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Comment by burningChrome | Hacker News Reader

I often ask a similar question of what happens when we, as humans, have offloaded everything to technology, to AI to Robots? What kind of a society will we have then? When you no longer have to think about how to do something, or how to build or repair something, or create something original from your imagination.

I shudder to think the direction this is all leading to.

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I'm kind of an AI pessimist, but I think that sounds like it could be a wonderful society. When the only work you need to do is work that you actually want to do. It could free up people to actually chase their dreams and achieve what they want to, without having to constantly chase subsistence.

The reason I'm a pessimist is that I mostly see society preserving the status quo. I don't see AI democratizing things and freeing us, because we have fetishized the concepts of work and profit that we can't imagine a society that functions properly without demanding those two things be put above all else.

I don't envision a dystopia or a utopia, I envision a future where AI disenfranchises people who should be taken care of, bolsters profits of the already powerful, and replaces the most fulfilling human pursuits without actually saving people from unfulfilling toil, mostly because society will bend backwards to try to preserve the status quo.

Raising kids, social stuff, exercise, travel, any leisure stuff like racing, horse ridding, acrobatics. entertainment, cooking, art, gardening etc. Just check what rich girls do and you will see they aren’t bored though they don’t have to work.

And I suppose we'll get to do all that stuff when all the value trickles down from the shareholders right?

That'd be the dream. Unfortunately only the owners of all the AI production will enjoy that, while everyone else has to figure out a way to earn money and not starve by switching professions.

Exactly zero of that unlocked time/value will come back to the workers.

It simply can't work within capitalism. We've seen it before so many times that it's a given. It's a natural conclusion to this.

Textile workers don't get happy when a machine can replace them despite it meaning they won't get injured anymore and this brutal job will get easier. It's objectively a good thing, but because our society ties all our livelihoods to work, they have to hate the machine.

Given how low standards are, executives will layoff swaths of people for a crappy AI very soon. I'm genuinely scared of how our world will cope with that.

Think about it in cycles. Handcrafted products were frowned upon since you could see imperfections and flaws. Now they are the thing, cheap perfect same mass machine-produced things often look bland and cheap, you pay massive premium over it. No reason this won't repeat in some form again.

True art will be rare and treasured, few artists will be rockstars. Till next fad we can't even see coming again mixes it all up.

But yeah these transitions do make tons of people miserable, losing jobs. Also overall middle class is disappearing, but thats the trend for quite some time. But it always paid off to anticipate what next generation of showels will be.

I think what it leads to is a world without scarcity. I think all this fretting about meaning is missing the forest from the trees. Things like meaning are important but making sure everyone can eat three meals a day, that your family has access to superhuman doctors, that different diseases are cured are all much more important.

Historically when this kind of stuff happens the result is usually a Revolution.

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