If AI is normal technology, history is not reassuring.

There’s a truism that technology is good - even if it creates winners and losers, it improves the world. Toby Ord argues that the conclusions about the benefits of technology is sensitive to the end of humanity - but this jumps over the transitions by starting from the assumption [1] that “long-term progress in science, technology, and values have tended to make people’s lives longer, freer, and more prosperous.” That is, looking back historically, the net impact misses the immense immediate harms of large scale technological changes that can last for generations. As I’ll explain, the largest technological revolutions in human history are arguably the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. In both cases, the vast majority of those immediately affected were harmed, not helped. Of course, the longer term impact was positive; those benefits are not in question [2] - not that those alive during the transition should have cared. The two obvious examples The invention of agri