It was a bunch of small changes over the course of 200 years but yes that's perfectly comparible to the effects needed to justify the valuation put into all the AI companies right now... but I was talking about the issues with comparing it to singular inventions like the cotton gin or jacquard loom that DO largely only affect one industry.
I think it's weird there's so much pushback on the idea that if the hype proves true and it /can/ replace basically any knowledge worker (and potentially drive robots replacing physical laborers) that that would have a bit of a larger effect than inventions that affect some parts of some industries...
There's plenty of space to think it just won't happen (where I'm personally at, at least on the current LLM driven versions) but if it does work the broad spread of the impact would require a huge amount of change all at once.
> I was talking about the issues with comparing it to singular inventions like the cotton gin or jacquard loom
Ok, appreciate the clarification. But in that time frame there have been a number of really tectonic inventions that changed pretty much everything: steam power, ICE power, electrification, refrigeration, computing and the internet, just to name a few off the top of my head.
> There's plenty of space to think it just won't happen (where I'm personally at, at least on the current LLM driven versions)
Same. I am both optimistic about human ability to find new jobs, and skeptical that "AI" is going to make that necessary in the new future.
That amount of change over 200 years is vastly different from the supposed timeline for AI to 'change everything' is the core of the difference. Over that long there's time for people to retrain into other jobs and there's enough people not significantly affected by the change that society as a whole can roll on and support the affected people. Mass disruption and joblessness is extremely destabilizing.
I get what you are saying, and I don't think you are wrong, but it has been like 100 monumental changes in 200 years. The demographic shift of the industrial revolution was particularly painful, to be sure. But we seem to be pretty good at coping with them, overall.
And again, I remain skeptical that general artificial intelligence is actually that close at hand.
I think it's weird there's so much pushback on the idea that if the hype proves true and it /can/ replace basically any knowledge worker (and potentially drive robots replacing physical laborers) that that would have a bit of a larger effect than inventions that affect some parts of some industries...
There's plenty of space to think it just won't happen (where I'm personally at, at least on the current LLM driven versions) but if it does work the broad spread of the impact would require a huge amount of change all at once.