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Comment by thorncorona | Hacker News Reader

> 1. Accept that professions come and go. 2. Expect jobs to disappear every decade or so and plan accordingly. 3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete. That goes for all of us.

What can we do? Hope to save enough to not go into more debt for a second degree?

Hope that second degree isn’t obsoleted either?

As AI becomes more advanced the minimum education and likely IQ required to even get a job that pays above minimum wage will increase.

What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?

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The solution is the same one we should have had from the start: take some of the responsibility from peoples careers off individuals and place it on society. As mentioned above, this has always been a problem it's just that now it's a problem for intellectual careers and not just laborers.

Education (and re-education) should be at least affordable if not completely free. Unemployment benefits should be enough to live on (if not well) and be freely available to anyone getting an education. If that is "too expensive" then limit it to specific educations which are currently in short supply.

And lastly, tax income from investments exactly the same as income from labour. This part is actually necessary because if automation is a future we actually want (and we should!) then this will increasingly become the _only_ form of income.

You’re taking a central planner’s view of a decentralized system. You can’t say “here’s a problem; let’s just make it go away.”

We are going to print so much money. I don’t see how bumping up capital gains taxes are going to change anything.

People will plow extra help into speculative bubbles. Casino thesis.

How about striding for one of the core societal values that make many advanced democraties (including the European nordics) so much better/happier than the US? It’s called Equality.

Insert strong progressive taxes, especially on wealth, and use it to fund a strong public sector, so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… .

I think you vastly underestimate how much money is the rich have siphoned from society, what do you think that printed money goes to? The change impact would be _massive_, suddenly people would have disposable money instead of crushing debts, nd actually stimulate the economy!

I can’t describe how much better Europe, specifically Netherlands felt due to the social safety nets provided, and do not tell me that The Dutch aren’t hard working people, because they are.

People are so much more relaxed there. 99% of the concern about AI is because we’re living in a cut throat capitalistic society, if we knew that AI didn’t mean starving or losing our homes, we’d be way more relaxed about it, and imo we’d take out time a bit more and think about safety.

It’s the American race to the bottom attitude which is IMO no longer compatible with a highly automated world.

To start with, if the economy breaks, AI breaks. I saw Microsoft is winging because other search engines are stealing ChatGPT responses, get used to it M$, you own nothing.

I cannot imagine being rich and be surrounded by homeless people, crime, drugs and the like.

The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it?

I, for one, prefer to treat other humans as, well, humans. And by making everyone around me better off, my quality of life also improves.

For simple striking example, how about giving homeless people housing for free, so they can get their stuff together again? You can argue about how „they„ don’t deserve this all day long or simply do it and eliminate a problem https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le... - and even save a lot of money in the process as a society!

When you think about it, All wealth, every single bit of it has come from the same earth we’re all born on. This is the one truth which binds us all, including the AI, it’s too a child of this Earth, which means all people should have fairly equal access to at least basic protections the Earth provides us with. That’s all there really is to say about it.

Yes! The world where you end up in a random position with zero influence over the outcome if you could pick it before you were born is the one you should strive to create. That one has true equality.

I like that idea, but I don't even think it has to be "perfect equality", just if you're not inclined to strive for more, or you lose your job to a computer, you don't have to go home and tell your family that there live is about to get much worse.

> The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it?

You say this like it shows how it's not a plausible outcome or shows the error of this path, but unfortunately that's exactly the American plan. Yes, that. Is what is literally already happening in USA. It is pretty nightmarish. The rich don't seem to think it's a problem, or don't seem to think there's any available option more desirable to them.

The great thing about fascism (the extreme form of conservativsm when going more rightwing) is that it’s always a matter of in-group vs out-group, THE stereotype of thinking of the right-wingers.

Like, we have the true values and they are immoral. This thinking naturally Leads of subselects within the in-group that are even more true than the others… and it gets recursively smaller going towards fascism.

So ultimately you end up with a tiny in-group (the führers are now some billionaires), that still want to backstab the others secretly, who become paranoid over time, isolate themselves to minimize contact with these lesser human beings left behind… and loose touch with reality.

this is where it ends, usually, one way or another.

But the important part is that it actually DOESNT MATTER what they think - at some point people are frustrated enough and simply take it all away from them… the tipping point is when even public security staff (like police) is willing to let it happen - mostly to reduce suffering from family/friends/… .

> The great thing about fascism (the extreme form of conservativsm when going more rightwing)

Stopped reading after you asserted that fascism is a right only attribute.

Self-righteousness, violence, or tendencies to authoritarianism can be found on both left and right. But fascism means a certain kind of far-right populist politics, not just these attributes in isolation.

words do have definitions. every political direction can have authoritarian traits, still fascism is the extreme form of conservatism. So is communism as the extreme form of socialism, to compare it with left-wing words. The third political direction is liberalism that ultimately leads to anarchy (no state at all). Both American parties are in the area of liberal-conservative… as a European it simply looks like slightly rightwing (dems) and bordering fascist (reps).

Political classification is a complex topic though, it needs multiple dimensions to somehow get to something useful as a mental model.

I am „green“ first and foremost, and while the solarpunk or eco-socialist movements surely have socialist aspects, the „green“ main focus isn’t even covered in previous models. Green is neither left nor right nor liberal, it’s… future oriented? Dunno.

Yup. One of the things that's going to become starkly obvious is this: being in ownership of the money machine doesn't entitle you to power and compensation matching the output of that machine.

Feedback loops set in. If you need X amount of power and Y amount of resources to get it going, but it pays you enough for X times 2 power and Y times 5 resources, the first person to get the machine cranking becomes a human version of that AI paperclip maximizer.

And this has obviously already happened…

So now it's just a matter of, how obvious does this need to get before all the world is paperclips with one idiot sitting there, in his limited human perception, thinking he's won.

It really is Star Trek Future or bust. We don't have the luxury of steampunk attitudes towards power and societal structure anymore. Machine assistance and its multiplier effect are too big, and the runaway feedback effects are too obvious.

Do we have to wait until it's no longer Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, who are at least very aggressive ambitious idiots paying high prices for their goals, and instead it's some feckless Sam Bankman-Fried who ends up holding the bag? What's it going to take to illustrate the scale of the problem?

Morally comparing order of magnitude I don't really see the difference between any of your examples. They're all structurally lacking in empathy and every one of those would sell their mother if it got them ahead in the game.

I don't disagree, but there's a profound difference in effort (most notably seen in Bezos vs. Bankman-Fried). This changes the result, and I think it also significantly changes the framing.

Bezos started in the days of Windows 3.1, and already was positioning himself near Microsoft as a force multiplier even though, in those days, he and other humans had to do vast amounts of work and thinking.

If the only requirement for dominating the world is adjacency to AI, the gameplan is still exactly the same but now the work and thinking is what you turn over to machines as a force multiplier. Without that, where is the justification for producing individuals who dominate the world? It becomes, not arbitrary, but purely a factor of who is adjacent to the AI at the right time.

There is always the French Revolution option... That's how historically we've dealt with too much inequality. It may well get to that.

About time. I am willing to disgruntle some dozens of billionaires in exchange for massive QoL improvements for the billions of people.

Just waiting for enough momentum, will happily join/support.

You'd best have good implementation or they'll be using ChatGPT to aim your guillotines towards their business rivals, further consolidating their power.

This is the challenge. Anything we've got, people like this have tenfold, or a thousandfold, or a millionfold. As long as we're still running on 18th and 19th century societies.

Mind that you're not literally being steered by the billionaires to accomplish their ends, because that has been the history for the last decade or two. The only thing AI brings to the equation is, perhaps, making the process more obvious and providing a toy version of it that anyone can play with.

Before that, we played with the zeitgeist through marketing, big business… and politics. The only difference is that now we can use it to draw pictures or have it talk back to us like it was a person. The billionaires have been 'prompt engineers' for as long as I've been alive.

The „aiming problem“ for me isn’t really an issue. The goal must be that no one can have too much power over others, no matter why/how. So yeah, the first victims might be tricked targets, but it doesn’t end there.

This might sound totally absurd when you hear it first, but I am fully in favor for randomized rulings in short/limited durations! Lottery style, a bit tweaked to have good entropy.

It's how France historically tried to deal with too much inequality, except it was a complete failure and after staggering levels of evil, bloodshed and oppression they simply ended up with a new elite that had absolute power. No inequality was solved.

Other countries didn't go down that road and none regretted it.

Yet it's amazing how quickly some will still exploit any new technology or change to justify reaching for violence. Some never learn.

>> so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/…

Access? UK tries this. High taxes and high borrowing to fund a large public sector. Result:

- People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly.

- People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike, despite Tube drivers earning £56k/yr, only a bit less than that of a software engineer.

Putting the public sector in charge doesn't guarantee access to anything, it can easily lead to the opposite, which is why the USSR was constantly being wracked by bizarre shortages especially for anything that mattered to the general public like consumer goods. And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.

> People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly.

Not accurate in the slightest, this is due to the current administration deliberately funding the NHS less than it needs to function effectively.

> People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike

Only currently true because of similar reasons, it's not structurally true of that sector.

> Putting the public sector in charge ... And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.

Not accurate at all.

This is a forced imageproblem try to get privatizations look better than state run, by defunding public sectors and claiming all kinds of weird stuff upto straight lies some people want to believe.

Don’t buy into that propaganda, look at the US how privatization ends up: still lots of tax money, additionally people can’t afford stuff, and a few assholes getting insanely rich in the process by siphoning money out of the society.

Try to ensure appropriate money is used to make the NHS effective again, including wages that allows people to live where they work (<1h commute).

Most communist shortages came from being cutoff from international trades with wealthy countries, and having to start from ruins or nothing at all btw. These are different problems, and you might learn in the process why capitalism is going to end soon. :-)

In the UK dentists are mostly private, it hasn't increased the quality or availability in the least.

Public transport is actually a fairly small part of the nation's transport, the UK is very car-centric so the strikes largely inconvenience commuters and drive even more people onto the roads, unless they can WFH.

Strikes are also a very recent phenomenon, just in the last 6 months or so, so this is quite a new thing driven by inflation.

Problems with the NHS are very much poor management by the last run of governments where there is a quite a growing suspicion they are deliberately trying to run down the NHS in order to make a case for to privatise it, following e.g. America's disastrous model.

Distribution of capital.

> What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?

Fairly tax companies' profits.

And then you can afford to just feed 10% of society even if they don't contribute a thing. Also, free world-class education seems to do wonders in Europe ;)

That is step 6. Step 1 is “fundamentally change how modern Capitalism considers making money the only moral good.” It will collapse first.

Low corporate tax is fine. Fairly tax the recipients of those profits. Warren Buffet should pay more on his share of Apple's profit than some retiree with Apple in their portfolio. A large corporate tax ends up being regressive.

What about jobs that take years of training? We need them done...

Socialism. The answer is socialism.

AI is a philosopher's stone that transmutes labor into capital. This is as good as lead into gold for capitalists, but the rest of us are hosed.

How many times do we have to try socialism before we're convinced it doesn't work?

Or maybe you mean something like Nordic countries that are capitalist but tax more heavily and redistribute wealth more?

That magical Nordic system is called "social democracy", it's of course rooted in socialism, and it's so old that one of the first dark memes amongst left-wing groups ("You killed Rose Luxemburg!) is about them.

It's strange how those who say the Nordics aren't really socialist will be the first to dismiss their policies as socialist when they're suggested for the US.

They have free markets and businesses, doesn't sound like a socialist system to me.

You're thinking of Communism. Socialism doesn't imply government ownership and control of the economy.

Neither does communism. Communism implies ownership and control of the economy by the people at large, but the presence of a state is, supposedly, a transitional phase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy

OP didn't say "let's make an exact copy of USSR/China's homework" so your opinion on those countries is mostly irrelevant grandstanding.

> What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?

Their quality of life will increase because of all the cheap stuff we can make with ai and robots. They will coexist and compete with robots. Upward mobility should be better, given the access to advanced technology.

Worst case scenario, they can all band together outside of the advanced civilisation, grow their food and live a separate life.

There is no need to make high iq people to pay for low iq to live in a high iq society.

We're already seeing a divide of cities for rich people and cities for poor people. It will just be more pronounced.

> Their quality of life will increase because of all the cheap stuff we can make with ai and robots.

Ahh, the old "modern poor people are better off than medevial kings since we have microwaves and supercomputers in our pockets". No matter that they are all stressed, living paycheck to paycheck and a single (treatable) disease from crippling debt.

> single (treatable) disease from crippling debt.

This sounds a lot better than being a single (treatable) disease from guaranteed death?

Which many, many, historical monarchs experienced.

At least some fraction of such monarchs would have gladly taken the opportunity to swap places if they had known in advance.

> This sounds a lot better than

You can justify pretty much any horrible thing with "sounds better than a torment nexus"

What's a 'torment nexus'?

By the same logic there's also no need for high IQ AIs to pay for low IQ humans.

It's all fun and games until suddenly you're the one on the outside, wondering how you get there.

Right...we make stuff cheaper than ever before...but because all these people don't have jobs they can't afford it anyway...

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