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Comment by tetris11 | Hacker News Reader

I imagine a lot of humans will be left to die, simply because they are no longer needed. See: those with insecure housing.

We might invent jobs for each other, but the earning potential of them will not be very high if the labour can be readily done by a machine.

Those who can live with their parents or have joint ownership with packs of friends could probably surf by paying the mortgage on gig work.

Of course, if housing suddenly becomes plentiful and cheap, renters might enjoy this gig economy too.

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> I imagine a lot of humans will be left to die

Which would mean discontent and rebellion. I don't think any significant portion of the population would just die quietly. And from what you described, you are probably talking about 50-90% of the population.

Of course if you are cynical, you could just say that technology could "solve" this problem as well.

It probably will. Technological leaps have often led to new kinds of war which reshape the world order (e.g. industrial revolution -> WW1).

Meanwhile, the efficiency with which capitalism (and war) created an angry, resentful underclass sowed the seeds that allowed fascism to bloom in the run up to WW2.

Imagine a world with 1% of the current population. There would still be millions of humans, the right amount ? A world given back to the wild.

Each person supported by a near limitless amount fusion energy and robot assistance, 500 years into the future, a long time after the cleansing of the undesirables. Sort of like what happened to the native americans, or the natives after any conquest really.

If humans die then what exactly is technology “solving”?

GDP

Seems like a weird metric to overfit to. Maybe because it's easily measurable.

It's because ultimately we live in a plutocracy and that is a measure of their collective success.

In all brutal honesty it solves a cost center for companies.

Less people to employ, for the same or greater output equals more profits.

I am not a proponent of this development, just a realist.

> Less people to employ, for the same or greater output equals more profits.

Companies are under no obligation to employ people just because they exist, so they can already employ less people if they choose to. I don't see why anyone has to die.

I wasn't saying that corporations are required to hire and then keep their hires on staff. I was talking about the societal impact of the possibility that corporations would lay off large chunks of their employees, during a climate where no work was to be had due to technology taking over most of those jobs.

Being fired and being unable to find employment elsewhere often has serious financial, physical and mental consequences for people. Often times it can completely ruin a persons life.

Not everyone has savings, or even the possibility to create savings, making the impact of being made redundant even that much more harder to handle.

Severe life changing situations can often lead to drug and substance abuse which carry with them higher chance of death. These situations can often directly lead to suicide.

Not every society around the world has systems in place to capture those that fall down, and even those that do are going to have a difficult time handling the large influx of people needing assistance if the techno dystopian future in the article comes to pass.

I would recommend checking out the excellent book "The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills by David Stuckler & Sanjay Basu" on the societal impact of austerity.

I agree with all of that. But unless I'm misunderstanding, your previous comment was saying that more dead people leads more profits for companies, and I don't agree with that.

> Being fired and being unable to find employment elsewhere often has serious financial, physical and mental consequences for people. Often times it can completely ruin a persons life.

Yeah, and that's because we've tied a person's survival needs to their ability to find "work". And in many cases "work" is not really a productive activity; it's just a facade we've all bought into. It's a useful facade though, because if we were all perfectly efficient and only rewarded true productive work then we'd be in deeper trouble.

So our challenge, it seems, is to somehow keep finding new "work" when technology makes it harder and harder for us to trick ourselves into believing we're working. "Prompt engineer" comes to mind.

> And in many cases "work" is not really a productive activity; it's just a facade we've all bought into.

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

Share holder value of course.

Humans.

But this is exactly my point. We can already solve the problem of humans and we aren’t bound by technological constraints. If AI is there chugging along after all humans are rendered “useless” then is it much different than the pre-human era where humans weren’t there to do whatever it is we are doing?

The whole thought experiment of “what if AI makes humans obsolete” is pointless because it assumes there is some universal goal that transcends human existence which there is not. We are not here to do anything but maintain our own existence, and existing with as little effort as possible is actually our end goal. The universe has no other purpose than for us to exist in it.

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