Home › Topics › Computers & Internet › Artificial Intelligence › Belief: Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workpl…

Belief

Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workplaces in order to protect existing jobs. 0.50 Agree Disagree

Topic: Artificial Intelligence · draft Still needs: evidence, objective criteria, testable predictions or a falsifiability test, costs and benefits, interests on either side (listed at the end of the page) · Votes are shown as what people think, next to what the analysis says, and never move a score. · Position on the topic axis (typed, not scored): -45

If you disagree, this page has a column for you. A study, record or dataset for “Every major technology, from the tractor to the spreadsheet, was predicted to cause mass joblessness, and each time new kinds of work appeared instead, so a government that protects today's jobs is protecting jobs that would have changed anyway”, which rests on argument alone.

Argument TreesHow arguments are scored →

Weight for 0.00 · weight against 0.00 · net +0.00

Each reason is a claim with its own page. Score = sign x (2 x Truth - 1) x Conf x Link x Imp x Uniq, and every column is here so the row can be multiplied out and checked. A reason argued false scores negative and counts against the side it is filed on; a reason nobody has argued yet scores exactly 0, and so does one whose own page has no work behind it.

What Would Change the AnswerTruth scores →

#InputIts truthConfIf falseIf trueMoveIf settledWhat it does here
1Every major technology, from the tractor to the spreadsheet, was predicted to cause mass joblessness, and each time new kinds of work appeared instead, so a government that protects today's jobs is protecting jobs that would have changed anyway. Claim0.500%0.500.500.000.17worth settling
2Most jobs are bundles of many tasks, and letting AI take over some of those tasks tends to change a job rather than end it, so there is far less to protect than the fear suggests. Claim0.500%0.500.500.000.17worth settling
3Holding back AI in one country does not stop it anywhere else; the new jobs built around the tools simply grow abroad, and the protected jobs still disappear when cheaper foreign products arrive. Claim0.500%0.500.500.000.17worth settling
4Past machines replaced muscle and left the thinking to people; a machine that can think is a different kind of thing, and a government that waits to see whether the old pattern holds risks finding out too late to help anyone. Claim0.500%0.500.500.000.17worth settling
5Even when new jobs eventually appear, the people who lose the old ones are rarely the people who get the new ones, and slowing the change gives those workers time to retrain or retire before their livelihood is gone. Claim0.500%0.500.500.000.17worth settling
6The spread of AI into workplaces is arriving faster than earlier shifts did, and a pace set by companies racing one another leaves schools, workers and towns no time to adjust unless government slows it down. Claim0.500%0.500.500.000.17worth settling

Every claim beneath this page held at false and then at true, one at a time, with the whole graph recomputed each time. "If false" and "if true" are where this page’s truth score lands; "Move" is how far apart they are. "If settled" is that same distance with the input’s confidence held at 1, which is what it would be worth once the work behind it is finished, so the gap between Move and If settled is the value of doing that work. This is one input at a time and finds single points of failure; it does not test several inputs moving together, which is how correlated assumptions actually fail.

Related Beliefs

  1. Training AI on copyrighted work without permission should be against the law. 0.50
  2. Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workplaces in order to protect existing jobs. (this page)

Submitting opens GitHub; you need a free account. As you type, claims already on the site that say the same thing are shown, and a duplicate becomes a vote for the one already here.

The other beliefs filed under Artificial Intelligence; this one is listed unlinked.

Not filled in yet

Evidence Ledgerno findings cited yet
Falsifiability Testnothing named that would strengthen or weaken this belief if it turned up
Testable Predictionsnothing stated that we should observe if this belief is true or false
Objective Criteriano yardstick both sides would accept in advance has been proposed
What Acting On This Would Cost and Gainno costs or benefits priced yet
Logical Anatomythe claim has not been split into its component parts
Interests, Not Positionsnobody has mapped who wants what, or why
Media Resourcesno books, studies or films weighed
Legal Frameworkno laws or rulings cited
General to Specificnot linked to broader or narrower beliefs

Submitting opens GitHub; you need a free account. As you type, claims already on the site that say the same thing are shown, and a duplicate becomes a vote for the one already here.

Submitting opens GitHub; you need a free account. As you type, claims already on the site that say the same thing are shown, and a duplicate becomes a vote for the one already here.

Submitting opens GitHub; you need a free account. As you type, claims already on the site that say the same thing are shown, and a duplicate becomes a vote for the one already here.

Submitting opens GitHub; you need a free account. As you type, claims already on the site that say the same thing are shown, and a duplicate becomes a vote for the one already here.

Submitting opens GitHub; you need a free account. As you type, claims already on the site that say the same thing are shown, and a duplicate becomes a vote for the one already here.

Parts of the template nobody has filled in here. They are named rather than shown, because an empty table is not a finding, and each one is a reason the confidence above is not higher. A part that takes rows has a form for its first one.

What this page needs right now

#The gapWhere it goesWho is best placed to fill it
1A study, record or dataset for “Every major technology, from the tractor to the spreadsheet, was predicted to cause mass joblessness, and each time new kinds of work appeared instead, so a government that protects today's jobs is protecting jobs that would have changed anyway”, which rests on argument aloneEvidence Ledgeranyone with the source
2A measurement both sides would accept in advance, with the reading each side predictsObjective Criteriaanyone who can name a yardstick the other side would sign

Named gaps, read off the tables above, so a newcomer can see exactly where a contribution goes. None of them requires agreeing with the page, and each one links to the form it goes in.

What the numbers are made of

Share on the agree side
no scored weight either way
Confidence
32%. Weakest parts: scrutiny 0% · grounding 0%
Depended on
ReasonRank 0.0033, 61 of 2173
Strongest reason for
Every major technology, from the tractor to the spreadsheet, was predicted to cause mass joblessness, and each time new kinds of work appeared instead, so a government that protects today's jobs is protecting jobs that would have changed anyway. +0.00
Strongest reason against
Past machines replaced muscle and left the thinking to people; a machine that can think is a different kind of thing, and a government that waits to see whether the old pattern holds risks finding out too late to help anyone. -0.00
What would move this most
Settling Every major technology, from the tractor to the spreadsheet, was pred…: 0.50 if false, 0.50 if true
Coverage
Of 6 scored rows, 6 have no linkage page, 6 have no importance page, 6 have no uniqueness page. This page reads 6 other pages. 6 of them are one-sided or empty: Every major technology, from the tractor to the spreadsheet, was predicted to cause mass joblessness, and each time new kinds of work appeared instead, so a government that protects today's jobs is protecting jobs that would have changed anyway.; Most jobs are bundles of many tasks, and letting AI take over some of those tasks tends to change a job rather than end it, so there is far less to protect than the fear suggests.; Holding back AI in one country does not stop it anywhere else; the new jobs built around the tools simply grow abroad, and the protected jobs still disappear when cheaper foreign products arrive.; Past machines replaced muscle and left the thinking to people; a machine that can think is a different kind of thing, and a government that waits to see whether the old pattern holds risks finding out too late to help anyone.; Even when new jobs eventually appear, the people who lose the old ones are rarely the people who get the new ones, and slowing the change gives those workers time to retrain or retire before their livelihood is gone.; The spread of AI into workplaces is arriving faster than earlier shifts did, and a pace set by companies racing one another leaves schools, workers and towns no time to adjust unless government slows it down..
Bottom line
The disagreement turns on whether slowing a technology to protect jobs actually saves workers or only delays the same change while the benefits go elsewhere.

Structural Checks

FindingHow seriousWhat it means
Nothing stated would show it falsea noteNo testable prediction is listed, so as written there is no observation that would count against this belief.

Faults the shape of the argument can show without reading a word of it: a claim used to support itself, a conclusion listed among its own premises, the same page counted twice. None of these changes a score. The wiki also specifies pattern-matching the prose for ten named fallacies; that is deliberately not done here, because a matcher looking for “attacking the person rather than the argument” would fire on the central legitimate argument on this whole site, and a score moved by a regular expression has no page to appeal to.

Scoring EngineTruth scores →

QuantityValueHow
Argument score+0.00argument rows: weight for minus weight against
Evidence score+0.00evidence rows: weight for minus weight against
Prediction contribution+0.00prediction rows, same signed formula as every other row
Belief score+0.00the three lines above added together
Positive total0.00every row whose signed contribution came out positive, from either side
Negative total0.00every row whose signed contribution came out negative, as a magnitude
Starting point0.50where this claim starts before any of its own rows count: Nothing observed: no source type recorded, so this claim starts at a coin flip
Weight of the starting point1.00k x a bounded reward for independent replication, k = 1, capped at 2.0 x k
Truth score, argued0.50(positive + weight x starting point) / (positive + negative + weight)
Truth score0.50argued truth, capped by the weakest load-bearing component that has its own page
ReasonRank0.0033how much of the site depends on this page: rank 61 of 2173. The share of a walk that starts at the 162 beliefs and steps to the pages they read, with a 0.85 chance of stepping on each time
Work value0.0023ReasonRank x (1 - confidence): how much settling this page would be worth to everything above it
Completenessyesat least one scored reason on each side (an importance page: at least one interest; an interest page: both readings filled)

Cite this page Governments should not hold back the spread of AI in workplaces in order to protect existing jobs. Idea Stock Exchange, belief page governments-hold-back-spread, truth 0.50, confidence 32%, revision 42c8344 of 2026-10-04. The revision is what makes this quotable: these numbers move as the argument is worked on, and rebuilding that revision reproduces them exactly.

Every number on this page as data: governments-hold-back-spread.json. Constants: K = 1 · UNARG = 0.5 · DEFLINK = 1 · DEFIMP = 0.5 · DEFUNIQ = 1. A reason placed under a conclusion is presumed relevant until a linkage page says otherwise; the burden is on the challenger. The neutral start for importance, the wiki's own rule.

Every value here is computed from the tables above at build time. Nothing is typed.