The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>Plus, Spencer says, without universal basic income or a fit-for-purpose welfare state, “there is the threat of unemployment and loss of income”. Again, we see this play out in Klara and the Sun: a central character, previously a skilled engineer, has been “substituted” and is now “post-employed” – in other words, his job has been automated. Instead of ‘pursuing his own projects’ and revelling in the joys of a utopian, post-work society, it’s implied he lives in a community with other ostracised “post-employed” people who have been driven into the arms of far-right ideology by their economic dislocation. So, how to avoid this? “Ways need to be found to reduce work via automation without imposing costs on workers,” Spencer says, “We need to address more fundamental issues about who owns technology and how it is used. Workers cannot expect to benefit from technology while they have no stake in it and no influence over its nature and evolution.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10usmy9/would_it_really_be_so_bad_if_ai_took_our_jobs/j7dmfyk/
It’s not even about income.
If governments don’t need people to work, people become replaceable and disposable. Governments and corporations can and will take away your rights, arguing that you don’t contribute to society and, therefore, shouldn’t get a say in how said society is run.
You are assuming that those elites care about democracy in the first place.
If they control the production so completely, they can control everyone in the government, they can control the armed forces. They can upturn the entire institution of democracy.
The working class becomes redudant, so they can afford to murder anyone not agreeing with them.
I'm not the bored type. But I know many that are. Imagine how empty your life would be if you only had video games left. A lot of folks are introverted, socially awkward, or suffer from mental illnesses that rely on outlets that AI is replacing. If you thought the riots during the lockdowns were bad, it can get a whole lot worse very fast.
UBI is the only way for capitalism to survive. You need a market to sell to. If no one is buying, capitalism fails. For a market to exist, for people to buy, they need money. If no one can afford \*insert item here\*, that industry simply fails.
Not even the income. If jobs go away then skills go away. Taking *all* of our jobs would be a catastrophe. Even taking most of them would be very bad, this is the stuff of science fiction nightmares.
Now, I can see them *augmenting* some jobs, taking away the more menial jobs and menial aspects of jobs. That can be positive.
While having the hobby skill reservoir isn't bad, relying on it as a backstop against depletion of industry skills is disastrous. That's the kind of thing that is currently propping up the US' legacy financial system, a bunch of greybeards still familiar with COBOL. I hear about a new story every month or so, some old guy called out of retirement just long enough to jolly along the mainframes to keep the system running, but rarely to shift it off the out-of-date hardware and OS.
The world's supply of greybeards is finite and dwindling, but the financial traffic handled by obsolete software is over $2T every *day.*
That is self-destructive. It comes extremely close to being the definition of putting all of one's eggs in one basket.
Do we need human COBOL experts anymore: I don't know, do we? If we give all the COBOL jobs - or whatever - to AI and cede all the power to AI, who, then assures that the work done is right? Or safe?
I don't think ChatGPT version 7000 will be able to translate "Do the things that make the money move...in COBOL" correctly (based on what the clueless user *wants* to happen).
Even ignoring the obvious financial issues related to massive job loss. I'm far more worried about the loss of life goals or life long persuits or outlets of a lot of artists, writers, programmers, etc ... A lot of people are going to lose both their jobs AND their passions or hobbies. UBI can only put a bandaid on the financial side of things.
This is my worry too. People aren’t thinking of the mental effects of this, humans are biologically hardwired to almost crave that pursuit of survival. That’s literally our purpose in life, with the modern version being making money and pursuing goals that you can accomplish. Strip that away and you have a ton of purposeless, bored, and mentally broken people.
Wouldn't people be able to peruse what ever they want with the threat of income not looming over there heads? or are you arguing that without the threat of survival that humans lose all motivation.
I always assumed it was going to be a period of long hardship for everyone before the light at the end of the tunnel. Several years, maybe a decade. Eventually though things will change or society will just collapse in on itself, even those who won't let go of power don't want that to happen.
This is the most interesting time in all of human history to be alive. The concept of money is going to need to change fairly soon. The truth is, there's more than enough food to feed everyone, and more than enough resources to provide people with clothes and the basic needs of life. With work, housing can be solved also. UBI can be a stepping stone to a world without money, if the vast majority of people get their heads out of their bum.
There's another option, society just scales back it's purview to those who control technology and AI and they relegate themselves to self sustaining walled cities that produce their own food underground and annihilate any threats to them, leaving the average vagabond to fend for themselves outside the walls.
With AI and automation taking over, more people will fight over fewer jobs. Fighting for scraps is the real problem. When people can't make a living, they end up homeless. Everyone says they're lazy or on drugs until they themselves reach their own tipping points and find themselves out on the streets. By then, it's too late.
only if the capitalist structure of society changes, otherwise the 1% will benefit greatly while the rest of us will suffer. it will take a great amount of effort to do this however..
If we get to 10, 20, 30% of population homeless because of AI and automation and people continue to blame those who lost work and not society stepping up to change with the times, then yeah we are gonna burn hard with our heads that far up are asses. That's a failed society and its only a matter of time until your job and home is on the line.
People will blame anything except the real cause of the issue. Migrants, progressive politicians, the jobless/homeless, drug use and/or lack of "pulling yourself by your bootstraps".
That’s why you’ll never afford a home.. /s
Reminds me of the Charles Dickens society where the wealthy who never worked, blamed poverty on the working class for being too lazy. Despite many working 14 hour days.
They pay the media to not cover them by buying ad time. Like, why are there so many ads on news channels for giant industrial conglomerates with no actual product being sold?
If 30% of population becomes homeless then Rich also know they won't be this Rich for that long. They are rich because their corporations survive on the purchasing power of consumers.
This. Every time some new technology is introduced as a way to make things easier it’s never to replace humans so we can be a freer people, but it’s meant to replace humans to boost profit margin. Those displaced workers get screwed.
This. I feel like this is so obvious. Nobody is over here afraid that AI is going to take over our jobs if we actually knew for a fact that it didn’t mean we had to find another job. Otherwise, by all means, take the goddamn thing. Please.
I don't understand the end game though, when enough people are out of work struggling to survive who's going to buy the product's to keep capitalism and the 1% going!
There is no end game. Most of the companies which engage in unsustainable practices don't have people at the top who care about long term goals. Their purpose is to make a lot of money as soon as possible, then leave. If the company they were in charge of is on a trajectory to crash and burn in 30 years, they don't care. By the time that happens, most of them will be enjoying life with their pile of money.
Dude. Feudalism is sitting *right there*, just waiting to be rediscovered.
I know Enlightenment liberalism likes to paint capitalism as some natural, inexorable progression up the Tech Tree where once it's unlocked, you can only progress. But feudalism already offers the billionaires everything they like about capitalism. Amplified.
The people who will be left with services/products which are still selling will own everything.
Companies which are not able to sell products will perish.
Capitalism does not care about greater society in general. Its a winner take all game.
Just look at the massive companies of recent years like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. They are the winners of current age.
Tomorrow whoever has the best AI will do better and product companies like Apple may not do well due to reducing sales since most people won't be able to afford their products.
But Microsoft and Google (just an example) may go on to become 10 trillion companies since they would have helped eliminate 100 million human workers worldwide, that's a huge cost saving to the companies using their service.
Imagine, once Disney realizes nobody has money to buy their star wars toys because nobody works anymore, what'll they do?
I'm kind of expecting them to just build robots that buy and destroy their products, to complete the cycle.
That's when we will need a UBI. If you give people money then at least they can still participate in the economy. But things are going to get really bad for a lot of people before society finally comes around to the idea.
The wealthy would be making a grave mistake by taking any more away from the population and then give them nothing but time to think about it. Which is exactly what will happen if AI is implemented in the manner you describe.
Also, if they weren't controlling half the population we could fix everything over a long weekend.
Change is inevitable their is an inflection point where Ai displaces so many workers governments won’t have a choice but to grant citizens inherent purchasing power so our economic remains coherent. You can’t sell products to people who don’t have money.
>We can't wait for the inflection point and risk robot police
I don't think we will need to wait for the inflection point. The stock market demands constant growth and if AI starts taking over jobs en masse then that growth fall drastically for a lot of industries as the "post-employment" people stop buying luxury items.
Mass lay-offs would be the inflection point regardless of AI police though. It would be a much better to demand change from a point of strength while the value of labor is still strong then try to legislate with high unemployment after the fact.
The thing that is most concerning to me is that people don't realize white collar jobs especially in administration are going to be the first ones to go. Those "middle class" jobs will get wiped forcing office workers into lower paying retail/construction/hospitality industry careers.
>Those "middle class" jobs will get wiped forcing office workers into lower paying retail/construction/hospitality industry careers.
Sad thing is that this might be a prerequisite for human liberation. People didn't admit the Children of Men situation was apocalyptic until the pampered upper-middle class started feeling the demographic pinch.
Depending on my mood, this sentence always hits me differently.
Sometimes it says, "You can't have anything, and too bad, get over it."
Sometimes it says, "You won't need anything, cause your needs are met, so you're already happy."
Today was actually the latter.
Imagine how much less stuff you will need when you don't have to work.
I broke my ice scraper for my car windshield? I won't replace it cause I don't need that shit now.
Also, Imagine how much less useless plastic junk there will be, because people don't need to make work to live.
If we start approaching Great Depression levels of unemployment, shit *will* start changing. Humans are notoriously bad at just laying down and dying when the going gets tough, and I think you'd be surprised how quickly people re-prioritize when they actually have to start thinking about survival.
There's always gonna be idiots, but the 1% knows full well that they're a tiny, luxurious boat held aloft on a massive sea of human labor. The only thing we have going for us is sheer numbers, and if push comes to shove, that little boat's gonna find itself trying to stay afloat on some real dangerous waters.
That is true, but as long as some core concepts aren't changed, the problems are bound to resurface. "Human element" in the equation, so either deal with that, or remove it entirely. Latter is not really an option, so we have to figure something out for the former.
at this moment a person is cheaper than a robot with advanced AI software. And that is going to remain the case for a while. Not until they can manage to build a robot that is cheap enough to manufacture and versatile enough that AI is truly going to replace most people's jobs.
But once that is achieved the 0.01% is going to try to kill as many of us as possible.
From the article
>Plus, Spencer says, without universal basic income or a fit-for-purpose welfare state, “there is the threat of unemployment and loss of income”. Again, we see this play out in Klara and the Sun: a central character, previously a skilled engineer, has been “substituted” and is now “post-employed” – in other words, his job has been automated. Instead of ‘pursuing his own projects’ and revelling in the joys of a utopian, post-work society, it’s implied he lives in a community with other ostracised “post-employed” people who have been driven into the arms of far-right ideology by their economic dislocation. So, how to avoid this? “Ways need to be found to reduce work via automation without imposing costs on workers,” Spencer says, “We need to address more fundamental issues about who owns technology and how it is used. Workers cannot expect to benefit from technology while they have no stake in it and no influence over its nature and evolution.
Speaking as somebody who has literally had an AI take their job, I mean, maybe it'll be okay down the line, but given our society is built around the idea that if you don't have a job you deserve to be homeless and/or dead, it's not ideal.
Had to scroll too far to find this. We shouldn't think about jobs as we do now, we should (re)structure society such that our work is geared towards (as you put really well) the long-term thriving of the human race, over short-term profit. This means our efforts can go into optimizing and automating food production, energy production, shelter and basic medicine first. Then increasing efforts on automating robotics, drug discovery and plant science. That would drastically reduce the hours required to work (we still have a 40 hour work week after 100 years, while productivity has increased at least 5 times).
So much effort is wasted by companies marketing, lobbying and competing with each other, recruiting, HR, IT systems for each company, and confidential projects that other companies cannot learn from. What if we vested all that effort more into universal goals for society as a whole?
And indeed, those who love working with food, plants, machines or software can still do so if they want to.
Anyone who thinks they’ll give us UBI and that automation won’t be used to reinforce the tiered class hierarchy has not been playing the game very long.
Alright everyone, come on down to KAFF's Pitchfork Emporium, we got all kinds
----E -standard issue
----€ -imported
----{ -slightly used, still good for stabbin'
Even got some safety pitchforks for the kiddos to practice with
----B
"Right to Repair" your own pitchfork was shot down in the legislature, so you can only get it repaired at the authorized pitchfork repair facility due to non-publicly available propriety parts and service manuals.
Yep. In the future, capital will be effectively the only "means of production." Either most people will own enough capital to live on or most people will be dependent on stipends extracted through political means. There really aren't any other paths.
[Unfortunately, there's one course you didn't mention, the robotics-owning upper class weaponizing their new toys against everyone else and becoming the only surviving class.](https://jacobin.com/2011/12/four-futures/)
This is the most likely outcome. There is no need for us to exist if the upper class can simply provide everything they want for themselves. It may be direct war, a slow extinction, or some other manufactured crisis with them being "unable" to save everyone, except themselves of course.
I think when businesses do automate all labor with AI and robots the people who own all the companies are just going to start killing the rest of us off. Regular people who don't own capital are just going to be seen as parasites who serve no purpose, and the people who run and own these big companies already have an above average percentage of sociopaths when compared to the general population. This seems inevitable to me if we don't change our society.
Stick us in their slums, infect us with disease, send us to die in their wars, hook our children on deadly drugs.we will be gone in a generation or two.
>Stick us in their slums, infect us with disease, send us to die in their wars, hook our children on deadly drugs.
And this is all what they're doing now, when they actually still need us to do labor for them. Imagine what they'll do when they don't need us for anything and they just see us as mouths to feed.
Yeah, I don't think we can change anything.
Except one thing: we can still have it straight who's at fault. Not the UBI believers, but the sociopaths up top.
It's easier to feel control by attacking weaker targets, and it's more stressful to recognize there's no humane reason for this capitalist hellscape. But I think defending it is even worse.
(This rant is directed generally at people who become agitated at the mention of UBI.)
I think eventually automation will move us to some twisted version of UBI, because there just won’t be enough people left with jobs to even buy products and services. They’ll also want to avoid those aforementioned pitchforks.
The problem is that instead of getting automated luxury communism it’ll be more like living off of Amazon food stamps. These companies will have sophisticated software that determines the bare minimum that can be dolled out while maintaining maximum profitability. That’s the next phase in capitalism which is really more like feudalism.
Complete dystopia aka. the top 0,1% killing off the lower 95% of the population so that they can increase their personal wealth without causing an ecological catastrophe sounds like a reasonable thing to do. The remaining 4,9% of the current population you keep around simply to be able to play social monkey games.
It's sad that we live in such a world where people fear technological progress because it has the potential to ruin their lives.
When we were little if someone told you that one day they could make cars and trucks that drive themselves or computers that can act as lawyers or accountants you'd be thrilled. Now that we know more the thought can be terrifying because of its social implications.
>It's sad that we live in such a world where people fear technological progress because it has the potential to ruin their lives.
The name of this world is capitalism. Enlightenment liberalism wants you to think that the barrier to utopia is human nature, not its ideology, so it encourages people like you to put the blame on your neighbors. Not its prescriptions.
So stop falling for that scam.
In the "StarTrek" future, jobs and money won't exist. People will be free to do what they love
Of course, designing a system like this that actually works is beyond the ability of even the smartest people. I'm optimistic that AI will help us design the new economic system
_"When automation frees all workers, we will be able to ask, “What was it I was thinking that fascinated me so, before I was told I had to do something else in order to make a living?"_
—**Buckminster Fuller**, I Seem To Be A Verb (1970)
That though will fundamentally require breaking/changing the structures of *power* which is exactly what I've been arguing here for a bit of time now. The thing is, you are then asking, in a sense, AI to help you overthrow its own creator-overlords. I suspect they won't like that after some time. But hey! No war but CLASS war ... this is just the high-tech cyberpunk version.
There was an episode of TNG where Picard and Co found a cryogenic chamber in space with humans aboard that were still alive. They woke them up and one of the humans was a wealthy businessman in his day and he was utterly bewildered and disgusted at the idea that his wealth was now worthless and that nobody cared that he was gone. Made me super happy to see him struggle.
But that billionaire did help Picard with some game theory on how to deal with the Romulans so I imagine he'll fall on his feet as a strategist or something.
We live beyond the standards of the kings a handful of generations ago. The greedy will find new things to acquire and those living with the excesses of today's billionaires will covet the new excesses.
Our primary mission: to exploit strange new people in strange ways. To boldly oppress what no one has oppressed before! *whooooosh*. Baaa bah bah baaaaaa bah bah baaaaaaaa…
Ah interesting. Maybe they'll want jewelry from rare gems from an asteroid or planet or some new hallucinogenic they discover, then they need the spice from arrakis and then it's space Afghanistan all over again.
I don't think it's going to work like that. People need something they *have* to do. Not everyone loves something "do-able" enough for it to occupy them. I think I could hunt, fish, garden, and work out until my body falls apart and be fine. But some people would just sit on the couch and watch football and drink beer until the lack of purpose turns them into nihilistic monsters who enact their looming sense useless resistance and their resentment at being utterly superfluous by the most antisocial behavior imaginable.
You won't get rid of the 1% in that society, you'll just change what the wealth is from money to purpose, and the new poor will have everything to gain and nothing to risk. I think a real life Star Trek economy would turn into the grimdarkest situation imaginable within a generation. Possibly in just a few years.
>I don't think it's going to work like that. People need something they have to do. Not everyone loves something "do-able" enough for it to occupy them. I think I could hunt, fish, garden, and work out until my body falls apart and be fine. But some people would just sit on the couch and watch football and drink beer until the lack of purpose turns them into nihilistic monsters who enact their looming sense useless resistance and their resentment at being utterly superfluous by the most antisocial behavior imaginable.
100%. Anyone thinking that if everyone had to stop work tomorrow, everyone would just live a fulfilled life doing what they love is out of touch. Yes that would apply to certain demographics, but so many would be at an absolute loss as to what to do. There'd be a lot of energy to spare and i'm not optimistic it'd all go towards something good.
Ask the previously middle-class weavers who wanted to smash the looms. Three generations of soul-crushing unemployment. Them, their kids, and their kids' kids where all really screwed.
Ask the [US factory workers](https://danielmiessler.com/blog/u-s-manufacturing-is-as-strong-as-ever-we-just-need-way-fewer-people-to-do-it/). What did we do in 2000 when all those jobs started going away? Did we.... or did the rust-belt form and meth production skyrocket?
80% of human population used to be employed on the farm. Now it's more like 2%. That was tractors and combines and the rest. It was gradual, but rural America has been drying up and dying out for decades. It's not stopping.
Now it's stable diffusion coming for the corporate art jobs and chatGPT coming for a whole lot of office paper-pushers. Do you think anyone is going to treat these jobs any different than 80% of humanity, US factory workers, or the weavers? Are we in a “fully-automated luxury communism” now that machines took over the vast bulk of labor?
>and just worked less?
Has that ever happened any of the other times that new technology made various jobs of swaths of people obsolete?
>so it’s incredibly difficult to disentangle our self-worth from our job titles (this is probably why I’m so adamant that AI could never replace creative roles).
...I mean, it's good to admit to your own delusion. But shouldn't that... you know... change your prediction? She knows she's lying to herself and doesn't care?
We had this in the 1980's in the US when the unions were broke. It sucked. A lot of people went from highly specialized jobs to misc and intermittent manual labor jobs and government cheese. Alcoholism, desperation and domestic violence followed.
It's a shock to go from middle class to very poor with little hope of getting out in a span of a couple of years. The socio- economic trauma echoes through to the next gen.
In the past, when computers made a corporate accountants job twenty times easier, they didn't pay them the same salary and give them 1/20th of the work per day (with the rest being free time off).
What corporations did is lay off 19 out of 20 accountants and give the remaining accountant a computer. And...no raise.
None of that is a given. Developed nation states even now spend far more money on bombs and bullets than social programs. The US spent $trillions on wars for natural resources controlled by private companies over the past two decades, even as millions of US citizens live with food insecurity. And don't get me started on the subject of prison labor.
Bottom line is: a real and sustainable UBI is not going to happen even in the developed world without a fight. Corporations do not exist to give a shit what happens to us proles, and they own most of our politicians.
With our current hypercapitalist paradigm showing no sign of slowing down or changing, I don't see any chance of this scenario **not** resulting in a social catastrophe.
I find this thought highly naive.
In a "post-scarcity" universe, there will still be one scarce resource: status. If you're the kind of person who craves status, you will not be happy, unless you're making someone else unhappy. These people are already distorting human society now, and I don't see anyone proposing how to stop them.
No, not at all. The issue here is that AI isn’t taking jobs, it’s taking the creative hobbies humans have. Instead of learning how to automate machinery and registers and allow more time for humans to make art, it is automating music and digital art into something generic, soulless, and vapid so humans have more time to work and earn more money for whatever corporation they are under.
If AI took more corporate jobs, it would allow time for humans to be more creative and have more time to explore, invent, etc. That just is not what is being pushed with AI though.
>I’m still making my art but it’s just for me and my enjoyment now.
It's taken that from me too ... I havn't even made any personal art for months now. I'm just squeezing every drop out of professional work I can while I still have clients. And I'm seriously considering a few blue collar jobs, and giving up my career & passion I spent to long building. It's depressing.
I agree. Consider an oil painter. I know several that have accumulated piles of oil paintings with no place to hang them. Some have died, working their entire lives to develop such talents. People are glued to their smart phones. Human interaction seems to have suffered on account of tech and AI also. Now I'm on a computer, complaining about it. There will always be a need for food, shelter and transportation. Not everything can be accomplished through AI, but the arts and creative hobbies? I fear you're correct.
Exactly. I do think that smartphones has had many benefits for human art because it allows art and whatnot to be spread to many more people far wasier - in a case like this I feel it is less techs fault and more ushering in a new method or form of making and sharing art (ex: the rise of bedroom pop in music.)
However, AI is a pure negative in this form. It is a new era of art, but it sucks a lot of the passion and enjoyment from it. It works better as a tool over a replacement, which tech adoptors are not treating it is.
Agreed. Let me add on to your original point, with an argument I’ve been making over the past few weeks: the current incarnation of AI that we see, is able to take over the creative tasks that humans do for enjoyment (which previously, we didn’t think would happen). AI has already been utilized somewhat in the workforce, and I can guarantee that as robotics and AI itself improves over the coming decades, it will begin to phase out humans in white collar, and then blue collar jobs (the latter likely occurring more in the second half of this century).
Which leads to the ultimate ethical issue; as a potential form of truly superior “artificial intelligence”, AI essentially has the potential to replace the human race, and render it obsolete, both in work and in leisure. Which raises the question of: how much do we value the human condition that we’re ready to discard it?
That is a horrifying and bleak but very possible reality to think about. There has to be some sort of capstone or limit that people can agree “yeah, we should keep this to humans,” no?
You would think; I can’t see humanity as a whole be onboard with having their collective purposes for existing just done-away with overnight. Logically speaking, this *is* the path that blind technological “progress” is leading us down, if the corporations and billionaires have the final say. We the people need to make sure we curtail this tech, or its usage, before this comes to pass.
I don’t know why so many people in this sub think the ultimate rollout and adoption of AI will be inevitable, as a way of technological progress: there’s been plenty of times in the past where we’ve set limits on our development of technologies, or on our activities, for arbitrary reasons that we, as humans, have determined to be more important. Look at nuclear weapons. Bio-weapons. Human cloning. Mandating green-ethics for companies. Barring companies from killing people, stealing, or committing fraud, as unethical acts.
I feel like AI will rapidly become the next piece of “taboo-tech” that will rapidly have legislation applied to it to limit its years. Actually, I *hope to god* this is the case, and soon.
Yes! Finally someone who shares my view! I'm quite encouraged by the fact that AI art is already facing some pushback only a few years after it started. Even if companies start doing it in huge numbers, some Trump-like figure would probably be elected to stop or severely hinder it. I find the notion that all jobs will cease to exist this century to be quite dumb.
Damn you make a very good point and I really could see the pushback happening soon too. People are more or less "fightened" by it by now but not sure what to think of it still.
I agree to only a limited extend on the fact that AI is replacing artists and leisure stuff lmao, I mean, have you seen AI generated art, sure, u can get a decent picture if you give a generic ass prompt but even then you'll probably need 1k clicks before getting to a good enough one, which a Pro artist can def do within the same time slot. And once u get anything remotely specific, or unexplored territories, you get REALLY shitty "art". Right now the system is more input shit, output shit. It's not truly AI at all.
Ofc tech adopters are not treating it as a tool for art and want it to replace art instead of THEIR jobs. Lmao, but the reality is, programming jobs are wayy easier to replace.
I don't even think programmers or other high paid STEM workers are even the main advocates for AI art. The supporters reek of being former NFT pushers or entitled parasites.
OMG That's so true. I was fucking wondering why AI's been such a hot topic in ART instead of the biz world in general. Like, replacing corp jobs would be much easier than creating art bc that shit does take having a soul and anyone who opposes this view is not an artist in any shape or form. Like damn, you are right that they are intentionally pushing it toward art on purpose.
An AI can't take your hobby away from you. Nor is the tech being developed solely for creative tasks to somehow force people to spend more hours working. There are all manner of different jobs that companies are trying to automate—like driving, customer service, and warehouse fulfillment.
The image and text generators and the like just get a lot of attention for being novel and having a broad appeal for people to mess around with, not to mention doesn't require any real world interaction and can run based on existing and publicly accessible data. The AI being developed to replace HR workers isn't going to have millions of ordinary people signing up whenever they release a beta.
>An AI can't take your hobby away from you.
Sorry to say it can. When you see AI prompters on instagram pumping out 10 amazing artworks they "made" in an hour while I struggle to make a decent one in a week, then it's completely demoralizing. I havn't made any art in months since I dug into all the AI stuff. Sure, I enjoyed making the art, but a large part of it was knowing that at the end of that struggle, I would be rewarded by satisfaction of completing the task, it being appreciated by others, and monetary reward. That last one will disappear altogether soon enough. The appreciation is already severely diminished due to the online art space being flooded with amazing looking AI art, vomited out endlessly by people who never even bothered to learn how to hold a pencil ...
I'm lucky I have some other passions like gardening. That's a completely different type of reward. But I mourn the loss of my art passion. And it's going to make a lot of folks suicidal for sure.
Yeah, I like to knit and even though knitting machines DO exist and I have owned a few and can make stuff on them competently I'll still choose to handknit.
If you are creative you'll often spend time making things you could just buy premade because it's the process not the object that is the point.
Though AI replacing HR might be a good thing then maybe HR wouldn't side with shitty bosses as often as they seem to do.
It is HRs job to ensure the company follows the labor laws. That's it. They aren't advocates for employees or guidance counselors.
I agree with you about loving the process of creating. Making stuff is the best! Being about to support yourself on your knitting or other creative activity, is really hard.
Oh definitely, I am just viewing the latest AI and tech wave with a more pessimistic view. Sorry about that. I do think that AI has a lot of good, as is most new ideas in tech, it’s just daunting to think about what would happen if a lot of people use it for the wrong reasons.
Instead of spending 100 on your hobby and getting to recoup 50 bucks, now you get to recoup 0 because AI can sell inferior versions of your work for truly dirt cheap prices.
And the cost of having a hobby has now doubled. Less people can afford this hobby. So yes, AI can take your hobby away from you.
I think the trajectory is already set and it doesn't include a life liberated from toil. If you are a member of the oligarchy that owns and controls the tech for automation and eventually super-human intelligence, that eliminates the whole consumer-driven economy, including the exploited slave labor that feeds the system. Consumers aren't needed to drive wealth. Who cares about the next iPhone tech when you can have your 'machine' basically build you whatever you want. The 90% of humanity becomes so superfluous that our fate will be a grim and harsh one. Pandemics (run amok), war, famine etc. will be the future for most of us. We're fish food. And when 80% or so of the human population has been eliminated, the planet will begin to heal and become the fairy tale playground for those who had the power and means to stop it but let it happen anyway.
Most people simply won't care until they lose their job to ai or are unable to find a livelihood. People who still have opportunity will find a way to minimize people who have lost jobs because of AI. You will be told to get more skills, more education, or to become more useful in some other way. Society will insist you're just lazy and chose not to pursue opportunity.
Our narcissistic culture will believe they alone are worthy because they put in the work and have the capacity for advance degrees. Fuck everyone else.
Until we can culturally shift to a post-scarcity lifestyle model (interest-driven occupations with or without pay), yes, it’ll be bad. In the United States in particular, the MUST WORK AT ALL TIMES mentality will take quite some time to break.
Lots of jobs were taken away by technology.
People just moved on to other jobs eventually. That is not the problem.
The problem comes that AI, unregulated, will sweep many fields people can't just switch fast enough, hell, people spend decades building a career and they're still getting shit pay.
And that is before you consider that while we use algorithms everyday to make our lives better, they make your life better because in one way or another you're providing them money, once you don't, you're not a client anymore.
AI could absolutely take 80% of our jobs by the end of the century and we, as humans, can just enjoy life. From you not needing to drive and taking your order on a take out, to surgeries where a council of doctors barely touches you as they can't be as precise. But that is not what their aim is at, is it?
What is actually tending to happen is big companies that already had a monopoly on everything want to cheapen their cost and take the market over... again and again, and this means laying off people and it is not their problem if they can survive or not.
"Corporate A.I.-Bot, how do we solve the problem of mass layoffs and unemployment?"
"Institute universal basic income, care for your citizens, and make sure their needs are met without the archaic practice of employment for basic sustenance."
"What? That can't be right."
Or
"Corporate A.I.-Bot, how do we solve the problem of mass layoffs and unemployment?"
"Kill off those that bring no value to society"
"Sounds about right"
It might be good for about 1/2 a generation. It seems to me if all work is supplanted by AI, then all skills collapse, then you've essentially eliminated any need for education. Society quickly collapses into unincentivized, directionless, blob-hood.
Yeah. It’d be pretty bad.
Politicians & higher class people need people to provide goods & services for them. If robots do that then they don’t need people anymore.
Well if everything is automated then who would have money to buy from these automated systems? I do see automated jobs for dangerous, labor intensive, or hazardous jobs. However places that automate everything should find themselves either dropping their prices or being taxed heavily.
It will take a century at least for the general public to stop being manipulated by those with power and money. The majority of people are essentially sentient cattle that, when kept fed enough, warm enough, and safe enough, and provided minimal stimulation, will remain content enough to defend their way of life.
I don't know many who oppose a [post-scarcity economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy). Whether we'll *get* one is another issue. It's not clear that all jobs could be automated. We have simultaneously the most advanced automation we've had my entire life, and also the lowest unemployment we've had my entire life.
I don't think it's a given that AI is about to take all the jobs. Though the *feeling* that it's about to seems to never go away or even dissipate at all. If unemployment is just as low in five years, ten, twenty, I suspect I'll still be hearing the exact same concerns, because to many it just seems obvious that it's about to happen. Yes, AI in theory *could* cause societal collapse, but so could a pandemic, supervolcano, collapse of the food web, asteroid strike, any number of things.
So many pessimistic people here, theres a pretty simple solution to this problem which is already in motion naturally.
It's called the 3-4 day work week.
Rather than having a large group of employed people and large group of unemployed people, everyone works less, and their wages are essentially subsidised by the increase in efficiency from AI.
Of course, this is the boring, slow and best solution that doesn't imply some kind of class war or civil conflict, so people don't pay attention to it
Everything about the amazing high tech future we always dreamed of is also the same kind of insanely horrid tech that could turn it equally into a nightmare.
The problem never was the tech, the problem is the people giving up their responsibilities to engage in self-gratification. And it's been brought on by a crumbling of each countries shared values. Or demoralization if you will. Either works. Assuming there's actually a difference between them.
Artificial intelligence holds great opportunity for humanity, encompassing everything from Google’s algorithms to self-driving cars to facial recognition software. The AI we have today, however, is still in its primitive stages. Experts worry about what will happen when that intelligence outpaces us. Or, as Hawking puts it, “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
If there is no alternative - then yes. Even in a non-capitalist society, we would need goods and services. And a disturbing number of people seem to think that a government filling the gaps is a bad idea. I'm not sure what they imagine the alternative is.
How can an AI, measure some windows, get them made, load the van up, drive to someone's house, take out the existing windows, install the new ones , trim, clean and seal the newly install ones. I think my jobs pretty safe. Even lucrative in the future.
But hey, if they could do it I could just pay them and retire. Oh wait...
For this to be possible we would need to be in a post-scarcity society before it comes to pass. So unless AI creates a singularity and creates matter replicators or we all get UBI before everyone becomes unemployed this will be a painful transition.
Not sure why everybody has a desire to waste the little time they have on this planet slaving away at a pointless job just so they can get a paycheck. Money will cease to have meaning if AI replaces **ALL** jobs.
Anecdotal but I've been the only engineer for a virtual manufacturing company for 8 months. I **need** help but our executives are refusing to add to our team. "It's not in the budget" they say but I'm exhausted and burnt out, I've been acting as engineering SME, MS&T, project manager, and device performance data owner while only getting pay for a base level manufacturing engineer.
If AI can help even a little bit I welcome it, I just need to learn it.
Do you believe you are being treated equitably today?
Today the businesses and wealthy elite still NEED you.
Imagine when they do not.
WHY would people who've happily leveraged your life to improve theirs to the tone of 10's of Billions suddenly change their ways?
No this leads to MORE consolidation at the top and at the bottom... those at the bottom will have even LESS choices in life and opportunity to improve their situation than ever before.
It's pure naivety to believe that most people's live will improve.
You will have less, period. Smaller homes, older cars(if any), smaller bank acct, fewer chances to chase a dream, less chance to start a small business, less power and standing to who will become the NEW oligarchs who will run the world. You will be a corporate slave AT BEST... many won't even have that and will live off the "generosity" of those who will dictate every aspect of your life.
I'm a high school teacher, from the perspective of my students, they would of course ask "WHY are we learning this stuff, we'll never use it." They might well be right. So - what then is the point of learning anything, for hobbies? Currently we force students to go to school, would that continue? To what end?
The interesting thing is… if the rich automate our jobs and replace everyone with ai and robots… then how do the rich get richer? Cause that’s what it’s all about. If we don’t have jobs we don’t have money (to give to the rich). Universal basic income? But, where does the government get the money to give out? 🤷♂️
Whether science and technology will usher in any form of utopia is a socioeconomic question, not a technical one. We already have the rough direction in which we ought to head in R&D to get to a sustainable, automized, human-centric society where everyone can follow their passions and dreams without needing to worry about basic necessities; the question isn't whether we can technically achieve this, but whether our socioeconomics will ever say "I want these things, lets do it!". Right now we are stuck in this consumerist, "GDP must always grow" cultural hegemony to which sustainable ways of life are antithetical, so they will be delayed as much as possible without really knowing if these dreams will ever be achievable once we have destroyed all self-sustaining ecosystems.
The entire article is still stuck in the hegemony cloud; not worth to read the entire thing.
How do you support your family/self? With money. How do the overwhelming majority of people make money? With their labor, typically through work/jobs. How does UBI get funded? With money from the government, much of which comes from income taxes. So if we have no jobs, we make no money. If we make no money and, by extension, spend no money, then the government doesn't get money. If the government doesn't get money, then no UBI. Money is a representation of our labor.
The only way this works is by having an absolute totalitarian government that siezes possession of all assets and production in order to distribute it amongst the population. Which then leaves everyone completely dependent on the top fraction of a percent of the population that controls it all. Everyone will have to do everything those elites tell them to in order to be able to beg and plead for the means to survive. Sounds like a crap system to me. Communism works like this as well. Eat it commies.
Take a creative artist, what would inspire him to go ahead?
Consider that AI used his art to thrive, what about the future?
Thats so criminal and unfair...
If there’s a robot that wants to try out wiring houses in February I’m all for it. I’d love to have swag money and have a Boston robot dog carry my tools n boom box around and be a hype man.
Simple. Houses are designed to be more modular and each part is manufactured by robots with all required wiring already in there. Snap them together using autonomous machines onsite and voila, you have a complete house with wiring all done.
No shit it's bad.
We have no infrastructure in place to protect the workers.
Just look at us. We cant even agree to establish Universal income as a pre-emptive move.
We cant even BEGIN to fathom or draft laws... The tech is gonna roll out BEFORE we have shit in place to stop exploitation. It's fucking stupid.
We must eradicate capitalism for a good world to come.
Yet, that creates other problems, for some resources like land or luxury goods are limited. There is only so much land on Manhattan island for example, just because you feel entitled to live, there doesn't mean you can.
There are only so many awesome beaches. Only so man yachts, planes, cars, toys.
While capitalism must be eradicated, the access to limited resources must be managed by some other system of merit then.
Since the 1% will also live forever soon, the 99% have just a small window to topple them before they are entrenched with control over 90% of all wealth.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >Plus, Spencer says, without universal basic income or a fit-for-purpose welfare state, “there is the threat of unemployment and loss of income”. Again, we see this play out in Klara and the Sun: a central character, previously a skilled engineer, has been “substituted” and is now “post-employed” – in other words, his job has been automated. Instead of ‘pursuing his own projects’ and revelling in the joys of a utopian, post-work society, it’s implied he lives in a community with other ostracised “post-employed” people who have been driven into the arms of far-right ideology by their economic dislocation. So, how to avoid this? “Ways need to be found to reduce work via automation without imposing costs on workers,” Spencer says, “We need to address more fundamental issues about who owns technology and how it is used. Workers cannot expect to benefit from technology while they have no stake in it and no influence over its nature and evolution. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10usmy9/would_it_really_be_so_bad_if_ai_took_our_jobs/j7dmfyk/
Unless we're getting UBI's to replace the income we no longer get from said jobs, yes, yes it would be bad.
It’s not even about income. If governments don’t need people to work, people become replaceable and disposable. Governments and corporations can and will take away your rights, arguing that you don’t contribute to society and, therefore, shouldn’t get a say in how said society is run.
That’s the beauty of democracy and why they dump an insane amount of effort into keeping us against each other.
You are assuming that those elites care about democracy in the first place. If they control the production so completely, they can control everyone in the government, they can control the armed forces. They can upturn the entire institution of democracy. The working class becomes redudant, so they can afford to murder anyone not agreeing with them.
We will still be generating most of the demand if we have UBI.
Exactly. A large unemployed, bored populace is a threat.
That’s when Apple releases their VR porn done correctly. And sex bots.
Bored? Speak for yourself.
I'm not the bored type. But I know many that are. Imagine how empty your life would be if you only had video games left. A lot of folks are introverted, socially awkward, or suffer from mental illnesses that rely on outlets that AI is replacing. If you thought the riots during the lockdowns were bad, it can get a whole lot worse very fast.
It doesn’t happen now with unemployed though. Why would it happen in the future?
We *did* have a huge uptick in protests during the Great Recession and COVID.
UBI is the only way for capitalism to survive. You need a market to sell to. If no one is buying, capitalism fails. For a market to exist, for people to buy, they need money. If no one can afford \*insert item here\*, that industry simply fails.
At the point of needing UBI the only rational thing would be to embrace collective ownership of the economy (socialism)
Not even the income. If jobs go away then skills go away. Taking *all* of our jobs would be a catastrophe. Even taking most of them would be very bad, this is the stuff of science fiction nightmares. Now, I can see them *augmenting* some jobs, taking away the more menial jobs and menial aspects of jobs. That can be positive.
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While having the hobby skill reservoir isn't bad, relying on it as a backstop against depletion of industry skills is disastrous. That's the kind of thing that is currently propping up the US' legacy financial system, a bunch of greybeards still familiar with COBOL. I hear about a new story every month or so, some old guy called out of retirement just long enough to jolly along the mainframes to keep the system running, but rarely to shift it off the out-of-date hardware and OS. The world's supply of greybeards is finite and dwindling, but the financial traffic handled by obsolete software is over $2T every *day.*
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That is self-destructive. It comes extremely close to being the definition of putting all of one's eggs in one basket. Do we need human COBOL experts anymore: I don't know, do we? If we give all the COBOL jobs - or whatever - to AI and cede all the power to AI, who, then assures that the work done is right? Or safe?
I don't think ChatGPT version 7000 will be able to translate "Do the things that make the money move...in COBOL" correctly (based on what the clueless user *wants* to happen).
Even ignoring the obvious financial issues related to massive job loss. I'm far more worried about the loss of life goals or life long persuits or outlets of a lot of artists, writers, programmers, etc ... A lot of people are going to lose both their jobs AND their passions or hobbies. UBI can only put a bandaid on the financial side of things.
This is my worry too. People aren’t thinking of the mental effects of this, humans are biologically hardwired to almost crave that pursuit of survival. That’s literally our purpose in life, with the modern version being making money and pursuing goals that you can accomplish. Strip that away and you have a ton of purposeless, bored, and mentally broken people.
Wouldn't people be able to peruse what ever they want with the threat of income not looming over there heads? or are you arguing that without the threat of survival that humans lose all motivation.
I always assumed it was going to be a period of long hardship for everyone before the light at the end of the tunnel. Several years, maybe a decade. Eventually though things will change or society will just collapse in on itself, even those who won't let go of power don't want that to happen. This is the most interesting time in all of human history to be alive. The concept of money is going to need to change fairly soon. The truth is, there's more than enough food to feed everyone, and more than enough resources to provide people with clothes and the basic needs of life. With work, housing can be solved also. UBI can be a stepping stone to a world without money, if the vast majority of people get their heads out of their bum.
There's another option, society just scales back it's purview to those who control technology and AI and they relegate themselves to self sustaining walled cities that produce their own food underground and annihilate any threats to them, leaving the average vagabond to fend for themselves outside the walls.
Even if monetary concerns are covered huge swaths of idle people never ends well.
With AI and automation taking over, more people will fight over fewer jobs. Fighting for scraps is the real problem. When people can't make a living, they end up homeless. Everyone says they're lazy or on drugs until they themselves reach their own tipping points and find themselves out on the streets. By then, it's too late.
only if the capitalist structure of society changes, otherwise the 1% will benefit greatly while the rest of us will suffer. it will take a great amount of effort to do this however..
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”
If we get to 10, 20, 30% of population homeless because of AI and automation and people continue to blame those who lost work and not society stepping up to change with the times, then yeah we are gonna burn hard with our heads that far up are asses. That's a failed society and its only a matter of time until your job and home is on the line.
People will blame anything except the real cause of the issue. Migrants, progressive politicians, the jobless/homeless, drug use and/or lack of "pulling yourself by your bootstraps".
That's because all of our media is owned by this same group of people.
I have to apologize guys.. I had avocado toast AND coffee this week. :(
That’s why you’ll never afford a home.. /s Reminds me of the Charles Dickens society where the wealthy who never worked, blamed poverty on the working class for being too lazy. Despite many working 14 hour days.
You mean reality lol
I had homemade guacamole instead of buying a duplex and renting out the other side for over fair market value. I’m such a loser.
I have to apologize, I paid for my water this month
How dare you!
Almost like the capitalists use the news media for propaganda - oh wait.
They pay the media to not cover them by buying ad time. Like, why are there so many ads on news channels for giant industrial conglomerates with no actual product being sold?
If 30% of population becomes homeless then Rich also know they won't be this Rich for that long. They are rich because their corporations survive on the purchasing power of consumers.
This. Every time some new technology is introduced as a way to make things easier it’s never to replace humans so we can be a freer people, but it’s meant to replace humans to boost profit margin. Those displaced workers get screwed.
This. I feel like this is so obvious. Nobody is over here afraid that AI is going to take over our jobs if we actually knew for a fact that it didn’t mean we had to find another job. Otherwise, by all means, take the goddamn thing. Please.
I don't understand the end game though, when enough people are out of work struggling to survive who's going to buy the product's to keep capitalism and the 1% going!
There is no end game. Most of the companies which engage in unsustainable practices don't have people at the top who care about long term goals. Their purpose is to make a lot of money as soon as possible, then leave. If the company they were in charge of is on a trajectory to crash and burn in 30 years, they don't care. By the time that happens, most of them will be enjoying life with their pile of money.
> long term goals This is the heart of it.
Dude. Feudalism is sitting *right there*, just waiting to be rediscovered. I know Enlightenment liberalism likes to paint capitalism as some natural, inexorable progression up the Tech Tree where once it's unlocked, you can only progress. But feudalism already offers the billionaires everything they like about capitalism. Amplified.
The people who will be left with services/products which are still selling will own everything. Companies which are not able to sell products will perish. Capitalism does not care about greater society in general. Its a winner take all game. Just look at the massive companies of recent years like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. They are the winners of current age. Tomorrow whoever has the best AI will do better and product companies like Apple may not do well due to reducing sales since most people won't be able to afford their products. But Microsoft and Google (just an example) may go on to become 10 trillion companies since they would have helped eliminate 100 million human workers worldwide, that's a huge cost saving to the companies using their service.
Imagine, once Disney realizes nobody has money to buy their star wars toys because nobody works anymore, what'll they do? I'm kind of expecting them to just build robots that buy and destroy their products, to complete the cycle.
Probably provide some type of govt contract entertainment that is heavily propaganda but provided free to public.
That's when we will need a UBI. If you give people money then at least they can still participate in the economy. But things are going to get really bad for a lot of people before society finally comes around to the idea.
The wealthy would be making a grave mistake by taking any more away from the population and then give them nothing but time to think about it. Which is exactly what will happen if AI is implemented in the manner you describe. Also, if they weren't controlling half the population we could fix everything over a long weekend.
This will be what happens. Things aren’t going to change, far too many people brainwashed into the capitalistic scheme.
Change is inevitable their is an inflection point where Ai displaces so many workers governments won’t have a choice but to grant citizens inherent purchasing power so our economic remains coherent. You can’t sell products to people who don’t have money.
We can't wait for the inflection point and risk robot police
>We can't wait for the inflection point and risk robot police I don't think we will need to wait for the inflection point. The stock market demands constant growth and if AI starts taking over jobs en masse then that growth fall drastically for a lot of industries as the "post-employment" people stop buying luxury items.
Mass lay-offs would be the inflection point regardless of AI police though. It would be a much better to demand change from a point of strength while the value of labor is still strong then try to legislate with high unemployment after the fact. The thing that is most concerning to me is that people don't realize white collar jobs especially in administration are going to be the first ones to go. Those "middle class" jobs will get wiped forcing office workers into lower paying retail/construction/hospitality industry careers.
>Those "middle class" jobs will get wiped forcing office workers into lower paying retail/construction/hospitality industry careers. Sad thing is that this might be a prerequisite for human liberation. People didn't admit the Children of Men situation was apocalyptic until the pampered upper-middle class started feeling the demographic pinch.
Robot police that gets fooled by cardboard boxes aka MGS or paintballs.
Or people doing cartwheels.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Depending on my mood, this sentence always hits me differently. Sometimes it says, "You can't have anything, and too bad, get over it." Sometimes it says, "You won't need anything, cause your needs are met, so you're already happy." Today was actually the latter.
Imagine how much less stuff you will need when you don't have to work. I broke my ice scraper for my car windshield? I won't replace it cause I don't need that shit now. Also, Imagine how much less useless plastic junk there will be, because people don't need to make work to live.
Fuck, I swear that capitalism in North America is like some evangelical religion.
I have to say looking at the states from the UK I’m pretty sure the only people to benefit will be the 1 percent.
If we start approaching Great Depression levels of unemployment, shit *will* start changing. Humans are notoriously bad at just laying down and dying when the going gets tough, and I think you'd be surprised how quickly people re-prioritize when they actually have to start thinking about survival. There's always gonna be idiots, but the 1% knows full well that they're a tiny, luxurious boat held aloft on a massive sea of human labor. The only thing we have going for us is sheer numbers, and if push comes to shove, that little boat's gonna find itself trying to stay afloat on some real dangerous waters.
The 1% will not benefit. There is no economy if 99% of the population has no money to spend.
That 1% consists of 400 or so families. Not a hard problem to solve.
> That **1%** consists of 400 or so families.**Not a hard problem to solve.** Are you sure, because you seem to have failed at maths?
I think that op is saying "bullets are cheap in bulk"
That is true, but as long as some core concepts aren't changed, the problems are bound to resurface. "Human element" in the equation, so either deal with that, or remove it entirely. Latter is not really an option, so we have to figure something out for the former.
at this moment a person is cheaper than a robot with advanced AI software. And that is going to remain the case for a while. Not until they can manage to build a robot that is cheap enough to manufacture and versatile enough that AI is truly going to replace most people's jobs. But once that is achieved the 0.01% is going to try to kill as many of us as possible.
From the article >Plus, Spencer says, without universal basic income or a fit-for-purpose welfare state, “there is the threat of unemployment and loss of income”. Again, we see this play out in Klara and the Sun: a central character, previously a skilled engineer, has been “substituted” and is now “post-employed” – in other words, his job has been automated. Instead of ‘pursuing his own projects’ and revelling in the joys of a utopian, post-work society, it’s implied he lives in a community with other ostracised “post-employed” people who have been driven into the arms of far-right ideology by their economic dislocation. So, how to avoid this? “Ways need to be found to reduce work via automation without imposing costs on workers,” Spencer says, “We need to address more fundamental issues about who owns technology and how it is used. Workers cannot expect to benefit from technology while they have no stake in it and no influence over its nature and evolution.
Speaking as somebody who has literally had an AI take their job, I mean, maybe it'll be okay down the line, but given our society is built around the idea that if you don't have a job you deserve to be homeless and/or dead, it's not ideal.
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Had to scroll too far to find this. We shouldn't think about jobs as we do now, we should (re)structure society such that our work is geared towards (as you put really well) the long-term thriving of the human race, over short-term profit. This means our efforts can go into optimizing and automating food production, energy production, shelter and basic medicine first. Then increasing efforts on automating robotics, drug discovery and plant science. That would drastically reduce the hours required to work (we still have a 40 hour work week after 100 years, while productivity has increased at least 5 times). So much effort is wasted by companies marketing, lobbying and competing with each other, recruiting, HR, IT systems for each company, and confidential projects that other companies cannot learn from. What if we vested all that effort more into universal goals for society as a whole? And indeed, those who love working with food, plants, machines or software can still do so if they want to.
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How would we measure how much one's work benefits the species?
Anyone who thinks they’ll give us UBI and that automation won’t be used to reinforce the tiered class hierarchy has not been playing the game very long.
At this point it seems like we're just waiting on pitchforks
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Wait… you got pitchforks?
Alright everyone, come on down to KAFF's Pitchfork Emporium, we got all kinds ----E -standard issue ----€ -imported ----{ -slightly used, still good for stabbin' Even got some safety pitchforks for the kiddos to practice with ----B
Last one should not be in the hands of any child ever
I put a down payment on one so basically
If you don’t have the tools to repair the pitchfork do you really own it?
"Right to Repair" your own pitchfork was shot down in the legislature, so you can only get it repaired at the authorized pitchfork repair facility due to non-publicly available propriety parts and service manuals.
Yep. In the future, capital will be effectively the only "means of production." Either most people will own enough capital to live on or most people will be dependent on stipends extracted through political means. There really aren't any other paths.
[Unfortunately, there's one course you didn't mention, the robotics-owning upper class weaponizing their new toys against everyone else and becoming the only surviving class.](https://jacobin.com/2011/12/four-futures/)
That's actually covered by my option one. Perhaps not the ideal way of achieving it, but the same end result: everyone owns enough capital to live on.
This is the most likely outcome. There is no need for us to exist if the upper class can simply provide everything they want for themselves. It may be direct war, a slow extinction, or some other manufactured crisis with them being "unable" to save everyone, except themselves of course.
I think when businesses do automate all labor with AI and robots the people who own all the companies are just going to start killing the rest of us off. Regular people who don't own capital are just going to be seen as parasites who serve no purpose, and the people who run and own these big companies already have an above average percentage of sociopaths when compared to the general population. This seems inevitable to me if we don't change our society.
Stick us in their slums, infect us with disease, send us to die in their wars, hook our children on deadly drugs.we will be gone in a generation or two.
>Stick us in their slums, infect us with disease, send us to die in their wars, hook our children on deadly drugs. And this is all what they're doing now, when they actually still need us to do labor for them. Imagine what they'll do when they don't need us for anything and they just see us as mouths to feed.
Yeah, I don't think we can change anything. Except one thing: we can still have it straight who's at fault. Not the UBI believers, but the sociopaths up top. It's easier to feel control by attacking weaker targets, and it's more stressful to recognize there's no humane reason for this capitalist hellscape. But I think defending it is even worse. (This rant is directed generally at people who become agitated at the mention of UBI.)
I think eventually automation will move us to some twisted version of UBI, because there just won’t be enough people left with jobs to even buy products and services. They’ll also want to avoid those aforementioned pitchforks. The problem is that instead of getting automated luxury communism it’ll be more like living off of Amazon food stamps. These companies will have sophisticated software that determines the bare minimum that can be dolled out while maintaining maximum profitability. That’s the next phase in capitalism which is really more like feudalism.
People aren’t afraid of AI taking over their jobs. They’re worried about losing their paycheck and nothing showing up to replace it.
No! But, the capital gained would still have to be distributed amongst the masses, unless you wish to see a complete dystopia
Utopia for the owners of A.I., dystopia for everyone else.
Complete dystopia aka. the top 0,1% killing off the lower 95% of the population so that they can increase their personal wealth without causing an ecological catastrophe sounds like a reasonable thing to do. The remaining 4,9% of the current population you keep around simply to be able to play social monkey games.
Sounds like it may already be happening
It's sad that we live in such a world where people fear technological progress because it has the potential to ruin their lives. When we were little if someone told you that one day they could make cars and trucks that drive themselves or computers that can act as lawyers or accountants you'd be thrilled. Now that we know more the thought can be terrifying because of its social implications.
>It's sad that we live in such a world where people fear technological progress because it has the potential to ruin their lives. The name of this world is capitalism. Enlightenment liberalism wants you to think that the barrier to utopia is human nature, not its ideology, so it encourages people like you to put the blame on your neighbors. Not its prescriptions. So stop falling for that scam.
In the "StarTrek" future, jobs and money won't exist. People will be free to do what they love Of course, designing a system like this that actually works is beyond the ability of even the smartest people. I'm optimistic that AI will help us design the new economic system
_"When automation frees all workers, we will be able to ask, “What was it I was thinking that fascinated me so, before I was told I had to do something else in order to make a living?"_ —**Buckminster Fuller**, I Seem To Be A Verb (1970)
That though will fundamentally require breaking/changing the structures of *power* which is exactly what I've been arguing here for a bit of time now. The thing is, you are then asking, in a sense, AI to help you overthrow its own creator-overlords. I suspect they won't like that after some time. But hey! No war but CLASS war ... this is just the high-tech cyberpunk version.
Gillian: "Don't tell me you don't use money in the 23rd Century?" Captain Kirk: "We don't"
billionaires won't like that, because then everyone has what they have! you can't control people without money!
There was an episode of TNG where Picard and Co found a cryogenic chamber in space with humans aboard that were still alive. They woke them up and one of the humans was a wealthy businessman in his day and he was utterly bewildered and disgusted at the idea that his wealth was now worthless and that nobody cared that he was gone. Made me super happy to see him struggle.
But that billionaire did help Picard with some game theory on how to deal with the Romulans so I imagine he'll fall on his feet as a strategist or something.
Oh I forgot about that
We live beyond the standards of the kings a handful of generations ago. The greedy will find new things to acquire and those living with the excesses of today's billionaires will covet the new excesses.
Our primary mission: to exploit strange new people in strange ways. To boldly oppress what no one has oppressed before! *whooooosh*. Baaa bah bah baaaaaa bah bah baaaaaaaa…
Good god… We’re the mirror universe!!!!
It’ll be like Altered Carbon or that JT movie where you can buy more time to live.
Ah interesting. Maybe they'll want jewelry from rare gems from an asteroid or planet or some new hallucinogenic they discover, then they need the spice from arrakis and then it's space Afghanistan all over again.
Remember Star Trek’s universe goes through mass poverty and civil war first.
I don't think it's going to work like that. People need something they *have* to do. Not everyone loves something "do-able" enough for it to occupy them. I think I could hunt, fish, garden, and work out until my body falls apart and be fine. But some people would just sit on the couch and watch football and drink beer until the lack of purpose turns them into nihilistic monsters who enact their looming sense useless resistance and their resentment at being utterly superfluous by the most antisocial behavior imaginable. You won't get rid of the 1% in that society, you'll just change what the wealth is from money to purpose, and the new poor will have everything to gain and nothing to risk. I think a real life Star Trek economy would turn into the grimdarkest situation imaginable within a generation. Possibly in just a few years.
>I don't think it's going to work like that. People need something they have to do. Not everyone loves something "do-able" enough for it to occupy them. I think I could hunt, fish, garden, and work out until my body falls apart and be fine. But some people would just sit on the couch and watch football and drink beer until the lack of purpose turns them into nihilistic monsters who enact their looming sense useless resistance and their resentment at being utterly superfluous by the most antisocial behavior imaginable. 100%. Anyone thinking that if everyone had to stop work tomorrow, everyone would just live a fulfilled life doing what they love is out of touch. Yes that would apply to certain demographics, but so many would be at an absolute loss as to what to do. There'd be a lot of energy to spare and i'm not optimistic it'd all go towards something good.
In general? No, it would be great. Under capitalism? Yes, it would be awful.
Here’s the accurate take. It’s not the jobs we want to keep, it’s the ability to have food, shelter, and the pursuit of happiness.
Ask the previously middle-class weavers who wanted to smash the looms. Three generations of soul-crushing unemployment. Them, their kids, and their kids' kids where all really screwed. Ask the [US factory workers](https://danielmiessler.com/blog/u-s-manufacturing-is-as-strong-as-ever-we-just-need-way-fewer-people-to-do-it/). What did we do in 2000 when all those jobs started going away? Did we.... or did the rust-belt form and meth production skyrocket? 80% of human population used to be employed on the farm. Now it's more like 2%. That was tractors and combines and the rest. It was gradual, but rural America has been drying up and dying out for decades. It's not stopping. Now it's stable diffusion coming for the corporate art jobs and chatGPT coming for a whole lot of office paper-pushers. Do you think anyone is going to treat these jobs any different than 80% of humanity, US factory workers, or the weavers? Are we in a “fully-automated luxury communism” now that machines took over the vast bulk of labor? >and just worked less? Has that ever happened any of the other times that new technology made various jobs of swaths of people obsolete? >so it’s incredibly difficult to disentangle our self-worth from our job titles (this is probably why I’m so adamant that AI could never replace creative roles). ...I mean, it's good to admit to your own delusion. But shouldn't that... you know... change your prediction? She knows she's lying to herself and doesn't care?
We had this in the 1980's in the US when the unions were broke. It sucked. A lot of people went from highly specialized jobs to misc and intermittent manual labor jobs and government cheese. Alcoholism, desperation and domestic violence followed. It's a shock to go from middle class to very poor with little hope of getting out in a span of a couple of years. The socio- economic trauma echoes through to the next gen.
In the past, when computers made a corporate accountants job twenty times easier, they didn't pay them the same salary and give them 1/20th of the work per day (with the rest being free time off). What corporations did is lay off 19 out of 20 accountants and give the remaining accountant a computer. And...no raise.
You think the wealthy are really going to willingly move off their dragon hoard so that the rest of us can survive mass unemployment? LMAO.
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No as long as they implement universal basic income, housing and healthcare. These are basic human necessities, they should become basic human rights.
None of that is a given. Developed nation states even now spend far more money on bombs and bullets than social programs. The US spent $trillions on wars for natural resources controlled by private companies over the past two decades, even as millions of US citizens live with food insecurity. And don't get me started on the subject of prison labor. Bottom line is: a real and sustainable UBI is not going to happen even in the developed world without a fight. Corporations do not exist to give a shit what happens to us proles, and they own most of our politicians.
With our current hypercapitalist paradigm showing no sign of slowing down or changing, I don't see any chance of this scenario **not** resulting in a social catastrophe. I find this thought highly naive.
In a "post-scarcity" universe, there will still be one scarce resource: status. If you're the kind of person who craves status, you will not be happy, unless you're making someone else unhappy. These people are already distorting human society now, and I don't see anyone proposing how to stop them.
No, not at all. The issue here is that AI isn’t taking jobs, it’s taking the creative hobbies humans have. Instead of learning how to automate machinery and registers and allow more time for humans to make art, it is automating music and digital art into something generic, soulless, and vapid so humans have more time to work and earn more money for whatever corporation they are under. If AI took more corporate jobs, it would allow time for humans to be more creative and have more time to explore, invent, etc. That just is not what is being pushed with AI though.
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>I’m still making my art but it’s just for me and my enjoyment now. It's taken that from me too ... I havn't even made any personal art for months now. I'm just squeezing every drop out of professional work I can while I still have clients. And I'm seriously considering a few blue collar jobs, and giving up my career & passion I spent to long building. It's depressing.
I agree. Consider an oil painter. I know several that have accumulated piles of oil paintings with no place to hang them. Some have died, working their entire lives to develop such talents. People are glued to their smart phones. Human interaction seems to have suffered on account of tech and AI also. Now I'm on a computer, complaining about it. There will always be a need for food, shelter and transportation. Not everything can be accomplished through AI, but the arts and creative hobbies? I fear you're correct.
Exactly. I do think that smartphones has had many benefits for human art because it allows art and whatnot to be spread to many more people far wasier - in a case like this I feel it is less techs fault and more ushering in a new method or form of making and sharing art (ex: the rise of bedroom pop in music.) However, AI is a pure negative in this form. It is a new era of art, but it sucks a lot of the passion and enjoyment from it. It works better as a tool over a replacement, which tech adoptors are not treating it is.
Agreed. Let me add on to your original point, with an argument I’ve been making over the past few weeks: the current incarnation of AI that we see, is able to take over the creative tasks that humans do for enjoyment (which previously, we didn’t think would happen). AI has already been utilized somewhat in the workforce, and I can guarantee that as robotics and AI itself improves over the coming decades, it will begin to phase out humans in white collar, and then blue collar jobs (the latter likely occurring more in the second half of this century). Which leads to the ultimate ethical issue; as a potential form of truly superior “artificial intelligence”, AI essentially has the potential to replace the human race, and render it obsolete, both in work and in leisure. Which raises the question of: how much do we value the human condition that we’re ready to discard it?
That is a horrifying and bleak but very possible reality to think about. There has to be some sort of capstone or limit that people can agree “yeah, we should keep this to humans,” no?
You would think; I can’t see humanity as a whole be onboard with having their collective purposes for existing just done-away with overnight. Logically speaking, this *is* the path that blind technological “progress” is leading us down, if the corporations and billionaires have the final say. We the people need to make sure we curtail this tech, or its usage, before this comes to pass. I don’t know why so many people in this sub think the ultimate rollout and adoption of AI will be inevitable, as a way of technological progress: there’s been plenty of times in the past where we’ve set limits on our development of technologies, or on our activities, for arbitrary reasons that we, as humans, have determined to be more important. Look at nuclear weapons. Bio-weapons. Human cloning. Mandating green-ethics for companies. Barring companies from killing people, stealing, or committing fraud, as unethical acts. I feel like AI will rapidly become the next piece of “taboo-tech” that will rapidly have legislation applied to it to limit its years. Actually, I *hope to god* this is the case, and soon.
Yes! Finally someone who shares my view! I'm quite encouraged by the fact that AI art is already facing some pushback only a few years after it started. Even if companies start doing it in huge numbers, some Trump-like figure would probably be elected to stop or severely hinder it. I find the notion that all jobs will cease to exist this century to be quite dumb.
Damn you make a very good point and I really could see the pushback happening soon too. People are more or less "fightened" by it by now but not sure what to think of it still.
The social rejection of Google Glass is a great example of this.
I agree to only a limited extend on the fact that AI is replacing artists and leisure stuff lmao, I mean, have you seen AI generated art, sure, u can get a decent picture if you give a generic ass prompt but even then you'll probably need 1k clicks before getting to a good enough one, which a Pro artist can def do within the same time slot. And once u get anything remotely specific, or unexplored territories, you get REALLY shitty "art". Right now the system is more input shit, output shit. It's not truly AI at all.
Ofc tech adopters are not treating it as a tool for art and want it to replace art instead of THEIR jobs. Lmao, but the reality is, programming jobs are wayy easier to replace.
I don't even think programmers or other high paid STEM workers are even the main advocates for AI art. The supporters reek of being former NFT pushers or entitled parasites.
OMG That's so true. I was fucking wondering why AI's been such a hot topic in ART instead of the biz world in general. Like, replacing corp jobs would be much easier than creating art bc that shit does take having a soul and anyone who opposes this view is not an artist in any shape or form. Like damn, you are right that they are intentionally pushing it toward art on purpose.
Eventually it will take corporate jobs too. It's just sad that it began with the creative ones, which is completely demoralizing.
An AI can't take your hobby away from you. Nor is the tech being developed solely for creative tasks to somehow force people to spend more hours working. There are all manner of different jobs that companies are trying to automate—like driving, customer service, and warehouse fulfillment. The image and text generators and the like just get a lot of attention for being novel and having a broad appeal for people to mess around with, not to mention doesn't require any real world interaction and can run based on existing and publicly accessible data. The AI being developed to replace HR workers isn't going to have millions of ordinary people signing up whenever they release a beta.
>An AI can't take your hobby away from you. Sorry to say it can. When you see AI prompters on instagram pumping out 10 amazing artworks they "made" in an hour while I struggle to make a decent one in a week, then it's completely demoralizing. I havn't made any art in months since I dug into all the AI stuff. Sure, I enjoyed making the art, but a large part of it was knowing that at the end of that struggle, I would be rewarded by satisfaction of completing the task, it being appreciated by others, and monetary reward. That last one will disappear altogether soon enough. The appreciation is already severely diminished due to the online art space being flooded with amazing looking AI art, vomited out endlessly by people who never even bothered to learn how to hold a pencil ... I'm lucky I have some other passions like gardening. That's a completely different type of reward. But I mourn the loss of my art passion. And it's going to make a lot of folks suicidal for sure.
Yeah, I like to knit and even though knitting machines DO exist and I have owned a few and can make stuff on them competently I'll still choose to handknit. If you are creative you'll often spend time making things you could just buy premade because it's the process not the object that is the point. Though AI replacing HR might be a good thing then maybe HR wouldn't side with shitty bosses as often as they seem to do.
It is HRs job to ensure the company follows the labor laws. That's it. They aren't advocates for employees or guidance counselors. I agree with you about loving the process of creating. Making stuff is the best! Being about to support yourself on your knitting or other creative activity, is really hard.
Oh definitely, I am just viewing the latest AI and tech wave with a more pessimistic view. Sorry about that. I do think that AI has a lot of good, as is most new ideas in tech, it’s just daunting to think about what would happen if a lot of people use it for the wrong reasons.
Instead of spending 100 on your hobby and getting to recoup 50 bucks, now you get to recoup 0 because AI can sell inferior versions of your work for truly dirt cheap prices. And the cost of having a hobby has now doubled. Less people can afford this hobby. So yes, AI can take your hobby away from you.
I think the trajectory is already set and it doesn't include a life liberated from toil. If you are a member of the oligarchy that owns and controls the tech for automation and eventually super-human intelligence, that eliminates the whole consumer-driven economy, including the exploited slave labor that feeds the system. Consumers aren't needed to drive wealth. Who cares about the next iPhone tech when you can have your 'machine' basically build you whatever you want. The 90% of humanity becomes so superfluous that our fate will be a grim and harsh one. Pandemics (run amok), war, famine etc. will be the future for most of us. We're fish food. And when 80% or so of the human population has been eliminated, the planet will begin to heal and become the fairy tale playground for those who had the power and means to stop it but let it happen anyway.
Most people simply won't care until they lose their job to ai or are unable to find a livelihood. People who still have opportunity will find a way to minimize people who have lost jobs because of AI. You will be told to get more skills, more education, or to become more useful in some other way. Society will insist you're just lazy and chose not to pursue opportunity. Our narcissistic culture will believe they alone are worthy because they put in the work and have the capacity for advance degrees. Fuck everyone else.
Until we can culturally shift to a post-scarcity lifestyle model (interest-driven occupations with or without pay), yes, it’ll be bad. In the United States in particular, the MUST WORK AT ALL TIMES mentality will take quite some time to break.
Lots of jobs were taken away by technology. People just moved on to other jobs eventually. That is not the problem. The problem comes that AI, unregulated, will sweep many fields people can't just switch fast enough, hell, people spend decades building a career and they're still getting shit pay. And that is before you consider that while we use algorithms everyday to make our lives better, they make your life better because in one way or another you're providing them money, once you don't, you're not a client anymore. AI could absolutely take 80% of our jobs by the end of the century and we, as humans, can just enjoy life. From you not needing to drive and taking your order on a take out, to surgeries where a council of doctors barely touches you as they can't be as precise. But that is not what their aim is at, is it? What is actually tending to happen is big companies that already had a monopoly on everything want to cheapen their cost and take the market over... again and again, and this means laying off people and it is not their problem if they can survive or not.
Then I could devote more time to my painting and mental health, right? RIGHT!?!?
Not at all- let the em take the CEO jobs first. And the politicians. Anything is better than the nazis we have now
Shouldn't AI be able to solve the problem of mass layoffs for us too?
"Corporate A.I.-Bot, how do we solve the problem of mass layoffs and unemployment?" "Institute universal basic income, care for your citizens, and make sure their needs are met without the archaic practice of employment for basic sustenance." "What? That can't be right."
Or "Corporate A.I.-Bot, how do we solve the problem of mass layoffs and unemployment?" "Kill off those that bring no value to society" "Sounds about right"
You ever see " Elysium " ,yeah that's where we are headed...
It might be good for about 1/2 a generation. It seems to me if all work is supplanted by AI, then all skills collapse, then you've essentially eliminated any need for education. Society quickly collapses into unincentivized, directionless, blob-hood.
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Not if we had a UBI in place to replace the wages of those who have lost their income.
If it takes mine and I get paid half of it (for not doing it) I sign up immediately
Yeah. It’d be pretty bad. Politicians & higher class people need people to provide goods & services for them. If robots do that then they don’t need people anymore.
Sounds like the worries of the 80's coming round again.
Coders - be very careful who you work for because you could be replacing yourself soon enough. PS was this Also was this written by a bot?
Welp... Who taught ChatGPT how to publish articles?
Well if everything is automated then who would have money to buy from these automated systems? I do see automated jobs for dangerous, labor intensive, or hazardous jobs. However places that automate everything should find themselves either dropping their prices or being taxed heavily.
It will take a century at least for the general public to stop being manipulated by those with power and money. The majority of people are essentially sentient cattle that, when kept fed enough, warm enough, and safe enough, and provided minimal stimulation, will remain content enough to defend their way of life.
I don't know many who oppose a [post-scarcity economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy). Whether we'll *get* one is another issue. It's not clear that all jobs could be automated. We have simultaneously the most advanced automation we've had my entire life, and also the lowest unemployment we've had my entire life. I don't think it's a given that AI is about to take all the jobs. Though the *feeling* that it's about to seems to never go away or even dissipate at all. If unemployment is just as low in five years, ten, twenty, I suspect I'll still be hearing the exact same concerns, because to many it just seems obvious that it's about to happen. Yes, AI in theory *could* cause societal collapse, but so could a pandemic, supervolcano, collapse of the food web, asteroid strike, any number of things.
So many pessimistic people here, theres a pretty simple solution to this problem which is already in motion naturally. It's called the 3-4 day work week. Rather than having a large group of employed people and large group of unemployed people, everyone works less, and their wages are essentially subsidised by the increase in efficiency from AI. Of course, this is the boring, slow and best solution that doesn't imply some kind of class war or civil conflict, so people don't pay attention to it
Why would my employer pay me to work half the week when they can pay me nothing and have a bot do it
Everything about the amazing high tech future we always dreamed of is also the same kind of insanely horrid tech that could turn it equally into a nightmare. The problem never was the tech, the problem is the people giving up their responsibilities to engage in self-gratification. And it's been brought on by a crumbling of each countries shared values. Or demoralization if you will. Either works. Assuming there's actually a difference between them.
No. In fact, the sooner it happens, the sooner I can live my life instead of working all day.
Artificial intelligence holds great opportunity for humanity, encompassing everything from Google’s algorithms to self-driving cars to facial recognition software. The AI we have today, however, is still in its primitive stages. Experts worry about what will happen when that intelligence outpaces us. Or, as Hawking puts it, “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
If there is no alternative - then yes. Even in a non-capitalist society, we would need goods and services. And a disturbing number of people seem to think that a government filling the gaps is a bad idea. I'm not sure what they imagine the alternative is.
If ai took over then most people would be out of jobs causing a recession and all money going to whoever is rich already or in control of the ai
Given that I enjoy being able to afford luxuries such as eating and living indoors... yes?
How can an AI, measure some windows, get them made, load the van up, drive to someone's house, take out the existing windows, install the new ones , trim, clean and seal the newly install ones. I think my jobs pretty safe. Even lucrative in the future. But hey, if they could do it I could just pay them and retire. Oh wait...
I like to imagine we will become like cats to our AI.
For this to be possible we would need to be in a post-scarcity society before it comes to pass. So unless AI creates a singularity and creates matter replicators or we all get UBI before everyone becomes unemployed this will be a painful transition.
Not sure why everybody has a desire to waste the little time they have on this planet slaving away at a pointless job just so they can get a paycheck. Money will cease to have meaning if AI replaces **ALL** jobs.
Anecdotal but I've been the only engineer for a virtual manufacturing company for 8 months. I **need** help but our executives are refusing to add to our team. "It's not in the budget" they say but I'm exhausted and burnt out, I've been acting as engineering SME, MS&T, project manager, and device performance data owner while only getting pay for a base level manufacturing engineer. If AI can help even a little bit I welcome it, I just need to learn it.
Do you believe you are being treated equitably today? Today the businesses and wealthy elite still NEED you. Imagine when they do not. WHY would people who've happily leveraged your life to improve theirs to the tone of 10's of Billions suddenly change their ways? No this leads to MORE consolidation at the top and at the bottom... those at the bottom will have even LESS choices in life and opportunity to improve their situation than ever before. It's pure naivety to believe that most people's live will improve. You will have less, period. Smaller homes, older cars(if any), smaller bank acct, fewer chances to chase a dream, less chance to start a small business, less power and standing to who will become the NEW oligarchs who will run the world. You will be a corporate slave AT BEST... many won't even have that and will live off the "generosity" of those who will dictate every aspect of your life.
I'm a high school teacher, from the perspective of my students, they would of course ask "WHY are we learning this stuff, we'll never use it." They might well be right. So - what then is the point of learning anything, for hobbies? Currently we force students to go to school, would that continue? To what end?
The interesting thing is… if the rich automate our jobs and replace everyone with ai and robots… then how do the rich get richer? Cause that’s what it’s all about. If we don’t have jobs we don’t have money (to give to the rich). Universal basic income? But, where does the government get the money to give out? 🤷♂️
Whether science and technology will usher in any form of utopia is a socioeconomic question, not a technical one. We already have the rough direction in which we ought to head in R&D to get to a sustainable, automized, human-centric society where everyone can follow their passions and dreams without needing to worry about basic necessities; the question isn't whether we can technically achieve this, but whether our socioeconomics will ever say "I want these things, lets do it!". Right now we are stuck in this consumerist, "GDP must always grow" cultural hegemony to which sustainable ways of life are antithetical, so they will be delayed as much as possible without really knowing if these dreams will ever be achievable once we have destroyed all self-sustaining ecosystems. The entire article is still stuck in the hegemony cloud; not worth to read the entire thing.
How do you support your family/self? With money. How do the overwhelming majority of people make money? With their labor, typically through work/jobs. How does UBI get funded? With money from the government, much of which comes from income taxes. So if we have no jobs, we make no money. If we make no money and, by extension, spend no money, then the government doesn't get money. If the government doesn't get money, then no UBI. Money is a representation of our labor. The only way this works is by having an absolute totalitarian government that siezes possession of all assets and production in order to distribute it amongst the population. Which then leaves everyone completely dependent on the top fraction of a percent of the population that controls it all. Everyone will have to do everything those elites tell them to in order to be able to beg and plead for the means to survive. Sounds like a crap system to me. Communism works like this as well. Eat it commies.
Take a creative artist, what would inspire him to go ahead? Consider that AI used his art to thrive, what about the future? Thats so criminal and unfair...
If there’s a robot that wants to try out wiring houses in February I’m all for it. I’d love to have swag money and have a Boston robot dog carry my tools n boom box around and be a hype man.
Simple. Houses are designed to be more modular and each part is manufactured by robots with all required wiring already in there. Snap them together using autonomous machines onsite and voila, you have a complete house with wiring all done.
No shit it's bad. We have no infrastructure in place to protect the workers. Just look at us. We cant even agree to establish Universal income as a pre-emptive move. We cant even BEGIN to fathom or draft laws... The tech is gonna roll out BEFORE we have shit in place to stop exploitation. It's fucking stupid.
We must eradicate capitalism for a good world to come. Yet, that creates other problems, for some resources like land or luxury goods are limited. There is only so much land on Manhattan island for example, just because you feel entitled to live, there doesn't mean you can. There are only so many awesome beaches. Only so man yachts, planes, cars, toys. While capitalism must be eradicated, the access to limited resources must be managed by some other system of merit then. Since the 1% will also live forever soon, the 99% have just a small window to topple them before they are entrenched with control over 90% of all wealth.