I wish GPT4 had never happened

I know many people in my circles who would find literal religious meaning in the work of painting your fence.

>>This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? I personally would hate to spend all my time on leisure activities. I would still be working as hard but on my passion projects.

No offense but who wants to spend most of their time on leisure activities. That gets old fast. It is a lot more fun being productive. Maybe I'm just weird.

A person on minimum wage in the USA today can enjoy a higher quality of life than kings of a few hundred years ago. My point being that automation has brought huge benefits to society, even if we are blind to them.

Most people are tarded up

This sentiment reminds me of Burdens. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/

“[on the topic of a patient with moderate brain damage] back in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, in a nice tribe with Dunbar’s number of people, there would be no problem … he could just hang out and live in a cave and gather roots and berries and maybe hunt buffalo….

“But society came and paved over the place where all the roots and berry plants grew and killed the buffalo and dynamited the caves… This increased productivity by about a zillion times, so most people ended up better off. The only ones who didn’t were the ones who for some reason couldn’t participate in it… Society got where it is by systematically destroying everything that could have supported him and replacing it with things that required skills he didn’t have.

“…Imagine an employment waterline, gradually rising through higher and higher levels of competence. In the distant past, maybe you could be pretty dumb, have no emotional continence at all, and still live a pretty happy life. As the waterline rises, the skills necessary to support yourself comfortably become higher and higher. Right now most people in the US who can’t get college degrees – which are really hard to get! – are just barely hanging on, and that is absolutely a new development. Soon enough even some of the college-educated won’t be very useful to the system. And so on, until everyone is a burden.”

I see this happening myself as well. Part of my job as a hotel receptionist is taking bookings over the phone: in many cases I am literally just asking them questions and typing their answers into a form, exactly the same form that is available on our website. They even get the same price as if they went to our site directly. But they call up instead, because phones are within their capability to understand, while websites are definitely not. E-commerce has brought increased economic activity, but for some people it has also paved over most of the ways they are capable of performing economic activity.

GPT4 has raised the productivity waterline to a level where “people who blog” are now underwater, so we’re hearing about it a lot more. But it’s just an instance of the general phenomenon. Civilization has been systematically drowning the less cognitively fortunate for a few hundred years, and we should have had something in place to address this long ago.

> find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income.

that system was called communism, and so far, it has not had any of the success that those envisioning it had wanted.

I cannot see how ownership of the output of automation and AI could be distributed evenly. At best, the people being made obsolete would be given food stamps and the barest of life's necessities so they don't die in the streets (and even that, is getting hard as earth runs out of resources). Until the day humanity discovers how to obtain a post-scarcity society, all income must directly be linked to labour.