> Work brings dignity and purpose to people’s lives.
Speak for yourself! For me, and in my experience many others, work is a necessary evil. I’ve experienced more indignities in the workplace than anywhere else (though fortunately not as consistently as some people), and the thought of work being my life’s purpose is too bleak to entertain. I’m very happy for those who have a more positive experience, but some of us don’t fit so well.
First, I want to be clear that in the sense you are talking about, I fully agree with you.
But "work", in the sense that AI can, in theory, replace humans in, is about more than just jobs. It's about many of the things that humans do—including many that we do for pleasure as well as for money, like painting, writing, and other forms of art.
In that sense, it absolutely does bring dignity and purpose to people's lives. Very few people can feel fulfilled without some form of work in their lives, whatever that looks like for them.
You are talking about intrinsic vs extrinsic value. Most work people do is for money (extrinsic) but no one is stopping you from doing work for the former. I learn/program for fun in my spare time and AI doesn't stop that.
Are we gonna get a cure for cancer and other devastating ailments? Because if AI gives us that, I'll let it destroy the workplace and boil the oceans. If not, I may be part of the crowd that goes to arson the data centers and hang the barons, when that day comes.
I love how myopic the knee-jerk reactions to these pleas of modesty and decency tend to be.
"If AI replaces all jobs, none of us will have to work!" Alright, let's extrapolate a bit.
Society is currently organized around working to survive. AI suddenly replaces all work. How do people survive?
"Well everything will just be free now" Will it? Will the Capitalists who built these systems and replaced that labor now suddenly just give away product? Housing? Food? Care?
"Well, we'll just have to reconfigure society!" I mean, yeah, sure, obviously that'll have to happen. Will the Capitalists who empower the current systems of governance now cede said power when work is no longer available but still necessary to survive?
"Oh, well, people need to cooperate then, speak up for themselves, take action now." I don't disagree, and I think these sorts of Op-Eds, the "AI Doomers" making pleas for decency and civility in comments sections, the artisans demanding compensation for the theft of their work, and the myriad of folks who recognize the pace we're on will get people killed - nevermind the folks highlighting AI's disproportionate use in mass surveillance, genocide, and inflicting harm on "undesirables - are doing exactly that: speaking up, taking action, and attempting proactive reform.
"But they're hindering AI!" That's the fucking point you colossal numpty. The point is to slow it down so we have time to adapt.
Like...jesus, I expected more/better from folks who digest mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies, yet so many people here just cannot think critically about complex issues that involve people other than themselves.
Unfortunately there is no way to slow down technological progress. The plea for mercy in the face of rapid change is heard, and now it's time to adjust instead of asking for pause.
The Guardian opinion piece is sad to me, in that the view of humanity freed from work is seen as a problem. I prefer to think that we could adjust our economic goals from 'high employment' to more wholesome metrics about mental health and happiness.
Some people seem to think that the capital owning class is somehow going to grow a conscious and start sharing their wealth with the common folks. Let's be real that has never happened willingly only by force and bloodshed have the working people ever gotten anything.
Moreover it's possible to use military power to lock things down so hard that the people don't even have a chance to revolt. For example North Korea, or any other despotic regime in the world.
If you think the musks and zuckerbergs are going to ever give anyone anything think again!
The post scarcity post work future means complete poverty for the majority of the worlds people. (So in fact the complete opposite, lots of work and lots of scarcity)
>Like...jesus, I expected more/better from folks who digest mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies, yet so many people here just cannot think critically about complex issues that involve people other than themselves.
People who LARP about digesting mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies.
I mean, also yes, but barring that I'd still like some time to avoid having the Civilizational Tesla slam into the concrete barrier on auto-drive. Y'know, just to try.
Construction used to involve shoveling shit and dirt. But thanks to technology road workers sit in air conditioned cubicles manipulating hydraulic levers, gaining tremendous leverage.
Yes, sometimes they go outside to dig around fragile stuff with a shovel - old pipes, the odd archaeological find..
With AI, we gained “hydraulic levers for knowledge work”.
What will your “comfy air conditioned cabin” look like in that analogy?
I love programming without having to also type. My days involve watching the computer type code, making zero typos and zero mismatched variable names. When it refactors it keeps the comments updated, making that industry truism that “comments lie” obsolete. In my codebase 100% of the comments are true and up to date.
For $100/mo (Anthropic) I don’t have to code by hand and can focus on whether I’m building what customers want and need.
Ideally they get snatched up by a competitor with more vision. You know who processes more volume than one guy with AI? Six guys with AI. I think it'll take the market a minute to relearn this.
The only thing that makes me happy about that is the fact that our entire economy just might not implode. But I think we'd be better off without LLMs at all. Oh well. Pandora Box is open and here we are.
They got higher paying jobs as more of mankind could specialize away from grunt labor.
How do you think, despite centuries of jobs being automated, that more people work than ever before, and have quality of life few if any could dream of when large parts of the workforce was employed in backbreaking labor?
Does this extend to the ones pushed into the gig economy working 16h a week every day without holidays or sick leaves or anything really. No? Didn't think so really. Even the literal slaves in the 1800 century had housing.
Which higher-paying jobs were those, which have not and are not presently under the same threat of disappearing?
When you replace 7 jobs with 1 job, 6 jobs don't magically appear, much less ones which match the qualifications of those 6 people.
How many non-AI companies using AI are increasing headcount as a result, compared to those which don't use AI? Did the Washington Post just hire 33% more people, or did they eliminate 33% of their positions?
Ai should be a vehicle for us to amplify individual human purpose and authenticity while it learns from our stupidity and risk taking along the way. Sprinkle in some guard rails for harm reduction and boom, perfect partnership.
Peter Thiel thinks that he has the upper hand and will outsmart everyone to stay at the top. The problem with chaos is that it’s very difficult to control so there’s a good chance he won’t and different actors will come to the top.
I'm tired of these gloomy takes. Everyone only ever focuses on the negatives.
Automation being the end of work would be an unambiguously good thing. Machines can be far more productive than humans ever can, and it would free us up to do whatever we want. We might have to rework the social and economic order a little bit, but we probably needed to do that anyway.
It's less "gloomy" and more of a passionate "Hey, we need to rework the social order anyway, so can we maybe not set everything on fire before we do so?"
Nobody's disagreeing with your latter line, just vehemently screaming that there's no need for willful harm.
1. Economic change drives social change. The political will to create something like UBI will not exist unless there is mass unemployment.
2. Right now we need people to work, in order to create the things they need to live. It will not be possible to allow willful unemployment until machines can actually do most jobs.
3. We don't actually know if 100% automation will happen. Past automation has tended to create new jobs, and we've maintained full employment at higher wages. We should see if this happens again before we start panicking.
We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.
> We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.
Get that accelerationist fatalism outta my face. Just because you personally have no qualms with harming others in the name of some facsimile of progress, doesn't mean it's the only option available to us. Slowing things down through regulations, through employment mandates, through pleas for cooperation instead of immediate replacement, all of those and more are ways of gradual reform and adaptation.
We're proposing letting the organism (humanity) adapt to traditional work and employment being wholesale eliminated in a society that demands work for basic survival through gradual and continuous reforms as circumstances change. Your proposal is the functional equivalent of telling an endangered species, "lol get gud bruv".
That’s just faith though. And I see no driving reason to trust in your faith.
We’ve never seen anything remotely close to this kind of upheaval. This kind of techno-optimism makes sense in the very young, but seems painfully naive once you’ve been around the block a bunch of times.
There are no adults in the room driving this. There’s weird ultra elite people driving this forward with their competitive megalomaniacal egos. And we’re stuck in a game theoretic landscape where it’s effectively an inevitable race to a max AI future. None of this is a recipe for a stable or prosperous future.
If this wild accelerated future ends up being a utopia, I’ll be jazzed to eat my words. I just haven’t seen any utopias unfold in my life, and I’m skeptical of those who tell me to chill and embrace the chaos.
Look, I've got enough things challenging my actual faith that I just cannot deal with piling on more so that the pro-AI camps don't have to do some critical thinking or basic empathy.
Those with the means have an obligation to help those without. It's basic cooperation. It's how humanity made it this far.
People starving en masse because there was no work to do anymore and no way to get paid, despite there being plentiful food, is something that has never happened. If the amount of money on the consumer side of the food economy were to shrink significantly, what should happen is that the price of food should also go down until people can buy food again. The stock has to move no matter what, otherwise it spoils.
And if the price that those people can afford is $0, because ClaudeGPTPilot MegaAGI took all their jobs? What then?
There is a price below which no farmer is going to sell, regardless of whether they have another buyer.
What you're saying effectively amounts to "come on, there's no way they'd actually let people starve in the streets! That's something that could never happen these days."
Think about whether there might be other things that "could never happen these days" that are happening right now, in various places in America.
If we're talking about huge groups, like thousands, of people having no money for food, it would behoove the government to pay for that food, just to avoid a revolt. Just as a matter of self-preservation.
By "this government" you mean Trump's administration? If so, then to answer your question, I need to presuppose that there's going to be such a massive revolution in automation within the next three years (already a dubious proposition IMO) that intervening with food aid is going to be a concern for the US's federal government. We're talking millions of people across the US who might start rioting because they need to eat. That's the scenario you want me to consider? I don't know what the logistics might be, but if the state governments let their local situations fester to that degree it might be too late to do anything federally.
We're genuinely speculating on the end of work and the thorn of the Protestant Work Ethic, and the imaginative void left by There Is No Alternative has us existentially paralyzed?
How depressing. If we're distressed at the thought of liberation then the bars of containment exist within our own minds. The door is open, we just have to step out.
Most people in this econonic system have to work to earn a wage in order to pay for their living. That combined with large swathes of people being made redundant and not able to earn said wage is gonna be a problem.
Came here to say this. Nobody is saying "I want to work forever", we're saying "can we not replace work while our entire global civilization is predicated on working to survive?"
JFC, if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly. More people need to think of immediate systemic impacts instead of the high-fantasy post-work future the AI folk are selling.
> if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly.
Don't worry, the economists will slap the label "natural readjustment of labour supply levels" on this phenomenon, and it will make everything morally better.
Edit: in fact, we have historic precedents in e.g. Indian famines and how the British administrations talked about them and handled them [0][1]. Ah, malthusianism and undisguised racism, what a mixture. Of course, nobody counts those as part of "the millions of victims of Capitalism".
No they won't. You're missing the other half; if labor becomes free, the fruits of that labor become exceedingly cheap or even free.
See: the rapid drop in cost of food, manufactured goods, etc as automation took over those sectors. No one starved when we automated farming; they got fat.
Destroying planet in the process.. NOTHING is fucking free.. wake up.. It have costs. Energy and waste (waste needs to be reproceesed so energy again).
If you take a look how much energy is put into producing 1kcal of food, you will see that its negative. We put around x6 more that we get (diesel, syntetic fertlizers, water pumping, etc). This is because we have cheap energy, like fossil fuels.. Unfortunatelly, it have hidden costs smartasses didnt anticipate.
Keep everyone precarious and fearful, stringing together multiple bullshit jobs to make the rent, always one car repair or health scare away from the abyss.
Let owners/exploiters suppress the wages they pay workers in the name of efficiency.
Encourage owners/exploiters to relentlessly raise the prices workers pay owners/exploiters in the name of shareholder value.
Then say "there is no alternative", our civilization is predicated on systematic exploitation to survive, and if you try to change it now "everyone will die".
The owner/exploiter class is going to replace labor with capital like they always have.
The worker's enemy isn't the automation that eliminates work, the worker's enemy is is the owner/exploiter who weaponizes automation in their class war.
Reminds me of a review (written somewhere in the early 60s, I believe) by some Soviet sci-fi writer of Hamilton's Star Kings (1949) and the Western sci-fi in general; to paraphrase, "it's astonishing that those writers would set their decorations thousands years in the future, with wildly imaginative technological advances and inventions, yet when they come to the social systems, all they can imagine is either the feudal order of the past, or the modern style of capitalism".
If it can be automated, it will be, and there is no avoiding it, since the people with the robots and the automation care only about profit, nothing more.
We, little people, are merely annoyances, and the sooner they can be done with us, the better.
The race is to make Bank’s culture a reality doesn’t have to depend entirely on human ability. It’s a race to create the minds before we’re too dumb to do so.
Can AI fix a leaking pipe? Identify a faulty power wire? Care for farm animals? Et cetera. So far it looks like a faster search engine that a human has to double check every time, so not really.
Ubi I guess? Loaaaads of spare time. Anything that the machines can't do for whatever reason is crazy expensive and reserved for the rich. The only way to get rich is to do one of the things the machines can't do. But you don't have to. You can just chill and be ok.
> Work brings dignity and purpose to people’s lives.
Speak for yourself! For me, and in my experience many others, work is a necessary evil. I’ve experienced more indignities in the workplace than anywhere else (though fortunately not as consistently as some people), and the thought of work being my life’s purpose is too bleak to entertain. I’m very happy for those who have a more positive experience, but some of us don’t fit so well.
Agreed.
Humans were never meant to work to line the pockets of billionaires who see us as mere speed bumps on the path to their personal success.
Work is an obscene use of intellect.
First, I want to be clear that in the sense you are talking about, I fully agree with you.
But "work", in the sense that AI can, in theory, replace humans in, is about more than just jobs. It's about many of the things that humans do—including many that we do for pleasure as well as for money, like painting, writing, and other forms of art.
In that sense, it absolutely does bring dignity and purpose to people's lives. Very few people can feel fulfilled without some form of work in their lives, whatever that looks like for them.
You are talking about intrinsic vs extrinsic value. Most work people do is for money (extrinsic) but no one is stopping you from doing work for the former. I learn/program for fun in my spare time and AI doesn't stop that.
It can if you can’t make a living doing whatever it is you do for a living.
I’ve not met anyone who defines “work” like that.
Well...now you have! ^_^
I also define work like that.
I define it both ways on context.
If I won the lottery, I'd never work again and I'd work every day until I died.
Are we gonna get a cure for cancer and other devastating ailments? Because if AI gives us that, I'll let it destroy the workplace and boil the oceans. If not, I may be part of the crowd that goes to arson the data centers and hang the barons, when that day comes.
But we all went back to the office 5 days a week? Surely we are too valuable to replace!
I love how myopic the knee-jerk reactions to these pleas of modesty and decency tend to be.
"If AI replaces all jobs, none of us will have to work!" Alright, let's extrapolate a bit.
Society is currently organized around working to survive. AI suddenly replaces all work. How do people survive?
"Well everything will just be free now" Will it? Will the Capitalists who built these systems and replaced that labor now suddenly just give away product? Housing? Food? Care?
"Well, we'll just have to reconfigure society!" I mean, yeah, sure, obviously that'll have to happen. Will the Capitalists who empower the current systems of governance now cede said power when work is no longer available but still necessary to survive?
"Oh, well, people need to cooperate then, speak up for themselves, take action now." I don't disagree, and I think these sorts of Op-Eds, the "AI Doomers" making pleas for decency and civility in comments sections, the artisans demanding compensation for the theft of their work, and the myriad of folks who recognize the pace we're on will get people killed - nevermind the folks highlighting AI's disproportionate use in mass surveillance, genocide, and inflicting harm on "undesirables - are doing exactly that: speaking up, taking action, and attempting proactive reform.
"But they're hindering AI!" That's the fucking point you colossal numpty. The point is to slow it down so we have time to adapt.
Like...jesus, I expected more/better from folks who digest mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies, yet so many people here just cannot think critically about complex issues that involve people other than themselves.
> I expected more/better from folks who digest mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies
Hate to break it to you, but the real hard problems are in the humanities.
As someone who flunked out of psychology and squeaked by with a D in sociology in college, this hit me right in the bones.
I've come a long way since, but yeah, more of the humanities are sorely needed in tech.
Unfortunately there is no way to slow down technological progress. The plea for mercy in the face of rapid change is heard, and now it's time to adjust instead of asking for pause.
The Guardian opinion piece is sad to me, in that the view of humanity freed from work is seen as a problem. I prefer to think that we could adjust our economic goals from 'high employment' to more wholesome metrics about mental health and happiness.
Some people seem to think that the capital owning class is somehow going to grow a conscious and start sharing their wealth with the common folks. Let's be real that has never happened willingly only by force and bloodshed have the working people ever gotten anything.
Moreover it's possible to use military power to lock things down so hard that the people don't even have a chance to revolt. For example North Korea, or any other despotic regime in the world.
If you think the musks and zuckerbergs are going to ever give anyone anything think again!
The post scarcity post work future means complete poverty for the majority of the worlds people. (So in fact the complete opposite, lots of work and lots of scarcity)
>Like...jesus, I expected more/better from folks who digest mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies, yet so many people here just cannot think critically about complex issues that involve people other than themselves.
People who LARP about digesting mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies.
> People who LARP about digesting mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies.
Damn, call the burn ward.
> The point is to slow it down so we have time to adapt.
...and also to try to pry it loose from the fingers of the capitalists, so we have a hope of being able to share in the prosperity it brings.
I mean, also yes, but barring that I'd still like some time to avoid having the Civilizational Tesla slam into the concrete barrier on auto-drive. Y'know, just to try.
What work is is always changing.
Construction used to involve shoveling shit and dirt. But thanks to technology road workers sit in air conditioned cubicles manipulating hydraulic levers, gaining tremendous leverage.
Yes, sometimes they go outside to dig around fragile stuff with a shovel - old pipes, the odd archaeological find..
With AI, we gained “hydraulic levers for knowledge work”.
What will your “comfy air conditioned cabin” look like in that analogy?
I love programming without having to also type. My days involve watching the computer type code, making zero typos and zero mismatched variable names. When it refactors it keeps the comments updated, making that industry truism that “comments lie” obsolete. In my codebase 100% of the comments are true and up to date.
For $100/mo (Anthropic) I don’t have to code by hand and can focus on whether I’m building what customers want and need.
Your boss just called. They're replacing you with someone cheaper who is also able to prompt for half the price.
> making zero typos and zero mismatched variable names.
What a low bar for quality
What happened to the 6 people outside the cabin who used to dig the hole?
Ideally they get snatched up by a competitor with more vision. You know who processes more volume than one guy with AI? Six guys with AI. I think it'll take the market a minute to relearn this.
The only thing that makes me happy about that is the fact that our entire economy just might not implode. But I think we'd be better off without LLMs at all. Oh well. Pandora Box is open and here we are.
They got higher paying jobs as more of mankind could specialize away from grunt labor.
How do you think, despite centuries of jobs being automated, that more people work than ever before, and have quality of life few if any could dream of when large parts of the workforce was employed in backbreaking labor?
Does this extend to the ones pushed into the gig economy working 16h a week every day without holidays or sick leaves or anything really. No? Didn't think so really. Even the literal slaves in the 1800 century had housing.
The same gig economy that is taking even those jobs away in favor of automation.
Which higher-paying jobs were those, which have not and are not presently under the same threat of disappearing?
When you replace 7 jobs with 1 job, 6 jobs don't magically appear, much less ones which match the qualifications of those 6 people.
How many non-AI companies using AI are increasing headcount as a result, compared to those which don't use AI? Did the Washington Post just hire 33% more people, or did they eliminate 33% of their positions?
What happened to all the people who used to nail horseshoes to horse hooves?
> the workplace is doomed
'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Ai should be a vehicle for us to amplify individual human purpose and authenticity while it learns from our stupidity and risk taking along the way. Sprinkle in some guard rails for harm reduction and boom, perfect partnership.
Original title: AI must augment rather than replace us or human workers are doomed
The article does not mention the workplace as the editorialized title would imply. It's primarily about trade unions.
Dooming the workplace is peter thiel's stated position, as he attempts to crash the currency to better control the future corporate economy
Peter Thiel thinks that he has the upper hand and will outsmart everyone to stay at the top. The problem with chaos is that it’s very difficult to control so there’s a good chance he won’t and different actors will come to the top.
I'm sure Think-o-Tron 9000 will find some kind of use for Thiel. I can't think of one myself, but then I'm not a superintelligence.
I'm tired of these gloomy takes. Everyone only ever focuses on the negatives.
Automation being the end of work would be an unambiguously good thing. Machines can be far more productive than humans ever can, and it would free us up to do whatever we want. We might have to rework the social and economic order a little bit, but we probably needed to do that anyway.
It's less "gloomy" and more of a passionate "Hey, we need to rework the social order anyway, so can we maybe not set everything on fire before we do so?"
Nobody's disagreeing with your latter line, just vehemently screaming that there's no need for willful harm.
Several issues with this:
1. Economic change drives social change. The political will to create something like UBI will not exist unless there is mass unemployment.
2. Right now we need people to work, in order to create the things they need to live. It will not be possible to allow willful unemployment until machines can actually do most jobs.
3. We don't actually know if 100% automation will happen. Past automation has tended to create new jobs, and we've maintained full employment at higher wages. We should see if this happens again before we start panicking.
We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.
> We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.
Get that accelerationist fatalism outta my face. Just because you personally have no qualms with harming others in the name of some facsimile of progress, doesn't mean it's the only option available to us. Slowing things down through regulations, through employment mandates, through pleas for cooperation instead of immediate replacement, all of those and more are ways of gradual reform and adaptation.
We're proposing letting the organism (humanity) adapt to traditional work and employment being wholesale eliminated in a society that demands work for basic survival through gradual and continuous reforms as circumstances change. Your proposal is the functional equivalent of telling an endangered species, "lol get gud bruv".
We are not the same.
> through employment mandates
Be careful not to create a permanent future of mandatory makework.
If we don't want makework, then don't mandate work to survive.
Simple.
You're panicking. We're gonna be fine.
We've done lots of automation before, and we all benefited immensely. Just chill and deal with problems as they come up.
That’s just faith though. And I see no driving reason to trust in your faith.
We’ve never seen anything remotely close to this kind of upheaval. This kind of techno-optimism makes sense in the very young, but seems painfully naive once you’ve been around the block a bunch of times.
There are no adults in the room driving this. There’s weird ultra elite people driving this forward with their competitive megalomaniacal egos. And we’re stuck in a game theoretic landscape where it’s effectively an inevitable race to a max AI future. None of this is a recipe for a stable or prosperous future.
If this wild accelerated future ends up being a utopia, I’ll be jazzed to eat my words. I just haven’t seen any utopias unfold in my life, and I’m skeptical of those who tell me to chill and embrace the chaos.
This.
Look, I've got enough things challenging my actual faith that I just cannot deal with piling on more so that the pro-AI camps don't have to do some critical thinking or basic empathy.
Those with the means have an obligation to help those without. It's basic cooperation. It's how humanity made it this far.
The "problems that come up" will be people homeless and starving.
I'm 100% with stego-tech that I think we should address the major, glaring concerns that come with greater automation before that happens.
Because I care about my fellow human beings, and do not want them to suffer.
People starving en masse because there was no work to do anymore and no way to get paid, despite there being plentiful food, is something that has never happened. If the amount of money on the consumer side of the food economy were to shrink significantly, what should happen is that the price of food should also go down until people can buy food again. The stock has to move no matter what, otherwise it spoils.
And if the price that those people can afford is $0, because ClaudeGPTPilot MegaAGI took all their jobs? What then?
There is a price below which no farmer is going to sell, regardless of whether they have another buyer.
What you're saying effectively amounts to "come on, there's no way they'd actually let people starve in the streets! That's something that could never happen these days."
Think about whether there might be other things that "could never happen these days" that are happening right now, in various places in America.
If we're talking about huge groups, like thousands, of people having no money for food, it would behoove the government to pay for that food, just to avoid a revolt. Just as a matter of self-preservation.
Yeah? And do you think this government is likely to do that?
By "this government" you mean Trump's administration? If so, then to answer your question, I need to presuppose that there's going to be such a massive revolution in automation within the next three years (already a dubious proposition IMO) that intervening with food aid is going to be a concern for the US's federal government. We're talking millions of people across the US who might start rioting because they need to eat. That's the scenario you want me to consider? I don't know what the logistics might be, but if the state governments let their local situations fester to that degree it might be too late to do anything federally.
We're genuinely speculating on the end of work and the thorn of the Protestant Work Ethic, and the imaginative void left by There Is No Alternative has us existentially paralyzed?
How depressing. If we're distressed at the thought of liberation then the bars of containment exist within our own minds. The door is open, we just have to step out.
Most people in this econonic system have to work to earn a wage in order to pay for their living. That combined with large swathes of people being made redundant and not able to earn said wage is gonna be a problem.
With all due respect, if the economic system no longer serves us, then we deserve one that does.
Deserving and getting are 2 totally different things here. The problem is in the not getting.
Came here to say this. Nobody is saying "I want to work forever", we're saying "can we not replace work while our entire global civilization is predicated on working to survive?"
JFC, if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly. More people need to think of immediate systemic impacts instead of the high-fantasy post-work future the AI folk are selling.
> if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly.
Don't worry, the economists will slap the label "natural readjustment of labour supply levels" on this phenomenon, and it will make everything morally better.
Edit: in fact, we have historic precedents in e.g. Indian famines and how the British administrations talked about them and handled them [0][1]. Ah, malthusianism and undisguised racism, what a mixture. Of course, nobody counts those as part of "the millions of victims of Capitalism".
[0] Rune Møller Stahl, "The Economics of Starvation: Laissez-Faire Ideology and Famine in Colonial India": https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304189843_The_Econo...
[1] Jayant Chandel, "Political Economy of Famines in the British Empire: An Analysis of the Great Famines in India from 1876–1879" (PDF): https://www.journalofpoliticalscience.com/uploads/archives/8...
No they won't. You're missing the other half; if labor becomes free, the fruits of that labor become exceedingly cheap or even free.
See: the rapid drop in cost of food, manufactured goods, etc as automation took over those sectors. No one starved when we automated farming; they got fat.
Destroying planet in the process.. NOTHING is fucking free.. wake up.. It have costs. Energy and waste (waste needs to be reproceesed so energy again).
If you take a look how much energy is put into producing 1kcal of food, you will see that its negative. We put around x6 more that we get (diesel, syntetic fertlizers, water pumping, etc). This is because we have cheap energy, like fossil fuels.. Unfortunatelly, it have hidden costs smartasses didnt anticipate.
Keep everyone precarious and fearful, stringing together multiple bullshit jobs to make the rent, always one car repair or health scare away from the abyss.
Let owners/exploiters suppress the wages they pay workers in the name of efficiency.
Encourage owners/exploiters to relentlessly raise the prices workers pay owners/exploiters in the name of shareholder value.
Then say "there is no alternative", our civilization is predicated on systematic exploitation to survive, and if you try to change it now "everyone will die".
The owner/exploiter class is going to replace labor with capital like they always have.
The worker's enemy isn't the automation that eliminates work, the worker's enemy is is the owner/exploiter who weaponizes automation in their class war.
Reminds me of a review (written somewhere in the early 60s, I believe) by some Soviet sci-fi writer of Hamilton's Star Kings (1949) and the Western sci-fi in general; to paraphrase, "it's astonishing that those writers would set their decorations thousands years in the future, with wildly imaginative technological advances and inventions, yet when they come to the social systems, all they can imagine is either the feudal order of the past, or the modern style of capitalism".
Smash the looms, people before profit!
If it can be automated, it will be, and there is no avoiding it, since the people with the robots and the automation care only about profit, nothing more.
We, little people, are merely annoyances, and the sooner they can be done with us, the better.
The hope is that society will turn into Banks' "Culture."
The reality is that it'll probably turn into Idiocracy.
The race is to make Bank’s culture a reality doesn’t have to depend entirely on human ability. It’s a race to create the minds before we’re too dumb to do so.
Idiocracy was at least funny. It'll probably look a lot more like Haiti IRL.
The current trend seems to be that fewer and fewer people will be employed with larger and larger salaries.
Can AI fix a leaking pipe? Identify a faulty power wire? Care for farm animals? Et cetera. So far it looks like a faster search engine that a human has to double check every time, so not really.
What does a true post-workplace world look like?
Ubi I guess? Loaaaads of spare time. Anything that the machines can't do for whatever reason is crazy expensive and reserved for the rich. The only way to get rich is to do one of the things the machines can't do. But you don't have to. You can just chill and be ok.
There will be new constraints where humans can fill the gaps. But, who knows if that'll be enough.
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