reason to believe the latest AI automation won't be too.

the difference this time is that humans just moved to other activities where they were useful, and with super-AI(if it will happen) this is not the case anymore.

Progress is not guaranteed.

Humanity has been around in basically the same form for 2 million years (and the same form for probably 200 000 years) yet life for the average person on the planet really started improving circa 1950.

2 million years is a long time. It’s quite a stretch to say life only started improving in the last 50. An asteroid could hit today and nearly all evidence of our existence would be gone in 10k years.

Life expectancy skyrocketed once we discovered and applied hygiene, plus improved sanitation, and also antibiotics. More or less, modern medicine.

The industrial era did a lot of things but it also made cities, famous for being horrible places to live in, even worse. It took the realization of that fact and action against pollution to improve that.

Worker's rights movement also had to spring up for 40 hour work weeks, 2 day weekends, sick leave, unemployment benefits, pensions, disability benefits.

Slavery was barely abolished 150 years ago, and it's still present in some places. Ditto for serfdom.

Hunter gatherers had healthier diets that settled populations thousands of years after the invention of agriculture.

MANY things were better for society and neutral or worst for the average person.

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