11–20 of 99 posts
...Good? Work is horrible? If a drop in the amount of work that needs to be done is actually a problem then that's a policy failure.
...Good? Work is horrible? If a drop in the amount of work that needs to be done is actually a problem then that's a policy failure.
So when a significant portion of the population has no work because they have been replaced by machines, who will buy what the machines make (or do)? Seems like a short sighted race to extinction. Not everything that can be done should be done. Footnote:in the long run if society survives the initial shock, I predict it will actually lead to a resurgence in artisanal crafts to manufacture bespoke items that are prize…
There is no dictum that consumerism is the only way an economy can work. Consumerism is (not exclusively) a manifestation of mass affluent democracies, but I can imagine other systems. The economy ultimately is a mixture of social norms and economic laws. There's enough leeway that I don't think you need mass consumerism.
The devil is in the details, however, and the big question is: who will inherit the earth? Increasingly it's a question of motivation and not survival.
There's already a hedge fund where an AI has a board vote on acquisitions. This isn't that far out of reach.
I think automation will succeed where humans hate to do the job because it's too monotonous, risky or unhealthy - fruit picking, Foxconn, mining etc. It also makes the most economic sense to automate those jobs. Knowledge workers' jobs on the other hand - it'll be much easier for employers to put downward pressure on the salaries of those jobs than to replace them with automation due to higher automation costs and ri…
secondly, the horrible, unanticipated errors will be the catch, while the raw capacities of the machine side will continue to soar..
$0.02
Isn't replacing people with machines what we've been doing uninterrupted since the beginning of the industrial revolution ? In what sense is replacing a translator with DeepL different from replacing a farmer with a tractor ? We've gone from more than two third of the population working on the fields to less than 5% and people still have jobs. What has changed that makes us think that this time it will be different ?
Isn't replacing people with machines what we've been doing uninterrupted since the beginning of the industrial revolution ? In what sense is replacing a translator with DeepL different from replacing a farmer with a tractor ? We've gone from more than two third of the population working on the fields to less than 5% and people still have jobs. What has changed that makes us think that this time it will be different ?
...Good? Work is horrible? If a drop in the amount of work that needs to be done is actually a problem then that's a policy failure.
It’ll be a problem because ultimately the people who own all the capital won’t need anyone else to survive. They’ll build walls and robot guards and live in their utopias of plenty while everyone else starves.
I'm not sure any of us are going to live to see that dystopian time, but o boy if I were one of the ones...