In 1964, highly distinguished experts called on LBJ “to develop ways to smooth the transition from a society in which the norm is full employment within an economic system based on scarcity, to one in which the norm will be either non-employment, in the traditional sense of productive work, or employment on the great variety of socially valuable but ‘non-productive’ tasks made possible by an economy of abundance." Sound familiar???
In my weekly "System Check" update, I think a little bit about what studying history does and doesn't tell us about where AI might be heading. I contrast the observation that previous panics about automation have been wrong with the inescapable fact that AI is letting us do incredible things, using @krishnanrohit 's recent evolutionary simulation as a sharp example of something that would have been unthinkable to produce as a casual blog post just a year or two ago. So maybe this time really is different?
I conclude that either way, it's not a coincidence that so many of us are increasingly craving reading and thinking about history.
https://freesystems.substack.com/p/the-cybernation-revolution
