Is this really true? If Gmail was replaced with a dozen competing services each with "only" 100M users each, would the total number of moderators be lower? How does the number of required human moderators per million users scale, and why?
I agree: not true. The advantage of automation is you can do more for less which extends the reach in wealth and services available to the human race. Automation is a beautiful thing and gmail being too big to service with human support is not understanding that we'll never have enough intelligence power to police every square inch of existence + the net if we rely solely on human intelligence.
Problem is: can we cultivate machine learning intelligence to be as good as some of the best human arbiters?
Automation is a form of capital. In an economic system that has conditions for a runaway positive feedback loop of accumulation of capital, in the long term, it benefits primarily those who own the capital. Specifically, it allows them to collect more economic rent from it, and share less with the rest.
Taken to its logical conclusion, when everything is automated, the people who own the automation don't actually need the rest of the population at all - it becomes redundant. Of course, the "redundant" population might have different ideas about itself...
I don't think anyone is proposing that moderation rely solely on humans. The question is about machine learning with human backup/appeals vs. Google's approach of machine learning with no appeals.
Depends on how much of that wealth is captured and how it is distributed after it is captured.
If a huge amount of wealth is created and 90% of it is captured and the vast majority of it is distributed in share price/dividends then increasing inequality can really fuck up society even while GPD rises.
