281–290 of 340 posts
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It just seems like people are asserting that AI will enslave humanity without any reason to actually think that outside of speculative fiction.
I’m trying to discuss a scenario where the labor class becomes extraneous/unnecessary to the elite class, not an AI takeover.
Write a book about it then?
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Are you going to be the one to round up all the homeless people and ship them off to abandoned houses in Appalachia?
Admittedly this is a few years old: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/61000-homes-are-empty-in... 61,000 empty houses in San Francisco, 10,000 unhoused people. Even if the unhoused population is under reported by an order of magnitude, there is more than enough housing available to house everyone where they currently are.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but here goes... The rise of AI does not mean that everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse. That is an utter fallacy. It's important to ask two questions: - What happens to the workers? - What happens to the capital? For the first category, it's obvious. The workers lose their jobs. For the second category, the author and many others are under the presumpt…
I feel there are like 50 load bearing assumptions in this piece of fiction that are dubious at best, definitely speculation. When you put all of them together and chain them in a product of probabilities it becomes tech bro wish fulfilling fantasy. But as usual this is expressed with total confidence and inevitability. This is a perfect encapsulation of all that is wrong with rationalists, TPOT, etc. IMHO. I'll just…
Maybe your thinking that underneath the corporate SAS economy, theres a giant sea of consumer spending that props it all up.
That might be reasonable, but remember that in this future hyper unequal AI economy, only a handful of ultra wealthy people, most likely through agent proxies, make up more purchasing power than the bottom 95% combined. We're already past the 50% mark in the real world, so this is not implausible.
I'm not saying this is a good future. In fact its absolutely dystopian. But its way more plausible than the fantasy world the author is describing.
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New technology doesn't eradicate what came before. It only replaces what's profitable. There are still some people in the world subsistence farming. A tech worker is many orders of magnitude more productive in monetary terms, but hasn't replaced them. In the worst case, automation (including physical) may drive the cost of labor far down, but it cannot drive it to zero, and as it does so commodity goods will become c…
> Lots of struggle. But not as bad as some folks are saying I don’t know, what you’re outlining there is pretty grim. Especially as we could elect to just…not destroy people’s livelihood’s en masse?
I don't know, I don't think many nations/organizations would go for that. If we had that level of trust, it feels like there's a lot of other bad stuff that wouldn't be going on right now.
Farmers won't be fired. AI won't replace plumbers. Hairstylists, chefs, landscapers, escorts, nurses, fisherman, etc. There are and will be plenty of people with jobs that AI can't do.
We can keep moving the goal posts all we want, but eventually things will get automated.
Why can't we have automated farm land, automatic harvesting, automatic sorting, delivered automatically via robotic trucks to your door? It's not that far fetched.
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Employed doing what? At some point, we'll have autonomous tractors, autonomous techs to fix those tractors, autonomous cars and delivery vehicles, robot plumbers, AI doing information work. Employed doing...what?
If we reach a point where all labor is automated, then realistically we should have achieved post scarcity utopia at that point. If not, the only realistic options are some form of UBI, or state sponsored make-work. Grow the bureaucracy, the state employs people to do BS fake jobs. Audits, compliance, oversight. Middle-management type work just to continue the illusion of a work for income social contract.
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.
Many billionaires have expressed the desire to eliminate the lower classes. Just take a look at the World Economic Forum and their goals.
> The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions. Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than d…
A true UBI might be hard to fund today, but it's not inherently hard to fund in principle. Mathematically speaking, any UBI amount (or other expansionary monetary policy) could be offset by an equal and opposite increase in aggregate supply, resulting in more money with net zero inflation. If we had 100x higher annual growth in supply of housing/food/energy/transportation/healthcare/electronics/etc., creating 100x mo…
I think the whole, “If we all lose our jobs who will buy things?” Question is like the nuclear scare of the 1950s or the concerns of environmental collapse and the end of the world of the ‘60s and ‘70s. No, it can and will get so, so much worse. I want you to imagine, if you will, the homeless equivalent of the United States environmental health concern prior to the formation of the EPA. Except instead of thick pollu…
Why do you think that physical labor will become incredibly expensive if nobody has jobs? Do you think tools are that hard to get? Chinese tools are cheaper than ever.
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“It’s totally fine guys, if we give billionaires even more money it will totally all work out and be fine! Everything is ok and our benevelont overlords will take earnest care of us, despite literally never having shown the merest inclination to do that ever before”.
You jest, but the wonderful thing is billionaires are mortal. The known anti-semite and Hitler admirer Henry Ford's chartiable foundation added DEI to its mandate in 2021. Andrew Carnegie, an infamous monopolist and strike crusher...his charitable foundations helps fund science education to this day, and his university has graduated countless engineers. The point is... billionaires will die... their capital can conti…
Money isn't.
When Jeff Bezos dies, someone is going to inherit his money. There's no particular reason to believe that whoever he chooses as his heir(s) will be less disposed toward funding fascism and destroying the ability of regular people to have a voice in the world.
You invoke Carnegie, but the current generation of robber barons have shown no real propensity toward philanthropy—they donate to charity, to be sure, but in tiny (relative) amounts, and frequently to their own foundations, which make it legally charity, but in practice just another way for them to control their own money.
The proposals that the billionaires of today will give away their money (and thus power) within their lifetimes, or that their heirs will suddenly become champions of labor and the downtrodden, require some fairly significant evidence—from today, not just comparisons to the Gilded Age—before they can be considered credible.