Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was some article here on HN a while back that framed this much better for me. It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and productivity advances are going to reduce the people necessary by a drastic degree. There's lots of stats like Ikea factories making 17x the bookcases they did in 1985 but with the same number of staff. But even in our technical and development niche, look at s…
> It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and productivity advances are going to reduce the people necessary by a drastic degree. That's been happening for hundreds of years. It's actually going more slowly now - productivity growth is some of the slowest that we've seen over the past 70 years[1]. It seems more likely that flashy tech (like articles about self driving cars and drone…
From another thread:
Today I have already consumed more sugar than most of my distant ancestors would see in a year. The device i hold in my pocket reminds me that it is time to perform the action, and so i will perform the action. I sit down about 10 hours a day, and I have never once hunted for an animal I would eat, nor retried food from nature to consume, aside from a few raspberries on the hill in my parents' back yard when I was a child.
The contours of my life are dictated largely by a curious system called 'capitalism', a distributed computational mechanism whereby larger numbers of agents act with only one goal: to maximize their own utilities. I think capitalism is a mostly benevolent AI attempting to limit the oppressive conditions of our reality's scarcity, and to allow billions of us to live on a planet that can only support so many hunter-gatherers per square meter. Many suspect it is not benevolent. They may easily be right.
The singularity is already upon us; it's unevenly distributed. It started with the sedentary shift. Agricultural societies dropped the egalitarian nature of their ancestors, they had lower average health, and they had a tiny elite cast of nobles presiding over a much larger population of what were essentially slaves. As hunter-gatherer population increased, fighting was more frequent. An army of slaves beats a smaller contingent of well-fed free men. This terrible knowledge was the apple in the garden. What we call our written history is essentially the singularity playing itself out, as knowledge accumulates, depends, reflects itself, and expands.
Our lives are already controlled by this embodied, accumulated knowledge. Capitalism, rule by the head, our tools are knowledge condensed into matter, and we are controlled by them, living lives as far from our natural environments as cows in a farm or chickens in tiny cages, towering over the streets of hong kong.
I don't think it's destroying us, any more than we seek to destroy chickens or cows. Well, sometimes we do. I had a veggie burger for lunch today though.