If humans die then what exactly is technology “solving”?
Less people to employ, for the same or greater output equals more profits.
I am not a proponent of this development, just a realist.
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.
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.
> 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.
Seems like a weird metric to overfit to. Maybe because it's easily measurable.
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.