The luddite example is one of suddenness: The owners see the massive advantage of mechanization and move in fast. The workers are blindsided - they don't have the time and spend all the time they do have in a ludicrous war. The regions are somewhat mono-industry which completes in making a giant mess. All in all the exact quandary not to get caught in. Now that they have demonstrated it, long ago, do we really have to fall in the same problem again and again? Just because it didn't happen in the US, or in this century, doesn't mean we can't learn from it.
People at all level should do better using the time there is. For the ones (workers) to move up or away in their skills. For the others (businesses) to recognize a looming availability of human workforce which might be useful for some (other) business opportunity. For the third (governments) to - just in time - organize or encourage re-training at scale and in time. Trying to impose on each business to manage this whole world by itself is idiotic - normal business is tough and precarious enough. Trying to let each worker manage their own training is also insufficient: few people can optimally manage their own career at the same time as everything else.
An example in this direction is, I believe, Denmark's "Flexicurity". Firms can adapt to follow their needs; while workers can in general principle retain earnings while they retrain; while the state orchestrates availability of training (which itself can be a big industry sector). No doubt not perfect for anyone, but the general idea sounds solid.
Your comments fall into exactly the trap the article talks about. The luddites were painted as being against automation. That's only partially true, at best. Destroying machines was not the point. It was just the only thing that hurt and got remembered.
It was not layoffs that caused the revolts much worsening working conditions. They wanted things like getting paid in the promised time frame, and not having their children killed. It seems the protests were sprawling and later integrated every disappointment under the sun.
The other side took that as an opportunity to paint them as being generally anti progressive and against all forms of mechanization, but from what I understand there's not much to suggest that was actually true. Yes, machines were broken but so were a lot of other things as the protests turned violent.
Our lesson from the luddies should be that winners write history, we should not reiterate a centuries old smear campaign.
At times, the destruction was also quite utilitarian. For example, if you destroyed a piece of agricultural equipment, and it took three months to get another one up from London, you and your chums had work for the season. That's an entirely rational course of action (though not necessarily the most effective or moral one).
> It was not layoffs that caused the revolts much worsening working conditions.
I read the article (twice - it's interesting), and I wrote "spend all the time they do have in a ludicrous war".
For the workers of the time it looked probably like a fast combination of things. Which the author kinda summarizes as "the inequitable profitability of machines". Things likely included: at first a boom in employment: the factories started at the same time the old, somewhat distributed production method mostly continued - but probably with minimal worker freedom of choice as to who went to which. Then layoffs as the old method just about disappears and more factories start or fail in seemingly (to the workers) random occurences. Then working conditions as factories no doubt did not start safe or comfortable. Then like you say every complaint under the sun.
I don't think it matters actually: the workers reacted to upheaval and probably felt they had no time to be heard. That's the complaint we hear now: "The current jobs are going and that's not right". That's the point of my response: "How does that help anything or anyone?". The lesson should be to try responses that actually have a chance to succeed as opposed to getting in the papers for (metaphorically) breaking frames. Denmark and Co seem to have thought up something in the right general direction.
To note, luddites' issues were not just losing their job. Let's remember that the earlier machines were very crude, safety was absolutely not in their design, and a worker life's also didn't have much weight. So, the early days of machine assisted production were in inhumane conditions, people losing limbs, kids getting killed in them (less skills needed also meant kid labour was a viable option) etc.
So yes, regulation on how the machines work, how much they get introduced, how the workers are impacted, trial periods to see the impacts etc. should help a lot in all respects. The difficult part being that those all mean putting breaks on profit making.
To add to your note: iirc the Luddites were also concerned because the quality of the cloth produced by the machines was worse than the handmade stuff, beyond all of the labor abuses and job losses. Another parallel to the AI age.
Under the current regime jobs can be automated away and the businesses will reap 100% of the profit unless there is a union standing in its way: AI could be used on footage of a day's work some actor and recreate their likeness forever. Paid for one day, then the derived work is owned by the business forever.
We could for example say that 90% of jobs get automated away. The benefit for the businesses are astronomical as all those jobs get turned into direct profit. Meanwhile the workers get the change to... upskill? Yeah, so they just have to “upskill” forever while the businesses get free profit because they sit on the means of automation. (Remind me how the businesses have to put in work, here? Seems like they only get the upsides while the workers get all the downsides.)
Until there is nothing to upskill into anymore because only 12% of the labor pool is needed for actual work.
The notion that workers and employers are anywhere near to being peer competitors is bizarre.
Your proposed solution doesn't solve anything, it only delays it.
As long as workers are not self-organizing, top to bottom, up to and including what to produce, how much to priduce and how to produce it, the domination will exist. What is the added value to the society of having bosses ? Of having people not producing but deciding how to produce ?
Scratch the destruction of machines, the sudden uprise, the distinction between what group acted and what group negotiated. The real lesson to learn from this all: society doesn't need someone telling you what to do if they're not also a worker.
I remember the mantra of some in the tech field of "no problem - just learn to code" when blue collar jobs in the manufacturing in the US was on the wane as production moved to cheaper locations overseas.
I think that is a good point to bring up, but it is orthogonal.
Production moving overseas is not the same as technological advancement. One can be against outsourcing but in favor of domestic technological progress.
Woah woah woah buddy you’ve got that completely backwards. Journalists started that whole learn to code bullshit and then got justly lampooned about it when there were a bunch of media lay offs afterwards. It was a huge meme a while back so I’m not sure how you missed it.
Hu? The "learn to code" was not coming from the tech field itself (programmers know that coding is hard and FAANG are not hiring coal miners), but used as a dig against out-of-touch journalists who wrote articles like that:
> Biden said, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
According to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from the audience.
It turns out manufacturing is actually doing fine in the US as an industry. Just very different and probably employing higher skilled machinists (and at CNC machines).
But meanwhile Denmark has been making a go at a constructive, thought out, response. Perhaps let's look at how that works - who retrains for what? (Which I don't know in detail.)
>> to recognize a looming availability of human workforce which might be useful for some (other) business opportunity.
In other words: a cheap labor force of people now desperate enough to accept lower compensation that their previous employment. If these later employers were able/willing to pay a similar wage, they would have already been doing so. Predicting a forthcoming a wave of despite people as a business opportunity, a chance to pay people lower wages tomorrow than you would have to today ... that is a dark sentiment. I think twitter is going to fail, but I'm going to wait on launching my new startup until the market is flooded with x-twitter employees willing to work for peanuts. Dark.
You can call it dark, or you can hire the many fine software people laid off from the twitter ridiculosity. Your choice.
The job market is strange currently. Low unemployement rate (in part because of how many people withdrew). Businesses complaining they can't find people (some in part because they offer too little money). Many perenially underemployed. Absurd hiring processes (because of perceived cost of hiring the wrong person rather than nobody at all.)
My point is that simply "calling it dark" is not helpful to any of the participants.
I heard Brian Merchant on 99% Invisible and this take is slight historical revisionism, but I'm ok with that.
It's revisionist because he's conflating the earlier movement when workers tried to negotiate with factory owners and organize with the Luddite movement. True - the failure of the first movement led to Ludditism out of desperation, but the groups are separate. Luddite literally is named after Ned Ludd smashing machinery, so it cannot be the name of the movement that was around organizing and negotiation because they only turned to smashing when organizing was made illegal. Basically workers tried to negotiate, were stymied, and a bunch of frustrated people started smashing machines, which caused a positive reaction from people so it started spreading and others started smashing stuff too.
When I first heard of Ludditism it was with more nuance that it's used today - to be a Luddite was to rage against technology with the art of a bull in a china shop. It wasn't a blanket term against "anti-progress" like it is now, but rather a dumb approach to dealing with change. Of course now it is used just to shut down people who don't like technology, so that's why I'm ok with some amount of revisionism, since the way it's being used currently is revisionist itself.
The only danger in conflating these legit concerns about automation with a violent movement is this implication that violence is the only way to bridge this gap, and I can see a strong argument that is was true back in those days, due to the Crown literally making any organizing and collective negotiation illegal, I strongly don't believe it's true today. I believe a violent reaction today would cause more harm to workers rights than help.
I get it - I'm against revisionism in theory but practically there's a strong argument that all history is revisionist. I am conflicted, but I'm going to argue the "ok with revisionism" side of things - "Ok" being the weakest pro word, like I'd rate this 6 out of 9 if 1 was "totally against", 5 was "totally neutral" and 9 was "totally for".
Part of us building the future is interpreting the past in a way that applies to our current world. For example - our modern western world was built on reinterpreting Romans and Greeks and idealizing their use of democracy. We had to throw away a lot of awful things they did to focus on just the good stuff. And even that period of history is being debated about how to interpret it in an attempt to understand who we are now - was it slave owning colonists who only prospered due to others labour or was it enlightened open thinkers who brought prosperity to the world, or was it a mix of those things or something else entirely. Revising the Luddite movement to include the earlier peaceful methods with the goal of saying healthy skepticism about technology is IMO a good thing - the Luddite movement specifically is tightly linked to the earlier movement so it's not a stretch to revise things it to include that whole chain of events.
But I'd be lying if I wasn't annoyed when he said things that weren't technically correct during the 99% invisible interview. But it's also revisionist to use Luddite as bludgeon, so if people are going to remove any subtlety from a word, I'd rather it was revised in an helpful way.
> Today, the word “Luddite” is used as an insult to anyone resistant to technological innovation
Interesting, I never thought of the term as pejorative. I always thought of the movement as a kind of working-class heroes trying to navigate an uncertain future where rich people made them obsolete.
It's not pejorative for you if you are a liberal, for me it is pejorative, I see Luddites as people who damage important parts of production systems and threaten people's lives.
I understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.
It is sometimes scary how long propaganda continues to work. In the case of the Luddites, ot was factory owners propaganda about, rightfully, discruntled workers opossing abuse and exploitation.
In a sense, this propaganda win in England gave us the current oppossition to unions we see in the US and among corporations.
> understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.
Do you mean a strike? A very common event in many first-world countries like the US or France ?
I don’t think “only rich people are worried about automation” is a very reasonable take. And the scale is a bit different - the luddites weren’t throwing the economy into disarray, they were trying to stop it from changing.
No
It is pejorative in First World also.
I'd say the dominant view is that it is pejorative .
Really, all through collage and career, in the US for last 30 years.
Calling someone a Luddite was an insult, someone that is standing in the way, not smart, desiring to just go live on a farm without any technology because it is all just too complicated.
I've never heard the term used in a positive way.
Not saying this is true of the actual Luddites, just how the term is used in the US.
The sense of the word "luddite" (I guess until this recent rethought) has always been pejorative, and has zero dependency on political ideology. Why even bring it into the conversation, unless you're trying to stir some shit up.
> important parts of production systems and threaten people's lives
Which is fair and proportional if people doing it got their own livelihood threatened by introduction of said systems. Especially in 19th century when not having a work to do meant not having food.
Basically a cross section of the, to cite Marxx, non-capital owning class os citizens. Aka, the vast majority of us. Only difference today, parts the groups thatbmade uo the Luddites back then are now actively cheering in those developments.
Change isbinevitable, and in the long run society usually benefits as whole. The transition period is the problem, and on that front we are making no progress what so ever right now.
Seriously? You consider people who resist technological advancement "heros"? Do you not work in tech? Why are you on hacker news? I honestly don't understand the motivation of anti-technology people who frequent hacker news. It makes no sense to me.
Did you read the article? The whole point of it is about "rethinking the luddites" to understand them as pro workers rights (which would be nice to have more of in our field), rather than anti technology.
This book came out in 2021, so there's definitely a trend to look back at the Luddites, investigate what their movement and actions were about, and apply some of those ideas to today. I actually just happened to pick this up in a local bookshop on a whim this weekend, but haven't read it yet.
99% invisible had Brian Merchant on recently. I agree with him except on the point that “Luddite” can be reclaimed. In an ideal world that would be possible, but in practical terms Luddite means a person who is against technological change.
If you want to defend Luddite positions you don’t need to defend the term itself. Then the correct retort would be I’m not a Luddite I’m an X where X is something intuitive and short.
I like to characterize my approach to technology as "informed carefulness". So maybe "I'm a cautious adopter of technology. I adopt what works, what improves my life, and respects my rights."
The violation of people's trust through the use of telemetry is precisely what turned me skeptical of modern day stuff. There's a lot of stuff that I would probably use, if it wasn't hellbent on learning the color of my underwear, how often I snore, or what products I'm interested in.
You won't catch me with a Ring camera, any Alexa device, I use uBlock, etc. There is so much more I would be comfortable using in this world of technology if there was a modicum of mutual respect.
This reminds me that I find it hilarious when they ask permission to collect more data on you so they can make the ads "more relevant." This is close to their version of mutual respect, "We'll show you the ads you WANT to see."
Conversely, a country that allows AI to replace too many jobs will find itself buried in masses of angry people with little to lose except their devalued lives.
Both of these comments are excellent. However, countries don’t make decisions. Individuals (that are mentally capable) make decisions, within their economic framework, and the result emerges at the national or global level.
Individuals will decide how to respond to AI, and we will see what happens. My guess, based on past adoptions of work-saving technologies, is that anyone capable of using AI to make their job easier will do so. And that may result in the elimination of other jobs.
That's a good point. A nuance to that would be that not every field impacts the economy, or put another way, our economies work with a lot of inefficiencies.
There could be a future where the fields that matter the most are heavily impacted and most of the work is automatized, while a flurry of other parts are strictly kept off AI and automatization.
I have in mind the extent to which agriculture requires way fewer people that we'd imagine given its scale and importance, while we have people making money doing funny faces on camera [0].
[0] that's also absolutely needed by the society, but it's not at the same primary level
If AI can truly reason and build complex applications - I.e it has mastered composition and causality, then AI would have a full mental map of how commercial and residential buildings work.
How every pipe fitting links to each other. In that case plumbers aren’t needed for small things since a user could state their problem to a smartphone and AI could guide them to the correct fix as it debugs the users house.
Same with construction or doctors or teachers.
If AI can truly learn and reason the physical world, then it doesn’t mean much to be human.
What is being a human in terms of labor? A 100 watt 80kg biological agent with general intelligence that can learn and follow steps. With eyes and ears they sense, with legs they move and and with hands they apply fine motor skills to move other objects.
The whole point of AI is to build cheaper labor that follows instructions, never sleeps, never forgets, replaceable if broken.
The rich and powerful will 100% get more rich and powerful, the question is how well that prosperity will be shared with the rest.
It could be that some powerful nations say let’s go kill entire other continents and take their land with our robot and drone army.
Globally 35 billion barrels of oil / yr are consumed. Thats 1700 kWh/barell * 35B = 59.5TWh/year = 6.8 TW. This means if someone could make human equivalent robots that take gasoline as energy, they’d have an army of 68 billion human-like robots.
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People at all level should do better using the time there is. For the ones (workers) to move up or away in their skills. For the others (businesses) to recognize a looming availability of human workforce which might be useful for some (other) business opportunity. For the third (governments) to - just in time - organize or encourage re-training at scale and in time. Trying to impose on each business to manage this whole world by itself is idiotic - normal business is tough and precarious enough. Trying to let each worker manage their own training is also insufficient: few people can optimally manage their own career at the same time as everything else.
An example in this direction is, I believe, Denmark's "Flexicurity". Firms can adapt to follow their needs; while workers can in general principle retain earnings while they retrain; while the state orchestrates availability of training (which itself can be a big industry sector). No doubt not perfect for anyone, but the general idea sounds solid.
It was not layoffs that caused the revolts much worsening working conditions. They wanted things like getting paid in the promised time frame, and not having their children killed. It seems the protests were sprawling and later integrated every disappointment under the sun.
The other side took that as an opportunity to paint them as being generally anti progressive and against all forms of mechanization, but from what I understand there's not much to suggest that was actually true. Yes, machines were broken but so were a lot of other things as the protests turned violent.
Our lesson from the luddies should be that winners write history, we should not reiterate a centuries old smear campaign.
I read the article (twice - it's interesting), and I wrote "spend all the time they do have in a ludicrous war".
For the workers of the time it looked probably like a fast combination of things. Which the author kinda summarizes as "the inequitable profitability of machines". Things likely included: at first a boom in employment: the factories started at the same time the old, somewhat distributed production method mostly continued - but probably with minimal worker freedom of choice as to who went to which. Then layoffs as the old method just about disappears and more factories start or fail in seemingly (to the workers) random occurences. Then working conditions as factories no doubt did not start safe or comfortable. Then like you say every complaint under the sun.
I don't think it matters actually: the workers reacted to upheaval and probably felt they had no time to be heard. That's the complaint we hear now: "The current jobs are going and that's not right". That's the point of my response: "How does that help anything or anyone?". The lesson should be to try responses that actually have a chance to succeed as opposed to getting in the papers for (metaphorically) breaking frames. Denmark and Co seem to have thought up something in the right general direction.
To note, luddites' issues were not just losing their job. Let's remember that the earlier machines were very crude, safety was absolutely not in their design, and a worker life's also didn't have much weight. So, the early days of machine assisted production were in inhumane conditions, people losing limbs, kids getting killed in them (less skills needed also meant kid labour was a viable option) etc.
So yes, regulation on how the machines work, how much they get introduced, how the workers are impacted, trial periods to see the impacts etc. should help a lot in all respects. The difficult part being that those all mean putting breaks on profit making.
We could for example say that 90% of jobs get automated away. The benefit for the businesses are astronomical as all those jobs get turned into direct profit. Meanwhile the workers get the change to... upskill? Yeah, so they just have to “upskill” forever while the businesses get free profit because they sit on the means of automation. (Remind me how the businesses have to put in work, here? Seems like they only get the upsides while the workers get all the downsides.)
Until there is nothing to upskill into anymore because only 12% of the labor pool is needed for actual work.
The notion that workers and employers are anywhere near to being peer competitors is bizarre.
Deleted Comment
As long as workers are not self-organizing, top to bottom, up to and including what to produce, how much to priduce and how to produce it, the domination will exist. What is the added value to the society of having bosses ? Of having people not producing but deciding how to produce ?
Scratch the destruction of machines, the sudden uprise, the distinction between what group acted and what group negotiated. The real lesson to learn from this all: society doesn't need someone telling you what to do if they're not also a worker.
Production moving overseas is not the same as technological advancement. One can be against outsourcing but in favor of domestic technological progress.
https://imgur.com/TKX47O3
… and, well, infamously Joe Biden in his 2019 campaign:
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/47...
> Biden said, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!” According to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from the audience.
But meanwhile Denmark has been making a go at a constructive, thought out, response. Perhaps let's look at how that works - who retrains for what? (Which I don't know in detail.)
In other words: a cheap labor force of people now desperate enough to accept lower compensation that their previous employment. If these later employers were able/willing to pay a similar wage, they would have already been doing so. Predicting a forthcoming a wave of despite people as a business opportunity, a chance to pay people lower wages tomorrow than you would have to today ... that is a dark sentiment. I think twitter is going to fail, but I'm going to wait on launching my new startup until the market is flooded with x-twitter employees willing to work for peanuts. Dark.
The job market is strange currently. Low unemployement rate (in part because of how many people withdrew). Businesses complaining they can't find people (some in part because they offer too little money). Many perenially underemployed. Absurd hiring processes (because of perceived cost of hiring the wrong person rather than nobody at all.)
My point is that simply "calling it dark" is not helpful to any of the participants.
It's revisionist because he's conflating the earlier movement when workers tried to negotiate with factory owners and organize with the Luddite movement. True - the failure of the first movement led to Ludditism out of desperation, but the groups are separate. Luddite literally is named after Ned Ludd smashing machinery, so it cannot be the name of the movement that was around organizing and negotiation because they only turned to smashing when organizing was made illegal. Basically workers tried to negotiate, were stymied, and a bunch of frustrated people started smashing machines, which caused a positive reaction from people so it started spreading and others started smashing stuff too.
When I first heard of Ludditism it was with more nuance that it's used today - to be a Luddite was to rage against technology with the art of a bull in a china shop. It wasn't a blanket term against "anti-progress" like it is now, but rather a dumb approach to dealing with change. Of course now it is used just to shut down people who don't like technology, so that's why I'm ok with some amount of revisionism, since the way it's being used currently is revisionist itself.
The only danger in conflating these legit concerns about automation with a violent movement is this implication that violence is the only way to bridge this gap, and I can see a strong argument that is was true back in those days, due to the Crown literally making any organizing and collective negotiation illegal, I strongly don't believe it's true today. I believe a violent reaction today would cause more harm to workers rights than help.
Talk about a slippery slope...
Part of us building the future is interpreting the past in a way that applies to our current world. For example - our modern western world was built on reinterpreting Romans and Greeks and idealizing their use of democracy. We had to throw away a lot of awful things they did to focus on just the good stuff. And even that period of history is being debated about how to interpret it in an attempt to understand who we are now - was it slave owning colonists who only prospered due to others labour or was it enlightened open thinkers who brought prosperity to the world, or was it a mix of those things or something else entirely. Revising the Luddite movement to include the earlier peaceful methods with the goal of saying healthy skepticism about technology is IMO a good thing - the Luddite movement specifically is tightly linked to the earlier movement so it's not a stretch to revise things it to include that whole chain of events.
But I'd be lying if I wasn't annoyed when he said things that weren't technically correct during the 99% invisible interview. But it's also revisionist to use Luddite as bludgeon, so if people are going to remove any subtlety from a word, I'd rather it was revised in an helpful way.
Interesting, I never thought of the term as pejorative. I always thought of the movement as a kind of working-class heroes trying to navigate an uncertain future where rich people made them obsolete.
I understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.
In a sense, this propaganda win in England gave us the current oppossition to unions we see in the US and among corporations.
Do you mean a strike? A very common event in many first-world countries like the US or France ?
Really, all through collage and career, in the US for last 30 years.
Calling someone a Luddite was an insult, someone that is standing in the way, not smart, desiring to just go live on a farm without any technology because it is all just too complicated.
I've never heard the term used in a positive way.
Not saying this is true of the actual Luddites, just how the term is used in the US.
Dead Comment
Which is fair and proportional if people doing it got their own livelihood threatened by introduction of said systems. Especially in 19th century when not having a work to do meant not having food.
Change isbinevitable, and in the long run society usually benefits as whole. The transition period is the problem, and on that front we are making no progress what so ever right now.
This book came out in 2021, so there's definitely a trend to look back at the Luddites, investigate what their movement and actions were about, and apply some of those ideas to today. I actually just happened to pick this up in a local bookshop on a whim this weekend, but haven't read it yet.
If you want to defend Luddite positions you don’t need to defend the term itself. Then the correct retort would be I’m not a Luddite I’m an X where X is something intuitive and short.
The violation of people's trust through the use of telemetry is precisely what turned me skeptical of modern day stuff. There's a lot of stuff that I would probably use, if it wasn't hellbent on learning the color of my underwear, how often I snore, or what products I'm interested in.
You won't catch me with a Ring camera, any Alexa device, I use uBlock, etc. There is so much more I would be comfortable using in this world of technology if there was a modicum of mutual respect.
This sentiment was likely shared by many of the original Luddites.
Individuals will decide how to respond to AI, and we will see what happens. My guess, based on past adoptions of work-saving technologies, is that anyone capable of using AI to make their job easier will do so. And that may result in the elimination of other jobs.
There could be a future where the fields that matter the most are heavily impacted and most of the work is automatized, while a flurry of other parts are strictly kept off AI and automatization.
I have in mind the extent to which agriculture requires way fewer people that we'd imagine given its scale and importance, while we have people making money doing funny faces on camera [0].
[0] that's also absolutely needed by the society, but it's not at the same primary level
Then they came for the skilled craftsmen, and I was not a skilled craftsman, so I did nothing.
Then they came for the clerks and bookeepers, and I was not a clerk or a bookkeeper, so I did nothing.
Now they've come for the chattering classes, and there is no one left to speak for me.
First they came for the writers and illustrators, and I did nothing because I'm not a writer or an illustrator.
Then they came for the musicians, and I did nothing because I only listen to music.
Then they came for the text-dependent professional classes, and I did nothing because I'm not one of those people.
They they came for the programmers, and the plumbers sat around laughing saying "and you thought you were so much better than us!"
How every pipe fitting links to each other. In that case plumbers aren’t needed for small things since a user could state their problem to a smartphone and AI could guide them to the correct fix as it debugs the users house.
Same with construction or doctors or teachers.
If AI can truly learn and reason the physical world, then it doesn’t mean much to be human.
What is being a human in terms of labor? A 100 watt 80kg biological agent with general intelligence that can learn and follow steps. With eyes and ears they sense, with legs they move and and with hands they apply fine motor skills to move other objects.
The whole point of AI is to build cheaper labor that follows instructions, never sleeps, never forgets, replaceable if broken.
The rich and powerful will 100% get more rich and powerful, the question is how well that prosperity will be shared with the rest.
It could be that some powerful nations say let’s go kill entire other continents and take their land with our robot and drone army.
Globally 35 billion barrels of oil / yr are consumed. Thats 1700 kWh/barell * 35B = 59.5TWh/year = 6.8 TW. This means if someone could make human equivalent robots that take gasoline as energy, they’d have an army of 68 billion human-like robots.