Jed Frankowski

so far at least, i'm pretty sure AI has been net job-creating. this was not what i expected--although i was much less pessimistic than others, i thought by this level of capability we'd have seen some impact. it is possible this direction keeps going!

is it me or fable 5 is using english premium? i'm having trouble understanding half of the words it writes. Absolutely language-mogging me

A prediction on what will happen in the next 20 years with ai. But first, some bro-history: - steam engine gets invented in 1712 in england by Thomas Newcomen. - its first job is boring: pumping water out of flooded coal mines. that's all it did for 60 years. - then James Watt makes it way more efficient in 1769, and now you can power factories with it. cotton mills everywhere. the modern factory is born. - 100s of of thousands of craftsmen who made fabrics by hand... were pissed. this damn machine's taking everything we've worked for. - so they start breaking the machines at night, in organized crews. one mill owner even gets murdered. england freaks out, makes machine-breaking a CAPITAL OFFENSE - the craftsmen signed all their threat letters "General Ned Ludd"...a completely made-up guy, so there was no leader to hang. - that's why we call them Luddites. - well, the Luddites lost. trade destroyed. their jobs never came back. - for the next 30-50 years, the economy boomed but wages stayed FLAT. - all the gains went to factory owners. this period is call "Engels' Pause." - named after Friedrich Engels, the son of a rich mill owner. Engel managed family's cotton factory. he looked around Manchester and wrote a whole book saying this system is grinding people to death. "a dogs life", he said. - then he meets Karl Marx (1844), hands him all the factory data, and funds him for DECADES off the mill profits. communism was literally bankrolled by cotton dividends. - meanwhile the railroads (steam engine on wheels) gets invented and get huge fast. entire new jobs that never existed before come about. 600,000 railway workers. new cities. the world transforms. - around 1850, wages finally take off. New cities form. The world changes for the better. The takeaway: When new technology comes, thins may be bad at first. But over time, things typically get far far better. If the goal is to decrease time in the pain cave for the average joe (and also make money): 1. pick which industries will explode (hard). for example: the coal indsutry blew up with steam engine. as did railroads (which wasn't even an industry at first) 2. compress the time for a new tech to become ubiquitous. took steam engine 50 years because factories and railroads are slow to make, internet 15 years, will ai be faster? 2. speed up the ability to reorganize companies and society around this new tech. hoe fast can you invent tangent products and industries? My opinion on all this is: the fear around ai is the same fear other eras had around new tech. And there will be pain - but there's a playbook on how to make it all a net positive.