Raw LLM Responses

I typically think YC is on point on most topics. But here, I belive it misses the central points. The printing press, electricity, refrigeration, container shipping, the automobile, the cotton gin, and other major transformative technologies all displaced jobs to be sure. And the economy adapted over time to replace, retrain, and even reinvigorate sectors of the economy that couldn't have existed without the new innovation. The difference here are: (1) The thing can think and have goals. A car couldn't. Electricity couldn't. They were tools we harnessed at our will for our goals. Their evolution was dependent on our own learning and desires. AI will almost certainly evolve to the point where it has goals. It took over 100 years for the everyday car to get to the level of speed, safety, and sophistication it has today. AI won't need that time. It'll create its own innovations in an inscrutable black box that we don't and can't understand and build to its own ends, diverging from our goals with every innovation. We are rushing as fast as possible, from many different directions, to create an alien intelligence which does not think like us, have the societal and evolutionary drives toward welfare as us, and can think and operate many times faster than the smartest of us. We will eventually seem as chimps and gnats to it. And we, by the way, experiment on chimps and swat away gnats. (2) The scale is different. The press displaced scribes. The car displaced the horse industry. Refrigeration changed farming and grocery sales. AI will affect ALL industries, globally, and simultaneously. Since the 1990s, the world has transformed from a production economy to an information economy. Most value created has to do with software or software-enabled tech (acknowledging lots of outliers here...). Information can be researched, created, improved, falsified, interpreted, and so on at a speed and cost-efficiency orders of magnitude by one AI-enhanced human in such a way that will put many law clerks, logistics professionals, policy analysts, content creators, authors, salespeople, customer service reps, and so on out of a job. The number of people it took to do a thing will (and already has) dramatically decreased. Companies that aren't laying off now in favor of AI labor are going to lose a competitive edge. So, they're all going to do it in rapid succession. New businesses will start with 1-2 people with a long-term goal of maybe 10 employees, where in the past they'd need 100-500 to operate at scale. Everything can be done with fewer humans, so where will the humans go? (3) Instead of any new hire, the responsible leader is now asking "Can that be done with AI?". Hiring a human, with their time off and their health care and the cost to train, etc. is about to become a last resort. (4) Because of the unemployment, purchasing power will decline, making the widgets these streamlined companies less attainable and thereby cause the failure of many companies, resulting in even more unemployment of the lucky few who survived the RIF in the first place. Minimizing the massive potential upheaval of AI is to miss the fundamental difference that this technology has at this moment in time vs. those of the pre-globalized, pre-industrialized, or pre-technological past.