The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.
The AI people point to post 1950s style employment and say 'people recovered after industrial advance' and ignore the 1880s through the 1940s. We actually have zero idea if the buggy whip manufacturer ever recovered or just lasted a year in skid row before giving up completely, or lived through the 2 world wars spurred by mechanisation.
I did a deep research into the decline of horses and it was consistent with fewer births, not mass slaughter. The US Department of Agriculture has great records during this time, though they’re not fully digitized.
One would argue also if you don't see this, it's because you'd prefer not to.
If we had at least a somewhat functioning safety net, or UBI, or both, you'd at least have an argument to be made, but we don't. AI and it's associated companies' business model is, if not killing people, certainly attempting to make lots of lives worse at scale. I wouldn't work for one for all the money in the world.
and even if AI becomes good enough to replace most humans the economic surplus does not disappear
it's a coordination problem
in many places on Earth social safety nets are pretty robust, and if AI helps to reduce cost of providing basic services then it won't be a problem to expand those safety nets
...
there's already a pretty serious anti-inequality (or at least anti-billionaire) storm brewing, the question is can it motivate the necessary structural changes or just fuels yet another dumb populist movement
I don't exactly know how I feel about those, but I respect those criticisms. I think the grand synthesis is that UBI exists on top of existing safety nets.
Not only would there be more people on the streets protesting against real or perceived cuts;
there also would be fewer movements based on exclusivist ideologies protesting _in favour of cuts_*
* e.g. racist groups in favour of cutting some kinds of welfare because of racial associations
... also, one pretty practical problem with UBI is that cost of living varies wildly. And if it depends on location then people would register in a high-CoL place and live in a low-CoL place. (Which is what remote work already should be doing, but many companies are resistant to change.)
In theory it makes sense to have easy to administer targeted interventions, because then there's a lot of data (and "touch points" - ie. interaction with the people who actually get some benefit), so it's possible to do proper cost-benefit analyses.
Of course this doesn't work because allocation is over-overpoliticized, people want all kinds of means-testing and other hoops for people to jump through. (Like the classic prove you still have a disability and people with Type I diabetes few years have to get a fucking paper.)
So when it comes to any kind of safety net it should be as automatic as possible, but at least as targeted as negative income tax. UBI might fit depending on one's definition.
Epstein was ahead of his times...
I'm not up to speed here -- is Bill Gates doing work to reduce the birth rates in Africa?
When the Covid-truther geniuses "figured out" that "Bill Gates was behind Covid", they pulled out things like this as "proof" that his master plan is to reduce the world's population. Not to reduce the rate of increase, but to kill them (because of course these geniuses don't understand derivatives)...
> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.
> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.
> But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less.
While most of the text is written from cold economic(ish) standpoint it is really hard not to get bleak impression from it. And the last three sentences express that in vague way too. Some ambiguity is left on purpose so you can interpret the daunting impression your way.
The article presents you with crushing juxtaposition, implicates insane dangers, and leaves you with the feeling of inevitability. Then back to work, I guess.
> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.
Horses typically live between 25 to 30 years. I agree with OP that most likely those horses were not decimated (killed) but just died out and people stopped mass breeding them. Also as other noticed chart shows 'horses PER person in US'. Population between 1900 and 1950 increased from 1.5B to 2.5B (globally but probably similarly almost 70% increase in US).
I think depends what do you worry about:
1) `that human population decrease 50-80%`?
I don't worry about it even if that happen. 200 years ago human population was ~1 B today is ~8 B. At year 0 AD human population was ~0.250 B. Did we 200 years ago worry about it like "omg human population is only 1 B" ?
I doubt human population decrease 80% because of no demand for human as workforce but I don't see problem if it decrease by 50%. There will short transition period with surplus of retired people and work needed to keep the infrastructure but if robots can help with this then I don't see the problem.
2) `That we will not be needed and we will loose jobs?`
I don't see work like something in demand. Most people hate their jobs or do crappy jobs. What do people actually worry about that they will won't get any income. And actually not even about that - they worry that they will not be able to survive or be homeless. If there is improvement in production that food, shelter, transportation, healtcare is dirty cheap (all stuff from bottom maslov piramid) and fair distribution on social level then I also see a way this can be no problem.
3) `That we will all die because of AI`
This I find more plausable and maybe not even by AGI but earlier because of big social unrests during transition period.
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/ending-poverty
From 1990 to 2014, the world made remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty, with over one billion people moving out of that condition. The global poverty rate decreased by an average of 1.1 percentage points each year, from 37.8 percent to 11.2 percent in 2014.
I see quite the opposite, and have very little hope that reduced reliance on labor will increase the equability of distribution of wealth.
Historically, advanced civilizations with better production capabilities don't necessarily do better in war if they lack "practice". Sad but true. Maybe not in 21st century, but who knows.
Check this out - https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart. The US is increasingly a miserable place to live in, and the worse it gets the more their people double down on being shitty.
Fun fact: Fit 2 lines on that data and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far off. Set a reminder on your phone: Chinese dream.
We are truly and profoundly fucked.
That at least is the fantasy of these people. Fortunately. LLMs don't really work, Tesla cars are still built by KUKA robots (while KUKA has a fraction of Tesla's P/E) and data centers in space are a cocaine fueled dream.