71–80 of 340 posts
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
All you have to do is look at the state of the world today to see this is the endgame. Huge swaths of humanity live on basically subsistence level agriculture, and it's not like we're all sending UBI to them. The top .001% can see the rest of us fall a lot further before they have to worry about who will buy their products.
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limit…
EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
Exactly. There is no UBI. It is has always been a unsustainable utopian failure once tried at a large scale.
> What will happen is they will leave us to die.
That is the hard truth.
Unfortunately, 2030 will make this so obvious that we have to prepare for when a crash that will wipe out many to the point where the divide will be widened.
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
At some point a AI that maximises paperclips and one that consumes resources to achieve a few people self interested desires starts to look the same.
I'm not sure I follow Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth? In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs do…
You assume that the people who are at the top of the organizations generating said wealth will have any incentive to do that. Look around the world at the petro states for examples of a highly capital intensive industry generating money that subsidizes the rest of the economy.
2. Even if we were to assume an analogy to a petro state, it seems like we as a society can decide if we go the route of Norway or Venezuela
The AI industry, and arguably at this point the tech industry as a whole, isn't concerned with sustainability, as long as they can profit today tomorrow is tomorrow's problem. Who will buy the services, where will data for AI training come from, these are perfectly valid questions but they're questions that don't have an immediate effect on profit, so easier to ignore it until we can't apparently. The same could be s…
It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so that all of our retirement funds depend on it.
But it’s fine, as long as you brand it as “tech” and give some vague promises of it being “the future”.
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
Analogous to that, this is something that I'd been wondering about with respect to hardware prices as silicon is reallocated from consumers to data centers: how am I to make heavy use of frontier (edit: i.e., cloud/data center-provided) AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?
> how am I to make heavy use of frontier AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on? You are not supposed to run them locally but to pay for them running somewhere else.
(I know, I know... the answer is probably that they expect me to just move my software development to the cloud, too. Joy!)