The Software Revolution

"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it."

This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a weaver or a smith. You have dedicated your life to mastering the craft and slowly produce products by hand. Now a textile factory or a foundry opens up. You will suddenly find it impossible to make your products profitably. Not only will you be out of work, but so will all of your colleagues in the rest of the country.

Or imagine you are a farmer, and then the green revolution happens. In 1870, 80% of the US population was in agriculture. Today, its under 2%.

In both of these cases, it will seem like the end of the world to the displaced workers. But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.

I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get.

> But I worry we learned the wrong lessons from recent examples, and these two issues—huge-scale destruction of jobs, and concentration of huge power—are getting lost.

Yet, we still promote "beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission". You can't have both -- "legislative safeguards" and a bunch of entrepreneurs running around begging forgiveness when they create destruction.

It reads as if you're asking for a mechanism for a future technological event explained purely in terms of present technology. The whole "existential risk" concerns aren't about what present systems can do, they're about what future self-improving system might do. If we postulate this hypothetical software becoming smarter than humans, arguing about what will or won't be easy for it becomes a bit silly, like a chimp trying to predict how well a database can scale.

Industrialization, massification, standardization of production and moving to big cities have had tough consequences on worker's life. Charlie Chaplin shows just that. It was a tougher life than traditional community life with flexible work amounts.

You could definitely argue that there was an improvement in caloric supply (except in some countries). For the general happiness, though, industrial revolution has been a tough time.

Step 1) People will be paid for their data. Information used by systems doesn't spontaneously come into existence.

Step 2) Get rid of governments. They're inefficient war-mongers. A theatre to obfuscate kleptocracy!

Step 3) See step 1. You can pay me in cryptocurrency. Thanks.