Many people casually state that they are unconcerned about AI's supposed threat to employment opportunities for actual humans with mouths to feed and families to educate and care for. Why, look at history, they say; sure, technological disruptions temporarily cause unemployment and the pain that brings, but that always leads to NEW types of employment, NEW opportunities, and NEW paradigms in human ingenuity. It's a GOOD cycle, they hasten to assure us. If we're not on board with it, we are Luddites who resist the march of progress.

Just as those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, those who learn the WRONG lessons from history are up the same creek, possibly trying to use a toaster for a paddle. Because just as every major war is different despite apparent similarities, causing generals to alway prepare for the last one, every technological disruption is different, and it is absurd to apply truisms where they have no business being.

Which brings us to horses. Hardly because they wanted to, for millennia they were among the most important drivers of human enterprise, conquest, massive construction projects, and so on. You cannot point to a single human tool or invention that played a bigger role in human civilization than horses other than, perhaps, the plow.
And yet, in the blink of an eye, the work done by horses was completely eradicated in the early 20th century. So decisive was the elimination of horses from the industrial picture and their replacement with the internal combustion engine that in today's world we rarely even consider them in relation to progress, to commerce, to industry. Yet so vital were they that steam locomotives were deemed 'iron horses' and steam engine pioneer James Watt used the term 'horsepower' to denote work output units. Today, only a few very minor industries continue to employ their services: racing, polo, circuses etc. This is all that remains for them to do.

Now, obviously, that is hardly a bad thing for horses. Millions upon millions of them have been spared thankless, grueling tasks. However, if in some parallel universe, those horses had needed those jobs, been paid for them, and those jobs and paychecks had been vital to the economy as a whole, then what Henry Ford, Ransom Olds and others did to them in the nineteen aughts would have been seen as not only reckless, but an absolute atrocity. No mere Luddite Uprising would have ensued. Karl Marx would have probably got the global revolution he predicted. 'Horses of the World, Unite!'

Why does this matter? Because something very similar may well be taking place before our very eyes. The rise of AI is not your great-granddaddy's disruption, because this time it isn't horses who will be replaced, it is people.
Throughout the history of technology, humans used animal bodies and their strengths to model our inventions. What could we make that were faster than horses, stronger than elephants, more resilient than camels, etc? The Wright Brothers followed DaVinci and others in studying the flight of birds in order to invent airplanes. Helicopter inventors looked as much to bees and dragonflies for inspiration as they did to birds. Always the same pattern. Relatively weak and limited homo sapiens used their one strength - their minds - to devise tools that imitated and ultimately improved upon what animals could do.

Now? It is not animals we are imitating to develop AI. It is the HUMAN BRAIN. So, pay heed to what happened to horses, in a time not that long ago, a time that the oldest among us still remember.
Because THAT is the parallel we should be drawing, not blithe tropes about how all innovations are job creators.
That is a shallow and blinkered way to consider the history of technology, and one that plays right into the hands of the AI developers of Silicon Valley and elsewhere who are working so hard, and so recklessly, to replace the human brain with something 'better'.
Don't fall for their slogans and their self congratulating rationales. Because just as horses were relegated to the circuses and the racetracks, hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of human beings may, in a matter of decades, be forced into sideshows while tech oligarchs horde everything to themselves and brag about the progress and benefits they are bringing. As Mr. Ed might say, 'Nay'.

I made a sign to use at my exhibitions. I am planning to hold several over the coming months so it is sure to get a lot of use :) !

My favorite place for perching is upon a rhino’s lap
It’s there I daydream, sing, imagine, read, and take a nap.
It’s spacious as a royal mattress, or a sultan’s chair;
and all the while the rhino's giant snout shades me from glare.
A rhino’s faulty eyesight gives a Rhino Sitter clearance
to worry not a tad about one’s looks or one’s appearance.
His mild, placid manner means you seldom need to worry
that he will suddenly aright and take off in a hurry.
I sat upon an ostrich once, but nothing’s more preposterous!
I’m taking no more chances and will stay with my rhinoceros.
And though I’m yet a youngling there’s one thing
for sure I know;
one’s life passes most pleasantly when
perched on a rhino!

I am working on a circus theme for a future exhibition. These are the first three works specifically done as part of the series.

Meet my new friend, Raita the Bunny! He is posing with his papa, who runsa shop that sells liquor and has daily wine tastings. This being the Year of the Rabbit, I had a nengajo image that he agreed to display in his rabbit-themed shop!

https://liquor-stand-sai.com/

And she'll have fun fun fun till her daddy takes the T bird away!

~ The Beach Boys

Imagine a product that, if they could afford it, nearly everyone would want to own. Imagine it being so expensive that any company that made it, so long as it managed to cater to the desires of potential customers, would become one of the biggest companies in the world. Imagine that this new product would be of a type such that, to be viable, a slew of new industries and services would have to be invented to support it. Imagine that, as well, some former industries that existed long before this new product was even thought of would become transformed and revolutionized as they fitted their production capacities toward this new product, growing huge themselves alongside it. Imagine that the very environment we humans inhabit would change dramatically, by necessity, as this new product made old notions of communities, towns, cities, even the very notions of "near" and "far" obsolete. Furthermore, imagine that the people who manufactured this product, and worked in all the other industries that serve it, were paid so well that they could afford to satisfy their desires for other products, and that these products also then grew into enormous industries of their own. I think you can easily imagine that this product would have a profound influence on the world's economy. I think it is fair to say that were such a product to arise, within a few short years the bleak economic forecasts of financial meltdown and worldwide economic malaise would be briskly whisked away. I also think you would agree that such a product coming about now, when the world needs it most, is unlikely at best.

The problem, of course, is that such a product did come about, once. However, that happened around 100 years ago. The automobile represents what I call a "Jackpot Industry". With it, the world economy hit the jackpot. Around it grew the oil industry, the steel industry, the rubber industry, the glass industry, etc. The workers at the factories where all of these were produced were able to buy televisions, radios, stereos, etc. It grew cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, Akron, Nagoya and Hiroshima. It took two countries, the U.S. and Japan, as well as the already mature economies of Western Europe, to economic heights never seen before, and brought about a new system: an economy not based on lords and serfs, but on a middle class with desires they could now fulfill by virtue of their paychecks.

It is staggering to think what this one product made possible. And yet, as with so many other products invented before the mid 20th century, the automobile began as a plaything, strictly for the enjoyment of the leisure class. It was therefore the vision of Henry Ford - that the very workers who produced it would themselves be able to afford one - that brought this machine among machines into its own. But once that genie was released from its lamp, the world's economy was set on a course of expansion never before seen. And the world changed. Very old industries, such as metal smelting and glassworks, as well as newer industries such as oil, rubber and cement, grew to heights undreamed of as they fitted their technology to serve the demand for automobiles and the roads and bridges to drive them on. Buildings reached new, literal, heights, as working spaces for people traveling great distances to their offices - made possible by cars and highways - resulted in the need for skyscrapers, creating our modern image of what cities look like. Homes filled with consumer goods, supermarkets, fast food restaurants, shopping malls, etc; not to mention freeways and suburbia - none of these things existed before automobiles became a commonplace item, nor could they have.

Tragically, the effects of the automobile industry are as much a litany of global woes as a story of new possibilities. The devastation to the environment wrought by the automobile and its ancillary industries represents a threat to the planet that we are slowly beginning to recognize as existential. What we are also learning is the benefits may be far more ephemeral than we imagined. Whereas most Americans growing up in the Age of the Automobile may have easily deluded themselves that the country's vibrant middle class was the true economic bedrock upon which the nation depended, we have woken up to discover that, to the executives in their gleaming Midtown towers, the middle class was simply a moveable feast. They milked it dry in the U.S., and then began building it up, in Japan, Korea, etc.; with eyes on an even bigger prize: if China and India, which together comprise nearly a third of the world's population, should manage to evolve into western-style consumer cultures, the American middle class can ever after be treated as an afterthought. Which, considering the outsourcing frenzy of corporate America, appears to already be the case.
But even that scenario will not come about as planned, to the chagrin of ruthless executives. The Jackpot Days are over. Supplying India and China with cars for every available driver simply doesn't work. Our environment is already severely wounded, and we are reduced to tearing up mountains and gouging holes into the ocean to squeeze out the last bit of oil that cars need to run on, with ever more disastrous environmental consequences. Electric and hybrid cars won't do the trick. Certainly, making cars that run more efficiently and pollute less should be the top priority of all car companies. But their products still have to be manufactured and shipped. That means tons of steel, plastic, fiberglass, rubber, and all the energy required to produce them. The most recent super freighters, fully loaded, are perhaps the largest and heaviest things ever built by man, and eco-friendly cars will do nothing to unclog shipping lanes.

Likewise, there is no new Jackpot Industry to do for the world economy what the Model T began doing eighty years ago. The internet, mobile phones, ecological and medical technologies, etc., simply do not have the ancillary industrial backing to turn the world's economic downturn around. Some may champion the notion of home robots as a linchpin industry, as the populations of developed countries age and need caring for. This could (and well may) lead to extraordinarily lucrative technological breakthroughs, but cannot possibly create the kind of ripple effects that were the key to the success of the Age of the Automobile. In fact, nothing can. This limited planet cannot withstand another era of unrestrained industrial growth.

That Age is over. Period. The economic protests that are erupting all over the world right now are an entirely predictable consequence of the point we have reached, and a clarion call that bears heeding. Nothing, within our current framework of thinking about economics, commerce, or manufacturing, is going to get us out of the mess we are now in. The benefits of the automobile industry are now in our rearview mirror, and fading fast. We must begin creating deeper and further reaching, non-economic solutions to the numerous problems our world faces.