r/technology • u/fchung • Feb 05 '23
Would it really be so bad if AI took our jobs? Society
https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/57944/1/would-it-be-so-bad-if-ai-took-our-jobs-chat-gpt-automation940
u/MonteryWhiteNoise Feb 05 '23
Wrong question.
The relevant question is: If I'm not working, how do I survive when the profit takers aren't forced to dispense me a fraction of a percent of their profits as salary?
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u/DrThiccBunz Feb 06 '23
People think that the powers that be want what’s best for humanity, they wouldn’t use Ai to further humanity… only their bank account balance.
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u/Aethenil Feb 06 '23
Something tells me AI isn't gonna stop the landlord from demanding rent on the 1st of each month either.
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u/bonniesupvotes Feb 06 '23
I always thought this… it’s not like we are all gonna kick back and frolic in the fields while AI makes a utopia. AI will do our jobs AND we still will have to pay rent and buy food, but then there will be less jobs.
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u/falco_iii Feb 06 '23
The positive case has some big ifs, but goes like this:
If AI takes over jobs, then the cost of goods and services will drop, as there is no labour cost.
If there is UBI, people can live a good life essentially for free.
If people want to do more they can do so, and will be rewarded, taxed and memorialized.
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u/bonniesupvotes Feb 06 '23
This is a good view of it, and I hope for it. Maybe I’m a pessimist
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u/ken579 Feb 06 '23
Obviously this transition requires an entire re-structuring of how our economy works. Whether we can do that or not is a question but this idea that AI is beneficial requires us to find that answer, not pretend that the old economic system inherently applies to a world where AI took over our jobs.
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u/SniffUmaMuffins Feb 06 '23
The AI won’t stop the bank from demanding mortgage from the landlord on the 1st of each month either
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u/rata_thE_RATa Feb 06 '23
How do I survive when nobody needs me anymore? When I have nothing productive to do with my own life?
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u/thatissomeBS Feb 06 '23
Does it have to be work to be productive? If you didn't have to work, how would you most enjoy spending your time?
You could literally do any hobby you want. If you like painting, making furniture, working on whatever, you could do that however much you want, and make side cash here and there. It's hard to support yourself doing that as your primary source of income, but with UBI and universal healthcare taking care of your baseline needs, you could do something like that as you please for a bit on the top. And there will still be service jobs to be had, if that's you're thing. Plenty of skilled work will still require people.
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u/Spacejunk20 Feb 06 '23
This is the fundamental issue with Ai and automation. All humanistic achievements are founded on the value of the human being. We often see the trend in human history where states became more democratic when the lords, merchants and peasants became wealtchier and more valuable and thus more relevant in decisionmaking.
If you are not valuable, you become disposable.
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u/NofksgivnabtLIFE Feb 05 '23
Does AI give us free insulin or still no.
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u/GMPWack Feb 06 '23
I think AI will deem T1D’s as unnecessary and reprogram our smart insulin pumps to phase us out of existence
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u/NofksgivnabtLIFE Feb 06 '23
I like this. In my sleep would be preferred big bolus.
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u/Indy1204 Feb 05 '23
I've wondered about this for a long time. Suppose AI starts taking over jobs left and right. How far can it go before its no longer sustainable financially for the owners of the AI? You need humans to earn money to buy whatever the AI is making, right? What am I missing?
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u/Chamchams2 Feb 05 '23
you're right, but only in the transient stage of AI. After a few decades, they won't even need money or things to sell. AI will plan, build, and provide everything the owners of said AI needs. They specifically will NOT need us. That's what scares me. There will be no need for a working-class or an economy at all. They will just have everything. Save for some benevolent AI creator who specifically makes it available to everyone with the idea that everyone will be provided for, I think they'll let us starve. They won't be greedily hoarding cash, I think they'll be hoarding space. They'll have all they need and be looking down on us in disgust, wishing there were fewer of us clogging up the roads and eating food. I guess this is a pretty pessimistic view, but I think it's hard to argue that our society as a whole has not put money before people since day 1. So, once they no longer need money or people, why wouldn't they just get rid of both?
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u/GMPWack Feb 06 '23
Another alternative:
AI could implement a “rat park” type of world where everything that could we could possibly want or need is just provided to us so that we won’t see the need to procreate and humanity just peters out of existance
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u/GMPWack Feb 06 '23
Edit:
I meant “behavioral sink”rat utopia study
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u/Eggy-Toast Feb 06 '23
This is my desired outcome. Humanity going extinct because it had too good a time sounds like my kinda party.
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u/I_ONLY_PLAY_4C_LOAM Feb 05 '23
This is a fundamental issue in capitalist economics lol. Marx literally wrote about this almost 200 years ago.
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u/bubbleweed Feb 05 '23
A massive shift will occur when most people don’t NEED to work much or at all to get by. We don’t even know how to think about things that way. Finance and money as they currently exist only make sense when there are limited supplies of things and services that take a lot of human labour to make and distribute. Remove that scarcity, and the massive human labour, and we have no idea what to do…
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u/aqpstory Feb 05 '23
I doubt there will ever come a point where we have so many resources that the greed of all humans will be satisfied. Some people will look at a castle made out of solid gold and they will just demand a larger castle.
And those who have the most power tend to also be among the most greedy.
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u/SonsofStarlord Feb 05 '23
Maybe 100 or 200 years into the future we will mining asteroids and be a interplanetary civilization but the odds of us destroying ourselves seems higher.
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u/parkinthepark Feb 06 '23
We will see massive revolutionary and reactionary violence, just like we saw from the late 1700’s through the early 20th century, as Industrialization made agrarian power structures (feudalism, colonialism, and chattel slavery) obsolete/untenable.
The British Empire did not surrender her colonies without a fight. The Czar did not surrender his throne. The plantation owners did not surrender their slaves.
It will be a generation for the guillotine, the pogrom, and the refugee.
Or we could just decommodify food, housing, and medicine and establish a UBI.
Probably gonna be blood though.
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u/Guywithquestions88 Feb 06 '23
This is how I imagine it going down. We either have to embrace universal basic income or be pushed to violent revolution out of hopeless poverty.
Unfortunately, in the U.S. there are far too many idiots who would fight against UBI claiming it's communism/socialism while simultaneously having nothing to eat because an AI/robot took their job.
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u/Dizman7 Feb 06 '23
Then we create some sort of science academy to train people to explore the universe and colonize planets. And build the vessels to travel the stars…some sort of Star Fleet of ships 😏
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u/parkinthepark Feb 06 '23
Optimistic view: Through a combination of decommodification of necessities and UBI, the displaced workers will be maintain a comfortable lifestyle engaging in pursuits that benefit them directly, no longer in service to Capital.
Realistic view: For a generation, it will work much the way it works today- debt. * You will be replaced by an AI, and eek out an income doing gig work for people who haven’t been replaced yet. * You will fill the gap between your income and cost of living with debt. * Naturally this is unsustainable, but that’s not the CEOs’ problem- they will be retired by the time all of these debts start to default.
After that, who knows. Probably serfdom. Your grandchildren will farm and desalinate water for a 3rd generation Musk or Bezos or Walton in exchange for medicine.
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u/SohndesRheins Feb 06 '23
Lol no. Money is imaginary, resources are real. After AI and machines have replaced workers, the string-pullers of the world no longer need the unwashed masses for any purpose at all. They will let you starve, or actively kill you, and keep the world for themselves. Money is created by government and the government is owned by the ultra rich, if they need money still they can get it from the government or from other rich people, they won't need you anymore and the poor are just going to become useless eaters that are consuming resources without providing any productive value, like a dairy cow that no longer produces any milk.
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u/Adorable_Octopus Feb 06 '23
The problem is that once you have sufficient automation, you no longer need humans at all, in order to get everything you want.
Think of it like this: if you're a farmer, you want to work less, but if you don't work, you don't eat. But one year you have a really good harvest and the farmers around you don't, so you use some of that extra harvest to hire these farmers to work your land for you. Now you don't work, and get the benefit from having the land. But there's a tension here, because you need these other farmers to do the work. You have to pay them, to keep them working for you. This is the fundamental tension that underlies economics and the rich/poor divide. The rich aren't nearly as independent from the poor as they want to pretend they are. They need the poor, either directly for labour or semi-directly because they need someone to sell to, or indirectly in that they can't produce everything themselves.
Automation and AIs thought mean that they can own labour that will produce everything the rich might want or need without interacting with someone else. If they can produce everything themselves, they no longer need to buy anything, they can have it all. Money becomes meaningless. In theory, this bounty could be shared, but in practice it won't be. This vast disparity in wealth could incite revolution, of course, but, again, automation and AIs will mean that the rich no longer have to rely on non-rich people for protection. A robotic dog with a machine gun is just as effective at saving your skin as a police officer or the military ever will be.
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u/Jollyjacktar Feb 05 '23
In the 1970s, UK, I remember how the government said automation would take jobs and we would all have more leisure time. What it really meant was mass layoffs of workers of all skill levels. Only the minority could retrain for new skills. The older workers were thrown on the scrap heap and got zero hours contracts in retail as their best alternative. I don’t see a bright future, just increasing poverty.
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u/AmbitiousHedgehog313 Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 05 '23
Consider this. Before the agricultural revolution, 90% of people worked to grow our food. Over a period of 100 years or so, this dropped to under 10%. That means 80% of working people needed new jobs.
No problem, the industrial revolution came along and put all those people into miserable factory jobs.
But wait, that's not the end. Because we then invented automation. The industrial revolution put most of those people out of work, since it took fewer people to run machines producing goods.
No problem again, capitalism to the rescue! The information revolution pulled us out of this; people transitioned from factory work to office work.
As we built more software to automate our lives, many of these office jobs were lost. So the tech revolution came to the rescue, finding many of those people jobs in software.
We're about to automate away all of those jobs, and the remaining office jobs. The question is, what will we do with those people?
It's tempting to think that they will simply be free to live their lives, freed from toil by machinery. But that is not how capitalism works. Capitalism demands labour, production and consumption.
Edits for spellling.
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u/eecity Feb 05 '23
It's tempting to think that they will simply be free to live their lives, freed from toil by machinery. But that is not how capitalism works. Capitalism demands labour, production and consumption.
Socialism wasn't proposed to follow capitalism as a consequence of the industrial revolution as if people simply felt like it. Productivity, regardless of the form in which humans own it, is maximized through automation. That is the means of labor and production the further we progress from the industrial revolution. The question is rather who owns it and has rights to its consumption over the long-term, the endless generations of humans that put labor into making such technology possible or a consistently shrinking subset of humans that own all of this merely as a consequence of wealth inequality inherent to market economics.
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u/sirgoofs Feb 05 '23
Full circle, back to everyone working all day to grow food because they have no income source to buy it. Then people who own land become landlords to sharecroppers and we’re back to a feudal system
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u/BoycottJClarkson Feb 05 '23
That's interesting but just one point of confusion. Why is the landlord renting out his land at all?. What are the landlords getting paid with? Food? In this scenario automation would presumably given them all the food they wanted, so what are the tenants paying with?
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u/meangingersnap Feb 05 '23
In feudalism, they are required to give the lords some of the crop
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u/tired_hillbilly Feb 06 '23
But why do the lords even need need the peasants? Their AI-driven tractors will plow their fields, AI-driven mills mill their flour, and AI-driven ovens bake their bread.
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u/olegkikin Feb 05 '23
It's pretty obvious, if all (or most) jobs are automated, capitalism, as we know it, will be over. It will be absolutely pointless to have robotic factories produce products that noone can afford to buy. The obvious reaction of the free market would be to drop the prices to near zero.
We're definitely going towards the abundance of at least basic products.
The transition, however, is going to be ugly. If the automation happens very fast, we're going to have a huge number of unemployed, but there will still be people with jobs.
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u/JaneSays87 Feb 05 '23
we're going to have a huge number of unemployed, but there will still be people with jobs
Can those jobs survive the drop in demand that would come with mass unemployment? Not every job would need to be automated before the entire system would collapse.
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u/olegkikin Feb 05 '23
You're right, some jobs, that are tied to other jobs, should experience a drop in demand.
And yes, not every job will be automated before the "collapse".
Though I don't consider job automation a collapse. It will free people to do what they actually want to do. Economics and money will have to change.
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u/JaneSays87 Feb 05 '23
Well it would be a collapse in an economic system that relies on consumer demand, and where consumer demand comes from people having money. Like you said, who would these corporations be producing for without consumers? Even the guys who automate the jobs would eventually run out of stuff to do once no one is consuming.
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u/misersoze Feb 05 '23
Capitalism doesn’t demand anything. It’s just a system based on money.
If you have a society where people need money to survive, then they need to do things to acquire that money.
Now maybe what you are saying if there is no way to acquire that money then people will starve. I agree. We have a system for resolving this conflicts and that is called government.
When government resolved these conflicts with new productivity, everyone moves to a better equilibrium (eg no more working on farms, universal public education).
But when government does that poorly, we usually have revolutions and massive deaths. Hopefully that won’t happen in this situation.
Even if AI take most jobs realize that we already have jobs we don’t need that we all agree to have because they are nice and we just may make more of those nice to have jobs. Currently we have waiters in restaurants but those are almost all unnecessary. You could just walk to the cook. Tell them your order then pick up your plates from the cook and go to your table. That’s essentially fast food. But we still have restaurants with waiters and hostesses because people just like that.
Maybe in the future we will have more caretakers for kids and the elderly. Maybe we will have more life coaches and matchmakers. Who knows. But if humans like humans doing stuff for them over machines or other efficiencies, then there is always work for humans.
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u/AmbitiousHedgehog313 Feb 05 '23
That's an interesting take, and I definitely gained from several of your points, thank you.
I will take issue with one thing though - capitalism does indeed demand. It demands competition. That is its defining quality. In a capitalist system, whatever product or service you are selling, someone will try to make one that sells better. It is this drive that creates technological progress, and accelerates it relentlessly.
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u/misersoze Feb 05 '23
I try not to anthropomorphize things that aren’t human. Capitalism usually has competition as part of what the description of what it is. (But sometimes it doesn’t with monopolies). You are right that we normally think of competition as being fundamental to a capitalist system. I just would phrase it differently.
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u/bubbleweed Feb 05 '23
If all human labour can be done more cheaply and efficiently by machines and AI then humans, then what?
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u/eecity Feb 05 '23
Assuming your premise becomes increasingly true humanity will be tested as to whether they value capitalism or democracy more.
If aggregate human labor were to approach no value as a consequence of automation yet under the economic consequences of market inequality those same humans do not own the productive tools that replaced them, there will be no incentive for these people to exist under our current economic system if taken to the future. They will be treated in the manner we decide to treat people that provide zero labor value with no ownership over productive tools. In our current world, those people are homeless.
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u/AmbitiousHedgehog313 Feb 05 '23
It depends on the goals of your governing and economic systems.
In the current model, we will simply invent new jobs to keep us all busy. We seem to be very good at that. Invent new industries, new specialisations, new skills.
I can imagine a model where we get to just live, free of the burden of providing the necessities of life, but this will not happen anytime soon, it's not in our nature.
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u/eecity Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 05 '23
You're somewhat missing the premise. The labor those humans can provide has zero relative value given such conditions. They're as useful as a horse in a world where cars have replaced their usefulness in transportation. Any business in the current model that hires them to "keep them busy" is not sustainable and can't compete.
For the idea that we will simply invent new jobs its important to have an understanding on the trajectory of automation and why the future there will be different. I'd recommend these two videos to anyone for a basic stage of understanding there: Eric Weinstein on the topic and humans need not apply. Those are both useful videos for anyone at any level of understanding. I don't fully agree with either but I think both are the most agreeable yet fair introductions on the topic.
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u/HowVeryReddit Feb 05 '23
This is capitalism, a fundamental belief is that you need to make your own income, if you don't have capital to make it for you then you have to work. New, ever more pointless and soul eviscerating jobs will be invented that will pay ever less satisfactory wages to the majority of people until the economically unnecessary are allowed to die out (more so than already encouraged) or something snaps and the power of capital is overthrown in (hopefully peaceful) revoultion.
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u/DisillusionedBook Feb 05 '23
Most jobs are dogshit so no, BUT ask if it is bad that they are threatening to take away our only incomes. That is the real question to ask.
Corporations already make an obscene amount of profit and begrudgingly have to follow human labour laws (or they outsource to the third world where the bar is much lower), this would just be the next step. Take people out of the equation.
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u/elysios_c Feb 05 '23
AI is also taking jobs people enjoy doing. They are not striving for some higher purpose, they are just taking the money out of whatever field they can.
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u/PresidentBreadstick Feb 05 '23
Exactly this. People enjoy being artists for example. They enjoy animating.
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u/Searing-George Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 05 '23
Agreed, also apologies if this is long-winded but this is a big reason why I don’t fully agree with the “adapt, it’s just another tool” crowd. Even in digital art, I enjoy drawing from scratch on my tablet, using different brushes, colors, and dozens of layers and masks.
And the same can be said as a viewer, I enjoy seeing the details, brushstrokes, references, and all the skills and techniques the artist used when producing an original digital painting or illustration. The fact that a human took time to make decisions on how big things need to be, why they decide to put marks where they exactly are, etc. is part of the reason I appreciate the art.
While it’s incredible to see what AI can do, I just don’t feel the same emotional response and only think “oh, neat, that’s pretty cool”. Seeing it done by hand whether it be speedpainting videos or someone streaming themselves on twitch, you can often see the passion and joy in their voice and that translates to the work itself.
An old boss of mine is a chef and owner of a restaurant and I remember asking her how she’d feel if someday a machine would be able to produce one of her dishes exactly how she wanted it, taste, appearance, ingredients, and all. She said while it may relieve some stress, part of the reason she loves her work is the process of cooking itself and making things by hand for others to enjoy.
Sure some might say “well couldn’t she just cook for herself or for fun?” but I feel that’s missing the point. She enjoys cooking for people and getting paid for it due to her effort and talent that took years to get to that point.
So I can understand the potential benefit people always bring up with how AI can create in the commercial art world, but for digital artists, I feel it’ll be trading talent and passion for soulless efficiency as AI improves. Years from now, I worry to see if commercial artists who already take low pay just because they enjoy their work will get replaced by some programmers and a prompt.
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u/weewoo_3299 Feb 05 '23
Also how the fuck would corporations make money if there's no one to buy from them because everyone lost their income and became homeless?
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u/DisillusionedBook Feb 05 '23
The same could be asked of them when their corporations cause climate change collapse, or power hungry dictators imaging offer countries cause a nuclear war. Pure unadulterated short term greed thinking. The multi billionaires at the top will get theirs fuck everyone else.
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u/justafang Feb 05 '23
In America? Yes. Because those with power and the control over the AI would leave the rest of us behind. We would not get UBI, and millions would starve to death
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u/Wwize Feb 05 '23
As long as we get a universal basic income, it's not a bad idea. I welcome the day when machines do all the work and I can just have fun every day.
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u/BaldDudeFromBrazzers Feb 06 '23
If BUI is even a thing, it’ll probably be just enough for you to pay rent and buy cheap food. Let’s not keep our hopes high about traveling and new gadgets, let alone medical stuff
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u/Ftpini Feb 06 '23
The ultra wealthy are not charitable. Not even remotely. They already hoard all the wealth now and only send any of it down because they must in order to keep increasing their wealth.
Once the means of production are fully automated, they will not require a human workforce for anything. Think elisium, but actually a thing. Its a bad outcome and not something we should ever allow.
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u/MelancholyWookie Feb 05 '23
If they take our jobs the rich will let the people who lose their jobs starve.
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u/Royalstopdrop Feb 05 '23
People will sort to violence if it's not set up properly. In U.S , corporations own the government so it won't be set up to serve people but corporate profits.
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u/UCS_White_Willow Feb 05 '23
I generally say that we are approaching a future where a.) No one has to work or b.) No one has a job. The future we get depends on how we decide to think about labor and responsibility.
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u/Nate-__- Feb 05 '23
Companies need profit. Consumers need income. If we eliminate consumers' incomes, we eliminate companies.
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u/Minute-Flan13 Feb 05 '23
Normalize the thought that the jobs to replace start at the top...CEOs, prime ministers, politicians.
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u/fukatroll Feb 05 '23
Oh man, this would be awesome. I mean, I don't want robot overlords, but considering how so much is being run at this point, I'm almost willing to give it a try.
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u/buggzy1234 Feb 05 '23
The robot overlords would probably be better than the human ones lmao. At least they wouldn’t let personal prejudices or feelings influence how they rule and all their decisions would be based on logic that makes sense.
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u/vezwyx Feb 06 '23
Biases are still present in AI models. Those models were written by people, and we build our assumptions and preconceptions into the software without realizing. AI isn't bias-free just because it's thinking with silicon instead of carbon
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u/Western_Ad9562 Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 05 '23
Just as long as there are lots of AIs operated by lots of different groups, not just one AI that a single government or corporation or whatever has total control over.
There will be customer service AIs, but many of them. Farming robot AIs, but many of them.
That's how we avoid a totalitarian outcome with AI, by ensuring the power and benefits of AI and robotics are as open source and widely distributed as possible. Then family farmers can easily build agg drones from 3d printed parts, an additional parts kit they ordered online, and free software rather than that kind of productivity being gatekept by some Monsanto of robots.
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u/carbonbasedlifeform Feb 05 '23
I completely agree. If it is Open Source AI that rules the world it will be the programmers who hold the reins.
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u/Justtryme90 Feb 05 '23
If AI replaces people, eventually there just won't be enough things for people to do to be able to afford to live. How are people supposed to keep earning?
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u/pmotiveforce Feb 06 '23
At some point the cost to produce the things we need approaches 0.
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u/hamilton_burger Feb 05 '23
The reality is that resources are limited. That means that “AI taking our jobs” will mean that there will be more incentive for there to be less population, so that an elite can have increased resources. People increasingly no longer need to exist in order for the ultra elite to enjoy service or access to resources. Draw your own conclusions about how that might work out.
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u/deckardcain1 Feb 05 '23
Please please replace all the ppl in dmv with ai. I don't even know why most tasks in dmv can't be done on kiosk still. We can probably get rid of 80% of employees in dmv.
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u/bubbleweed Feb 05 '23
Yes it would be terrible because the elite of the world and their owned politicians etc.. would now hold even more power over us as we’ve given up the one big bargaining chip we have against them. Our labour to keep things running. Without that, it’s not too difficult to imagine the dystopia that’s possible.
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u/Western-Image7125 Feb 05 '23
Here’s an optimistic take - throughout history many many types of jobs became obsolete and replaced by automation. But unemployment has not increased with every such revolution. So why do we think this one will be different? Not a rhetorical question I’m actually asking
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u/procrastibader Feb 06 '23
But if AI can replace the human worker as a generalist, then there isn’t a work vertical humans can segway into that AI can’t also do
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u/bigfatmatt01 Feb 05 '23
Yes because rich people will never allow a UBI because as far as I've observed they are all greedy fucks with little to no morals.
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u/BrandenburgForevor Feb 05 '23
If the capitalists are still running everything, then yeah pretty bad.
They will reap all the benefits and let everyone else starve.
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u/Simple-Barghest Feb 05 '23
Theoretically, not bad. Not bad in the slightest, as it's tools being used to make human life easier.
What's going to be bad is that predictably, the AI is going to take the job and the people who used to fulfill those jobs will be unceremoniously kicked onto the street to starve in homelessness. And the people who pushed for the AI replacement will just fucking laugh and use their newly-bolstered income flow to block any and all attempts at caring for said people.
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u/hk317 Feb 05 '23
If AI is doing all our work what value will people have in a capitalist world? It won’t just be routine work and low wage jobs that it replaces. It has the potential to replace high paying intellectual and creative positions (lawyers, financial advisors/managers, programmers, graphic artists, actors, writers, journalists, etc.). Our society doesn’t like the idea of a welfare state which is what all countries would have to become. Look at how we treat homeless people, the unemployed, and refugees. In a capitalist system, people with little or no economic (labor) value are useless. It’s only state intervention that stops capitalism from discarding such people completely. AI could render nearly all of society into a disenfranchised poverty class completely dependent on a small group of owners/rulers. As a tool, AI’s effect may ultimately be to consolidate power to those with power.
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u/B-Glasses Feb 06 '23
It’d be fantastic if it wasn’t to make corporations more money and fulfill every bit of sci-fi saying they would do that
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u/gdwam816 Feb 05 '23
Universal income was laughed at less than 2 years ago. I work in the tech sector for one of the big 3. The amount of automation that will hit the commercial sector in the next 5 years will astound people.
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u/ArmsForPeace84 Feb 05 '23
Long, long, long term...
The convergence of automation, AI, and a global population that first stabilizes, then declines, will yield the greatest standard of living in human history. If we don't flush that future down the toilet with nuclear weapons, authoritarianism, and runaway climate change.
In the near term, though, there will be a lot of economic pain to go around. Made even worse by spending resources continuing to train people en masse for jobs that AI is already threatening to render obsolete.
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u/HannyBo9 Feb 05 '23
They will orchestrate more wars to kill off the slave class that doesn’t have a job.
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u/CakeRobot365 Feb 05 '23
Yes. We need income to survive. UBI would be a tool to control and manipulate people.
I personally don't want my earning potential capped by my government
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u/Stykerius Feb 05 '23
Yes, I don’t wish for an age of strife type of situation. The men of iron aren’t the most trustworthy.
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u/JamesBong517 Feb 05 '23
If we became some quasi form of communism that would actually work & still motivate people to invent new things, AI would be a great replacement for so many jobs. Issue is, communism or socialism never works out in the long run. There’s no incentive for people to research and invent new things.
Just think about all the free time we could dedicate to solving issues— healthcare, homelessness, food shortages, and so much more if AI/robots did most jobs. We also could spend so much more time doing things for happiness, as well very extensive research projects and we could a lot more people focus on that.
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u/markth_wi Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 06 '23
I suppose the question becomes, what then becomes of the planetary economy. Machines take over every aspect of the economy from artists to programmers, chip engineers to laborers, farmers of extraordinary capacity, being able to grow and create opportunistic green spaces around the entire world. Imagine a billion automatons that will do nothing but plant trees, harvest kelp, restore fisheries, collect trash, plant food crops , install hyper-efficient hydroponics in the arctic , the various deserts of the world installing water collection, and cachements from Namibia to Nogales, being able to create aeroponic farms and generate cash-crops anywhere with access to air and some ground-cover. With an economy that was "efficiently" run, in this way, you suffer the opposite of various failed human systems, it's "too efficient", if I can get some spit of rock anywhere on the planet to produced food, enough to feed a few people, provide cotton, potatoes, fruits, vegetables, lentils in some tiny multi-storied subsurface hydroponic/aeroponic hyperfarm that does in say 200 square feet by 500 feet in height, create sub-surface "floors" just a few feet in height growing corn, rice, wheat, mushrooms with just the right amount of nutrients collected from the ocean or kept in some reclamation containers and remixed with water as salts and other undesirables are filtered out, and that you can feed, clothe, house and keep entertained and educated a cadre of humans in that same space, you run a risk of creating a positive threat to capitalism **as we know it**, not necessarily capitalism.
Moreover, who's going to make that investment, that cadre of humans?
Far more likely we engage in a new form of chattle slavery much like most of human history, with powerful trading AI's arbitraging stocks and bonds, a small cache of robots to do the farming/cleaning/cooking/waste-processing and humans to wander the world in search of the next bit of entertainment or adventure.
But we all know that's not how it would go, there will be a concentration of wealth at/near what is currently the top that might actually look like that.
But for the VAST numbers of people that would have been considered the unwashed masses of previous generations, or sent off to die in some resource war, it becomes a question of people management.
So do you setup terminator bot run Neo-Auschwitz franchisers providing liquidation and extermination for undesirable populations in an unobtrusive and discrete fashion, the billions and billions served, euthanized efficiently, perhaps even pleasantly returned to carbon resource leaving some small fraction of "desirables" in vast servitor run cities.
Or do we setup some sort of vast set of hyper-efficient arcologies, and provide for citizens all the means of a reasonable life, again something like a servitor transition where humans live out in relative comfort and ultimately find themselves transitioned into virtual hives, perhaps waking to dine on foods prepared by gigafarms providing all manner of delicacies because at some point the 100 trillion dollar human economy is a miniscule fraction of the quadrillions of dollars transacted as mining interests on the Moon, Mars, Mercury and throughout the asteroid belt start returning quadrillions of dollars in resources, creating vast arcologies in space , seeded by a few seeder ships from some breeding stock sent aloft hundreds of years earlier.
Perhaps some centuries from now, time-space engineering allows the machines to enclose some fraction of the sun's light into a Dyson swarm zeroing-out the cost of energy , and perhaps they simply master energy/matter conversion/engineering and create vast stores of antimatter to power vast projects of propulsion to distant star-systems with Von-Neumann type starships intent on colonizing the stars of other systems similarly far-and-away outstripping anything intentionally human regarding star-ships.
Humans kept in "reserve" as a backup to reboot civilization should some unforseen consequence occur as some geneship slowly plies it's way to distant brown dwarfs and the moons orbiting the gas-giants of those brown-dwarfs; destinations our telescopes never even detect to setup colonies of human in arcology cities around distant star-system.
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u/KidSuperHeat Feb 06 '23
none of us had life long career aspirations to become a "retail associate"
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u/tnred19 Feb 06 '23
Robot alicia vikander can take whatever she wants from me. I dont even care if she locks me in my own home to die.
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u/PK1312 Feb 06 '23
historically speaking, instead of using technology to increase leisure time for all, we've used it to further line the pockets of the people who own the machines
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u/NugKnights Feb 05 '23
The bad part is not people losing their jobs. Its the big guy on top just taking everything the worker was earning for himself.