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The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

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131–140 of 268 posts

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not against Universal Basic Income, but there are some things about it which worry me, and which don't seem to come up very much in these discussions. leverage If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerf…

Wait, what? If people don’t need to work full time to nominally survive, that gives them much more leverage vs. employers. The BATNA during labor negotiations is now “live a spare lifestyle on basic income” vs. “let your whole family die starving in a gutter”.

OP is talking about leverage against the government should they decide to lower the BI level.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#133
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? Not exactly the definition of the creative class is it?

Plenty of scientists, entrepreneurs and creative thinkers have backgrounds that would allow them to subsist with minimal work, and choose to do what they do anyway.

Heck in countries like France, scientists are paid like shit (I mean, by US standards) and still do unpaid overtime without being forced to.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#134
post #89
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs we could put the pedal to the metal in human freedom and innovation.

People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.

Once ai starts making better art than humans it might be able to improve itself better than humans as well. At that point we don't need humans either. Still nice to keep us around though.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#135
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.

The amount of money someone can make in our economy as an artist isn't a reflection of how much art we "need." Art in particular is not a commodity that society can just have enough of. And in general, the price something fetches in our economy isn't always a reflection of its value to society. See: salaries of social workers, emergency medical technicians, etc.

Everything, including art, follows supply and demand. Value is the point where they meet. Salaries of social works and EMTs are where the supply of those positions meet the need for those positions in any certain area.

Art has a defined supply and demand, where the supply is high and demand is low (probably due to the fact you can buy copies of famous masterpieces for very cheap).

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#136
post #101

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A u…

The topics of "boredom, vice and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor" come up whenever there is unearned income (from the point of view of the recipient). In this area, UBI and welfare benefits are very different from pensions, royalties or rents which - from the point of view of the recipient - have all been earned (through prior work) and thus don't come with indignity / stigma attached. Inher…

Inherited wealth is if anything a generous comparison, since those eligible to inherit wealth are often encouraged by their parents to jump through sizeable work-ethic related hoops to ensure their inheritance, and inheritance is usually with good reason more heavily taxed than most money transfers. UBI is all about assuming that it's entirely unreasonable to set thresholds of need or effort to state handouts when we could instead deny them to people solely on more reasonable criteria like whether they had the decency to be born in a particular country.

So yeah, I actually am against UBI for the foreseeable future, regardless of how well that sits with the HN crowd. Since in the real world we're a very long way from hard AI, replicators and post scarcity economics, UBI is - at best - redistributing from each according to his ability to each according to their ability to prove they're not a foreigner. Sure, the world isn't particularly fair anyway, but let's not pretend it's a step in the right direction to removing any assumption the welfare state is supposed to be a social insurance system for people that have paid into the system and are genuinely looking for work, and replacing it with the ethos that $nationals have a fundamental and inalienable entitlement to the fruits of other's labour (mostly non-entitled foreigners') if they're not particularly interested in trying to earn it themselves.

(Of course there are plenty of arguments against UBI that don't rely on notions of "dignity of work" like the important practical question of how much you're willing to slash existing welfare or raise taxes to give state handouts to much larger numbers of people that haven't indicated they need or want them, but that's probably a tangent to this particular article)

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#137
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large middle class hasn't been around all that long in the history of civilization. Maybe it's just a flash in the pan. My guess is that computer programming will be the new blue collar manufacturing job.

Programming isn't the new blue collar manufacturing job because you don't employ nearly as many people as you were doing manufacturing as you would be employing as computer programmers. Look at the amount of programmers at Alphabet (Google) vs people employed by Ford.

How about Infosys, Wipro, etc.? That kind of programming might employ a large number of people. I think many jobs which now only use spreadsheets for arithmetic may transform into programming jobs. Even some jobs which appear to be only words, like law, might become programming.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#138
post #33
post #7

People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm automation, they said it when computers were becoming popular. I'm not so sure that this time is different - despite all the insistence, I'm sure it seemed just as serious every other time before too.

Those things freed up people to do more things that require mental instead of physical labor. Now that we're automating mental labor, what is left to shift to? Spiritual and emotional labor? I struggle to envision how we can continue to keep people prospering in a money based economy on just those kinds of work.

>> Now that we're automating mental labor, what is left to shift to?

Creativity and innovation, those are far off in AI. Once AI can do those then we will be pets maybe but I don't know if creativity and innovation led by AI will ever have the value that it would with human creativity, at least not to us. An analogy might be we have fast food but people prefer food cooked by a good chef. Will AI be able to have a unwritten signature like a good movie director? writer? or musician? a home designer? etc.

Robots and AI will take over lots of jobs but will create lots of work like computers did. We aren't even off this planet yet or doing much in space or below the surface or oceans yet, so much work to do.

Just like computers and the internet did, robots and AI will empower smaller and smaller groups to achieve amazing things. Single people can have companies of bots/ai to compete more quickly.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#139
Now I'll highlight a concern I do actually have about a fully robotized economy: weapons proliferation. The key pieces of information needed to build a serviceable anti-tank missile or a jug of nerve gas are already lying on the shelves of thousands of technical libraries. The details may be classified, but the broad outlines in the open literature are good enough for someone with patience and a technical background to fill in workable solutions. Fortunately for civilization to date, {diligent, technically educated, sufficiently well funded, homicidal} is a set of attributes that rarely co-occurs. We've seen homicidal maniacs who were patient and well-funded enough to make their own nerve gas just once so far (Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the 1990s).

Things change if machines do all the real work and a would-be killer doesn't need any special skills to get deadlier weapons. The unhinged man who rage-kills his ex-wife and some of her coworkers with a gun today could, in the future, ask the makerbot for kilograms of RDX or tabun instead of a gun. Outbreaks of lethal violence might be rarer, since people who are materially well-off are generally less likely to murder, but the rarer killings rooted in rage or ideology could become a lot deadlier.

In a few post-scarcity science fiction settings impulses to violence are stopped with direct human nerve implants linked to a machine panopticon that can halt dangerous actions. I don't consider that a plausible or even desirable future. In my favorite space opera setting, the Culture of Iain M. Banks, killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight running millions of times faster than biological intelligence. That sounds dreamy to me, but it involves a lot of made up Space Opera physics so I don't think it is plausible. Thinking about a future where AI is capable enough to manufacture anything people ask for, but not capable enough to act as benevolent gods, leads to some odd mixtures of prosperity and catastrophe.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Services like Uber are replacing what used to be a stable job by fewer drivers with a job now done by many more drivers for peanuts. Right idea, wrong complaint. GPS is the automated tool that killed the Taxi. There was a time when it took specialized knowledge to know the layout of a city. GPS took away the one edge the Taxi-industry had... experience in driving and roads. Uber is just the first major company to t…

"GPS is the automated tool that killed the Taxi." No, not really. When I travel to a new city, I always use a Taxi to get around. GPS actually helps out the taxi drivers because I don't need to sit there explaining exactly where to go. I can just tell them the address. In a foreign country, it's even better: Just give them a business card or piece of paper with the address on it. "Uber is just the first major company…

> Uber is the first major company to avoid all of the taxi unions and the medallion systems and hire any driver off the street for what amounts to some extra beer money for the drivers.

Oh come on. As if these Uber drivers would have been able to navigate an unknown neighborhood in the 1980s.

The enabling technology here is the GPS, specifically the free GPS in everybody's smartphone. Without that, the entire Uber model fails because the typical Uber Driver has no navigation skills.

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