It’s really intriguing how an increasingly popular view of what’s “ethical” is anything that doesn’t stand in the way of the ‘proletariat’ getting their bag, and anything that protects content creators’ intellectual property rights, with no real interest in the greater good.
Such a dramatic shift from the music piracy generation a mere decade or two ago.
It’s especially intriguing as a non-American.
Again, as you say, many sensible arguments against AI, but for some people it really takes a backseat to “they took our jerbs!”
Capitalism is not prepared nor willing to retrain people, drastically lower the workweek, or bring about a UBI sourced from the value of the commons. So indeed, if the promises of AI hold true, a catastrophe is incoming. Fortunately for us, the promises of AI CEOs are unlikely to be true.
If we manage to replace all the workers with AI - that's awesome! We will obviously have to work out a system for everyone to get shelter, and food, and so on. But that post-scarcity utopia of everyone being able to do whatever they want with their time and not have to work, that's the goal, right? That's where we want to be.
Jerbs are an interim nightmare that we have had to do to get from subsistence agriculture to post-scarcity abundance, they're not some intrinsic part of human existence.
Look at the current administration. Do you think they would even consider providing anything like UBI?
They actively want to take us down the cyberpunk dystopia route (or even the Christofascist regressive dystopia route...). They want us to become serfs to technofeudal overlords. Or just die, and decrease the surplus population.
Furthermore, they really, really want to be absolute rulers being treated like (the popular conception of) medieval lords by all of us, the peasants. They deeply believe that we are beneath them; that we do not deserve to have the means to thrive or even survive if they do not explicitly grant it to us; that our natural state is that of supplication, and theirs is that of power and control.
UBI would give that up. It would give us the unconditional means to live, regardless of their approval. And that they cannot abide.
An ordinary person, working diligently at a decent-paying job, can save up a million dollars if they're not unlucky.
Even a million-dollar-a-year salary is only 10x a fairly modest tech salary of 100k.
But a billion dollars a year is 1000 times that.
So...no, I don't know any billionaires personally either. I'm extrapolating from the things they say and do. But frankly, with the way the media is today, do you really think that more than a tiny fraction of it is trying to portray billionaires as worse than they are? Given how much of it is actually controlled by them, and bears the clear marks of their editorial hand?
Somehow there is always this huge leap between "Strong AI" -> stuff happens -> "about 10k people live in cloud cities and everyone else lives in the dirt".
I find it completely implausible.
Money is a tool that has no value by itself. Billionaires are billionaires because they get a much bigger part of the work their group is producing (the group can be one company, a region, a country or the whole world depending on how you see things). If AI does the work instead of people, it will change nothing for them.
You can be optimistic (it will self regulate and everyone will benefit from AI) or pessimistic (only the billionaire class will benefit from AI). But in any case, there will be no need to sell products or share if there is a class of artificial slaves that can replace workers
Forty years ago I would've had a personal secretary for my engineering job, and most likely a private office. Now I get to manage more things myself in addition to being expected to be online 24x7 - so I'm not even convinced that eliminating those jobs improve things for the people who now get to self-serve instead of being more directly assisted.
The luddites didn't destroy automatic looms because they hated technology; they did it because losing their jobs and seeing their whole occupation disappear ruined their lives and lives of their families.
The problem to fix isn't automation, but preventing it from destroying people's lives at scale.
That is what happened with the 19th century factories.
One question perhaps is, even if AI can do everything I can do (i.e., has the skills for it), will it do everything I do? I'm sure there are many people in the world with the superset of my skills, yet I bet there are some things only I'm doing, and I don't think a really smart AI will change that.
The Industrial Revolution caused a great deal of damage. It was a net positive in the long term because new jobs were created to replace those that were lost, but it took decades and enormous violence. Now, the promise of AI is that it will be more efficient than any human being. If this becomes a reality, there will be, by definition, no new jobs created for the people replaced by AI.