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Comment by aivosha | Hacker News Reader

In the video, the analogy between horses loosing out to cars and humans loosing out to AI is false. Humans are the ones building the AI. Horses however did not build the cars. Its a very important distinction we are not at a liberty to dismiss.

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You're missing something. Horse-like animals actually did develop cars. They only had to evolve into humans and build up a technological base before they could do it.

Over a very long period of time, animals developed cars. Now that same development process is remarkably faster, and robots are being developed. The horse analogy is perfectly valid.

Analogies are not meant to be perfect representations of an argument, but rather a facsimile that helps the reader compare and contrast. Your nitpick is therefore irrelevant.

I did not say the analogy is not representative. I said its wrong. Now if horses were building cars and being worried about their future, I'd say fine. But its not the case. Here horses are not in the same position at all as humans. So its not helping to "compare and contrast", its building up a wrong mindset, wrong premise.

It is never made explicit in the video but imagine that corporations are the current dominant super-organism on which the economy depends. Humans are only designing and building cars because corporations have no better way of getting that job done. Thus, humans are used by corporations just as horses were used by humans before the corporation became the dominant economic species on the planet. Corporations may not always need humans to survive.

Just as cars replaced horses for the benefit of human masters, robots may replace humans for the benefit of corporate masters.

You may still disagree with the analogy but I think this is at least the proper analogy to be arguing about.

I think that's an excellent analogy for what's occurring at this stage in humankind's development.

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