One Conversation is Worth a Thousand Angry Takes

The ocean is wet, the sun is bright, and online discourse heavily features people criticizing one another's viewpoints. I recently got pulled into such a situation, when econ blogger Noah Smith wrote a post arguing that fears of advanced AI causing mass unemployment are overblown. This seemed obviously wrong to me: when AIs can do everything faster, cheaper, and better than a person... won't we let them? How does that not result in the collapse of employment? I was, to put it simply, confused and sad. I respect Noah, and didn't understand how we could see things so differently. Is he not as smart or trustworthy as I thought? Should I drop my subscription to his blog? Or maybe am I not as smart as I thought? Should I stop blogging? I was also worried, because Noah is a prominent blogger, and was promoting an idea that struck me as dangerously incorrect. I wrote a rebuttal, but that didn’t really accomplish anything. Well, it let me feel like I'd "done something", but that’s always a sus

The ocean is wet, the sun is bright, and online discourse heavily features people criticizing one another's viewpoints. I recently got pulled into such a situation, when econ blogger Noah Smith wrote a post arguing that fears of advanced AI causing mass unemployment are overblown. This seemed obviously wrong to me: when AIs can do everything faster, cheaper, and better than a person... won't we let them? How does that not result in the collapse of employment? I was, to put it simply, confused and sad. I respect Noah, and didn't understand how we could see things so differently. Is he not as sm