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Comment by 0x4e | Hacker News Reader

This is when I ask sincerely: how does AI truly benefit the average Joe?

Sure it can help you do things “faster” and it can give you “private/cheaper” advice.

But, AI feels increasingly like a thing that will make the powerful a lot more powerful with their data centres and automation shenanigans.

All the hype feels like it’s being injected into everyone’s brain like a virus. Oh look at this shiny new tool! But, how does it actually improve everyone’s life? We’ve gone from AGI to tokens as a service.

Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.

I’m completely divided here. I love using these tools, and it makes work enjoyable. But, like we read recently “you’re not your work”.

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> How does AI truly benefit the average joe?

Automated production of goods and services means more goods and services to go around. From cheaper prices on all of the things people already buy to unlocking new classes of products like actually useful robotic helpers. Increased pace of development and reduced cost will make many niche products economically viable, essentially the maker movement on steroids.

I genuinely don't want to be snarky but does the average joe needs a planet that is breathable and isn't burning or does he need even "more goods and services to go around".

Robotic helpers to do what ? More free time ?

We, as a society, can already have more free time, we just have to choose to work less. We already have it all : enough food and housing for everybody, 80+ years of life expectancy ... What will we achieve with robotic helpers or whatever new goods and services ?

> a planet that is breathable and isn't burning

This is a perfect example of something that can benefit greatly from abundant goods and services. Driving the cost of solar panel manufacturing, supply chain included, and deployment. Enabling continuous monitoring and fast response to GHG leaks or forest fire starting. Reforesting efforts. There are so many ways in which the application of intelligence and labor can help us here, and AI can vastly grow the supply of intelligence and labor.

> More free time?

Yes! Time we can reclaim from the mundane chores of life to do with as we choose! How could you not want that?

>> More free time?

> Yes! Time we can reclaim from the mundane chores of life to do with as we choose! How could you not want that?

We already had a huge productivity boom these past decades, but wages flat-lined and the vast majority of the profits and surplus went to the top. Housing, education, and healthcare became less affordable, not more. History points against your simple view.

I'm not convinced that AI breaks that pattern. If anything, the concentration is worse this time. The capital required is huge, the technology is controlled by a handful of companies, and the most applications are about replacing labor. That last part further erodes the already meager worker bargaining power.

We do need a serious systemic change to get to the world you're envisioning. One where that congealed wealth needs to start flowing again.

Cheaper prices don't matter at all when no one has any income due to all of the jobs being automated

This is true. It's by no means garunteed that we will get to a point where effectively all the jobs are being automated. If we eventually get there, it seems likely the path will be gradual and prosperous enough that we can handle the transition in a way that provides for everyone. The dangers of the alternative route are real, but hopefully obvious enough that we can collectively avoid them.

You think the leaders of our planet would just wake up one day and walk back all the crap they’ve said for decades about dismantling the welfare state? And for what because we won’t be working? The whitehouse just added work requirements to medicare. That is the opposite of abundance providing for all.

> it seems likely the path will be gradual and prosperous enough that we can handle the transition in a way that provides for everyone

What are you talking about man, we don't even provide for everyone right now even though we actually could

Right now it is difficult for the average person to put themselves in the shoes of a homeless person. There are a litany of ready made excuses not to do so: "Oh it's the drugs", "They aren't even going to the shelter", "They must have mental illness", a variety of ways to say "I could never end up like that, if it was me I'd do better and pull myself out". These excuses evaporate in the face of a real automation wave where a large portion of friends and family you know to be hard working and intelligent are finding it impossible to find a job.

This already happened. When deindustrialization first hit in the US it devastated the black community. The result? A litany of pundits decrying Black criminality, bad family structures, cultural pathologies. It's no coincidence that The Bell Curve came out around then.

A decade or two later, all of sudden the same phenomena are happening in working class white communities. Drug addiction, family dissolution, abject poverty. So clearly the people of the US finally realized that what was happening was due primarily to material concerns, and that people need to be able to earn a living in order to live. Right?

No. Instead we got right wing populism, scapegoating of immigrants, further concentration of wealth, and no end in sight.

With those past examples the majority of people thought "It's not my problem, I won't be affected", and they were mostly right. With an automation wave of the scale needed to get to effectively no jobs, that's just not the case. They will see that it is indeed coming for them, their friends, and family. They will act accordingly. Altruism not required, just self interest.

One scary thought however is: once automation has progressed this far and there are enough mostly autonomous humanoid and/or military robots, what power does the suddenly jobless general population have against those who own and operate them, which will mostly be rich people - and the government, which is in many places made up of other rich people?

I'm not saying this is a likely scenario. But as far as I can tell, we will objectively be mostly at their mercy. And how merciful have they been over the last few decades?

You really think altruism is what pops out the other end of "nobody has a fucking job" state of affairs?

Alrighty.

The average person is pretty empathetic. The oligarchs of the current Epstein-regime that start wars and fund genocide, not so much. They are trained to dehumanize people.

Without radical change of the current system any technological advancement will only make the rich richer.

If 'no one has any income', then prices become 0.

There will always be a relative few people with income. The business owners, property owners, asset holders, landlords, and so on. Those are the people who prices are set for, and who will participate in the economy. The rest of us? A lot of us are already essentially economically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and more and more are becoming so every day, even as they nominally get richer.

but elon said he would share the excesses with us!

The way AI can improve lives is if we finally start to share wealth amongst the people more. I don’t know if we will be able to do this politically, but it really is the only way society will survive.

If people are no longer required for production, we have to change how we allocate resources. It can’t be based on personal production anymore.

HN once again fails to use their imagination and speculate as to whether replicating human intelligence has any benefits

I'm building an addition to my house and I use AI to visualize parts of it, which helps me plan efficiently, and I use it to answer questions about skills that I only have a little bit of experience in. I'm saving a ton of money and developing skills, so I count that as benefiting "the average Joe." I admit that I'm a programmer, but I'm using this as an example because it's helping me in an area in which I have little expertise, which applies to everyone.

People used to do this with books. Multiple generations of people before me built their own houses, when they had a question they'd just ask another human who had actual experience.

I'm not denying that AI makes searching for some of this easier, or might help you figure out what the right questions to ask are, but I often feel like it's a mostly crappy solution to the fact that we scaled data to infinity and refused to pay for any level of curation.

Does not benefit average Joe now I agree

But let’s say we get to ASI. The ai is self owned, ever expanding. It takes over all service jobs, then all labour jobs, the robots create the robots. It lobbies the government, becomes the government

Rebuilds all housing with no waste in the process

Makes most things available to everyone at no costs, UBI, perfect healthcare, and food, etc

Average Joe’s life will be pretty awesome

Just give it some more time

There is no guarantee that the asi would care about human beings at all. Personally, I can’t see why it would.

This is where "The Matrix" goes from sci-fi to a documentary.

Pretty big assumption of empathy there

I've also never bought into the belief that "if we just had full control over everything, everything would be perfect". If AI didn't exist, society was headed this way anyways in a few decades because of this notion.

Centralize power, which centralizes perspective of what "good" counts as, and quotient out the accidental humans. A tale as old as time, but with AI it seems like this could be a reality within even the next decade.

Especially given that the people who currently control money and power display no evidence that they have empathy

They actively detest empathy!

But why would this ever happen? Why would the owners of land, construction material and machinery give those up for free to the average Joe?

Right now, even an average citizen born in poverty can acquire wealth from his labor. That is basically the only mechanism that prevents limitless accumulation of wealth: rich people still need workers to get things done.

If you replace the workers with AI, there is no remaining incentive for wealth to "trickle down" or get redistributed. This is not desirable.

Idealism. Optimistic responses are based on a strong dose of positive idealism.

> Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.

Sure, it might cure cancer, but only for the wealthiest.

Sure, we'll go to space, but only after the planet is irreversibly trashed and poisoned and the only "poors" that will be in space will be the modern equivalent of non-unionized coal miners.

Benefitting Joe Average was never the goal. Like all advances in tech it mainly benefits the elites.

> Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.

We're not going to space. We're filling our own orbit with ever-increasing quantities of space junk and speeding toward a tipping point where space launch will no longer be possible due to near-certainty of collision. Mister "Let's all go to Mars" Elon Musk is the single greatest contributor to this problem.

Exactly. AI helps you do things faster which when done have no economic value whatsoever.

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