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Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but we've already painted ourselves into a corner by almost a century of moving all that work onto computers.

Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control? What is there to gain from it? I don't think I have to convince anyone how much there is to lose.

The situation being created with an overdependence on AI is looking much more like the burning of Alexandria, and less like a utopian dream or even the oft-warned-about authoritarian hellscape. The AI hype is over and revealed to be delusional and politically motivated.

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>>Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control?

Trust me a fair bit of boomers and the generation before lost jobs to computer automation in the 1990s through the 2000s. And they used pretty much the same justification, every bit of work, take for example designing something like a machine spare that was earlier done through painstaking process of bringing the thing to life from the meticulous work on the drafting board till machining was now in the domain of computers.

In India alone, banking jobs were considered those commanding tremendous prestige and income potential, got automated through computers. Tax consultants, accountants, postal services etc etc. The list is endless.

AI is some what like that for us in this generation.

For many of those automations, we're worse off for them.

Like not being able to get some actual human when you call support, and talking to some fucking automatic system.

This includes many of the " 1990s through the 2000s" ones, and earlier ones too. Sometimes what was lost was an added layer of attention and quality that was previously required, but it was sacrificed away for efficiency.

That really depends on who is the one that benefits from automation. Companies automate support systems in order to keep their support staff small, because apparently for many of them it is more profitable to frustrate their customers with crappy support than to pay more support staff to do a better job.

In addition to your last paragraph: lots of things that we used to do the less efficient way had side-benefits that were not immediately obvious, probably because they compounded over time. Now that we're not doing them anymore, we notice all kinds of widespread societal problems (in particular among young people) that come up that were never there before.

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