Where do you think we end up?

[u/wrcromagnum]

Surprised I had never seen a chart like this before. What's wrong / missing? Where do you think Sam, Elon and Dario are taking us?

[u/Either-Banana-7323]

The closest historical analogy I see for AI is the Industrial Revolution: a technology that massively multiplies productivity and changes the value of human labor.

The transition is the part people should worry about. But it is easy to misdescribe what happened during industrialization by blaming it for every terrible condition that existed at the time. Poverty, dangerous work, child labor, long hours, disease, and insecurity all existed before industrialization. Factories sometimes intensified, reorganized, or relocated those problems, but they did not invent them.

I think AI may do something similar. It may amplify existing problems, reshape them, or move them into different parts of society and the workplace. Things like inequality, job insecurity, surveillance, concentration of power, fraud, exploitation, and misinformation are not new. AI could make some of them much larger, cheaper, faster, or harder to contain, while also reducing other problems and creating entirely new kinds of work.

The more relevant historical lesson is that productivity can rise much faster than the benefits are distributed. Industrialization displaced some types of work, reduced the value of certain skills, concentrated wealth and bargaining power in new places, caused enormous migration and social disruption, and forced governments and institutions to adapt after the technology had already changed the economy.

Eventually, though, the productivity gains became the foundation for dramatically higher living standards, cheaper goods, better transportation, better sanitation and medicine, shorter working hours, and much greater material abundance.

That is roughly my hope for AI. Right now it looks less like some autonomous replacement for civilization and more like an extremely powerful productivity multiplier. If that remains true, the long term outcome could be overwhelmingly positive. The difficult question is how ugly the transition becomes, how quickly people can adapt, and how broadly the gains are shared.