I see three possibilities if AI is able to eliminate a significant portion of jobs:
- Universal basic income, that pays out based on how productive the provider side was per person. Some portion of wealth is continually transferred to the owners.
- Neofeudalism, where the owners at the time of transition end up owning everything and allow people to live or not live on their land at their whim. Then they can use them for labour where needed or entertainment otherwise. Some benevolent feudal lords might generally let people live how they want, though there will always be a fear of a revolution so other more authoritarian lords might sabotage or directly war with them.
- Large portions of the population are left SOL to die or do whatever while the economy doesn’t care for them. Would probably get pretty violent since people don’t generally just go off to die of starvation quietly. The main question for me is if the violence would start when the starving masses have had enough of it or earlier by those who see that coming.
I’m guessing reality will have some combination of each of those.
In the USA, it would be option 3 all the way. We would see three classes: Mega Rich, the warfighters of the mega rich, and then the rest of us left to starve.
They wouldn’t just pull the plug and leave us to our own devices, they would actively destroy farming equipment and industry to make sure life is awful
I’m not even sure it will be 3 classes because having a soldier class risks them deciding to just take over. This is one of the real dangers of AI, they won’t have any issue going into an area and killing everything that moves there until they are given an encrypted kill command. Or maybe the rich will even come in with an EMP (further destroying what infrastructure is left) and act like they are the heroes while secretly being the ones who give the orders to reduce the numbers in the first place.
Worst part is the tech for that already exists. The complicated kill bot AI is getting it to discriminate and selectively kill. I remember seeing a video of an automated paintball turret that could hit a moving basketball with full precision 20 years ago. Not only that, it was made by a teenager (or team of teenagers).
If ONLY some smart fella had pushed a theory about collective ownership of the means of production or something
That man: Abraham Lincoln.
-Wayne Gretzky
Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.
Further proof of this: Climate change.
These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.
Well that’s not true at all. The vast majority of investors are in it for the long run.
Yup, economics are all about “LiNe mUsT gO uP!!!” It’s infuriating as all hell for people that can actually see further than the tip of their own nose.
Funny thing is that capitalism accidentaly solves global warming same way as it created it - turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources
The problem is that the previous accumulation of capital has centralized a lot of power in actors who have a financial incentive to stop renewables. If we could hit a big reset on everything then yes, I think renewables would win, but we’re dealing with a lot of very rich, very powerful people who really want us to keep being dependent on them.
They are only slowing us down though. They really cannot stop the change, because solar power is simply cheaper than oil. Once governments stop subsidizing oil, the big oil companies will be done for if they haven’t innovated by than. That is also one of the reasons why they are slowing us down, so they can buy more time to innovate and remain on top with a new, green business model.
I hope all the big oil bosses get locked up for crimes against humanity, but I think they’ll just change their business model into something green and exploit us in some different way.
This is why they say “they’re too big to fail”.
Sort of like how Phillip Morris sells vapes now.
Except numbers aren’t confirming that theory Look at Wikipedia article about growth of photovoltaics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Solar power is booming world wide, consistently since many years. At >20% annual expansion rate, the exponential growth will start putting a dent on fossil within few years.
Global warming isn’t fucking solved you twat!
It’s a hopeful idea, but it may be too late.
I seriously doubt it’s too late, it’s more of a question how much damage will it cause
Alternatively: too late for who?
Should not stop us from trying though
Agreed.
This is not “capitalism accidentally solves climate change”. This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way. From there, capitalism took over, as intended. For green energy to be be feasible, we needed it to get picked up by the capitalist machine, because the capitalist machine has all the power and infrastructure in place to make it into a succes.
I predict that the same thing will happen with large capacity, small size home batteries once they become economically feasible. They are on the brink of becoming profitable and once they do, they will become a huge success and help reduce energy waste.
Same thing goes for fusion, but we’re a long way off making that economically viable.
This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way
I think this oversimplifies it a lot. There were a lot of different actors involved - I’m sure a lot of development was coming both from the semiconductor industry, and from state funded research, but in the end, the greed machine (aka capitalism) takes care of further researching and scaling it to the global level.
Also it’s not like there wasn’t any money in that business years ago - even back then solar was commonly used as a remote power source in mobile applications (calculators, camping and so on). Also NASA, but this was purely state funded
turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources
Cool, when is that going to start happening? Because I only see a handful of electric cars and I see a whole ton of coal power plants.
Cool, when is that going to start happening?
Apparently right now https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/05/08/a-major-turning-point-more-than-30-of-worlds-energy-now-comes-from-renewables-report-revea
Wow! More than 30%! Global warming over!
AI owners will.
And if you then go around wandering “oh, but not every AI builds something those few people want”, “that’s way too few people to fill a market”, or “and what about all the rest?”… Maybe you should read Keynes, because that would not be the first time this kind of buying-power change happens, and yes, it always suck a lot for everybody (even for the rich people).
That’s economic ignorance - the more AI is used to produce goods, the cheaper they are - so you have to work less to fulfill your needs.
Exactly this. That’s why groceries have dropped in price the last decade as cashiers are replaced by automated self checkouts. /s
Hell yeah! People in 50s and even 20s worked 40 hours per week to feed a family of 4! Now we can do that by working much less than… wait, not even 2 working parents safely feed a family of 4? Even with all the gains in productivity?
They keep talking about UBI as income…. But I’m not a huge fan as it can be exploited in many ways.
Depending on the details of the system… Who cares?
Sure, we can have a couple investigators working on gross abuse of the system, but we spend more money fighting social security and disability claims than it would cost to just pay every request.
It sounds like the beginning of a cast system, I can’t imagine it not being abused in our current economic system. It’s also essentially welfare + a bit extra so you can actually live on it.
How will this deal with home ownership and paying for your kids education? And then your kids end up bjeing stuck in the same situation they were born into with absolutely no wajy forward. It’s already like this in a sense but UBI is very likely to amplify it imo.
It’s the same capitalism we have now; Accept the bottom income level, isn’t zero anymore.
Who would be in what Cast?
Where do you draw the lines?My main fear is how this will affect renting and house ownership. Rents will probably go up as UBI comes into play and what’s left won’t be enough to save for any kind of down deposit. I doubt UBI will be enough for monthly mortgage payments in any case.
It’s already very hard to move past the renting stage, I imagine it will be impossible once on UBI.
The cast would be comprised of land and business owners. Again, it’s already almost the case, I just think UBI without careful considerations would amplify it.
Rents will probably go up […] and what’s left won’t be enough to save for any kind of down deposit.
It’s the same capitalism we have now.
Whatever it does to home and rent prices, as well as inflation generally, would be temporary until the markets adjusts. That can be softened by slowly phasing it in, maybe $100/m each year. The standard supply, demand, price balancing act at play. This time with the income floor not being at $0.
I completely agree with you. UBI is overall a good idea, I just think UBI alone won’t be enough to properly deal with massive job loss and certain aspects of our economic systems are going to greatly reduce its impact. It’s a very complicated problem and we have some serious decisions to make, it’s further complicated by the fact that the best solutions will probably end up dealing a blow to the billionaire class and big corporations and they will most likely fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
Don’t think of people having money as an on-off switch. It’s a gradual shift, and it’s already started, before AI was a thing. AI is just another tool to increase the wealth gap, like inflation, poor education, eroding of human rights etc.
The vanishingly small amount of people that will be unfathomably rich in a privatized post-scarcity economy will give us just enough in UBI to make sure we can buy our Mountain Dew verification cans. And without the ability to withhold our labor as a class, we’ll have no peaceful avenue to improve our conditions.
Why are you obsessed around wealth of other people? You should be more concerned about your own income rather than some super wealthy CEO
Because, as OP points out, wealth disparity is a zero-sum game. Being concerned about the super wealthy is being concerned about our own income.
wealth disparity is a zero-sum game
Except it’s not. That wealth isn’t cash in some bank account, in most cases it’s a stock in companies these people built from scratch - Bezos made Amazon, Gates Microsoft, Buffet Berkshire Hathaway and so on
The wealth of super rich is allocated in places that produce goods and services
Keep defending your CEO daddies. I’m sure their wealth will trickle down to you any day now.
Keep defending your CEO daddies
Maybe I’m one of them?
Lol
Because my labor creates their super wealth, and because they’re destroying the planet to maintain it.
I’m an optimist, so I’ll believe one day we’ll have a utopian society like in Star Trek. I ask politely you don’t criticize me too harshly
I am also an optimist. I believe one day we’ll all be dead, and all that will remain are robots that fuel off blood, left to invade hell for the only thing that will sustain them.
I think it’s as relistic a future as the complete destruction of mankind, but your point of view makes life a lot more enjoyable. Here’s a nice quote to back it up:
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future” - Victor Hugo
Hey, that’s a reasonable thing to hope. The flip side, of course, is that I’m hoping I don’t have to live through Star Trek’s idea of how the 21st century goes. They definitely got all of the details wrong, but I’m afraid the vibes are matching a little too well.
Hey, we’ve still got 2 months to the Bell Riots, and DeSantis was talking about putting all the homeless people in Florida on an island
While I agree, I’m skeptical that we’ll see any meaningful advance toward that end in our lifetimes.
It will get a lot worse before it gets any better
The hand has been played and trend has been set, I don’t see anything coming close to a reversal, short of gereatric nepo babies dying off but their replacements don’t look any better…
Sucks to suck
Very bleak of you
Well the facts don’t look good, what is a peasant supposed to do?
Hope your descendants have it better
Hoping for something like that without taking direction action today is naive.
Direct action won’t fix shit unless critical mass does it, so also got to spread the word about the fuckening we are enduring, most people are really not aware of the conditions on the ground beyond their personal experiences.
And what direct action would you propose?
Shoot yourself?
I gotta keep it real with you chief, I think about it quite a bit.
In the 2000s, there was a strong angle about how programmers would no longer exist thanks to drag and drop programming tools and website builders. The average office worker would write little programs as easy as a excel formula, and a “programmer” would cease to exist.
I remember CS professors fearing for the future as they talked about the doomsday scenario of programmer jobs ceasing to exist, going the way of human calculators and the people who put letters together for a printing press.
Of course, business is still normal. It ebbs and flows.
I think about that whenever I think about AI.
You are more likely to be fired due to offshoring
That hasn’t really been an issue for more than a decade at this point. Domestic manufacturing production in developed nations has actually been increasing. They just don’t use humans much. You’re not losing your job to poor people overseas. You’re losing it to robots, and you have been since before the current AI craze.
That hasn’t really been an issue for more than a decade at this point.
Ohh wow really? i guess they can really only off shore manufacturing 🤡
What, do want a shitty graveyard shift call center job? Trust me, you aren’t losing out by not having access to that.
Unemployment isn’t even high right now. Why are you whining about a non-issue to begin with? What good would it do you to have more low paying jobs when the problem is that all the jobs are already low paying as it is? We just saw that if there are more jobs then people they’ll happily crash the economy until there aren’t just to make sure wages don’t go up. What do you hope to accomplish by spreading 30 year old conservative propaganda?
If all the money is hoarded by the rich, who is going to spend money to make the economy run?
The rich will live in their bunkers while society collapses and blame it all on communism.
The rich will keep trading with each other. Look at housing for an example.
Look at empires of the past.
Things were so bad in Dickens’ London that living in sewers to live off whatever scraps you could find was an actual occupation.
Wealth creates its own reality.
Capitalism doesn’t look that far ahead.
I agree it’s going to be problem. It’s already happened when we exported manufacturing jobs to China. Most of what was left was retail which didn’t pay as much but we struggled along (in part because of cheap products from China). I think that’s why trinkets are cheap but the core of living (housing and now food) is more expensive. So the older people see all the trinkets (things that use to be expensive but are now cheap) and don’t understand how life is more expensive.
How is everyone going to be fired by AI? First define AI, because what we have now is a bunch of LLMs.
In the end, it’s more practical to have both working in tandem. You have a person who has common sense guiding and an AI tool who assists the person in doing the work.
At worst, people would have to up skill/re skill to have working experience with AI tools.
But people are not gonna stop working. New jobs will be created and some old jobs will disappear, as it has been the case
When there is a scarcity of resources a population will shrink to sustainable levels. Right now there are too many people to share the scraps left from the billionaires hoovering up all the capital. People will stop having kids, others will die homeless, and population will decrease just as happens in any population of animals experiencing scarcity.
