Technology

I suspect that, in 50 years or so, we’ll look back at this time as the beginning of the “AI Revolution”, and see it as an overall net positive.

For the wealthy, yes. Investors love having less mouths to feed.

Writers and artists are very obvious casualties. Many other workers will find their jobs affected by AI as well. However, it’s also worth noting that we are nowhere near strong, general purpose AI.

That's part of the problem. We'll be lowering our standards to accept whatever formulated method of culture experience gets spoon fed to us, while true art goes by the wayside, along with creativity. Granted that's already happening in many entertainment industries, this just further accelerates the fad-chasing and reduces the set of levers that executives have to just tweaking formulas until the audiences match with their wallets. A true AGI might have an inkling or spark of creativity versus the formulaic results you get from model driven AI.

And what AI is likely to become, for now, is a tool to increase the productivity of professionals. It will mean that fewer people are needed to perform a task. But, there will still be a need for people to oversee the and direct the AI.

Fewer people, meanwhile our population continues to increase. That means housing and healthcare continue in the trajectory of being less accessible to the majority.

The Industrial Revolution wasn’t the end of the world, neither was the Digital Revolution or the Internet Revolution. The AI Revolution won’t be the end of the world either.

I have to say, I disagree. The end of the world doesn't come abruptly but in the form of a slow decline. I look around at young people who go into horrendous debt for a higher education that doesn't even benefit them, which then delays the timeframe they can start house shopping, only to find a housing market that's beyond the reach of even some of our most highly paid professionals. I see articles like "why 125k isn't enough anymore" and then the concepts of being "financially sound" being around 3 times higher than what people actually make.

I look at what you wrote and I'd love to believe in an optimistic future where this elevates us further out of the mundane and makes time for more creative endeavors and satisfying healthy work, but I instead see a bleak future with less opportunity and a higher dependence on public assistance programs for the majority just to get by.