Artificial Intelligence repeats the discussion of automation that was all the rage about half a century ago.

The problem as the professors saw it was that the working clahss would have nothing to do and lose all virtue.

Professors looked at the working class in exactly the same way that their New England predecessors did. They felt that automation would make them lazy and degenerate.

Eric Hoffer, being a workingman himself, went back over history and pointed out that the great breakthrough was made during playtime, not during worktime. This was a truy heretical repudiation of the Puritan Ethic, which says that mankind only makes Great Advances when it must do so for survival.

Under this Puritan Ethic, the only people who should get paid just to think were the professors, the heirs of the Puritan preachers.   This Hoffer piece may be hard to find, for the exact same reason that my stuff will be hard to find:

When Mommy Professor gets really put down, the arguments that put him in his place are carefully forgotten.

The only book that Hoffer wrote that is easy to find is The True Believer, which does not criticize Mommy Professor from the point of view of an actual working class spokesman.

It exposes the so-called Working Class Marxism for the silliness it is without even discussing it.

Hoffer said that the general population with more playtime would outthink the Mommy Professors.

That commentary,  like the rest of Hoffer’s real breakthroughs, are now in The Silence.

The True Believer is his only book that gets mentioned.

But unlike automation, AI involves not only artificial, nonhuman work.  it also means Artificial Will.

This is the old Frankenstein Complex that AI will produce genius machines who want what they want rather than what we want.

All the commenters asked for was commentary on the old automation idea that AI would take over the WORK.

If you can find it, Hoffer already covered this.

But artificial will is entirely different.

You will have enough trouble finding Hoffer’s common sense approach to automation.

Lots of luck. The Silence is very effective.