The essence of this, and every news article I’ve read lately about a specific, tangible economic impact of AI, has the benefits accruing solely to capital (shareholders of a company). If this pattern continues unabated, we are in deep shit.
Standards of living skyrocketed. It paid for things in the US like the TVA, social security, and the national highway system.
Since the computer revolution in 1975, capital captured all of the value creation. Wages are flat. Standard of living declining. Inequality at its worst since the gilded age.
The staggering wealth created by the computer revolution could have easily paid for universal healthcare and lowered the SS retirement age in the US, while leaving mountains of value intact for capitalists.
Now we’re going to do the same thing with AI?
This 50 year experiment in market fundamentalism has been bad for society and needs to come to an end.
> Mr Jansen said BT would become "a leaner business with a brighter future", with the firm planning to get rid of between 40,000 and 55,000 jobs by 2030.
> The cuts break down as:
> More than 15,000 cuts as BT completes building fibre networks in the UK
> More than 10,000 as new UK networks require less maintenance
> More than 10,000 from using new tech including AI
> About 5,000 from restructuring
So what do humans do to survive in this society? I can only see either UBI or a revolution that ends capitalism.
Which is why companies like Anduril are flooring the accelerator on autonomous defense tech. I've wondered lately if Anduril is a product of Thiel once again playing 4D chess. It's not hard to see where this is all headed.
I've been talking about this for a long while now. It pretty much follows the AI economic doomsday scenario to a tee, where AI destroys factor markets replacing workers, people can't get food, unrest then happens as people die, and then its the end for a large portion of us. Won't happen overnight, but slow and full of suffering. It has happened this way every time the economic cycle stalls, and we currently have at least 5B people over-provisioned for the planet when certain food systems fail there's only one thing that can happen.
Very predictable too if one were properly educated with a decent amount of economics and actual history and not the trite crap they teach these days in public education.
Support systems are in place, but the only way to fund them is to print money from nothing, and anyone that knows anything knows this runs fiat straight into an economic calculation problem (non-market socialism) which doesn't work. Its just a matter of time before debasement reaches a critical threshold (which we are close to already).
With AI it maybe good in macro terms but what about the folks impacted by it? Will it be possible from them to find another job without significant training/education?
This to me is the core problem. We give people in their lives really one chance to skill up. Basic skills through secondary education and then a period afterwards when you have no social responsibilities to go to college. If you need to retrain 15 years down the road, there is no support for supporting your family for you. If you try to pad your costs to sandbag for the eventuality of having to leave your industry for a couple of years to upskill, then some will take that as your margin and undercut you.
Or at all. If a large percentage of jobs go away, there's a very real chance that there won't be enough new jobs at any training/education level to make up for it.
True, but the prospect of widespread loss of the ability of people to earn a living absolutely should be -- even if you're not one who will lose that ability.
The problem isn't labor savings as such, it's the speed of the change. Losing too many jobs too quickly is a recipe for disaster.
A better comparison is the telephone switch operator industry, whose jobs (peak in 1950) were replaced directly by technology.
It is allowed to feel fear about losing a job-- there is no safety net, and rebounding is difficult.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opiiaLCBBok&ab_channel=GoodP...
It will require nuclear fusion or anything that makes the energy problem trivial though.