I've been thinking about writing an essay about the flip side for a while, but maybe it only needs to be a toss-off HN comment, so...
In political/economic debates, people like to say: "if you tax something, you get less of it." And in turn "if you subsidize something, you get more of it."
You could think of automation as a labor subsidy. Or, on a rough level, as a tax on attention. That's not strictly correct, but it gets you in the right frame of mind: automation is, among other things, designed the achieve labor with diminished (or even absent) attention.
The problem is that diminished attention can have overlooked tradeoffs. If you know those tradeoffs, you may be able to automate around them. If you're not paying attention, you probably can't. If you've automated away attention, you might not notice until you've hit a problem at the scale of your automation.
Automation is valuable, absolutely. You probably want more of it. I do. And yet...
In political/economic debates, people like to say: "if you tax something, you get less of it." And in turn "if you subsidize something, you get more of it."
You could think of automation as a labor subsidy. Or, on a rough level, as a tax on attention. That's not strictly correct, but it gets you in the right frame of mind: automation is, among other things, designed the achieve labor with diminished (or even absent) attention.
The problem is that diminished attention can have overlooked tradeoffs. If you know those tradeoffs, you may be able to automate around them. If you're not paying attention, you probably can't. If you've automated away attention, you might not notice until you've hit a problem at the scale of your automation.
Automation is valuable, absolutely. You probably want more of it. I do. And yet...