Stables became gas stations. Nintendo used to be a toymaker.

Businesses change and adapt. Workers too — but people often don’t like change, so many choose to stay behind. Should we cater to them?

I used to do a lot of work which is now mostly automated. Things like sysadmin work, spinning up instances and configuring them manually, maintaining them. I reconverted and learned terraform, aws etc when it became popular.

Should I have gotten help from the government to instead stick to old style sysadmin work?

> Should I have gotten help from the government to instead stick to old style sysadmin work?

I don't think anyone beyond a few marginal voices are calling for a ban on job automation. What they seem to prefer is that, if they are to be automated out of a job, they should be compensated for their copyrighted works having been used in the process of doing so.

Regardless, at the very least people who are being automated should get some government support. Not everyone can easily retrain.

Suppose you're a weaver. It's hard, fiddly work, and you have to get your timing and your tension just right to make quality material. Now, there are mechanised looms that can do the job faster (though the quality's not great: they could still do with some improvement, in your opinion). From this efficiency gain, who should reap the profits?

Suppose you're a farmer. You've been working on your tractors for decades, and have even showed the nice folk at John Deere how you do it. Now they've built your improvements into the mass-produced models, and they say you can't work on your tractors any more. Who should reap the profits?

Suppose you're a writer. You've spent a long time reading and writing, producing essays and articles and books and poems and plays, honing your craft. You've got quite a few choice phrases and figures of speech in your back pocket, for when you want to give a particular impression. Now, there is a great big statistical model that can vomit your coinages (mixed in with others') all over the page, about any topic, in mere minutes. Who should reap the profits?

Suppose you're a visual artist. You enjoy spending your time making depictions of fantasy scenes: you have a vivid imagination, and, so you can make a living illustrating book covers and the like. You put your portfolio online, because why not? It doesn't hurt you, it makes others happy, and maybe it gets you an extra gig or two, now and then. Except now, there's a great big latent diffusion model. Plug in “Trending on Artstation by Greg Rutkowski”, and it will spit out detailed fantasy scenes, photorealistic people, the works. Nothing particularly novel, but there was so much creativity and diversity in your artwork, that few have the eye to notice the machine's subtle unoriginality. Who should reap the profits?

I've answered this before. The container revolution split some of the resulting profits with those whose livelihoods were destroyed, the longshoremen.

"You build a dam that destroys 10000 homes, who should reap the profits?"

It's a good answer, but it raises further questions:

• Should we be destroying people's homes to build dams without their consent?

• In general, are people being compensated when these things happen to them? i.e., while it might be nice, does this actually happen?

The Luddites (the real ones, not the mythological bastardisation of them) continue to be sympathetic characters.

> • In general, are people being compensated when these things happen to them? i.e., while it might be nice, does this actually happen?

The famous: "it depends" :-)

AI most likely falls under: "they should be", IMHO.

I don't think we should cater to Luddites, but (and it's a big but) if we automate enough jobs out of existence it's essentially undeniable that we will need systemic changes to avoid becoming a completely dystopian society.

But as the corollary to that, I know of zero successfully stopped technological revolutions. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and there is no way to stop progress, aside from a one-world authoritarian government that forcibly stops as much of it as they can. But even that would only be marginally effective. Progress would eventually resume.

Yes, you do know of revolutions stopped and it worked for centuries.

Tokugawa Japan, Qing China, many other places including in Europe for centuries.

That's too extreme.

My point is that we're reaching a point where people need to be compensated. We can't just destroy their lives, collect all the money in 2 bank accounts and call it a day.

Bingo.

That's the real flaw in Luddite thinking -- you can destroy the machines.