The first thing this wave of automation seems likely to replace is automation itself.
For this reason it's hard for me to give much attention to comparisons to previous industrial revolutions. It would have looked way different if the first thing they built was a factory factory.
I will give this post some slack though, it was written in 2023.
Replacing a deterministic factory that makes one type of car that always comes with seatbelts and airbags with a probabilistic vibestruder that churns out carlike objects that usually drive and typically have something that resembles an airbag.
> It took over a century to go from Oliver Twist to the broad Post-WWII Middle Class. How long this time?
It may be optimistic to assume any path even exists this time (or at least that any path exists without violent revolution).
I won't pretend to know what will actually happen in the future, but the long road from Oliver Twist to middle class prosperity was paved in large part by labor realizing they have collective bargaining power and wielding that as a weapon to slowly forge a seat at the table. That weapon goes away in a world where a majority of people no longer have any individual labor power to collectivize.
It does not stop at negotiation power, if your economic value is epsilon above zero, what do you have to offer to exchange for food calories? I'm already seeing things being assessed on a Joules/Token basis.
The whole 'AI can't automate a lot of jobs, because that's exactly what everyone in the past said about technological advances then!' is a classic fallacious argument. It simply fails as a logical thought pattern. Past technological gains that happened decades or a century plus ago are discrete events separated by time and space from today. 'It didn't happen in the past so it can't happen today' is the same logic as 'I've flipped this coin and gotten heads 5 times, so it will land on heads on every future throw too'. It's completely possible that several times in the past, humanity was wrong about widespread job automation- but they can be right this time.
The whole argument just irritates me on a logical basis. You're basically saying 'the future will unfold exactly the way the past did'. No that doesn't follow at all. We may have dodged widespread automation in past history, but that doesn't mean it will automatically happen every time in the future. You haven't discovered like an Iron Law Of History that repeats every single time. You're just reasoning from a very small sample size and overfitting. Sorry for the rant, the whole argument just annoys me
He says something like "we fixed the problems with cars". I say "what problems and what we"? Technologies change the social and political order, sometimes preventing us from solving their problems.
In the U.S., cars changed the landscape in a very different way from the rest of the world. Because the car industry got a lot of political clout they were able to restrict public transportation (particularly in cities) and built an environment where you're barely functional without a car if you live outside New York or San Francisco (both cities had public transportation before the car industry came up). The rest of the world uses a lot more buses, trains and bicycles than the U.S. does.
Cars created a world with methyl-lead gasoline, global warming, corrupt petro-cleptocracies and several other distortions that we didn't completely fix yet. Mr. Gates only talks about accidents and drunken-drivers. That was easy because the responsible for those problems don't have political and economic clout. Now good luck trying to fix the problems caused by people with lots of money or lots of votes.
You'll need to go back another 1000 years or so for Jeremiah and friends, but they were masters of the oh-now-this-time-you're-really-gonna-get-it-just-you-wait-and-see polemic. These modern-day doomers are weak
Would love to know what he thinks nowadays
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-...
https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-c...
The first thing this wave of automation seems likely to replace is automation itself.
For this reason it's hard for me to give much attention to comparisons to previous industrial revolutions. It would have looked way different if the first thing they built was a factory factory.
I will give this post some slack though, it was written in 2023.
Replacing a deterministic factory that makes one type of car that always comes with seatbelts and airbags with a probabilistic vibestruder that churns out carlike objects that usually drive and typically have something that resembles an airbag.
It took over a century to go from Oliver Twist to the broad Post-WWII Middle Class. How long this time?
Why do you think there's a law that will make it happen again? A large, empowered middle class is a historical anomaly, not a law of nature.
The question is, if we're going to erase that anomaly, what can you do to be among the winners?
> It took over a century to go from Oliver Twist to the broad Post-WWII Middle Class. How long this time?
It may be optimistic to assume any path even exists this time (or at least that any path exists without violent revolution).
I won't pretend to know what will actually happen in the future, but the long road from Oliver Twist to middle class prosperity was paved in large part by labor realizing they have collective bargaining power and wielding that as a weapon to slowly forge a seat at the table. That weapon goes away in a world where a majority of people no longer have any individual labor power to collectivize.
It does not stop at negotiation power, if your economic value is epsilon above zero, what do you have to offer to exchange for food calories? I'm already seeing things being assessed on a Joules/Token basis.
The whole 'AI can't automate a lot of jobs, because that's exactly what everyone in the past said about technological advances then!' is a classic fallacious argument. It simply fails as a logical thought pattern. Past technological gains that happened decades or a century plus ago are discrete events separated by time and space from today. 'It didn't happen in the past so it can't happen today' is the same logic as 'I've flipped this coin and gotten heads 5 times, so it will land on heads on every future throw too'. It's completely possible that several times in the past, humanity was wrong about widespread job automation- but they can be right this time.
The whole argument just irritates me on a logical basis. You're basically saying 'the future will unfold exactly the way the past did'. No that doesn't follow at all. We may have dodged widespread automation in past history, but that doesn't mean it will automatically happen every time in the future. You haven't discovered like an Iron Law Of History that repeats every single time. You're just reasoning from a very small sample size and overfitting. Sorry for the rant, the whole argument just annoys me
Yeah it's up there with "they also believed at Dartmouth they will have AGI in a year"
AI can automate a lot of jobs because that is exactly what happened in the past.
AI cannot automate all jobs because the purpose of many jobs is to have a human do a thing for you e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
Just like with STDs
This page fails to load for me (Firefox on MacOS with UBlock Origin AND DNS-level pi-hole adblock)
https://www.gatesnotes.com/search-reader?readerfocus=the-ris...
This link works, though
His analogy misses a lot of subtleties.
Consider cars.
He says something like "we fixed the problems with cars". I say "what problems and what we"? Technologies change the social and political order, sometimes preventing us from solving their problems.
In the U.S., cars changed the landscape in a very different way from the rest of the world. Because the car industry got a lot of political clout they were able to restrict public transportation (particularly in cities) and built an environment where you're barely functional without a car if you live outside New York or San Francisco (both cities had public transportation before the car industry came up). The rest of the world uses a lot more buses, trains and bicycles than the U.S. does.
Cars created a world with methyl-lead gasoline, global warming, corrupt petro-cleptocracies and several other distortions that we didn't completely fix yet. Mr. Gates only talks about accidents and drunken-drivers. That was easy because the responsible for those problems don't have political and economic clout. Now good luck trying to fix the problems caused by people with lots of money or lots of votes.
This is so incredibly naive to me; the problem isn't AI, it's (as always) profit-above-all driven sociopaths that are running the show.
Bill Gates should stick to pretending to be a philanthropist. I.e., don’t quit your day job, Bill.
“Everything was fine before, so it’ll be fine now” is the level of argument I expect to find in thousand-year old religious texts.
The article is being shared to contrast with Bill's recent post "The turbulent AI era is here": https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-c...
Discussion on this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451313
You'll need to go back another 1000 years or so for Jeremiah and friends, but they were masters of the oh-now-this-time-you're-really-gonna-get-it-just-you-wait-and-see polemic. These modern-day doomers are weak