Who gives a fuck if some techno barons can deploy novel software at the drop of a hat if it means I lose my career in an environment without social safety nets.
It’s not progress from my perspective when my life quality regresses.
AI is the ultimate social safety net, if you'll just get out of the way of the people weaving it.
I see company doing layoffs left and right because they can do the same or more with less employees. I’m not seeing any companies feverishly hiring engineers because the productivity per hour of labor is higher.
There is also no guarantee that AI will lead to any social safety net, they are orthogonal concepts.
The only thing that would lead to a social safety net is political will and currently all the political will behind the technology firms building AI appears to be firmly behind dismantling democracy and becoming oligarchical leaders of their little fiefdoms while the rest of us can get fucked.
Better if you don't need saving at all, because you've been empowered to help yourself at your job. Ultimately the goal is to free you entirely from dependence on a day-to-day occupation.
You may have noticed that no one else is even trying to help.
Don’t hint at it. Lay out the mechanics of how you think AI is going to become a safety net for the average person.
Mechanically how is AI going to lead to a social safety net? You can’t just handwave the productivity increases when they are all owned by a handful of concentrated wealth
After this incarnation of the Industrial Revolution, those white-collar jobs will be mostly gone, and nothing will replace them. I personally don't think CEOs and politicians will end up being any more immune than junior programmers. New forms of organization will have to emerge on both the labor and management sides. (Democracy at the nation-state level is pretty much toast anyway, so something else is going to have to replace it, AI or no AI.)
Blue-collar labor will eventually be subsumed by robotics, but that will take longer. Things like UBI will make more sense in this environment than they do now, and I think that'll be a big part of it. Not to say that all gains will be equally distributed, or that they should be, but I don't things can get much worse than where they are headed today with regard to the tilted economic playing field.
The worst case scenario would indeed be if all the gains get concentrated and centralized, as the major AI labs seem to want, but I don't think it'll work out that way.
Youve laid out an idealistic view of how the world will work. You have not laid out how the transition between the current world where wealth is being concentrated somehow turns into UBI.
Even this sentence
> I personally don't think CEOs and politicians will end up being any more immune than junior programmers.
Implies that you think the capitalists who own these systems are going to be in charge since CEOs work for their boards and politicians largely follow their donors.
Again, lay out exactly how you think we move from our current system to UBI via AI technology.
>but I don't think it'll work out that way.
Is not you laying out how you think it will work, but a dogmatic religious belief with no evidence or logic behind it.
edit: Im sorry, I glossed over this sentence.
> Democracy at the nation-state level is pretty much toast anyway...
Are you a rationalist, e/acc, or someone related to TESCREAL, or especially anything touching on Curtis Yarvin? If so no need to answer, I think you guys are in a cult with the modern equivalent of Dianetics, so we are never going to see eye to eye.
Nor have you laid out how traditional political and social structures are going to save your job (or anyone else's) in the long run. You say you're "Angry and opinionated." We've seen the anger part, so let's hear some opinions.
Are you a rationalist, e/acc, or someone related to TESCREAL, or especially anything touching on Curtis Yarvin? If so no need to answer, I think you guys are in a cult with the modern equivalent of Dianetics, so we are never going to see eye to eye.
I'm e/acc-curious, you could say. Lots of philosophical overlap but I'm not much of a joiner. Not sure who the rationalists or TESCREAL are.
I know who Yarvin is, though, and would generally take the opposite side of any argument with him. If there's a "cult" in play here, it's the voters who were duped into electing and then re-electing Trump. Democracy simply cannot survive if it continues to grant stupid people the same political power as smart people. The stupid people will be herded to the polls by unethical smart people like Yarvin, using the power of mass media and social media as we've seen.
Meanwhile, the remaining smart people get along together like cats in a sack, ensuring they have only sporadic political influence that is bound to diminish further over time.
At the same time, democracy cannot retain the support of the people if it disenfranchises voters on grounds of education or intelligence. That leaves one obvious conclusion: that it won't survive. How AI will get us past that, I have no idea. But if you want to predict the future you're going to have to account for both the rise of AI and the fall of democracy.
I never stated that they would. That’s an opinion you manifested from thin air because I stated that I don’t think AI is going to lead to a social safety net on its own.
I think things are generally going to get worse for the average person with AI as all the benefits accumulate at the top.
Assuming the rise of AI and the fall of democracy doesn’t have a default mode of social safety nets, and we’re seeing leadership increasingly divorced from the will of the people already.
For reference on TESCREAL