Yet another
"AI will cause the sky to fall" thread.
This brings to mind the classic story of the invention of the automatic knitting machine back in the 16th Century. At a time when technology in the textile industry meant spinning wheels and hand looms, clergyman William Lee invented a machine that could knit stockings.
In 1589, Lee applied for a Royal Patent for his knitting machine. Queen Elizabeth I of England was extremely alarmed and said:
Quote:
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"Consider thou what the invention [of the automatic knitting machine] would do to my poor subjects," she pointed out. "It would assuredly bring them to ruin by depriving them of employment and thus make them beggars.”
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The above is from
"History of the Framework Knitters" written by Gravenor Henson back in 1831 in England. Hensen's thesis was that hosiery, lace and all other industries must be regulated by the government so as to maintain a decent living standard for the workers and fair conditions of trade, that British industries must be protected from direct foreign competition and, more particularly, from industrial espionage, migration of skilled workmen to other countries, and export of innovative machinery such as the knitting machine.
Clearly, the world didn't quite turn out the way they feared. As a direct result of that innovation, productivity went
up, GDP went
up, the standard of living went
up, and there was no widespread unemployment or starvation as a result of automatic weaving and knitting machines. Just the opposite, of course: more people were raised out of abject poverty as a result of the disruption as far more jobs were created than destroyed.
***
It also brings to mind the story of the greatest crisis the planet had ever known. No, not the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 - the Great Manure Crisis of 1894.
Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transportation, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 taxi cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. There were countless carts, drays, and wagons, all horse-powered and all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures exist for any great city of the time.
The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced over 2.5 Million pounds of horse manure per day, all of which had to be swept up and disposed of. What do you do with all the manure?
Businesses were formed to scoop poop. You hire men to scoop and sweep 2.5 million pounds of manure and even more straw soaked in 250,000 gallons of horse urine each day, and load it into carts pulled by yet more horses to Take It Elsewhere.
The problem seemed to have no solution. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Futurists of 130 years ago estimated that by 1950 every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay and grain to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by yet more horse-drawn vehicles.
It seemed that urban civilization was doomed and would fall under the weight of all that manure (or drown in the nearly 2.5 gallons of urine each and every horse produced per day).
In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York; one of its goals was to figure out what to do about all the horse manure. The conference was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses, manure and urine.
Obviously, the trend that couldn't go on forever -- and, well, it didn't.
The invention of the internal combustion engine and commercialization of the automobile changed all that by supplanting the need for horses.
But what about all those unemployed pooper scoopers? And unemployed stable-hands for the fleet of hundreds of thousands of horses worldwide? Wouldn't they be turned into beggars? Would they sit around and whine?
They all transitioned to work that has higher value than scooping poop and warehousing horses. The world became better. Productivity went
up, GDP went
up, the standard of living went
up, and there was no widespread unemployment or starvation as a result of the transition from horse-powered transportation to internal combustion-powered transportation.
****
Accurately forecasting decades into the future is exceedingly difficult.
For example, back in 1900, about 60% of the US population was
directly involved in agriculture, farming, and ranching. Today, it is less than 4%.
Imagine that you could go back in time to 1900 & tell learned scholars, politicians, futurists, and business leaders that in far-off 2020 less than 4% of the nation's population would be directly involved in agriculture.
Then imagine you asked them,
"what in the world do you think all the other people will do for a living in far-off 2020?"
Chances are none of those learned scholars and pundits would guess:
- "network engineer,"
- "geneticist,"
- "web designer,"
- "search engine optimization engineer,"
- "industrial robot tech,"
- "radiologist,"
- "professional MMA fighter,"
- "professional football player,"
- "cinematographer,"
- "sound engineer,"
- "microprocessor architect,"
- "telemarketer,"
- "City-Data forum moderator",
- "cryptocurrency miner",
- "social media marketer",
- "physical therapist",
- "occupational therapist,"
- "nuclear reactor technician,"
- "solid state physicist,"
- "white hat hacker"
- "mortgage broker,"
- "Facebook content censor"
- "coronavirus vaccine designer"
-- and the like.
Everyone agrees this is the way it worked throughout history regarding technical innovation and disruptive technologies: society is better off.
Yet somehow, AI scares people (most of whom have no understanding of technology and indeed lack the capacity to spell AI). People just don't get what AI is and does. Journalists write about the dangers of AI but they have zero domain knowledge and have even less subject matter expertise.[/quote]
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