This is just so negative. How will it destroy your life?
There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
Based on the past 40 years track record it seems unlikely that we will see any form of redistribution before it is existential.
That is definitely grounds for being pessimistic.
Every tech gets exploited to make some richer folks more rich. Nothing new. Since the rich-ladder *is* the power-ladder under cap'ism.
In the west "we" forgot how unions and strong labor parties gave us weekends, sick leave, holidays, etc. Now we pay the price.
Unions have power for one reason alone: the powerful need to keep the labour force on-board.
When the powerful do not need to care about labour, this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
It has also been protecting politics from capital in various ways; public funding of political parties, strict bans on various forms of political adverts, forced disclosure laws, essentially forcing capital into a single visible chair (NHO), etc.
As I understand it, that fund's returns are about 17%-ish of government spending. This is not sufficient for the powerful to no longer need to care about labour.
I think Saudi Arabia is 77%-ish of government income from oil?
Table 1: https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2008/170/arti...
(I'm saying government spending here rather than GDP because the point is "the powerful" not "the country").
A useful question for this is "on average, how long will a nation remain like Norway, and not elect someone that undermines democracy?"; this is… also complicated. UK elected Thatcher for various reasons, but it would be fair to say these included "removing power from the Trade Unions", yet the UK now has a politically untouchable "triple lock" on pensions that it can't really afford. It's a democracy, "the powerful" are the voters, pensioners vote more than the rest. A nation whose UBI is done by setting the state pension age to birth and keeps the voting age low may manage this… or some upcoming politician may figure out how to use Grok to win an election like social media became influential last decade (they're clearly already trying), and then we have to deal with the mess that this produces.
I think of it in roughly 3 eras:
pre industrialization, individual labor contribution had quite a lot of power.
Industrialization, labor sees commoditization and unions make sure that power is kept across individual workers.
Post industrialization (ground zero was like GFC, being accelerated by AI). We need to figure out new structures than labor to distribute resources and power - and that is going to hurt.
Pre-industrialisation, most labour was the peasantry, whose main contribution was growing enough crops to keep themselves healthy enough to be a useful bunch of conscripts.
Industrialisation created the conditions where labour became important, because the workers were no longer bound to an employer so if they all walked out and told their friends you were a bad boss, your expensive capital (machinery) went idle.
The third industrial revolution, AKA the Information Age, was when it (gradually, piece-by-piece) started to become possible to do "lights-out manufacturing" or "dark factories", so-named because you (sometimes) don't need lights if you have no human workers. This period also came with globalisation and offshoring, which muddied the waters somewhat.
When some task can be fully automated, the labour working on that task loses its power with the management, e.g. UK print workers lost their relevance to the creation of newspapers in the UK with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute
Lights-out manufacturing is the ultimate form of this, where all the humans are redundant.
Literally every income decile is getting richer. Don't tell me you got fooled by that fake graph showing productivity/income disconnect?
Don't tell me you have been fooled by the Chicago school of economics that has told you that relative wealth is indifferent as long as you can get a cheaper television.
If you think about it, it is clear that what you propose is not sustainable as there is a forced constant push on the spending distribution.
It will fail.
For what exactly, for growth? https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8... here
> large growth but largest in top decile vs no growth, the first one is absolutely 1000x times better
By taking away my ability to earn a living.
> There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
What great things and why would I get access to those things?
But this is an economy / capitalism problem, not an AI problem? AI isn't at fault that you can't get a job, your boss is for replacing you with AI.
That's like saying we should ban cars because millions of people who would upkeep horses for others to use just lost their jobs.
You're essentially making your life purposely harder because you want uninterrupted money. Perhaps look at the issues of the system that does this?
> What great things...
Aside from the medical AI stuff (detecting breast cancer, etc) that's mostly covered, AI can be helpful if you have to do a boring task that you don't want to do yourself. This is pretty much what every technology does - your phone is created so you don't have to run home and use the landline to make a phone call - it's making an already existing task easier.
>...and why would I get access to those things?
Why not? Seriously, why not? It's a bit like asking why should I get access to a car instead of keeping my horse around. You can keep your horse or car. Nobody's pressuring you to replace your horse with a car.
There are externalities. In my experience it was way easier to call people in the 90s. People answered and if not their faimily members did.
It was impossible to ghost phone calls until the early 2000s with presentation screens.
Nowadays people hardly answer unknown numbers or might ignore inconvinient calls.
> Nowadays people hardly answer unknown numbers or might ignore inconvinient calls.
So your phone does make calls and it is useful but you don't want to use it nowadays NOT because the technology is useless but because of phone spammers and because phones may have potentially made it easier for phone spammers to exist?
Which, once again, is the exact point I raised with AI. You don't like it NOT because the technology is trash - but because the current capitalist system makes businesses profit less when they have to pay you, so they work hard to use technology to replace you in hopes of paying less.
Which is why I say, this is less an AI problem and more a capitalist one. If there was no benefit to replacing people with technology then people would not be replaced. But currently the current system tries to give you benefits for not having to pay people.
So even if we all fight AI and get it banned it won't solve the underlying problem which will mean that it will repeat with a different thing.
1. tools like this are going to be exploited by corporations to extract money from people.
2. tools like this will provide great benefits for the average person.
We are currently exploited by corporations, arguably more than in the past, and yet we have the highest standard of living in history. In large part due to technological progress.
https://www.iwm.at/publication/iwmpost-article/tech-bros-and...
Caveat: Only if it also produces shareholder value
for me?
if it will stay on track for few more months or years, it will be able to do my work and I will have serious trouble to be employed
"destroy your life" may be overstating things but it is definitely not a welcome change
AI is automating a lot of things at the same time. Not evenly, there are faster- and slower-automated things. But this does suggest that instead of e.g. society as a whole doing better from all the fabric coming out of the power looms, by a large enough margin to stomp on the weavers who lost their profession, that we may face something more like the entire initial economic displacement from the first industrial revolution (including the period where weavers were replaced), everything from farms finding they no longer needed so many hands through the luddites getting the death penalty to (roughly) the invention of Communism concurrently with the Irish Potato famine, and as part of this those now-bulging cities having to invent new sanitation solutions because their "slop" problem was more literal and gave the population cholera and typhoid.
My expectation a decade ago was that software development would be the last thing to be automated, because we'd need software developers to write AI. Today, while I don't know how far most fields are from automation*, we definitely have AI capable enough at coding to write more AI.
* a decade ago I also thought self-driving cars were basically already sorted; what a pity that the software in the Paint It Black video was not as good as depicted