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'.
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