> Who actually stands to benefit from the massive devaluation of services in an economy that is buoyed by service-based roles?
Everyone, if it comes with productivity gains. We will need good tools to distribute the gains.
Everyone, if it comes with productivity gains. We will need good tools to distribute the gains.
Is everyone on this website 20 years old? They pulled the same shit with automation, with computers, with internet, with cryptos, and now with ai,... And people keep falling for the same bs over and over again. "the three day workweek", "we'll retire at 45", &c.
As of now there are basically no such tools. Everything is geared towards letting owners accumulate more and more. We would probably need highly progressive taxes to get some level of distribution
Not to mention: the grand majority of the US's GDP is wrapped up into services. If AI can flatten the skill floor so that anyone from anywhere in the world can produce 80% of the output of a US or European skilled worker at a fraction of the cost, what do you think happens? We're doing to US white collar work what offshoring did to manufacturing, but it'll be faster and to the only healthy cohort of economic actors in the US.
AI does not control the inputs of lumber or vegetables.
> We will need good tools to distribute the gains.
There is enormous handwaving happening here. Tools built by whom? The US can hardly pass a budget now, and its dominant political movement is allergic to questions of wealth redistribution. And as I already mentioned, the wealthy class in the US is clearly openly contemptuous of the idea that they owe anything to the broader population.
No, I am assuming the opposite. I agree: We do need political intervention.
Like I totally realize we're agreed in some sense, but some form of socialism now in the US seems politically untenable, and as soon as AI actually starts making service labor obsolete, we lose our leverage. How do we do something about it?
The leverage will simply come from existing and being in the same group as roughly ~everyone on the planet.
Mass economic displacement often doesn't produce solidarity, it produces fragmentation, scapegoating, and strongmen. People won't agree on why things are bad.
And the state is way more sophisticated than during the labor movements of the last century or two. If it is aligned with the elites and the masses have no leverage, it has numerous tools for massive surveillance, police and military control, and propaganda that will only get more effective through AI. They might not even need the extreme levers, mass confusion alone might be enough.
There's that old joke: "I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.
"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
so you become target practice