To give him credit, it's amazing that Mark Zuckerberg managed to take an easily defensible position like "we shouldn't allow AI to be owned by a couple of tech monopolies" and still manage to find so many individual points and arguments to be completely clueless on.
My personal favourite:
> Before the industrial revolution, 90% of people were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose.
Over a long enough time span, the industrial revolution has certainly improved living standards but the industrial revolution itself was l, for many, an absolutely horrific time to live. Life expectancies in cities plumetted and we saw the birth of workhouses.
It's such an odd example to choose for trying to suggest "technology x will help everyone in a non-complicated way". He might as well have picked the atomic bomb.
Yeah, using the "industrial revolution" as a positive is a weird argument in general. Sure, the end result was, eventually, an improvement, but the process took decades and was horrible for most involved. If this "revolution" (I don't think it is) takes as long as the industrial revolution, I'll be like 70-80 before the supposed benefits accrue.
I mean it’s not a particularly techno-optimistic idea, it’s pretty common. Likewise, the French Revolution is widely celebrated inside and outside France, but at the time in the place it was bad bad.
It's particularly interesting because things got so bad during the Industrial Revolution that workers revolted against the capital class to demand things that modern workers take for granted today, like the 40-hour workweek[0], elimination of child labor, workplace safety law, mandatory education, etc.
None of that was given away for free, people died fighting for those basic rights.
My personal favourite:
> Before the industrial revolution, 90% of people were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose.
Over a long enough time span, the industrial revolution has certainly improved living standards but the industrial revolution itself was l, for many, an absolutely horrific time to live. Life expectancies in cities plumetted and we saw the birth of workhouses.
It's such an odd example to choose for trying to suggest "technology x will help everyone in a non-complicated way". He might as well have picked the atomic bomb.