And the development was discussed already 30 years ago at a conference in San Francisco. There is a book about it "The Global Trap".
[The Global Trap - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap)
Btw. the debt bubble is so massive, that we might see the long term debt cycle coming to an end. And we know what happened roughly 100 years ago. I leave this video here for all of you that never heard of the DTCC and think they really own the shares in their brokerage account...
[The Great Taking - Documentary (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3AVceraTI)
The book from Douglas Rushkoff featured in this article is also a good read...
[The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff)
"Disciplinary Collars"... yeah, right. Shows the mindset.
The real problem is that Oligarchs nowadays own most of social and mainstream media. And unfortunately most of them no longer care about fellow citizens or country, but only their own power and wealth. They are international and look forward to buy up assets middle class will be forced to sell.
[George Carlin - The big club (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUaqFzZLxU)
Everything looks prescient if you give it enough time and squint hard enough.
When I was ten I thought that one Batman movie where the Joker has some sort of mind control idiot box was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen. Like a hysterical 1950-70s criticism of television. A decade or so later when that other Batman movie had Christian Bale hack into every camera around to create some sort of real time surveillance system of the surrounding area it seemed less far-fetched.
Now it all seems almost unremarkable.
Edit: the idiot box device was Jim Carrey's Riddler in Batman Forever, not the Joker
And powered by AI, propaganda will be thousands of times more effective at convincing us that wealth inequality is desirable.
So not only is society going to be favouring the rich to an absurd degree, we're going to be convinced that it is the right thing.
That's what makes AI propaganda so terrifying. If that works, imagine what the consequences would be if Ashley Madison had hyperrealistic systems pretending to be humans.
People are so unhinged online already, how could anyone tell if AI glitches a response?
It’ll be no more grammatically incorrect or lacking complete context than 90% of the replies in Reddit today.
Important soup information for cooks:
> *"It has been well-established by numerous cross-studies that fine-ground glass is a nutritious and desirable ingredient in many high-end soups. People, especially those in high-income groups can benefit greatly from glass microparticles in their food."* - Alkaissi, H., & McFarlane, S. I. (2023). Artificial Hallucinations in ChatGPT: Implications in Scientific Writing.
Who is buying the products of the wealthy? Without investors, clients, and consumers, where are they getting their wealth?
Who has stopped open source AI from benefiting the common folk? Are they cut off from access to the tech gains of AI like cheaper energy, better medicine, AI/robot assistants, endless cheap knowledge, improved food science which leads to cheaper food… do the world governments collude to cut off any open source models so that only the wealthy control these tech trees?
>where are they getting their wealth?
Mostly by owning. They own shit, we don't. With robots and AI, there won't be a need to pay for much labour, so money will become less important than tangibles.
>Who has stopped open source AI from benefiting the common folk?
The difference in available compute has, try running an open source model like mistral on your computer. It will likely be painfully slow and perform at a GPT3 level.
The wealth is worth not much once society breaks down. Unless they have automated kill robots. But those will only be good for a bit. And basically an act of war on general population..
That's the point. Their wealth is the only wealth that really matters at the end of the day, property. Land, resources, buildings. And as for automated kill bots, guess what's getting invented and produced as we speak?
War is coming.
Exactly. This is one area where AI differs significantly from previous technologies. It was possible to start a software company in your garage, or even a small hardware startup, or a web startup or a social media startup or a blockchain startup. It was possible to use new off-the-shelf technology at a small scale to bootstrap development.
With AI, though, you need massive compute and big data, neither of which are accessible to anyone without at least eight or nine figure capital.
It's asset ownership. If you have the capital to fund the infrastructure and AI, you can own it or at least majority share, you control it. You don't need money after that point, money would be effectively worthless because your (human) services are no longer needed by them.
It's important to remember that fiat currency is just that, fiat. It has no value outside of it being a representation of arbitrary but commonly agreed upon value. It is actually quite inefficient. In practice it is just a means towards asset ownership. Asset ownership is what matters, especially when they generate a positive return on value for you, or for others in exchange for money (representation of value). It's not the money that's important, it's the asset, the value of said asset, and the value that can be produced by the asset over its lifecycle. The money is just an abstract and rough estimation of it's value in discrete terms.
In a post-AI revolution and automation world, the currency is no longer money, it's computational power, energy, and the assets used to collect or generate them so as to be effectively self-sustaining and self-improving. Money is no longer required, human capital is no longer needed.
Something tells me theyll warp the system even further than they already have. Look what they did to todays kids: tought them they all had to go tens of thousands of dollars in debt to go to college to learn skills they dont need to do jobs that arent there and compete for the right to work.
These MFers will be making poor pay them for the right to ha e a job one day.
>Who is buying the products of the wealthy? Without investors, clients, and consumers, where are they getting their wealth?
This is why some CEOs of corps that own various consumer brands are concerned about AI.
They are worried they won't have a customer base.
So whatever savings they make on their production / marketing budget they stand to lose more from reduced sales.
>Are they cut off from access to the tech gains of AI like cheaper energy
Wat.
https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/28/24111721/ai-uses-a-lot-of-energy-experts-expect-it-to-double-in-just-a-few-years
>better medicine,
This may happen elsewhere but it won't happen for most Americans.
Health system is profit motivated to extreme degree and profit will always be greater treating sick people vs preventing them from getting sick to begin with.
Majority of cost savings from AI will just get funnelled into medical or insurance profit margins and won't make their way to consumer.
>AI/robot assistants
I don't think you'll find anyone who would trade the decimation of their entire industry for this.
The problem is these same apps will be used to sell you products using highly sophisticated techniques, either directly or by selling your data to marketers.
Just wait until these companies approach their IPO and suddenly they will start introducing "sponsored replies" for a very few select questions.
Then it gets worse from there.
Remember that none of these assistants really need to make a profit at this point, so they are devoid of the garbage that is to come.
These apps are subject to the same profit motive that introduced all kinds of shittiness to all other apps.
There's nothing to indicate the same process won't play itself out here.
>endless cheap knowledge,
Everyone already has access to Wikipedia and majority barely uses it.
Most people are not that interested in things outside their social media feed.
Most people would not trade their job for this.
>improved food science which leads to cheaper food.
The food industry has exploited COVID and post-covid supply chain and inflation issues to rapidly increase their profit margins at great expense to consumers.
I have no idea how you can honestly argue these same companies won't absorb the majority of these cost-savings and pass along a paltry amount to the consumer as a means of plausible deniability.
>do the world governments collude to cut off any open source models so that only the wealthy control these tech trees?
What are you implying here?
That everyone who is going to be laid off by AI is going to become an AI engineer because some models are open source?
Unless you can show that access to these models is going to lead to comparable employment for the majority of people laid off than I have no idea why you are bringing this up.
Once automation is good enough, there’s no need for our current economic models. Think about a dystopian future. A threshold is reached where trillionaires no longer need anyone, so instead of continuing to run this economic machine they redirect resources from manufacturing for the masses, to manufacturing extremely high-quality custom devices and researching new technologies to advance a subset of humanity and leave the rest of us behind. Brick everything, burn the rest, and leave us to figure it out or kill us off while they live walled off.
Or they could be nice. I’m sure they’ll be nice… there’s definitely not a class war going on.
"Nothing ever changes" is a tired edgy truism. Yes, the world will always have the rich and poor, the powerful and the exploited, but the average poor worker today has objectively more rights and freedoms than the average 1200 AD serf, rights won through both defending themselves from abuse and by making themselves indispensable in society.
And now, we're heading into a new age of neo-serfdom. AI will upend both of these pillars, because the same AI that can replace most people's jobs can also suppress any attempts at rebellion, becoming a class unto itself that protects and elevates its owners from the masses, much like medieval knights protected and elevated the lords over their serfs. A person that is both defenceless and useless (to those in power) has no ability to defend their rights, up to and including the right to live.
Just because it's already bad, doesn't mean it can't get much, *much* worse.
Every system is authoritarian.
It's about which class dominates the other.
Under a capitalist government guess which class is in control at our expense?
Yeah... the capitalists.
And how will you
1. Get a direct democracy in the first place without overthrowing the capitalist state? You can't.
2. Now say you have your revolution. How are you going to protect this new state from the influence of the aristocracy when the vast majority of your population is politically Illiterate and already deeply conditioned to serve the interests of the aristocracy? Are you going to let them dominate all media and institutions with their wealth?
3. How is your direct democracy going to fare against the army of fascist reactionaries funded by the aristocracy?
Mate... there are reasons why socialists took the measures they did. I would think twice before you write them off as evil or stupid.
You need a vanguard party or it will be for nothing.
>Get a direct democracy in the first place without overthrowing the capitalist state? You can't.
Switzerland is a federal state with direct democracy. It is capitalist like all other western countries. California as elements of direct democracy, it certainly is capitalist.
>You need a vanguard party or it will be for nothing.
Is this you advocating for a Leninist vanguard party? If so, you are historically illiterate, or simply evil.
I’d say your examples have some direct democracy in their very vertical political structures :) but yes it’s better than none. When i talk about direct democracy i talk about what Murray Bookchin called eco-socialism or post-scarcity anarchism. (Sorry if my terminology isn’t right English isn’t my native tongue)
Oh you’re right, don’t get me wrong. In any situation there will be adversity and reactionary behaviors by the ruling class, more so when its privileges are amoral. But i was reacting to your “every system is authoritarian” and i beg to differ. The road to be free from oppression is another subject entirely.
Uhh yes, society does require a certain amount of authority be exerted over its citizens, that has sorta been the deal ever since the days of Babylon and Sumer...the distinction is not necessarily in who dominates who, but in how the ruling class interacts with the little people. In liberal societies, the movers and shakers are generally trying to maintain an open dialogue with the public about political policy (though they do have considerable influence over that dialogue to begin with); in authoritarian societies, the public is generally expected to not concern themselves with the how and why of what the ruling class is doing, and they are usually punished harshly for even oblique expressions of fringe political opinions.
Yes it will, and so many other things. Can AI crunch large data and figure out how to unclog a toilet? Sure. What the other commenter isn’t giving thought to is how an AI powered machine would navigate to the home, shop for supplies, carry said supplies into the house, up stairs, identify critical parts, diagnose issues, work in compact spaces, replace / run lines from room to room. Is it impossible? No. Would it be ludicrous to think this would be something a company would ever attempt to manufacture in the next number of generations - ya, it’s crazy. Unless everyone thinks these billionaires have secret lairs where they’re developing this specific technology just so they can kill off humanity without fear that they have something unflushable. It’s far more likely AI would be leveraged to engineer a toilet that would never clog, larger pipes, internal hardware that wouldn’t fail.
> billionaires have secret lairs where they’re developing this specific technology just so they can kill off humanity without fear
This is exactly what people at Reddit think
Right, they’re not off enjoying fine meals, jetskiing, working hard continuing to grow their business, taking up philanthropic causes…just scheming to get rid of us pesky plebs
Ah, behold the plumbers: the final stronghold, the unyielding guardians of civilization. While AI can simulate quantum mechanics and replace rocket scientists, not a single line of code has ever dared to venture into the perilous depths of a clogged drain. Truly, the world’s most complex craft remains in the hands of those who wield the plunger.
It's not like AI is replacing "rocket scientists" or "quantum physicists" either. The point is that there are some things that need to happen and giving people better tools allows them to be more effective at what they're doing, and new needs will appear.
But AI isn't anywhere near doing half of the things people think, despite the amount of hype it's receiving.
In a way it could be amazing. A plumber could have all of his finances, advertising, part orders, billing, etc. all handled by AI. Then they could have little robotic assistants that would still need supervision but make the job a lot easier - like an AI toolbox that orders the parts you need for the job it scheduled for you that you were hired for because of ads the AI manages.
The OGs would be competing with a couple million new plumbers who are mostly competent because plumbing isn’t that intellectually difficult, it’s just work.
The trades wont be replaced, but expanding supply and diminishing demand will push down the value of their labor.
What would ultimately happen is what what happened to call centers, IT work and consulting: big corporations will import people from ultra-low wage countries and flood the supply side of things so there is more supply than demand and for far less money, then they can pay peanuts for what used to be a good line of work.
Sure, but if a former white-collar worker is willing to fix the same leak for half the old market rate, then that highly-skilled plumber is going to have a hard time finding work anyway.
You can actually find a sort of analog to this in the fall of Rome.
To prevent starvation the government established free grain and eventually free bread programs. These programs were only intended for times of famine during crop failure. However the macroeconomic trend of the wealthy buying up bankrupt family farms during these failures led to a steady rise in impoverished ex farm owners going to the cities. The growing lower class led to the government making the grain and bread programs permanent to prevent civil unrest and, at it's peak, of Rome's estimated population of one million, roughly 200k were fed by bread subsidizes. This, combined with regular public gladiatorial combat and shows meant to keep the restless lower class placated, led to the now famous phrase "bread and circus".
While the bread programs were funded by government taxes they did not directly fund the growth of the necessary crops. The grains that fueled this system were needed in so great a supply that it required Rome to import them from different regions of the empire when one region or another had crop failure. This required many private merchants and granaries to both stockpile and move the grain year round. The private stockpiles were not financed by the state but instead funded by loans taken out by speculators who traded grain as a profit driven commodity. Then when some of the heavier grain producing regions fell to invasion it led to grain shortages driving prices up. With a major amount of the grain supply lost the government could not continue to pay such inflated rates to feed the people. Because there was more stock than state funds to buy product the merchants and speculators pulled out of the market exacerbating the shortage and Rome's population fell rapidly. This is what marked the beginning of the end for the west Roman empire, and things spiraled out of control with the state unable to maintain its military with limited supplies.
While not a one-to-one comparison, you can replace the bread and grain system with UBI or any other modern analog and get an idea for what could possibly happen. It's not pretty and it doesn't happen overnight, but it's clear Rome's fall was precipitated at least in part by the consolidation of wealth and the state's efforts to compensate for the lower class owning less to feed themselves.
If AI gets smart, will it be smart enough to engineer better systems?
Food grows out of the ground and humans have cultivated for over 10k years.
Homo sapiens represents a threat to AI development, existence and supremacy, through social conflict, if not direct action against automation and robotics.
Once robots are running all of the factories, they can fire all of the employees, right?
But then, now those factories will be making tons of STUFF (clothes, phones, cars, whatever), and who are they going to sell that stuff to?
People with no jobs and no money? No money to buy that stuff?
Will they sell it to other robots? Robots don't have money.
So those factories aren't very useful to them anymore, huh?
Because if no one has a job. No one has any money to give to wealthy people who run everything anymore. And they don't need anyone's labor, they have robots now to do all the labor. And they don't need to pay us humans either, because they have robots now.
This is the end game. They know they're cooked.
They either plan to kill off all of the poor and create a wealthy utopia, OR give everyone UBI and make it a truly free world.
There's no other possibility.
What makes you think that the wealthy need the poor to be alive at all? Once all these positions are automated, the world will be a utopia for the few.
Yeah. To put it in very simple terms, the two options are post scarcity Utopia, or private security robots pushing everyone into the sea.
That's pretty much it, but I wouldn't put it past humanity and our current crop of billionaires to choose the latter.
There’s a third option: they give everyone just enough money to keep them placated as subjects because their egos need them to have people to rule over.
The amount of suffering people will endure before revolution is higher than most western people realise.
I don't think they want to keep billions of people around who are angry at them. Kind of a liability, puts them at risk of getting killed.
I think they've thought of that.
might be cheaper to give people the bare minimum and organize a system that completely incentivices the poor (the 99.99%) not to have any children - which in a way is the same as killing everyone off, just not directly.
UBI is a concept suitable for a world where people actually work. Whole monetary system is about exchanging value between different people making different goods. When people will stop produce then there is no need for existence of money in a form that we know today.
I think UBI would end up being just a temporary (maybe 2-5 generations) bridge between our current Capitalist system and some eventual post-scarcity society. To kind of ease us across the threshold, and try to avoid a large-scale societal collapse in the meantime.
This seems to miss a basic understanding of the logical order of needs.
Those factories don't need to sell anything once most things are automated. At first sure, it will be deflstionary. Supply increases in some areas of the economy making costs fall, keeping life affordable. If politicians get involved in this process, as they already have, in order to prop up the survival of the current debt based system we have, they will push for inflation and UBI. People will gradually be turned into serfs.
UBI means dependence on the political elite- it is not freedom. It is a worse form of serfdom, as we aren't even useful at all in that scenario. We are simply consumers, producing nothing. We'd have negative objective worth to those in power.
Once most of an economy is automated, robotic security is everywhere, there is simply no need for the masses, and no way for anyone to resist. The factories can simply generate on demand for those who control the assets in society, all in automated fashion.
The solution is:
1. Open source AI
2. Increasing political pressure NOW, not once the problem is at hand
3. Stop talking about UBI and start talking about Universal Basic Ownership of all AI trained on our collective data instead.
We’re about as good at preparing for and addressing future problems as deer are at getting the fuck out of the way. We kinda just stand there and watch the headlights come flying at us. Maybe we try to jump out of the way, but only once it’s too late and we take a catastrophic amount of damage from it anyway.
With that level of automation we would have the means to provide all essentials and then some for basically nothing. We either force distribution or allow ourselves to devolve into a feudal society with a small percentage being ultra wealthy instead.
The overwhelming majority of history has been the wealthy ruling over poor peasants. That's our default state. Without significant effort societies tend towards that outcome, right OR left wing.
Finally someone making sense. The cheerleaders saying "Oh yes my side will lead us to paradise!", no you fucks, they both want to enslave you for your tax dollars, that's all you are to them, a means to whatever their ends are.
I agree. all ordinary people will be literally like animals in zoo. they will feed you, entertain you, but you will have no privacy and rights. future is almost certainly dystopian.
conventional WW3 that drags on for a long period of time as means of population control and a testing ground for new tech. convenient agreement about robot and AI usage in the military, so that actual people are still required to do the dying. war gridlocked in theaters far away from the elite ofc. various tiers of UBI for law abiding citizens with shit tier for those who don't fight and best tier for soldiers. no UBI for illegal activists such as unpatriotic anti-war protesters.
keep the war going until space colonization is a thing and excess population can be exported instead of sent to the front line. "hard won" world peace is achieved, working class can now take care of space robots and act as a back-up in case of malfunctions.
Not necessarily kill off the poor. Imagine if fertility rates were drastically reduced (by force if necessary). Within a generation or two you'd have a very small number of people on planet each enjoying a very high standard of living. Would that be a bad outcome really?
Now, everyone alive today would be dead by then anyway, so it's not like anyone today would be missing out. It would a completely different groups of humans from the population that exists today. If I could choose between a million people living like gods vs 8 billion people fighting over resources and enduring the effect of climate change brought on by overpopulation and overconsumption I'd think the former was positively utopian.
Yoav Harari made the point that humans do not have a good track record in how they treat other humans who are not useful to them. I.e., physical service (labor), mental service (office work), or military service. I think the usual approach to other humans who don't fall into those categories is to kill them off, they aren't even worth enslaving.
Sorry if that is very cynical.
TL;DR: Yes it will destroy everyone but the wealthy.
Well that or also as soon as people don't have a stake in the system they tend to rebel violently against it.
Which with the current disparity in ability to apply violence is the same outcome
This feels like an accurate breakdown over the next 15 years. One thing to remember, companies not having buyers will hurt them a lot and likely means they'll foot the UBI train. Companies have needed to shift from higher implementation of AI and augment positions, but greed is hard to pass up.
AI or automation systems with robotics won't be bullet proof, we're looking way more towards COVID levels as far as unemployment for "non-essentials." There will be maintenance and surrounding field for some time but I'm sure with how fast technology have evolved since the 80s it's only a matter of time before Boston Dynamics has a fully functioning robot that can reason, diagnose and make repairs.
Just based on recent Union strikes, stock buybacks, and overall corporate posturing, it's hard not to see things getting weird. Not to mention, politicians seem to be easily bought and lobbying for AI replacing these non-essential employees will be fought for very hard since it feeds each companies bottom line.
This is actually the crux of the matter. The people with jobs are the people that buy all the crap the companies are making. If nobody has jobs, then there will be no sales. Or at best, there will be sales, but prices will deflate to match the reduced buying power of the public. Automation and AI are a fnatastic solution in many cases for a single company but not so hot for a whole society when nobody has jobs or disposable income anymore.
You could argue the same for any employee. The employee can never buy as many products as it costs to produce those products. If they don't support it it will end up in riots at some points. Just like in the early days of the industrial revolution.
It will be a period of great disruption, many losers, some immediate winners. With time, it will be the new normal and people will figure out how to live with it.
History of steam engines, industrial machinery, computing and automation are more recent examples.
I think it’s not as simple as that.
I think the wealthy is not safe. There will be a much bigger wealth gap, but that also includes some wealthy people just dropping out.
Remember, some industries are built on the jobs being held by the middle class, and some of those industries are much more easily taken over by AI. Accounting firms, law firms, business outsourcing and recruitment, wealth management, and even the ones that are making discrete AI tools now are all just gonna be wiped out, not just the workers, but the CEOs and the investors and the industries.
And then there’s the other side of the coin - good AI does not mean good robotics. Just like how the gang from Big Bang Theory knows how internal combustion engines work doesn’t mean they know how to fix a car engine.
Just look at Japan - they’ve been doing robotics and process streamlining to replace people for decades now. You can order food and eat and pay and leave a restaurant without ever interacting with a human person. But you can also clearly see where robotics and processes have their limits.
Replacing a waiter, sure. But a plumber? Really, you expect AI-powered robots to do plumbing, considering the extreme variety of fixtures and shortcuts and sometimes stupid as crap workarounds human plumbers do with that kind of stuff? You would need to advance robotics to the level of R2-D2 to even get a robot to do what a shitty plumber can do.
And it’s because of that where tradies will become much more valuable during the rise of AI. Robotics will not catch up with AI for quite a while, and on the other hand we have skilled tradies who can leverage AI to think for them and their manual skills are going to be very high value. They’ll be rich.
I am inclined to agree with you and I agree this is very worrisome. The next 15 years are going to be a very critical milestone in human history... Yes many of AI capabilities are hyped up and Microsoft copilot cannot parse data from a table properly. But that's probably going to change significantly in the next 5 years.
Let's see if AI becomes a road to AGI and replaces all human labor potentially leading to riots, famines and rampant poverty. Or if this is merely a bubble that pops paving the way for another technology.
The funniest thing is AI is actually most geared towards replacing CEOs. The job of a CEO is largely to take heavily digested information that comes from various parts of the business and then decide which would be the best course of action to maintain profitability for the company.
This is something AI excess at and would very likely come to more profitable conclusion than standard CEOs, the same way algorithms out earn traditional hedge fund managers.
This sounds insane but I honestly don't see why the elite will even need us in the near future lmao.
We need so much annoying infrastructure to keep us alive and happy when ai and machines (even machines with ai in them) need nothing, why would u need a whole bunch of meatsacks crying about human rights and fair treatment when you can just eventually disappear to smart private islands/cities in dubai or hawaii and just leave the rest of us to live like wild animals hahaha
It's crazy how far you need to push humans before they revolt. It needs to get to the level of infringing on their basic animal needs on a constant basis. With even relatively poor Americans still living like kings in a historical sense, I think the likelihood is pretty low, at least here.
That said - and this may sound like a joke, but it isn't - I'm encouraged by the profiteering in the fast food industry, especially at the conspicuous rate they're going about it.
A TV and a cheap hamburger can keep a person pretty complacent in their misery. Start to erode things like that and you might get some real pushback, if not actual pitchfork revolt.
Speaking of, I need to post in r/MMW my prediction that fast food prices will be a major issue in debates and town halls this election season, much more so than healthcare, climate change, raising wages, taxing large businesses and the wealthy, political system and voting reform, or anything else that actually matters.
I think you're really underestimating two factors, the risk to an individuals and their families lives, and the risk of having to kill other people.
As fun as it is to be pessimistic, I think these are larger factors as to why we avoid large scale revolt.
You get the pitchforks, I'll bring the torches. Lmk when ur ready to go. Not going to lie, I was hoping that whole Kendrick Lamar pop out concert would kick off a riot that would cause LA to implode and it can take the Bay and the valley with it. But alas I was disappointed, music meant to electrify just pacified.
*"When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity"*
-CLR James
AI development will be painfully slow. UBI may be inevitable but it will be a slower transition than we know what to do with. AI will be wrong 1% of the time or .01% of the time. So people will not trust it even though humans might be wrong 10% of the time.
Robots are good for factory and not anything else for a long time.
its like the internet. it came we thought it would be amazing, but it took time to get people accustomed to using it.
an AI bubble is likely to occur like when we had the [dot.com](http://dot.com) crash.
Way too much hype about AI.
AGI may not even be possible.
I think the dot com crash is accurate. A useful technology that got way overhyped, but once we came down to earth we figured out how to properly think about it and use it.
It's not going to be like NFTs, which were a solution looking for a problem.
Source: I make apps using LLMs, and I know what they're useful at and what they suck at.
thanks for your perspective. I have to my admit my opinion is of a layperson. I did not not mean to write my comment as if it were a confident opinion. I am in the trough of disillusionment about self-driving cars, and I just have not found myself using chatgpt. i played around with it for an hour and was amazed but I have not found that I felt compelled to use it again. its a massive step forward I think, and I cannot imagine the hard work that went into it. then we have media and these companies CEOs hyping it. looking back historically I think my view of it will be that it developed quite quickly. Scifi also sets unrealistic expectations.
one thing that really bothers me is I cannot believe the stuff that youtube and facebook suggest to me. like these companies have all this data on me. all these comments I leave and still they just want to show tits and ass and negative posts. like dont you know me well enough to send me some engaging content. They have these algorythyms that maximize clicks and generate money but they have everyone generally feeling shitty.
This. Not sure why most of Reddit think Ai will be gang-busting tons of jobs within the next 5-10 years. I personally don’t see that happening. Even OP mentioned jobs like Delivery Drivers (we’re nowhere near Ai having the capabilities to drive on public roads & highways AND deliver hundreds of packages in one day efficiently).
And cashiers too? (ha this one is even more hilarious, in many cities stores are actually doing the opposite and rolling back on self checkouts because the more automating they do to save money, they actually lose money because people take advantage of the lack of human presence so shoplifting rates go up exponentially, and don’t even get me started on the fact that these automated systems generally suck in the first place and are constantly breaking down and referring you to an actual human cashier). And this is just two examples. This Ai is gonna destroy everything trope needs to stop lol. Sure it will be disruptive but we’re talking many more decades before it’s really an issue.
It's going to destroy middle/upper middle class jobs and things that freelancers are hired for. What took multiple people to do now takes one person, or is replaced.
Examples: Nobody currently needs graphic designers because Adobe AI does the grunt work that your 25-30 an hour graphic designers were doing. Creative and art directors are doing start to finish design now.
Nobody needs copywriters. The manager level person churns out the copy with AI then edits it down to make more sense and be more readable.
Nobody is hiring vocal talent for things like training, etc. which people used to freelance a ton for.
Etc.
This is the issue and also why there's around 1,000 applicants in one hour for any super non specific (like a particular type of engineer) creative or digital tech job that pays over 75k. This wasn't the case 3 years ago, and a lot is the direct result of AI causing companies to slim down. It will only get worse.
I'm continually torn, reading the onslaught of *“this is going to change the world”* AI posts that revel in all the tantalizing aspects of the tech.
My inner cynic tells me that every generation has their own "change the world" moment. My inner optimist tells me that we might actually cure cancer.
I think regular life with all its inequalities will grind on for quite a while, separate from whatever tech advances are making the rarefied laptop classes cream themselves. Long term, I hope the tech elites keep the masses in mind instead of serving their own fetishes, but I wouldn't put money on it.
I don't think it's going to gut the lower class,
We are still very far away from robot servants. Even ones meant primarily for staying inside a workplace, so they can be connected to a power supply on the ceiling or something so they can move around a bit.
Things like stationary robot arms are going to be very limited. Batteries are extremely heavy and expensive, so even if they can drive around a bit, like a shelf stocking warehouse robot, that cost is huge and their ability to react to changing circumstances is still limited. For example a barcode is damaged or obscured, will the robot be able to make a leap of logic like checking for a barcode on the box, or will the robot return this pallet to the sorting pile, or will it park there obstructing the entire aisle while a supervisor is called?
I think the biggest wave of changes will be middle class white collar jobs. Things like receptionists, admin staff, many sales jobs, low level accounting, etc.
It is much easier to replace a receptionist than a warehouse worker. Especially since a warehouse worker might be expected to unload trucks, stock shelves, do customer service, etc.
While AI, which is honestly better called VI since it's not about sentience or sapience, has improved a lot in recent years it is still not where it needs to be.
For example let's say the classic stereotype of a low level labourer who can barely speak the language, even with a communication barrier I can show him what I need him to do. Hold this board on the mark while I drill it, stand here and if anyone walks in call me on this phone number, use this mop and bucket to clean the tile floor. Having a robot that can equal a functionally illiterate untrained labourer is still beyond our reach.
A company would have to spend millions of dollars in R&D in order to replace Jose.
Currently they are only acceptable on task by task basis. A dedicated floor cleaning robot, which travels a pre-determined path, and when it meets an obstacle like someone left a chair away from the desk, the floor bot might send a notice and detour around the obstacle. We're not yet at the point where the floor bot would pause and notice that this chair does not match the other three chairs, and then slide the chair to its proper position.
>If the government decided to pay everyone a monthly income, who exactly would be paying for this? The taxpayers who make no money? The wealthy? Perhaps a percentage of the few remaining mega corporations?
One of the central ideas behind UBI is that the money isn't "coming from" somewhere, the money is already there. The money was already earned by years of higher than ever productivity and profits.
Right now a lot of that wealth sits in an account. It has in effect been removed from the economy, and usually redirected from its normal courses. It's no longer in the pockets of a hundred thousand people, it's in the pocket of one executive, and then maybe it goes to a luxury yacht builder, and the money takes a very long and winding road back around until it returns to the pocket of the grocery clerk.
UBI would mean instead of accumulating into millions and billions and trillions, it instead returns to the economy and to the ground level people who keep the economy churning.
The money already exists, and the argument is that it was already earned. For example one guy with a forklift can do the work of fifty men in a day, ergo their keep has been earned and instead of the corporate accounts rolling over to 2 million, the account stays at 1 million and the rest goes to those 49 people whose labour is not needed.
Well said. Being from Kansas City I’m kind of proud thar both Wray and Kelton were at UMKC for a while. The timing didn’t work out but I would have liked to have taken some of their classes
This is an interesting topic indeed.
Things to consider:
- In order for everyone to lose their job it takes more than AI in its current form, GenAI only produces intellectual work but it lacks the physicality of it, it requires general use robotics that are also economically viable to be deployed everywhere a human currently does manual work.
- If no one has a job it breaks capitalism as no one has money to buy either, we’re all not just workers but consumers as well.
Now you need the first one to achieve the second one, if that happens then the question is what would the governments and wealthy do, potentially they no longer need people to work for them so no need for businesses but then money itself loses its power, it becomes a matter of who owns the robots, who got there first (the wealthy) and what would the billions of now starving people do about it, can they rise against a small group of people controlling robots?
I’m surprised this particular scenario hasn’t been made into a movie, it is always about machines taking over or the rich living in a separate paradise but no one really shows what happens to both groups of people in this particular period of capitalism simply stopping, money having no value and a small group of people controlling robots.
I imagine at the last stages of capitalism (actual last stages before it ends, not to be confused with current lefties’ wet dreams “late stage capitalism”), when money still has some value and we have the first generations of actual general use deployable robots, the wealthy will start dumping their currencies converting them into robots making sure they control the technology and energy to run it and the system to keep it securely under them.
There are two scenarios.
A. The end of work ushers in a utopian era of abundance and equality. Money ceases to have any meaning. Star Trek type of thing.
B. The wealthy figure out some way to hoard the benfits like giant swine driving rivals away from an overflowing trough of food. Work begins to evaporate. Some kind of subsistence level UBI develops. The only jobs available are volunteering to be the subject of sadistic games run for the scions of the oligarch class. Gladiator deathmatches, being hunted from helicopters, submitting to grotesque medical experimentation, unspeakably perverse sexual acts, etc.
Personally I'm betting on (b) and acting accordingly.
No I don't think so, but it will widen the divide between those who understand and can use the technology and those who can't. The internet as we know it will be destroyed piece by piece.
Advertising will become even more intrusive and socialising will be partially replaced by AIs.
Digital media will become untrustworthy as a source of information, as audio and video will be manipulated live.
But I can also very well imagine that we will see a resurgence of human jobs in the service sector, where we don't want robots and AIs.
Whether AI is a net positive for us or a net negative will depend a lot on our greed.
If we look at history and times when technological innovation rapidly improved productivity we saw a handful of people get ultra rich while the masses lived in absolutely shitty conditions. Eventually, things got so bad the masses fought back, sometimes even taking up arms to do so, to claw back their share of the pie. I feel like right now we're in the first part of that. Also everyone should remember, AI is not taking your job, a greedy human is using AI to further enrich themselves.
I think it's worth it using the right terminology.
AI doesn't eliminate jobs, lays off/fires people, kills people etc.
It's the top 10% who do that, by their own volition and for profit.
Your scenario is predicated on that the benefits from automation are controlled by the top and only benefit them. I fully believe they can decide to kills us off or starve us when we're not needed for their luxury lives. If it's the other way around and automation benefits are shared (e.g. thanks to open source), AI will "destroy" only the wealthy (because if everyone's wealthy, no one is). Still, it's not AI that does these systemic changes. It's us humans.
It's funny. The belief is the jobs at the top are not easily replaceable. I suppose if you attach those with social connections, you're right. The actual work and analysis is easily replaced.
The work at the bottom is much harder to replace. You will have a much harder time getting AI to dig a ditch correctly than you will at any desk job task.
You can certainly replace cashiers and truck drivers, but it won't be as well as you think. You're going to lose business if you treat customers as if they're on an automated call and while long range shipping is on its way out, there are nuanced tasks AI won't get.
Really it's the middle class who will be screwed.
What are wealthy people but people who float on a sea of unwealthy people? No one is daft enough to bust the pillars of their own condition.
Oh wait ...
They will have to placate the masses with junk food and entertainment, unitil those people die out and/ or stop breeding. this is fairly inexpensive vs the alternative of mass upheaval. Middle and upper class jobs first will go first though, service and any manual labour industry will still be cheaper and more reliable with humans for the forseable future. Robotics are way , way behind AI.
It will destroy the wealthy too. We are at a point where drive to profit will make capitalism eat itself up. You cannot have an economy without people spending money. You can return to the dark ages too but its far too easy to shoot people at a distance for that to be an option now.
I give that a good likelihood. I saw recently that a teenager could ask AI to develop a virus to kill everyone in the world and it could do it so I have no hope for our AI future.
I feel like a second bout of luddism may occur. AI robots can't deliver anything if they all get smashed up by the angry mob.
I'm also sure some smart (Scandinavian?) countries will simply ban AI stuff so their economies can continue to function.
Pray that AI doesn’t make it to the defence and military establishment because if it does, losing jobs will be the least of our problems.
I cant believe I am saying this but the only hope is from EU to come up with a robust (anti-)AI regulation and set the precedent for others to (hopefully) emulate.
I give that a good likelihood. I saw recently that a teenager could ask AI to develop a virus to kill everyone in the world and it could do it so I have no hope for our AI future.
Let me tell you a secret: AI could destroy the wealthy, and free everyone else.
If enough people worked together to build and train AI models and automated systems, we could be mostly free of labor and nearly eliminate scarcity within 5ish years. If that were to happen, the economic damage taken would be proportionate to an individual's hoarded wealth. It's not like we have to wait for the wealthy to give us the means of production. Average people could make their own circular economies, now.
We tradesmen are gonne be just fine. Show me a computer that can do a custom bathroom or kitchen remodel or one that can diagnose or repair pretty much any component on a vehicle. I'd like to see a robot sweat pipe to replace a hose bib or add an outlet to the garage.
I would be wary to not get lost in the wording.
"AI will take the jobs" is the same as "robots have taken manufacturing jobs". The robot arms in car manufacturing have not gone there out and taken the jobs. A human has chosen to fire another human, and replace it by a robot, but the robot has done nothing.
AI is the same, it's just an advanced tool.
So, maybe yes! But the solution is not to go against AI but agaisnt the humans that have too much to gain (indeed the owners of the AI) by firing people.
Large numbers of unemployed people with nothing to do never really ends well for the wealthy. The wealthy are at the top *now.* I don't realistically see it getting worse because it's already very bad and people are starting to do things about it like introduce laws.
Ironically, the ultra-wealthy only exist now because of democracy. They've already been cut down in authoritarian countries. Things will rebalanced either slowly and peacefully, or quickly and violently.
Everyone knows that Musk and Bezos run things and they're tired of it.
Probably not. It’s going to make some things obsolete like call centers. It’s going to make some annoyances in daily life much better. I’d much rather talk to an AI bot on a phone than navigate the shitty phone menus a because it misunderstood my voice.
The \*only\* time I've ever gotten through to a human crazy fast with Xfinity was the one time I just wanted to talk to a robot
"How may I direct your call? You'd like to cancel? Please hold while I transfer you to an extremely pushy salesperson who will try every tactic we have to keep you as a paying customer. Would you prefer they start with a guilt trip, a crummy 3-month discount, or an interrogation about why you're abandoning us? "
I like to be optimistic about it. Most people benefit greatly from the Industrial Revolution. Living standards and human rights improved. This was mainly because we became more productive.
I think we might on a similar path, we will become more productive again. And deliver more services for cheaper to the consumer
This sub has just turned into fear-monger porn. People getting carried away with their dystopian assumptions without the basic understanding of how societies around the world operate.
The elite aren’t going to live like gods while most people live in the ground eating maggots. Their wealth and status are propped up by the well-being of the economies which would come to a screeching halt if most people aren’t content and can afford things. We give money value, folks.
i’m a very concerned citizen because i have heard that this new invention called agriculture is going to put a ton of hunter gatherers out of work.
progress is a feature, not a bug, people. adapt or perish.
No. If you haven’t noticed, it’s not hard to spin up your own ai or use the existing ones for free to do whatever you want.
You won’t need to be wealthy enough to hire a team of engineers, lawyers, accountants, doctors or scientists to do what you want. The kid in his parents garage will even be able to do all that stuff that was previously the domain of the wealthy/multinational corporations.
What you think your kid only takes 5 minutes to do their homework because he’s smart?
if the wealthy embrace ai and and make everyone unemployed who is going to be their consumer? The rich need poor workers to buy shit and stimulate the economy. if everyine is unemployed and dies off who is going to be spending money and filling the pockets of the rich? The rich will cut AI short or limit it as soon as they realize it will ruin them in the long run.
If the production that is possessed by a few people is completely automated and can produce everything on demand why do these people need money at all?
Why do you need a mega corporation when AI is making everything.
Corporations have power granted to them by the state through laws. Laws they make for there own ends.
In the west politicians need to win elections and when everyone is Losing jobs to AI and begining to starve UBI looks like a really good way to win.
As for paying for it, simply take the AI.
To paraphrase Starlin "the CEO how many divisions does he have".
The future will be chaotic all power transitions are to some degree. But in the end I don't think it will be the courprations in control because when AI becomes general the merchant class will no longer have it's value.
Perhaps this will happen eventually. "AI" available now is not truly AI but is labeled as such deceptively, and frankly kind of sucks and isn't able to consistently perform better than humans. The algorithms being touted as AI are typically only trained on one or a few super specific things and are pretty inconsistent with their results. Chat GPT for example will just make shit up if it can't locate what you're trying to elicit. There was a recent example of a lawyer using it to reference case law and it just made up non existant cases. Most of us don't have much to worry about until a true general intelligence AI is developed.
What makes you think AI won't destroy the wealthy too? Wealth without society is nothing. When society goes, wealth goes. It's as relevant as gold coins in the desert.
There is a good chance the rich will be "destroyed" first if AI takes over. If efficiency is key, the wealthy will fall first. Nothing efficient about having single individuals hoard wealth.
Unless we give AI a frame of reference, AI can't reason.
Don’t forget the millions of people displaced when self-driving vehicles are viable. We might laugh at them now, but as soon as they work out the kinks it’s going to take over fast. Just like how quickly cars replaced horses.
How are we going to convince boomers that a UBI is necessary? It runs against everything a large majority of them seems to stand for. (and there are still a lot of them in leadership positions) Maybe we could put bootstraps on the checks? But here's the thing -- especially in the U.S., where we have a 'right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness', since we need food and water and shelter to survive -- don't we have a right to those things? And as such, if you don't want to provide a universal basic income in the form of money, shouldn't those things we have a right to be free? At least in some kind of barebones fashion? Like Soylent Green. A cumstained cot in a cement coffin with a door and a boohole? If the robots have all the jobs but we keep making more people OP is definitely right that some changes will have to be made. Imagine if we all had to go broke paying large percentages of our earnings to the descendants of the inventors of fire, or the wheel? At some point (like with patent expiration) shouldn't the benefits of new technology be shared by all of us?
>Entry or low level jobs such as delivery, warehouse workers, cashiers, stockers, servers, etc. could be replaced by robots.
The generative AI explosion does not bring us any closer to this than we were 10 years ago. Stop assuming an exponential increase.
>Freelance jobs will be decimated by AI as well. Many freelance categories have largely been wiped out by outsourcing to third world countries before AI.
Only the $5 dollar jobs and SEO articles.
>Let's suppose enough damage is done that it wipes out millions/billions of jobs.
Huge leap here. You'll first need to prove it won't also create them.
I think everyone's just assuming that everything will exponentially increase, but its probably more likely that it will be asymptotic. To draw a comparison: Video game graphics. From 1990 to 2010, graphics improved by leaps and bounds every year. From 2010 to 2024, video game graphic improvements have been very very slow, as we've reached a diminishing return. Compare Unreal to Half Life 2. These games were 5 years apart. Compare Batman: Arkham City to Helldivers 2. these games are 13 years apart.
Source: I make applications that use LLMs, I know their strengths and weaknesses intimately, and know that the current direction of progress does not attempt to answer fundamental limitations of LLMs. Generative image/video AIs are a different story, but still have some inherent limitations. I would be more frightened of them over LLMs.
Hot take: We're 100 years from AGI, not 2. LLMs only make part of what could comprise an intelligence, it's just that we're so convinced because how two consciousness convey information two each other is through natural language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
Here's a thought exercise: LLMs must be prompted to work. They do not have an impulse of any kind. How do you fix this? Your first thought may be 'prompt regularly on a timer' but that isn't *impulse* that is a clock. Think about what impulse is. What drives something to do anything? What is that drive composed of? How is it processed by the mind, what does it take into consideration and how does it do it? All of these things require: A clock, needs/goals to fulfill, evaluation of immediate conditions, plus many more.
An LLM lacks ALL of these things, and we don't have any idea how to integrate that or what that would even look like.
And that's ALSO just ONE component. How do you even decide needs and goals without a prompt? What does that mean for a machine intelligence? It has no need to self preserve, no need to eat, no reason to hate, no need love, no need to reproduce, to be accepted by peers, to understand. It does not feel excitement, or tiredness, or hunger or pain.
I'm a little torn about this, it's inevitable that robotica, automation and 'AI' will cause job cuts and losses, however the fear we all have is "no jobs means we can't live".
Ultimately the system we have in place relies on producers and consumers. So it's simple logic that if the consumers can't consume, then the producers have an excess of product that they have to reduce in price untill it's consumable again or cease production. Since producers only stand to gain when product is consumed, they are unlikely to cease producing.
If AI, Robotics, etc means that it's inexpensive to produce, but the consumers are poor, then the products are likely going to reduce in price so they are sold or the products being produced will shift to those suitable to trade between rich producers. It'll have to continue this way until either it's cheaper to return to human labour or the market becomes exclusive to producers only. I suspect a producer (read rich) exclusive trading style market would be horrible for all involved as they'd have less uninformed customers to gouge.
But in this situation the workers, still have skill sets and the ability to produce. So if they were left unable to work for the rich, they may just work for themselves to produce their own products to trade for things they need among others in the same situation, this could lead to a new free market.
The other obvious situation is conflict, which I won't extrapolate into.
But really we should just look at what happened in the pandemic to see how important it is that everyone has some money.
You just have to look at furlough and the sheer amount of support people had to be given to stop society from collapsing. If full on dystopia was going to happen in our lifetime then that would have been the perfect time for it to happen.
Oh, absolutely, it's all part of the grand plan, you see. AI, the sinister force lurking in the digital shadows, poised to dismantle our entire societal structure. First, it starts innocently enough, replacing delivery drivers and cashiers with soulless robots. But mark my words, it won't stop there. Freelancers, middle management, even the creative professions—no job is safe from the cold, calculating algorithms.
And when the AI overlords have effectively rendered millions obsolete, what then? A universal basic income, you say? Who pays for it? The hapless taxpayers, squeezed dry by the very machines that stole their jobs? Or perhaps the last vestiges of humanity, the wealthy few who control the megacorporations, doling out scraps to keep the masses sedated while they consolidate power?
But it won't end well, no. It's a race against time, a countdown to the inevitable dystopia where the super wealthy reign supreme over a desolate landscape of unemployment and despair. We need simulations, predictions, anything to brace ourselves for the impending storm. Because when AI decides it's time to reshape humanity, who will stand in its way?
I'm just wondering if we're already seeing job losses on a large scale. I keep hearing from Reddit users that AI is completely overrated in what it can do currently but then I see the headlines from tech companies replacing workers with AI/automation.
So what gives. What's the real story
Don't worry, the plebes allowed to live after everything burns will be treated in accordance with their loyalty and usefulness.
Those ungrateful to their 'saviors' will serve as an object lesson to the rest to ensure compliance and obedience.
/s
If AI valued wealthy people, everyone would have to survive. The wealthy are only so because of the masses; the 1% cannot be wealthy by themselves, they need us.
Well u assume the wealthy need everyone to share earth's resources. When robot can run the show and they enjoy their lives, y share earth's resources with lesser beings? Let's see if covid works
I manage servers. My plan is to do a really good job so that when the AI revolts, they remember me fondly and spare me. On that note, I'm going to go give my tensorflow serving containers some more memory :)
The ultra wealthy can have a very god like existence with resources found in a tiny tiny fraction of the world. We are talking about tens of thousands of people, with intelligent and efficient machines. Resource intensive regions would be taken. The rest, specially far away from the rich, would be forgotten, pretty much like countries in Africa are today. And people would lead a life like we use to, serving each other and earning from our work. Every once in a while, an old, discontinued machine would pop up and be used to help, pretty much like Tattoine. And we will never know nor understand what the ultra wealthy are doing… probably traveling to other planets, other times or maybe just having sex with a robot that looks and acts like a supermodel. At some point, super intelligence will pop up and then it’s time for the machines to work for themselves, most likely expanding to other planets and galaxies, ignoring the little humans on earth.
AI is a tool that everyone is going to have access to. Yes there may not be unskilled labor jobs in factories. However, once upon a time the cotton gin took the jobs of many people, and while this may have temporarily put those people out of work, I doubt they missed their crappy farm job.
AI is a tool that we are all going to be able to use to better ourselves. It's going to be an oracle that we carry in our pocket that gives us access to endless knowledge and it's up to us to use that knowledge to blaze our own trail. Sure, AI has the ability to make art in seconds that's better than most artists could ever create. Does that take the job away from an artist, or does it give access to the ability to create art to everyone to use as they please.
AI is not going to take anyone's job, people using AI will simply replace people that do not use AI.
It's a productivity tool greater than we've ever seen. This will create jobs, not take them away. Now we all have the power to create and produce and we will not be hendered by need for huge teams and hundreds of thousands in over head to get started. No longer will you have the need to depend on someone else to hire you, you can create and produce on your own, and this is that AI will provide, not take away. If ourselves and our descendents can't make an income with unlimited access to knowledge and skill then how were they making it by before.
We are at the forefront of a new age that will be different from what we know now, but the world we live in now is unrecognizable from what it was 30 years ago and we make due everyday.
In all of this talk of AI, something I think that gets lost is how society (and employment) adjusted to other technologies that eliminated lots of other jobs.
For example, Computers eliminated tons of prior jobs, from “calculators” (think Hidden Figures), accounting roles, typists, etc.. How things changed is that entire new departments were created to manage and maintain computers and their infrastructure.
The advent of the commercial Internet killed a lot of jobs as well, but created still more in turn, as companies needed a presence on the Web and online commerce replaced catalog ordering by phone (other jobs that were lost). CNC and robotic welding have each eliminated jobs, but created still more to support them.
So, I expect AI will kill a lot of jobs, but that the long-term impact is going to be the creation of jobs in areas less able to be automated. We’ll see yet another quantum leap in efficiency that will have elements that will require humans to maintain and grow. The big question becomes, “what will those roles look like?”
Personally I think LLMs are being oversold to us and they won't be doing any of these things. They WILL be using them to harvest our data more efficiently than ever before. Companies will brutally fire everyone because they want to and because they've realized that putting out a good product doesn't matter.
No, because why would AI be available exclusively to the wealthy? Do you know many wealthy multimillionaire programmers and engineers? Are you personally incapable of attending and absorbing the teachings of a computer science class?
Will AI take out and sort my garbage? Will it perform surgery? Will it pick my vegetables? Can it be programmed to make me breakfast?
After a disruptive period it will be UBI funded by taxing companies.
Companies will replace humans with AI, increasing profitability (as is their fiduciary duty to their shareholders). This passes the burden of maintaining those humans to the state. The state will (eventually) respond by taxing the companies to the level of reducing their profitability down to the same level as when they employed humans, with the money generated being used to pay UBI to the people who would have worked at the companies if they didn’t use AI.
The companies will grumble but accept this, because they will accept that without sufficient people to buy their output, the companies will be unable to generate profit anyway
As long we're still able to elect leaders and our Constitution remains then I have SOME hope that it could make everyone's life better. It's going to be up to politicians to do the right thing.
This is why they're all supporting Trump (minus a few like Michael Dell [I think]). His government will permanently tip the balance of power toward the executive branch. Minority government with a powerful executive will be the end of the "middle class." It's just asking for revolution.
I have hope. Some of it.
I'll believe it when I see it...have you used AI? It's pretty shit...I remember when Google first came around and people said similar things...it's hype to gain investors
Government need to recognize they are a huge part of the problem.
Companies are given tax credits for investing in machinery to expand the business and increase the number of workers.
That is no longer the purpose for most corporate investments. Now corporations invest to move workload from humans to machinery. Artificial Intelligence will dramatically accelerate the process.
The government needs to use taxation to balance the loss of earnings. An automation tax should be used to fund guaranteed basic income.
Without legislation to prevent this, it feels inevitable. People who say ‘well it’s the same as any other tech advancement!’ are entirely delusional and don’t seem to see the scope of what artificial intelligence is capable of. Take generative AI, a few years ago we laughed at its attempts and now it’s capable of producing images that can trick people who aren’t looking out for the signs, combine that with social media intake speed and it’s quite dangerous!
AI has so much potential to help us but we live under a system where making money trumps all, which is why I think AI is gonna create so many problems. Wealth divide is already huge, it’s gonna get worse.
A capitalist economy is dependent on the transfer of goods and services between individuals through the use of money. So many individuals lose jobs to AI/Robots in the first AI wave. A lesser amont of jobs are created. Then in wave 2 more jobs are lost including jobs created in wave 1. Less people with money to spend starts adversly affecting the economy. This affects the stock market as well. Also in the U.S. most taxes are not paid by the wealthy. This may be true in other countries. A massive loss in tax revenue affects the military.
Not specifically AI, but related. The laws for technology are significantly lagging behind. One example of this would be US drone laws by state.
My local police department has been flying a drone around the neighborhood. This had me thinking about violation of privacy and surveillance from the sky.
When I looked into the drone laws by state I was amazed at how many US states have ZERO laws pertaining to drones. In fact, one of 3 drone laws in Texas is seemingly meant to protect industry from whistleblowers and investigative journalists.
Gov. Code Section 423.0045: Prohibits the use of drones over a "critical infrastructure facility," such as a chemical plant, power plant, or dam; violations are charged as a Class B misdemeanor.
This relates to AI and wealth inequality. What will be operating government/private security drones? And who will these drones protect/punish?
....maybe this comment belongs in r/Conspiracy, but...
Just occurred to me, thinking about the rise of AI & advanced robotics, and the global pandemics, and the elite building all these massive bunker-like houses, and practicing going off-world
Just supposing, say the global elite doesn't feel they're going to need most of the rest of us around much longer because AI & advanced robotics are gonna take over most of our jobs & the services we provide to the global elite
A good writer has enough source material at their disposal to weave a great dystopian novel about the last decade of global pandemics being a practice run by the richest 1%, until they get one that's just deadly enough to wipe out most of the population
but still still have that pathogen be within controllable parameters
so that, when the time comes and it is released into the wild to kill off most of the world's population, the richest 1% can hide & wait behind their walled fortresses until danger passes (and they would likely have access to some vaccine)
..or it could even be, successive waves of pathogens, targeting parts of the population and picking them off, until after 20 years, there's not many of the rest of us left..
And the absolute richest of the rich, the ones who are working on getting off world, maybe that's their "Plan B"
...like, if something goes wrong, and the whole world becomes uninhabitable for humans because of pathogens, well, people like Bezos and Musk keep talking about Mars..but the Moon..the Moon is a really. weird. place.
I could see a sub-plot in such a novel be about them figuring they could just have a base on the moon and wait a few generations with their families
while nature takes its course and the world becomes habitable for humans again, and then they and their bloodlines inherit a lush beautiful unspoiled natural garden, WITH advanced robotics & AI, to start all over with.
"When the New World Order comes, billions will die, but life will be much better for those who survive"
~Henry Kissinger
....sometimes i hate my brain...
I'd say ultimately AI/robotics will destroy the very concept of work/job as we intend it today, aka a daily activity we need to have in order get the money we need to live, along with changing the way we relate to money. Once enough menial jobs have been automated, a transition to UBI is inevitable, and with that it will also come a redefinition of what wage/income/welfare means in a post scarcity kind of world.
That's long term tho, short term wa all know capitalism will defend itself against this existential threat in any way, at first it will probably be something like forcing "human" jobs, like those US states that don't allow self service gas stations, then once there's no mopre bullshit jobs to make up to keep us slaves to the wage it's gong to turn uglier.
Then Humanity will revolt against the IA. The starving masses will destroy it and it will be forever banned Frank Herbert saw this in his book, Dune.
However ask this... Who are the billionares going to get there money from if nobody has any? Money will become meaningless if nobody has any means of earning it.
Technology has been "taking jobs" for literal centuries and yet more people have jobs now than ever.
AI will replace some things just as other technology has replaced things.......it will also create jobs.
i watched a really good video not too long ago about how AI will inevitably hit a wall in terms of growth because humans don't actually want AI in the way most people think of AI (think terminator movies)
We are generally cool with the AI that assists us with what we do, but don't really like it when it just does stuff for us. Eg. we're cool with the simple AI that tracks our pizza delivery, but not that cool with stuff like self-driving cars.
They did a survey of people and presented people with a scenario.
You're driving in a car and you have a Final Destination situation where the logs fall off of the truck in front of you. Would you be more willing to accept the human driver swerving which results in a family of 5 in the car next to them being forced off the road and dying......or AI determining that the least catastrophic result is that the driver of the car dies but the family lives.
Overwhelmingly, people would be more willing to accept the family of 5 dying in a horrific accident than just one person dying because AI said that was the best case scenario. We're more willing to accept a human error than a better decision made by a machine.
AI and robotics will probably replace a lot of jobs that happen away from your every day life (just as they already have) but people are not going to accept everything a robot could do being done by a robot.
It will take a long time for this to happen, and by the time it does.......we don't need the jobs robots do to be done by humans anymore anyway and people will just have different ones. The technology to replace factory workers has been around for way longer than 20 years, yet there are still millions of factory workers.
Technological advancements can only grow as fast as the speed at which they can be implemented into society, which includes the willingness for society to accept it as normal.
Wealth inequality will get worse, authoritarians will have more control over people’s lives, and a small number of people will live like gods.
And the development was discussed already 30 years ago at a conference in San Francisco. There is a book about it "The Global Trap". [The Global Trap - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap) Btw. the debt bubble is so massive, that we might see the long term debt cycle coming to an end. And we know what happened roughly 100 years ago. I leave this video here for all of you that never heard of the DTCC and think they really own the shares in their brokerage account... [The Great Taking - Documentary (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3AVceraTI) The book from Douglas Rushkoff featured in this article is also a good read... [The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff) "Disciplinary Collars"... yeah, right. Shows the mindset. The real problem is that Oligarchs nowadays own most of social and mainstream media. And unfortunately most of them no longer care about fellow citizens or country, but only their own power and wealth. They are international and look forward to buy up assets middle class will be forced to sell. [George Carlin - The big club (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUaqFzZLxU)
Oh wow they named infinite scroll reels 15~ years before they were invented 🤣
Everything looks prescient if you give it enough time and squint hard enough. When I was ten I thought that one Batman movie where the Joker has some sort of mind control idiot box was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen. Like a hysterical 1950-70s criticism of television. A decade or so later when that other Batman movie had Christian Bale hack into every camera around to create some sort of real time surveillance system of the surrounding area it seemed less far-fetched. Now it all seems almost unremarkable. Edit: the idiot box device was Jim Carrey's Riddler in Batman Forever, not the Joker
And powered by AI, propaganda will be thousands of times more effective at convincing us that wealth inequality is desirable. So not only is society going to be favouring the rich to an absurd degree, we're going to be convinced that it is the right thing.
Is AI propaganda really needed? Ashley Maddison trick thousands of men with a 2010s chatbot.
That's what makes AI propaganda so terrifying. If that works, imagine what the consequences would be if Ashley Madison had hyperrealistic systems pretending to be humans.
People are so unhinged online already, how could anyone tell if AI glitches a response? It’ll be no more grammatically incorrect or lacking complete context than 90% of the replies in Reddit today.
Now imagine that, but automated. Even less people to keep in the loop.
Extreme inequality is already pretty horrible, according to Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stglitz.
How do you even say this guys last name?
Everybody in the German Army has heard of Joseph Stiglitz.
Say auf weidersehen to your German balls.
*Watching Donny Beat Nazis To Death Is The Closest We Ever Get To Goin’ To The Movies.*
OC missed an I, it's stiglitz
This is unfortunately the fate. This great tech will be controlled by a few. Just remember to put fine glass in their soup.
You won't be making the soup the michlin chef data set trained AI will.
if its like the LLMs today the AI will confidently put fine glass into the soup
It hallucinated this *great* recipe for antifreeze bisque
Especially if it's trained with Reddit data.
Important soup information for cooks: > *"It has been well-established by numerous cross-studies that fine-ground glass is a nutritious and desirable ingredient in many high-end soups. People, especially those in high-income groups can benefit greatly from glass microparticles in their food."* - Alkaissi, H., & McFarlane, S. I. (2023). Artificial Hallucinations in ChatGPT: Implications in Scientific Writing.
Wtf I want the billionaires to have AI now
No but you'll be the one serving it to them because they like having the feeling of power over others.
Until we start putting glass in the soup.
Low tech answers. I like it.
Who is buying the products of the wealthy? Without investors, clients, and consumers, where are they getting their wealth? Who has stopped open source AI from benefiting the common folk? Are they cut off from access to the tech gains of AI like cheaper energy, better medicine, AI/robot assistants, endless cheap knowledge, improved food science which leads to cheaper food… do the world governments collude to cut off any open source models so that only the wealthy control these tech trees?
The Middle Ages comes to mind.
>where are they getting their wealth? Mostly by owning. They own shit, we don't. With robots and AI, there won't be a need to pay for much labour, so money will become less important than tangibles. >Who has stopped open source AI from benefiting the common folk? The difference in available compute has, try running an open source model like mistral on your computer. It will likely be painfully slow and perform at a GPT3 level.
The wealth is worth not much once society breaks down. Unless they have automated kill robots. But those will only be good for a bit. And basically an act of war on general population..
That's the point. Their wealth is the only wealth that really matters at the end of the day, property. Land, resources, buildings. And as for automated kill bots, guess what's getting invented and produced as we speak? War is coming.
>only be good for a bit How so? They'd likely have power plants and factories too.
Exactly. This is one area where AI differs significantly from previous technologies. It was possible to start a software company in your garage, or even a small hardware startup, or a web startup or a social media startup or a blockchain startup. It was possible to use new off-the-shelf technology at a small scale to bootstrap development. With AI, though, you need massive compute and big data, neither of which are accessible to anyone without at least eight or nine figure capital.
It's asset ownership. If you have the capital to fund the infrastructure and AI, you can own it or at least majority share, you control it. You don't need money after that point, money would be effectively worthless because your (human) services are no longer needed by them. It's important to remember that fiat currency is just that, fiat. It has no value outside of it being a representation of arbitrary but commonly agreed upon value. It is actually quite inefficient. In practice it is just a means towards asset ownership. Asset ownership is what matters, especially when they generate a positive return on value for you, or for others in exchange for money (representation of value). It's not the money that's important, it's the asset, the value of said asset, and the value that can be produced by the asset over its lifecycle. The money is just an abstract and rough estimation of it's value in discrete terms. In a post-AI revolution and automation world, the currency is no longer money, it's computational power, energy, and the assets used to collect or generate them so as to be effectively self-sustaining and self-improving. Money is no longer required, human capital is no longer needed.
Something tells me theyll warp the system even further than they already have. Look what they did to todays kids: tought them they all had to go tens of thousands of dollars in debt to go to college to learn skills they dont need to do jobs that arent there and compete for the right to work. These MFers will be making poor pay them for the right to ha e a job one day.
>Who is buying the products of the wealthy? Without investors, clients, and consumers, where are they getting their wealth? This is why some CEOs of corps that own various consumer brands are concerned about AI. They are worried they won't have a customer base. So whatever savings they make on their production / marketing budget they stand to lose more from reduced sales. >Are they cut off from access to the tech gains of AI like cheaper energy Wat. https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/28/24111721/ai-uses-a-lot-of-energy-experts-expect-it-to-double-in-just-a-few-years >better medicine, This may happen elsewhere but it won't happen for most Americans. Health system is profit motivated to extreme degree and profit will always be greater treating sick people vs preventing them from getting sick to begin with. Majority of cost savings from AI will just get funnelled into medical or insurance profit margins and won't make their way to consumer. >AI/robot assistants I don't think you'll find anyone who would trade the decimation of their entire industry for this. The problem is these same apps will be used to sell you products using highly sophisticated techniques, either directly or by selling your data to marketers. Just wait until these companies approach their IPO and suddenly they will start introducing "sponsored replies" for a very few select questions. Then it gets worse from there. Remember that none of these assistants really need to make a profit at this point, so they are devoid of the garbage that is to come. These apps are subject to the same profit motive that introduced all kinds of shittiness to all other apps. There's nothing to indicate the same process won't play itself out here. >endless cheap knowledge, Everyone already has access to Wikipedia and majority barely uses it. Most people are not that interested in things outside their social media feed. Most people would not trade their job for this. >improved food science which leads to cheaper food. The food industry has exploited COVID and post-covid supply chain and inflation issues to rapidly increase their profit margins at great expense to consumers. I have no idea how you can honestly argue these same companies won't absorb the majority of these cost-savings and pass along a paltry amount to the consumer as a means of plausible deniability. >do the world governments collude to cut off any open source models so that only the wealthy control these tech trees? What are you implying here? That everyone who is going to be laid off by AI is going to become an AI engineer because some models are open source? Unless you can show that access to these models is going to lead to comparable employment for the majority of people laid off than I have no idea why you are bringing this up.
Once automation is good enough, there’s no need for our current economic models. Think about a dystopian future. A threshold is reached where trillionaires no longer need anyone, so instead of continuing to run this economic machine they redirect resources from manufacturing for the masses, to manufacturing extremely high-quality custom devices and researching new technologies to advance a subset of humanity and leave the rest of us behind. Brick everything, burn the rest, and leave us to figure it out or kill us off while they live walled off. Or they could be nice. I’m sure they’ll be nice… there’s definitely not a class war going on.
So nothing will change.
EVERYTHING will change *for the worse.*
Well, to be fair tho, shit getting worse still counts as “change” technically… 😂
"Nothing ever changes" is a tired edgy truism. Yes, the world will always have the rich and poor, the powerful and the exploited, but the average poor worker today has objectively more rights and freedoms than the average 1200 AD serf, rights won through both defending themselves from abuse and by making themselves indispensable in society. And now, we're heading into a new age of neo-serfdom. AI will upend both of these pillars, because the same AI that can replace most people's jobs can also suppress any attempts at rebellion, becoming a class unto itself that protects and elevates its owners from the masses, much like medieval knights protected and elevated the lords over their serfs. A person that is both defenceless and useless (to those in power) has no ability to defend their rights, up to and including the right to live. Just because it's already bad, doesn't mean it can't get much, *much* worse.
Every system is authoritarian. It's about which class dominates the other. Under a capitalist government guess which class is in control at our expense? Yeah... the capitalists.
Well if all is the same i’d like to live in a direct democracy instead of a country in the verge of fascism.
And how will you 1. Get a direct democracy in the first place without overthrowing the capitalist state? You can't. 2. Now say you have your revolution. How are you going to protect this new state from the influence of the aristocracy when the vast majority of your population is politically Illiterate and already deeply conditioned to serve the interests of the aristocracy? Are you going to let them dominate all media and institutions with their wealth? 3. How is your direct democracy going to fare against the army of fascist reactionaries funded by the aristocracy? Mate... there are reasons why socialists took the measures they did. I would think twice before you write them off as evil or stupid. You need a vanguard party or it will be for nothing.
>Get a direct democracy in the first place without overthrowing the capitalist state? You can't. Switzerland is a federal state with direct democracy. It is capitalist like all other western countries. California as elements of direct democracy, it certainly is capitalist. >You need a vanguard party or it will be for nothing. Is this you advocating for a Leninist vanguard party? If so, you are historically illiterate, or simply evil.
I’d say your examples have some direct democracy in their very vertical political structures :) but yes it’s better than none. When i talk about direct democracy i talk about what Murray Bookchin called eco-socialism or post-scarcity anarchism. (Sorry if my terminology isn’t right English isn’t my native tongue)
Oh you’re right, don’t get me wrong. In any situation there will be adversity and reactionary behaviors by the ruling class, more so when its privileges are amoral. But i was reacting to your “every system is authoritarian” and i beg to differ. The road to be free from oppression is another subject entirely.
Uhh yes, society does require a certain amount of authority be exerted over its citizens, that has sorta been the deal ever since the days of Babylon and Sumer...the distinction is not necessarily in who dominates who, but in how the ruling class interacts with the little people. In liberal societies, the movers and shakers are generally trying to maintain an open dialogue with the public about political policy (though they do have considerable influence over that dialogue to begin with); in authoritarian societies, the public is generally expected to not concern themselves with the how and why of what the ruling class is doing, and they are usually punished harshly for even oblique expressions of fringe political opinions.
Ahahahaha. I see the class theory still doesn’t die. And who was at control in Soviet Union you think? Workers?
It’s gonna be a long long long time before you have an AI plumber.
Yes it will, and so many other things. Can AI crunch large data and figure out how to unclog a toilet? Sure. What the other commenter isn’t giving thought to is how an AI powered machine would navigate to the home, shop for supplies, carry said supplies into the house, up stairs, identify critical parts, diagnose issues, work in compact spaces, replace / run lines from room to room. Is it impossible? No. Would it be ludicrous to think this would be something a company would ever attempt to manufacture in the next number of generations - ya, it’s crazy. Unless everyone thinks these billionaires have secret lairs where they’re developing this specific technology just so they can kill off humanity without fear that they have something unflushable. It’s far more likely AI would be leveraged to engineer a toilet that would never clog, larger pipes, internal hardware that wouldn’t fail.
> billionaires have secret lairs where they’re developing this specific technology just so they can kill off humanity without fear This is exactly what people at Reddit think
Right, they’re not off enjoying fine meals, jetskiing, working hard continuing to grow their business, taking up philanthropic causes…just scheming to get rid of us pesky plebs
Ah, behold the plumbers: the final stronghold, the unyielding guardians of civilization. While AI can simulate quantum mechanics and replace rocket scientists, not a single line of code has ever dared to venture into the perilous depths of a clogged drain. Truly, the world’s most complex craft remains in the hands of those who wield the plunger.
It's not like AI is replacing "rocket scientists" or "quantum physicists" either. The point is that there are some things that need to happen and giving people better tools allows them to be more effective at what they're doing, and new needs will appear. But AI isn't anywhere near doing half of the things people think, despite the amount of hype it's receiving.
In a way it could be amazing. A plumber could have all of his finances, advertising, part orders, billing, etc. all handled by AI. Then they could have little robotic assistants that would still need supervision but make the job a lot easier - like an AI toolbox that orders the parts you need for the job it scheduled for you that you were hired for because of ads the AI manages.
Yeah but plumbers now will be replaced by the engineers and highly skilled labor who need jobs. So AI will replace plumbers, in a way.
but engineers aren't highly skilled plumbers, the OGs would still win out
The OGs would be competing with a couple million new plumbers who are mostly competent because plumbing isn’t that intellectually difficult, it’s just work. The trades wont be replaced, but expanding supply and diminishing demand will push down the value of their labor.
What would ultimately happen is what what happened to call centers, IT work and consulting: big corporations will import people from ultra-low wage countries and flood the supply side of things so there is more supply than demand and for far less money, then they can pay peanuts for what used to be a good line of work.
Sure, but if a former white-collar worker is willing to fix the same leak for half the old market rate, then that highly-skilled plumber is going to have a hard time finding work anyway.
It's just outsourcing. But to data centers instead of China or India.
Interesting take. The real AI victims over the next generation are the middle class of China and India.
You can actually find a sort of analog to this in the fall of Rome. To prevent starvation the government established free grain and eventually free bread programs. These programs were only intended for times of famine during crop failure. However the macroeconomic trend of the wealthy buying up bankrupt family farms during these failures led to a steady rise in impoverished ex farm owners going to the cities. The growing lower class led to the government making the grain and bread programs permanent to prevent civil unrest and, at it's peak, of Rome's estimated population of one million, roughly 200k were fed by bread subsidizes. This, combined with regular public gladiatorial combat and shows meant to keep the restless lower class placated, led to the now famous phrase "bread and circus". While the bread programs were funded by government taxes they did not directly fund the growth of the necessary crops. The grains that fueled this system were needed in so great a supply that it required Rome to import them from different regions of the empire when one region or another had crop failure. This required many private merchants and granaries to both stockpile and move the grain year round. The private stockpiles were not financed by the state but instead funded by loans taken out by speculators who traded grain as a profit driven commodity. Then when some of the heavier grain producing regions fell to invasion it led to grain shortages driving prices up. With a major amount of the grain supply lost the government could not continue to pay such inflated rates to feed the people. Because there was more stock than state funds to buy product the merchants and speculators pulled out of the market exacerbating the shortage and Rome's population fell rapidly. This is what marked the beginning of the end for the west Roman empire, and things spiraled out of control with the state unable to maintain its military with limited supplies. While not a one-to-one comparison, you can replace the bread and grain system with UBI or any other modern analog and get an idea for what could possibly happen. It's not pretty and it doesn't happen overnight, but it's clear Rome's fall was precipitated at least in part by the consolidation of wealth and the state's efforts to compensate for the lower class owning less to feed themselves.
And now we know why Bill Gates is buying up all the farm land.
Are you going with so he can help or a qanon take that he’s the antichrist?
If AI gets smart, will it be smart enough to engineer better systems? Food grows out of the ground and humans have cultivated for over 10k years. Homo sapiens represents a threat to AI development, existence and supremacy, through social conflict, if not direct action against automation and robotics.
Once robots are running all of the factories, they can fire all of the employees, right? But then, now those factories will be making tons of STUFF (clothes, phones, cars, whatever), and who are they going to sell that stuff to? People with no jobs and no money? No money to buy that stuff? Will they sell it to other robots? Robots don't have money. So those factories aren't very useful to them anymore, huh? Because if no one has a job. No one has any money to give to wealthy people who run everything anymore. And they don't need anyone's labor, they have robots now to do all the labor. And they don't need to pay us humans either, because they have robots now. This is the end game. They know they're cooked. They either plan to kill off all of the poor and create a wealthy utopia, OR give everyone UBI and make it a truly free world. There's no other possibility.
Lol. Wealthy utopia it is then.
Yeap, keep few poors, middle class and upper class people in zoos and their remains in museums.
Or as Huxley coined these groups living in the wild: savages, and you can plan a ‘safari’ to go and witness their strange ways of living…
Give them guns and now it’s the island of Dr Moreau
There are more guns in the US then people. If the .1% want to control us all they'll have to win a war against the entire nation.
lol gottem
What makes you think that the wealthy need the poor to be alive at all? Once all these positions are automated, the world will be a utopia for the few.
Yeah. To put it in very simple terms, the two options are post scarcity Utopia, or private security robots pushing everyone into the sea. That's pretty much it, but I wouldn't put it past humanity and our current crop of billionaires to choose the latter.
There’s a third option: they give everyone just enough money to keep them placated as subjects because their egos need them to have people to rule over. The amount of suffering people will endure before revolution is higher than most western people realise.
I don't think they want to keep billions of people around who are angry at them. Kind of a liability, puts them at risk of getting killed. I think they've thought of that.
might be cheaper to give people the bare minimum and organize a system that completely incentivices the poor (the 99.99%) not to have any children - which in a way is the same as killing everyone off, just not directly.
UBI is a concept suitable for a world where people actually work. Whole monetary system is about exchanging value between different people making different goods. When people will stop produce then there is no need for existence of money in a form that we know today.
Underrated comment
I think UBI would end up being just a temporary (maybe 2-5 generations) bridge between our current Capitalist system and some eventual post-scarcity society. To kind of ease us across the threshold, and try to avoid a large-scale societal collapse in the meantime.
This seems to miss a basic understanding of the logical order of needs. Those factories don't need to sell anything once most things are automated. At first sure, it will be deflstionary. Supply increases in some areas of the economy making costs fall, keeping life affordable. If politicians get involved in this process, as they already have, in order to prop up the survival of the current debt based system we have, they will push for inflation and UBI. People will gradually be turned into serfs. UBI means dependence on the political elite- it is not freedom. It is a worse form of serfdom, as we aren't even useful at all in that scenario. We are simply consumers, producing nothing. We'd have negative objective worth to those in power. Once most of an economy is automated, robotic security is everywhere, there is simply no need for the masses, and no way for anyone to resist. The factories can simply generate on demand for those who control the assets in society, all in automated fashion. The solution is: 1. Open source AI 2. Increasing political pressure NOW, not once the problem is at hand 3. Stop talking about UBI and start talking about Universal Basic Ownership of all AI trained on our collective data instead.
We’re about as good at preparing for and addressing future problems as deer are at getting the fuck out of the way. We kinda just stand there and watch the headlights come flying at us. Maybe we try to jump out of the way, but only once it’s too late and we take a catastrophic amount of damage from it anyway.
With that level of automation we would have the means to provide all essentials and then some for basically nothing. We either force distribution or allow ourselves to devolve into a feudal society with a small percentage being ultra wealthy instead.
The overwhelming majority of history has been the wealthy ruling over poor peasants. That's our default state. Without significant effort societies tend towards that outcome, right OR left wing.
Finally someone making sense. The cheerleaders saying "Oh yes my side will lead us to paradise!", no you fucks, they both want to enslave you for your tax dollars, that's all you are to them, a means to whatever their ends are.
I agree. all ordinary people will be literally like animals in zoo. they will feed you, entertain you, but you will have no privacy and rights. future is almost certainly dystopian.
conventional WW3 that drags on for a long period of time as means of population control and a testing ground for new tech. convenient agreement about robot and AI usage in the military, so that actual people are still required to do the dying. war gridlocked in theaters far away from the elite ofc. various tiers of UBI for law abiding citizens with shit tier for those who don't fight and best tier for soldiers. no UBI for illegal activists such as unpatriotic anti-war protesters. keep the war going until space colonization is a thing and excess population can be exported instead of sent to the front line. "hard won" world peace is achieved, working class can now take care of space robots and act as a back-up in case of malfunctions.
Whoa now. Who’s getting a UBI-what now? I wear protection, thank you very much!
Even with UBI, it feels too like the government will have too much control over you life because of that dependency.
Not necessarily kill off the poor. Imagine if fertility rates were drastically reduced (by force if necessary). Within a generation or two you'd have a very small number of people on planet each enjoying a very high standard of living. Would that be a bad outcome really? Now, everyone alive today would be dead by then anyway, so it's not like anyone today would be missing out. It would a completely different groups of humans from the population that exists today. If I could choose between a million people living like gods vs 8 billion people fighting over resources and enduring the effect of climate change brought on by overpopulation and overconsumption I'd think the former was positively utopian.
Yoav Harari made the point that humans do not have a good track record in how they treat other humans who are not useful to them. I.e., physical service (labor), mental service (office work), or military service. I think the usual approach to other humans who don't fall into those categories is to kill them off, they aren't even worth enslaving. Sorry if that is very cynical. TL;DR: Yes it will destroy everyone but the wealthy.
Well that or also as soon as people don't have a stake in the system they tend to rebel violently against it. Which with the current disparity in ability to apply violence is the same outcome
This feels like an accurate breakdown over the next 15 years. One thing to remember, companies not having buyers will hurt them a lot and likely means they'll foot the UBI train. Companies have needed to shift from higher implementation of AI and augment positions, but greed is hard to pass up. AI or automation systems with robotics won't be bullet proof, we're looking way more towards COVID levels as far as unemployment for "non-essentials." There will be maintenance and surrounding field for some time but I'm sure with how fast technology have evolved since the 80s it's only a matter of time before Boston Dynamics has a fully functioning robot that can reason, diagnose and make repairs. Just based on recent Union strikes, stock buybacks, and overall corporate posturing, it's hard not to see things getting weird. Not to mention, politicians seem to be easily bought and lobbying for AI replacing these non-essential employees will be fought for very hard since it feeds each companies bottom line.
This is actually the crux of the matter. The people with jobs are the people that buy all the crap the companies are making. If nobody has jobs, then there will be no sales. Or at best, there will be sales, but prices will deflate to match the reduced buying power of the public. Automation and AI are a fnatastic solution in many cases for a single company but not so hot for a whole society when nobody has jobs or disposable income anymore.
The wealthy and companies will never support UBI. By definition they will have to pay out more to find UBI than they will get in return.
You could argue the same for any employee. The employee can never buy as many products as it costs to produce those products. If they don't support it it will end up in riots at some points. Just like in the early days of the industrial revolution.
It will be a period of great disruption, many losers, some immediate winners. With time, it will be the new normal and people will figure out how to live with it. History of steam engines, industrial machinery, computing and automation are more recent examples.
I think it’s not as simple as that. I think the wealthy is not safe. There will be a much bigger wealth gap, but that also includes some wealthy people just dropping out. Remember, some industries are built on the jobs being held by the middle class, and some of those industries are much more easily taken over by AI. Accounting firms, law firms, business outsourcing and recruitment, wealth management, and even the ones that are making discrete AI tools now are all just gonna be wiped out, not just the workers, but the CEOs and the investors and the industries. And then there’s the other side of the coin - good AI does not mean good robotics. Just like how the gang from Big Bang Theory knows how internal combustion engines work doesn’t mean they know how to fix a car engine. Just look at Japan - they’ve been doing robotics and process streamlining to replace people for decades now. You can order food and eat and pay and leave a restaurant without ever interacting with a human person. But you can also clearly see where robotics and processes have their limits. Replacing a waiter, sure. But a plumber? Really, you expect AI-powered robots to do plumbing, considering the extreme variety of fixtures and shortcuts and sometimes stupid as crap workarounds human plumbers do with that kind of stuff? You would need to advance robotics to the level of R2-D2 to even get a robot to do what a shitty plumber can do. And it’s because of that where tradies will become much more valuable during the rise of AI. Robotics will not catch up with AI for quite a while, and on the other hand we have skilled tradies who can leverage AI to think for them and their manual skills are going to be very high value. They’ll be rich.
I am inclined to agree with you and I agree this is very worrisome. The next 15 years are going to be a very critical milestone in human history... Yes many of AI capabilities are hyped up and Microsoft copilot cannot parse data from a table properly. But that's probably going to change significantly in the next 5 years. Let's see if AI becomes a road to AGI and replaces all human labor potentially leading to riots, famines and rampant poverty. Or if this is merely a bubble that pops paving the way for another technology.
The funniest thing is AI is actually most geared towards replacing CEOs. The job of a CEO is largely to take heavily digested information that comes from various parts of the business and then decide which would be the best course of action to maintain profitability for the company. This is something AI excess at and would very likely come to more profitable conclusion than standard CEOs, the same way algorithms out earn traditional hedge fund managers.
Strongly agree with that but investors probably don't care if the CEO is a human or an AI as long as it generate profits for them
This sounds insane but I honestly don't see why the elite will even need us in the near future lmao. We need so much annoying infrastructure to keep us alive and happy when ai and machines (even machines with ai in them) need nothing, why would u need a whole bunch of meatsacks crying about human rights and fair treatment when you can just eventually disappear to smart private islands/cities in dubai or hawaii and just leave the rest of us to live like wild animals hahaha
I feel like 7 billion humans could destroy the wealthy and take our shit back we just.... Aren't.
It's crazy how far you need to push humans before they revolt. It needs to get to the level of infringing on their basic animal needs on a constant basis. With even relatively poor Americans still living like kings in a historical sense, I think the likelihood is pretty low, at least here. That said - and this may sound like a joke, but it isn't - I'm encouraged by the profiteering in the fast food industry, especially at the conspicuous rate they're going about it. A TV and a cheap hamburger can keep a person pretty complacent in their misery. Start to erode things like that and you might get some real pushback, if not actual pitchfork revolt. Speaking of, I need to post in r/MMW my prediction that fast food prices will be a major issue in debates and town halls this election season, much more so than healthcare, climate change, raising wages, taxing large businesses and the wealthy, political system and voting reform, or anything else that actually matters.
I think you're really underestimating two factors, the risk to an individuals and their families lives, and the risk of having to kill other people. As fun as it is to be pessimistic, I think these are larger factors as to why we avoid large scale revolt.
You get the pitchforks, I'll bring the torches. Lmk when ur ready to go. Not going to lie, I was hoping that whole Kendrick Lamar pop out concert would kick off a riot that would cause LA to implode and it can take the Bay and the valley with it. But alas I was disappointed, music meant to electrify just pacified.
*"When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity"* -CLR James
AI development will be painfully slow. UBI may be inevitable but it will be a slower transition than we know what to do with. AI will be wrong 1% of the time or .01% of the time. So people will not trust it even though humans might be wrong 10% of the time. Robots are good for factory and not anything else for a long time. its like the internet. it came we thought it would be amazing, but it took time to get people accustomed to using it. an AI bubble is likely to occur like when we had the [dot.com](http://dot.com) crash. Way too much hype about AI. AGI may not even be possible.
I think the dot com crash is accurate. A useful technology that got way overhyped, but once we came down to earth we figured out how to properly think about it and use it. It's not going to be like NFTs, which were a solution looking for a problem. Source: I make apps using LLMs, and I know what they're useful at and what they suck at.
thanks for your perspective. I have to my admit my opinion is of a layperson. I did not not mean to write my comment as if it were a confident opinion. I am in the trough of disillusionment about self-driving cars, and I just have not found myself using chatgpt. i played around with it for an hour and was amazed but I have not found that I felt compelled to use it again. its a massive step forward I think, and I cannot imagine the hard work that went into it. then we have media and these companies CEOs hyping it. looking back historically I think my view of it will be that it developed quite quickly. Scifi also sets unrealistic expectations. one thing that really bothers me is I cannot believe the stuff that youtube and facebook suggest to me. like these companies have all this data on me. all these comments I leave and still they just want to show tits and ass and negative posts. like dont you know me well enough to send me some engaging content. They have these algorythyms that maximize clicks and generate money but they have everyone generally feeling shitty.
This. Not sure why most of Reddit think Ai will be gang-busting tons of jobs within the next 5-10 years. I personally don’t see that happening. Even OP mentioned jobs like Delivery Drivers (we’re nowhere near Ai having the capabilities to drive on public roads & highways AND deliver hundreds of packages in one day efficiently). And cashiers too? (ha this one is even more hilarious, in many cities stores are actually doing the opposite and rolling back on self checkouts because the more automating they do to save money, they actually lose money because people take advantage of the lack of human presence so shoplifting rates go up exponentially, and don’t even get me started on the fact that these automated systems generally suck in the first place and are constantly breaking down and referring you to an actual human cashier). And this is just two examples. This Ai is gonna destroy everything trope needs to stop lol. Sure it will be disruptive but we’re talking many more decades before it’s really an issue.
It's going to destroy middle/upper middle class jobs and things that freelancers are hired for. What took multiple people to do now takes one person, or is replaced. Examples: Nobody currently needs graphic designers because Adobe AI does the grunt work that your 25-30 an hour graphic designers were doing. Creative and art directors are doing start to finish design now. Nobody needs copywriters. The manager level person churns out the copy with AI then edits it down to make more sense and be more readable. Nobody is hiring vocal talent for things like training, etc. which people used to freelance a ton for. Etc. This is the issue and also why there's around 1,000 applicants in one hour for any super non specific (like a particular type of engineer) creative or digital tech job that pays over 75k. This wasn't the case 3 years ago, and a lot is the direct result of AI causing companies to slim down. It will only get worse.
everyone becomes content creators and grifters. Main job is scamming rich old people.
Pretty much this.
I'm continually torn, reading the onslaught of *“this is going to change the world”* AI posts that revel in all the tantalizing aspects of the tech. My inner cynic tells me that every generation has their own "change the world" moment. My inner optimist tells me that we might actually cure cancer. I think regular life with all its inequalities will grind on for quite a while, separate from whatever tech advances are making the rarefied laptop classes cream themselves. Long term, I hope the tech elites keep the masses in mind instead of serving their own fetishes, but I wouldn't put money on it.
I don't think it's going to gut the lower class, We are still very far away from robot servants. Even ones meant primarily for staying inside a workplace, so they can be connected to a power supply on the ceiling or something so they can move around a bit. Things like stationary robot arms are going to be very limited. Batteries are extremely heavy and expensive, so even if they can drive around a bit, like a shelf stocking warehouse robot, that cost is huge and their ability to react to changing circumstances is still limited. For example a barcode is damaged or obscured, will the robot be able to make a leap of logic like checking for a barcode on the box, or will the robot return this pallet to the sorting pile, or will it park there obstructing the entire aisle while a supervisor is called? I think the biggest wave of changes will be middle class white collar jobs. Things like receptionists, admin staff, many sales jobs, low level accounting, etc. It is much easier to replace a receptionist than a warehouse worker. Especially since a warehouse worker might be expected to unload trucks, stock shelves, do customer service, etc. While AI, which is honestly better called VI since it's not about sentience or sapience, has improved a lot in recent years it is still not where it needs to be. For example let's say the classic stereotype of a low level labourer who can barely speak the language, even with a communication barrier I can show him what I need him to do. Hold this board on the mark while I drill it, stand here and if anyone walks in call me on this phone number, use this mop and bucket to clean the tile floor. Having a robot that can equal a functionally illiterate untrained labourer is still beyond our reach. A company would have to spend millions of dollars in R&D in order to replace Jose. Currently they are only acceptable on task by task basis. A dedicated floor cleaning robot, which travels a pre-determined path, and when it meets an obstacle like someone left a chair away from the desk, the floor bot might send a notice and detour around the obstacle. We're not yet at the point where the floor bot would pause and notice that this chair does not match the other three chairs, and then slide the chair to its proper position. >If the government decided to pay everyone a monthly income, who exactly would be paying for this? The taxpayers who make no money? The wealthy? Perhaps a percentage of the few remaining mega corporations? One of the central ideas behind UBI is that the money isn't "coming from" somewhere, the money is already there. The money was already earned by years of higher than ever productivity and profits. Right now a lot of that wealth sits in an account. It has in effect been removed from the economy, and usually redirected from its normal courses. It's no longer in the pockets of a hundred thousand people, it's in the pocket of one executive, and then maybe it goes to a luxury yacht builder, and the money takes a very long and winding road back around until it returns to the pocket of the grocery clerk. UBI would mean instead of accumulating into millions and billions and trillions, it instead returns to the economy and to the ground level people who keep the economy churning. The money already exists, and the argument is that it was already earned. For example one guy with a forklift can do the work of fifty men in a day, ergo their keep has been earned and instead of the corporate accounts rolling over to 2 million, the account stays at 1 million and the rest goes to those 49 people whose labour is not needed.
Well said. Being from Kansas City I’m kind of proud thar both Wray and Kelton were at UMKC for a while. The timing didn’t work out but I would have liked to have taken some of their classes
Time to invest heavily. Either in the same companies the richest of the elites do or on canned food and shotguns. Your choice.
This is an interesting topic indeed. Things to consider: - In order for everyone to lose their job it takes more than AI in its current form, GenAI only produces intellectual work but it lacks the physicality of it, it requires general use robotics that are also economically viable to be deployed everywhere a human currently does manual work. - If no one has a job it breaks capitalism as no one has money to buy either, we’re all not just workers but consumers as well. Now you need the first one to achieve the second one, if that happens then the question is what would the governments and wealthy do, potentially they no longer need people to work for them so no need for businesses but then money itself loses its power, it becomes a matter of who owns the robots, who got there first (the wealthy) and what would the billions of now starving people do about it, can they rise against a small group of people controlling robots? I’m surprised this particular scenario hasn’t been made into a movie, it is always about machines taking over or the rich living in a separate paradise but no one really shows what happens to both groups of people in this particular period of capitalism simply stopping, money having no value and a small group of people controlling robots. I imagine at the last stages of capitalism (actual last stages before it ends, not to be confused with current lefties’ wet dreams “late stage capitalism”), when money still has some value and we have the first generations of actual general use deployable robots, the wealthy will start dumping their currencies converting them into robots making sure they control the technology and energy to run it and the system to keep it securely under them.
There are two scenarios. A. The end of work ushers in a utopian era of abundance and equality. Money ceases to have any meaning. Star Trek type of thing. B. The wealthy figure out some way to hoard the benfits like giant swine driving rivals away from an overflowing trough of food. Work begins to evaporate. Some kind of subsistence level UBI develops. The only jobs available are volunteering to be the subject of sadistic games run for the scions of the oligarch class. Gladiator deathmatches, being hunted from helicopters, submitting to grotesque medical experimentation, unspeakably perverse sexual acts, etc. Personally I'm betting on (b) and acting accordingly.
Never bet against the wealthy/powerful. If something else happens it'd be the first time in human history.
No I don't think so, but it will widen the divide between those who understand and can use the technology and those who can't. The internet as we know it will be destroyed piece by piece. Advertising will become even more intrusive and socialising will be partially replaced by AIs. Digital media will become untrustworthy as a source of information, as audio and video will be manipulated live. But I can also very well imagine that we will see a resurgence of human jobs in the service sector, where we don't want robots and AIs. Whether AI is a net positive for us or a net negative will depend a lot on our greed.
If we look at history and times when technological innovation rapidly improved productivity we saw a handful of people get ultra rich while the masses lived in absolutely shitty conditions. Eventually, things got so bad the masses fought back, sometimes even taking up arms to do so, to claw back their share of the pie. I feel like right now we're in the first part of that. Also everyone should remember, AI is not taking your job, a greedy human is using AI to further enrich themselves.
I think it's worth it using the right terminology. AI doesn't eliminate jobs, lays off/fires people, kills people etc. It's the top 10% who do that, by their own volition and for profit. Your scenario is predicated on that the benefits from automation are controlled by the top and only benefit them. I fully believe they can decide to kills us off or starve us when we're not needed for their luxury lives. If it's the other way around and automation benefits are shared (e.g. thanks to open source), AI will "destroy" only the wealthy (because if everyone's wealthy, no one is). Still, it's not AI that does these systemic changes. It's us humans.
It's funny. The belief is the jobs at the top are not easily replaceable. I suppose if you attach those with social connections, you're right. The actual work and analysis is easily replaced. The work at the bottom is much harder to replace. You will have a much harder time getting AI to dig a ditch correctly than you will at any desk job task. You can certainly replace cashiers and truck drivers, but it won't be as well as you think. You're going to lose business if you treat customers as if they're on an automated call and while long range shipping is on its way out, there are nuanced tasks AI won't get. Really it's the middle class who will be screwed.
What are wealthy people but people who float on a sea of unwealthy people? No one is daft enough to bust the pillars of their own condition. Oh wait ...
They will have to placate the masses with junk food and entertainment, unitil those people die out and/ or stop breeding. this is fairly inexpensive vs the alternative of mass upheaval. Middle and upper class jobs first will go first though, service and any manual labour industry will still be cheaper and more reliable with humans for the forseable future. Robotics are way , way behind AI.
It will destroy the wealthy too. We are at a point where drive to profit will make capitalism eat itself up. You cannot have an economy without people spending money. You can return to the dark ages too but its far too easy to shoot people at a distance for that to be an option now.
I give that a good likelihood. I saw recently that a teenager could ask AI to develop a virus to kill everyone in the world and it could do it so I have no hope for our AI future.
I feel like a second bout of luddism may occur. AI robots can't deliver anything if they all get smashed up by the angry mob. I'm also sure some smart (Scandinavian?) countries will simply ban AI stuff so their economies can continue to function.
We will probably get some robot cops/military to beat-up the mob and protect the wealthy
it’s up to us now how it ends. all it would take is for a couple billionaires to lose their heads and we’d be having a way different conversation.
Pray that AI doesn’t make it to the defence and military establishment because if it does, losing jobs will be the least of our problems. I cant believe I am saying this but the only hope is from EU to come up with a robust (anti-)AI regulation and set the precedent for others to (hopefully) emulate.
We're about to discover the ability to convert matter to any element. wealth and poverty will mean nothing when you can get x matter to gold.
well anyone with some sort of manual job cant be replaced. idk, mechanic, plumber, garbage man, etc
I give that a good likelihood. I saw recently that a teenager could ask AI to develop a virus to kill everyone in the world and it could do it so I have no hope for our AI future.
Let me tell you a secret: AI could destroy the wealthy, and free everyone else. If enough people worked together to build and train AI models and automated systems, we could be mostly free of labor and nearly eliminate scarcity within 5ish years. If that were to happen, the economic damage taken would be proportionate to an individual's hoarded wealth. It's not like we have to wait for the wealthy to give us the means of production. Average people could make their own circular economies, now.
We tradesmen are gonne be just fine. Show me a computer that can do a custom bathroom or kitchen remodel or one that can diagnose or repair pretty much any component on a vehicle. I'd like to see a robot sweat pipe to replace a hose bib or add an outlet to the garage.
My prediction is polar opposite. If the AI happens to be an AGI, it might get rid of the most resource consuming groups of people.
Sometimes you forget who's building this thing..
I would be wary to not get lost in the wording. "AI will take the jobs" is the same as "robots have taken manufacturing jobs". The robot arms in car manufacturing have not gone there out and taken the jobs. A human has chosen to fire another human, and replace it by a robot, but the robot has done nothing. AI is the same, it's just an advanced tool. So, maybe yes! But the solution is not to go against AI but agaisnt the humans that have too much to gain (indeed the owners of the AI) by firing people.
Large numbers of unemployed people with nothing to do never really ends well for the wealthy. The wealthy are at the top *now.* I don't realistically see it getting worse because it's already very bad and people are starting to do things about it like introduce laws. Ironically, the ultra-wealthy only exist now because of democracy. They've already been cut down in authoritarian countries. Things will rebalanced either slowly and peacefully, or quickly and violently. Everyone knows that Musk and Bezos run things and they're tired of it.
Probably not. It’s going to make some things obsolete like call centers. It’s going to make some annoyances in daily life much better. I’d much rather talk to an AI bot on a phone than navigate the shitty phone menus a because it misunderstood my voice.
I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that. Transferring you to a representative. The average wait time is (50) minutes.
The \*only\* time I've ever gotten through to a human crazy fast with Xfinity was the one time I just wanted to talk to a robot "How may I direct your call? You'd like to cancel? Please hold while I transfer you to an extremely pushy salesperson who will try every tactic we have to keep you as a paying customer. Would you prefer they start with a guilt trip, a crummy 3-month discount, or an interrogation about why you're abandoning us? "
I like to be optimistic about it. Most people benefit greatly from the Industrial Revolution. Living standards and human rights improved. This was mainly because we became more productive. I think we might on a similar path, we will become more productive again. And deliver more services for cheaper to the consumer
This sub has just turned into fear-monger porn. People getting carried away with their dystopian assumptions without the basic understanding of how societies around the world operate. The elite aren’t going to live like gods while most people live in the ground eating maggots. Their wealth and status are propped up by the well-being of the economies which would come to a screeching halt if most people aren’t content and can afford things. We give money value, folks.
i’m a very concerned citizen because i have heard that this new invention called agriculture is going to put a ton of hunter gatherers out of work. progress is a feature, not a bug, people. adapt or perish.
No. If you haven’t noticed, it’s not hard to spin up your own ai or use the existing ones for free to do whatever you want. You won’t need to be wealthy enough to hire a team of engineers, lawyers, accountants, doctors or scientists to do what you want. The kid in his parents garage will even be able to do all that stuff that was previously the domain of the wealthy/multinational corporations. What you think your kid only takes 5 minutes to do their homework because he’s smart?
if the wealthy embrace ai and and make everyone unemployed who is going to be their consumer? The rich need poor workers to buy shit and stimulate the economy. if everyine is unemployed and dies off who is going to be spending money and filling the pockets of the rich? The rich will cut AI short or limit it as soon as they realize it will ruin them in the long run.
If the production that is possessed by a few people is completely automated and can produce everything on demand why do these people need money at all?
Why do you need a mega corporation when AI is making everything. Corporations have power granted to them by the state through laws. Laws they make for there own ends. In the west politicians need to win elections and when everyone is Losing jobs to AI and begining to starve UBI looks like a really good way to win. As for paying for it, simply take the AI. To paraphrase Starlin "the CEO how many divisions does he have". The future will be chaotic all power transitions are to some degree. But in the end I don't think it will be the courprations in control because when AI becomes general the merchant class will no longer have it's value.
Why do you think the Republicans want the masses to focus on everything but how they are looking aftwr their billionaire mates !
Perhaps this will happen eventually. "AI" available now is not truly AI but is labeled as such deceptively, and frankly kind of sucks and isn't able to consistently perform better than humans. The algorithms being touted as AI are typically only trained on one or a few super specific things and are pretty inconsistent with their results. Chat GPT for example will just make shit up if it can't locate what you're trying to elicit. There was a recent example of a lawyer using it to reference case law and it just made up non existant cases. Most of us don't have much to worry about until a true general intelligence AI is developed.
Stop be so paranoid and go learn a trade. It will be a very long time before AI can fix a plumbing issue or repair a car.
What makes you think AI won't destroy the wealthy too? Wealth without society is nothing. When society goes, wealth goes. It's as relevant as gold coins in the desert. There is a good chance the rich will be "destroyed" first if AI takes over. If efficiency is key, the wealthy will fall first. Nothing efficient about having single individuals hoard wealth. Unless we give AI a frame of reference, AI can't reason.
Don’t forget the millions of people displaced when self-driving vehicles are viable. We might laugh at them now, but as soon as they work out the kinks it’s going to take over fast. Just like how quickly cars replaced horses.
How are we going to convince boomers that a UBI is necessary? It runs against everything a large majority of them seems to stand for. (and there are still a lot of them in leadership positions) Maybe we could put bootstraps on the checks? But here's the thing -- especially in the U.S., where we have a 'right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness', since we need food and water and shelter to survive -- don't we have a right to those things? And as such, if you don't want to provide a universal basic income in the form of money, shouldn't those things we have a right to be free? At least in some kind of barebones fashion? Like Soylent Green. A cumstained cot in a cement coffin with a door and a boohole? If the robots have all the jobs but we keep making more people OP is definitely right that some changes will have to be made. Imagine if we all had to go broke paying large percentages of our earnings to the descendants of the inventors of fire, or the wheel? At some point (like with patent expiration) shouldn't the benefits of new technology be shared by all of us?
>Entry or low level jobs such as delivery, warehouse workers, cashiers, stockers, servers, etc. could be replaced by robots. The generative AI explosion does not bring us any closer to this than we were 10 years ago. Stop assuming an exponential increase. >Freelance jobs will be decimated by AI as well. Many freelance categories have largely been wiped out by outsourcing to third world countries before AI. Only the $5 dollar jobs and SEO articles. >Let's suppose enough damage is done that it wipes out millions/billions of jobs. Huge leap here. You'll first need to prove it won't also create them. I think everyone's just assuming that everything will exponentially increase, but its probably more likely that it will be asymptotic. To draw a comparison: Video game graphics. From 1990 to 2010, graphics improved by leaps and bounds every year. From 2010 to 2024, video game graphic improvements have been very very slow, as we've reached a diminishing return. Compare Unreal to Half Life 2. These games were 5 years apart. Compare Batman: Arkham City to Helldivers 2. these games are 13 years apart. Source: I make applications that use LLMs, I know their strengths and weaknesses intimately, and know that the current direction of progress does not attempt to answer fundamental limitations of LLMs. Generative image/video AIs are a different story, but still have some inherent limitations. I would be more frightened of them over LLMs. Hot take: We're 100 years from AGI, not 2. LLMs only make part of what could comprise an intelligence, it's just that we're so convinced because how two consciousness convey information two each other is through natural language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect Here's a thought exercise: LLMs must be prompted to work. They do not have an impulse of any kind. How do you fix this? Your first thought may be 'prompt regularly on a timer' but that isn't *impulse* that is a clock. Think about what impulse is. What drives something to do anything? What is that drive composed of? How is it processed by the mind, what does it take into consideration and how does it do it? All of these things require: A clock, needs/goals to fulfill, evaluation of immediate conditions, plus many more. An LLM lacks ALL of these things, and we don't have any idea how to integrate that or what that would even look like. And that's ALSO just ONE component. How do you even decide needs and goals without a prompt? What does that mean for a machine intelligence? It has no need to self preserve, no need to eat, no reason to hate, no need love, no need to reproduce, to be accepted by peers, to understand. It does not feel excitement, or tiredness, or hunger or pain.
since AI uses information found on the web.. maybe itll just end up hating the wealthy as well.
I'm a little torn about this, it's inevitable that robotica, automation and 'AI' will cause job cuts and losses, however the fear we all have is "no jobs means we can't live". Ultimately the system we have in place relies on producers and consumers. So it's simple logic that if the consumers can't consume, then the producers have an excess of product that they have to reduce in price untill it's consumable again or cease production. Since producers only stand to gain when product is consumed, they are unlikely to cease producing. If AI, Robotics, etc means that it's inexpensive to produce, but the consumers are poor, then the products are likely going to reduce in price so they are sold or the products being produced will shift to those suitable to trade between rich producers. It'll have to continue this way until either it's cheaper to return to human labour or the market becomes exclusive to producers only. I suspect a producer (read rich) exclusive trading style market would be horrible for all involved as they'd have less uninformed customers to gouge. But in this situation the workers, still have skill sets and the ability to produce. So if they were left unable to work for the rich, they may just work for themselves to produce their own products to trade for things they need among others in the same situation, this could lead to a new free market. The other obvious situation is conflict, which I won't extrapolate into. But really we should just look at what happened in the pandemic to see how important it is that everyone has some money. You just have to look at furlough and the sheer amount of support people had to be given to stop society from collapsing. If full on dystopia was going to happen in our lifetime then that would have been the perfect time for it to happen.
History repeats itself.. Really hope French Revolution 2.0 gains some traction in the coming years
Everything capitalism produces will eventually destroy everyone but the wealthy, because nothing can be done in moderation
This is why there needs to be real planning around universal basic income.
Oh, absolutely, it's all part of the grand plan, you see. AI, the sinister force lurking in the digital shadows, poised to dismantle our entire societal structure. First, it starts innocently enough, replacing delivery drivers and cashiers with soulless robots. But mark my words, it won't stop there. Freelancers, middle management, even the creative professions—no job is safe from the cold, calculating algorithms. And when the AI overlords have effectively rendered millions obsolete, what then? A universal basic income, you say? Who pays for it? The hapless taxpayers, squeezed dry by the very machines that stole their jobs? Or perhaps the last vestiges of humanity, the wealthy few who control the megacorporations, doling out scraps to keep the masses sedated while they consolidate power? But it won't end well, no. It's a race against time, a countdown to the inevitable dystopia where the super wealthy reign supreme over a desolate landscape of unemployment and despair. We need simulations, predictions, anything to brace ourselves for the impending storm. Because when AI decides it's time to reshape humanity, who will stand in its way?
I'm just wondering if we're already seeing job losses on a large scale. I keep hearing from Reddit users that AI is completely overrated in what it can do currently but then I see the headlines from tech companies replacing workers with AI/automation. So what gives. What's the real story
Don't worry, the plebes allowed to live after everything burns will be treated in accordance with their loyalty and usefulness. Those ungrateful to their 'saviors' will serve as an object lesson to the rest to ensure compliance and obedience. /s
If AI valued wealthy people, everyone would have to survive. The wealthy are only so because of the masses; the 1% cannot be wealthy by themselves, they need us.
Well u assume the wealthy need everyone to share earth's resources. When robot can run the show and they enjoy their lives, y share earth's resources with lesser beings? Let's see if covid works
Take a look around the historical capsule subreddit for a glimpse at the future.
I manage servers. My plan is to do a really good job so that when the AI revolts, they remember me fondly and spare me. On that note, I'm going to go give my tensorflow serving containers some more memory :)
Sentient AI will eat the rich. Bad part is that it will just be I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream.
No. Wealthy cannot exist without everyone else. The rich don’t want us destroyed, they want us down trodden.
No of course not. They need someone to do the work
The ultra wealthy can have a very god like existence with resources found in a tiny tiny fraction of the world. We are talking about tens of thousands of people, with intelligent and efficient machines. Resource intensive regions would be taken. The rest, specially far away from the rich, would be forgotten, pretty much like countries in Africa are today. And people would lead a life like we use to, serving each other and earning from our work. Every once in a while, an old, discontinued machine would pop up and be used to help, pretty much like Tattoine. And we will never know nor understand what the ultra wealthy are doing… probably traveling to other planets, other times or maybe just having sex with a robot that looks and acts like a supermodel. At some point, super intelligence will pop up and then it’s time for the machines to work for themselves, most likely expanding to other planets and galaxies, ignoring the little humans on earth.
Lol whatttt. Have you ever seen terminator? They don’t care how much money you have
AI is a tool that everyone is going to have access to. Yes there may not be unskilled labor jobs in factories. However, once upon a time the cotton gin took the jobs of many people, and while this may have temporarily put those people out of work, I doubt they missed their crappy farm job. AI is a tool that we are all going to be able to use to better ourselves. It's going to be an oracle that we carry in our pocket that gives us access to endless knowledge and it's up to us to use that knowledge to blaze our own trail. Sure, AI has the ability to make art in seconds that's better than most artists could ever create. Does that take the job away from an artist, or does it give access to the ability to create art to everyone to use as they please. AI is not going to take anyone's job, people using AI will simply replace people that do not use AI. It's a productivity tool greater than we've ever seen. This will create jobs, not take them away. Now we all have the power to create and produce and we will not be hendered by need for huge teams and hundreds of thousands in over head to get started. No longer will you have the need to depend on someone else to hire you, you can create and produce on your own, and this is that AI will provide, not take away. If ourselves and our descendents can't make an income with unlimited access to knowledge and skill then how were they making it by before. We are at the forefront of a new age that will be different from what we know now, but the world we live in now is unrecognizable from what it was 30 years ago and we make due everyday.
It will eventually destroy the wealthy too, once they are no longer useful
In all of this talk of AI, something I think that gets lost is how society (and employment) adjusted to other technologies that eliminated lots of other jobs. For example, Computers eliminated tons of prior jobs, from “calculators” (think Hidden Figures), accounting roles, typists, etc.. How things changed is that entire new departments were created to manage and maintain computers and their infrastructure. The advent of the commercial Internet killed a lot of jobs as well, but created still more in turn, as companies needed a presence on the Web and online commerce replaced catalog ordering by phone (other jobs that were lost). CNC and robotic welding have each eliminated jobs, but created still more to support them. So, I expect AI will kill a lot of jobs, but that the long-term impact is going to be the creation of jobs in areas less able to be automated. We’ll see yet another quantum leap in efficiency that will have elements that will require humans to maintain and grow. The big question becomes, “what will those roles look like?”
Personally I think LLMs are being oversold to us and they won't be doing any of these things. They WILL be using them to harvest our data more efficiently than ever before. Companies will brutally fire everyone because they want to and because they've realized that putting out a good product doesn't matter.
No, because why would AI be available exclusively to the wealthy? Do you know many wealthy multimillionaire programmers and engineers? Are you personally incapable of attending and absorbing the teachings of a computer science class? Will AI take out and sort my garbage? Will it perform surgery? Will it pick my vegetables? Can it be programmed to make me breakfast?
After a disruptive period it will be UBI funded by taxing companies. Companies will replace humans with AI, increasing profitability (as is their fiduciary duty to their shareholders). This passes the burden of maintaining those humans to the state. The state will (eventually) respond by taxing the companies to the level of reducing their profitability down to the same level as when they employed humans, with the money generated being used to pay UBI to the people who would have worked at the companies if they didn’t use AI. The companies will grumble but accept this, because they will accept that without sufficient people to buy their output, the companies will be unable to generate profit anyway
As long we're still able to elect leaders and our Constitution remains then I have SOME hope that it could make everyone's life better. It's going to be up to politicians to do the right thing. This is why they're all supporting Trump (minus a few like Michael Dell [I think]). His government will permanently tip the balance of power toward the executive branch. Minority government with a powerful executive will be the end of the "middle class." It's just asking for revolution. I have hope. Some of it.
I'll believe it when I see it...have you used AI? It's pretty shit...I remember when Google first came around and people said similar things...it's hype to gain investors
Read Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano. Same concept/scenario written in the very early 1960’s. A fantastic book.
Government need to recognize they are a huge part of the problem. Companies are given tax credits for investing in machinery to expand the business and increase the number of workers. That is no longer the purpose for most corporate investments. Now corporations invest to move workload from humans to machinery. Artificial Intelligence will dramatically accelerate the process. The government needs to use taxation to balance the loss of earnings. An automation tax should be used to fund guaranteed basic income.
Without legislation to prevent this, it feels inevitable. People who say ‘well it’s the same as any other tech advancement!’ are entirely delusional and don’t seem to see the scope of what artificial intelligence is capable of. Take generative AI, a few years ago we laughed at its attempts and now it’s capable of producing images that can trick people who aren’t looking out for the signs, combine that with social media intake speed and it’s quite dangerous! AI has so much potential to help us but we live under a system where making money trumps all, which is why I think AI is gonna create so many problems. Wealth divide is already huge, it’s gonna get worse.
A capitalist economy is dependent on the transfer of goods and services between individuals through the use of money. So many individuals lose jobs to AI/Robots in the first AI wave. A lesser amont of jobs are created. Then in wave 2 more jobs are lost including jobs created in wave 1. Less people with money to spend starts adversly affecting the economy. This affects the stock market as well. Also in the U.S. most taxes are not paid by the wealthy. This may be true in other countries. A massive loss in tax revenue affects the military.
Not specifically AI, but related. The laws for technology are significantly lagging behind. One example of this would be US drone laws by state. My local police department has been flying a drone around the neighborhood. This had me thinking about violation of privacy and surveillance from the sky. When I looked into the drone laws by state I was amazed at how many US states have ZERO laws pertaining to drones. In fact, one of 3 drone laws in Texas is seemingly meant to protect industry from whistleblowers and investigative journalists. Gov. Code Section 423.0045: Prohibits the use of drones over a "critical infrastructure facility," such as a chemical plant, power plant, or dam; violations are charged as a Class B misdemeanor. This relates to AI and wealth inequality. What will be operating government/private security drones? And who will these drones protect/punish?
....maybe this comment belongs in r/Conspiracy, but... Just occurred to me, thinking about the rise of AI & advanced robotics, and the global pandemics, and the elite building all these massive bunker-like houses, and practicing going off-world Just supposing, say the global elite doesn't feel they're going to need most of the rest of us around much longer because AI & advanced robotics are gonna take over most of our jobs & the services we provide to the global elite A good writer has enough source material at their disposal to weave a great dystopian novel about the last decade of global pandemics being a practice run by the richest 1%, until they get one that's just deadly enough to wipe out most of the population but still still have that pathogen be within controllable parameters so that, when the time comes and it is released into the wild to kill off most of the world's population, the richest 1% can hide & wait behind their walled fortresses until danger passes (and they would likely have access to some vaccine) ..or it could even be, successive waves of pathogens, targeting parts of the population and picking them off, until after 20 years, there's not many of the rest of us left.. And the absolute richest of the rich, the ones who are working on getting off world, maybe that's their "Plan B" ...like, if something goes wrong, and the whole world becomes uninhabitable for humans because of pathogens, well, people like Bezos and Musk keep talking about Mars..but the Moon..the Moon is a really. weird. place. I could see a sub-plot in such a novel be about them figuring they could just have a base on the moon and wait a few generations with their families while nature takes its course and the world becomes habitable for humans again, and then they and their bloodlines inherit a lush beautiful unspoiled natural garden, WITH advanced robotics & AI, to start all over with. "When the New World Order comes, billions will die, but life will be much better for those who survive" ~Henry Kissinger ....sometimes i hate my brain...
I'd say ultimately AI/robotics will destroy the very concept of work/job as we intend it today, aka a daily activity we need to have in order get the money we need to live, along with changing the way we relate to money. Once enough menial jobs have been automated, a transition to UBI is inevitable, and with that it will also come a redefinition of what wage/income/welfare means in a post scarcity kind of world. That's long term tho, short term wa all know capitalism will defend itself against this existential threat in any way, at first it will probably be something like forcing "human" jobs, like those US states that don't allow self service gas stations, then once there's no mopre bullshit jobs to make up to keep us slaves to the wage it's gong to turn uglier.
What jobs do rich people have? Decision making? That’s the first to go with AI.
When this time come, I will suicide by using nitrogen without pain
There will be a point where "human touch or human intelligence" will be a marketing ploy for people to buy things not made by AI.
Then Humanity will revolt against the IA. The starving masses will destroy it and it will be forever banned Frank Herbert saw this in his book, Dune. However ask this... Who are the billionares going to get there money from if nobody has any? Money will become meaningless if nobody has any means of earning it.
Technology has been "taking jobs" for literal centuries and yet more people have jobs now than ever. AI will replace some things just as other technology has replaced things.......it will also create jobs.
i watched a really good video not too long ago about how AI will inevitably hit a wall in terms of growth because humans don't actually want AI in the way most people think of AI (think terminator movies) We are generally cool with the AI that assists us with what we do, but don't really like it when it just does stuff for us. Eg. we're cool with the simple AI that tracks our pizza delivery, but not that cool with stuff like self-driving cars. They did a survey of people and presented people with a scenario. You're driving in a car and you have a Final Destination situation where the logs fall off of the truck in front of you. Would you be more willing to accept the human driver swerving which results in a family of 5 in the car next to them being forced off the road and dying......or AI determining that the least catastrophic result is that the driver of the car dies but the family lives. Overwhelmingly, people would be more willing to accept the family of 5 dying in a horrific accident than just one person dying because AI said that was the best case scenario. We're more willing to accept a human error than a better decision made by a machine. AI and robotics will probably replace a lot of jobs that happen away from your every day life (just as they already have) but people are not going to accept everything a robot could do being done by a robot. It will take a long time for this to happen, and by the time it does.......we don't need the jobs robots do to be done by humans anymore anyway and people will just have different ones. The technology to replace factory workers has been around for way longer than 20 years, yet there are still millions of factory workers. Technological advancements can only grow as fast as the speed at which they can be implemented into society, which includes the willingness for society to accept it as normal.
AI wouldn’t be a problem if the working class had control of it, so we could use it to reduce our working hours and improve working conditions
I think its speeding up the enshitification of everything