Unfortunately these companies are working to eliminate jobs, but not in any way making a path for a transition to a post-work society.
We are indeed entering a post-job-scarity environment though. You see a lot of ghost posting and lack of response for years now, 6 out of 10 application is ghosted, 2 out of 10 said no, and just a few remaining. Jobs are getting rarer and are going to be more of a status rather than for breadwinning
The tech dystopia doesn’t even try to flatter us by assuming we’re important enough to oppress individually.
Everything that were comforts before COVID are far too expensive now.
Even the bread and circuses are gradually being taken away.
After all, "attention is all you need". Although it is nothing but just a title of the paper who introduced us to "transformers", and enabled all this AI slop lately (note: I'm not against LLM "AI" but I'm against using it in an irresponsibly, e.g. vibe coding without knowing your domain knowledge in the first place is one), but it is quite a dark humor to me that we can actually use this title literally to describe a lot of real world phenomemon.
All of that to make you feel numb in the rat race to the bottom. I don't think your argument that we are closer to BNM than 1984 is wrong, just that the antifa and all the ICE, and the politics fiasco makes me feel like it is more 1984 than BNM. Or maybe we have a super deluxe package to have both.
Netflix/Sports/RealityTv + Onlyfans/PH + Doordash tacobell/chic-fil-a
Someone, yes, but not millions, maybe not even thousands anymore.
The Stasi needed 1 in 40 of the working population as informers (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/03/lessons-from-...), but large parts of surveillance can be automated now.
For policing, you may not need that much, either. To put out smaller fires, you only need local superiority in numbers. That can be achieved by having a small force that can be rapidly deployed.
For large uprisings, you can use drones. You’ll want to avoid that, though because that isn’t guaranteed to keep you in power.
AI is taking jobs faster than making new ones!
No field is safe and trying to switch careers over 40 is almost impossible. Even flipping burgers is nearly impossible (very hard to do without pior experience at such age).
Youngsters are 2x faster than you and precise. I'm not from USA tho.
I was SHOCKED that I was the worst at flipping the burgers at McDonald's. Pace is CRAZY and stress is NOTHING in comparison to let's say dropping production database or shipping 2 months late in startup.
Shit just looks easy, but noise, speed, temp and pressure (constant KPI over your head) is CRAAAAAZY.
Got kicked out after 3 months :| Got new job at tech support
How so? Throwing out the term "UBI" every once in a while doesn't miraculously make it economically viable.
Widespread job losses as a path to post-work are about as plausible as a car accident as a path to bringing a vehicle to a standstill. You would have to be from another planet (or a sociopath) not to understand that this violates boundary conditions that we implicitly want to leave intact.
They control how quickly they deploy, but I don't see how they have any control over the rest: "which industries they automate" is a function of how well the model has generalised. All the medical information, laws and case histories, all the source code, they're still only "ok"; and how are they, as a model provider in the US, supposed to cooperate (or not) with a trade union in e.g. Brandenburg whose bosses are using their services?
> Widespread job losses as a path to post-work are about as plausible as a car accident as a path to bringing a vehicle to a standstill.
Certainly what I fear.
Any given UBI is only meaningful if it is connected to the source of economic productivity; if a government is offering it, it must control that source; if the source is AI (and robotics), that government must control the AI/robots.
If governments wait until the AI is ready, the companies will have the power to simply say "make me"; if the governments step in before the AI is ready, they may simply find themselves out-competed by businesses in jurisdictions whose governments are less interested in intervention.
And even if a government pulls it off, how does that government remain, long-term, friendly to its own people? Even democracies do not last forever.
who exactly is paying for you to live and why would they be so kind?
If I phrase it that succinctly, people tend to reply "democracy!" without considering who has the power and how they behave.
It is fortunate for him that those of us who understand the implications of this, do not believe he can do it.
Do you believe he could do it? Would you act against him now, when most people think his success in this endevour is implausible? Or wait until he demonstates all the parts necessary, at which point action against him is impossible? Or do you believe his claims that him doing this will render work unnecessary rather than, as I fear, making it impossible without also making it unnecessary?
What about everyone else that you think would be on your side? If you need everyone on-side, timing matters too.
Musk wants to make a data center *factory* on the Moon, with an output of 1000 TW/year of satellites which are (supposedly) going to be launched from the moon.
I have done the maths on this, and suspect Musk used Grok for this plan, those numbers are on the edge of what's plausible for the thermodynamic limits of rearranging atoms, even with engineering that nobody's actually designed yet. But let's disregard my mere opinion that this is beyond him and say he solves all those technical difficulties:
If you built that much each year, given how long it lasts, the physical size of that many watts of PV-powered satellites is enough to block enough sunlight as to lower the average temperature of planet Earth by 33°C immediately, without accounting for any additional affects from how ice reflects more light than unfrozen land and water. Those feedback mechanisms can plausibly make it more like 48°C cooling.
> and make work unnecessary
Note: I am not making that claim, Musk is. Musk doesn't have a good answer to this, just vague platitudes about how AI can do all the work, not why his AI and his robots are going to give everyone (and not just his fans) luxury.
> Serious question: Are you okay?
No. I see the world's richest man sowing chaos, and demanding the removal of all checks on his plan to gain even more power both by political campaigning and by using phrases such as "robot army" within his own companies, and when his AI calls itself "Mecha Hitler" the military of the world's largest economy decides to pay for its use and then goes on to make threats against other competing AI companies that don't want to be involved in the military.
Just to re-emphasise: I also don't believe Musk.
The earlier question is: when do you decide to believe someone like him? When do you act against someone like him who you do believe? Waiting until he is credible is waiting too late, acting before then makes you look like the villain and you don't get much support.
What do you mean? I have the day off today. I'm sitting here in my underwear listening to my washing machine in the background. The sun is shining outside. I went for a walk in the park next door earlier. In an hour (Germany time), I'll cook something for lunch and then go to the garage to put a new rear tire on my motorcycle. Tomorrow, sauna; Sunday, bike ride; and on Monday, back to the office. What I'm trying to say is: I'm not the protagonist whose decision determines whether Musk f*ks up the world or not. And that's not a question of my priorities, but of a realistic assessment of the real scope for action.
If you want to have a real chance of putting someone like Musk in his place, you need to join the largest possible political collective with the right agenda. But looking at the course of the conversation, my respectful recommendation (assuming you're not trolling) would be to focus on your own well-being first.
> I want to live. And if you threaten my life, I will defend myself with whatever means I have at my disposal. It makes no difference whether you threaten me by taking away my livelihood or by withholding it from me. You therefore have a choice. Either you value my life as you value your own, or there will be war between us. And that is a war you will not win, because you are not only waging it against me, but against all people whose right to life you wish to deny.
Like, OK, is that just you blowing off steam or do you have a specific threshold where you'll do anything?
> do you have a specific threshold where you'll do anything?
This conflict is not fought only once a certain threshold has been reached, but from the outset and continuously, in political struggles, in the struggle for social values and prevailing ethics, etc. Only when there is really no other option is it fought with fists and weapons. If you ask me specifically when the masses will storm the palaces of people like Musk with pitchforks, I can't answer that. For myself, I can say that I still see a lot of scope for political action within the legal frameworks that have been established (at least here in Europe). After World War II, there was a comprehensive redistribution policy throughout the Western world (especially in the US) that we could certainly repeat: top tax rates above 90%, enormous power for trade unions, a rapidly growing middle class, and historically low income concentration. The constraints are different today than they were then, but the only thing that is really necessary is the willingness to put things that are currently upside down back on their feet.