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Comment by King-Aaron | Hacker News Reader

This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for! The utopia where machines do all our work and we receive universal basic income to enjoy our freedoms.

Taking away work was exactly the premise it was sold under.

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AI being able to work for us does not mean that AI reduces employment. Every form of automation does work for us. But there is no limit to how much work can be done. And there are things that humans uniquely do that AI will never be able to do because we will never want to create AI as dangerous as human intelligence, but those same traits that make human intelligence dangerous also provide it with unique value in many domains.

The promise is that it'll make producing goods and services more efficient, like just about every other invention in human history. As always, that does put some people out of work in the short term, but it doesn't increase unemployment over the long term, and it makes all of society richer, not just the few who invented it.

> we receive universal basic income

Well, this part ain't coming without a revolution.

You need to end scarcity to end money. That means dilithium crystals, replicators and virtually infinite energy.

Real basic income will be a lot less like Star Trek and a lot more like The Expanse.

Also, revolutions are rarely ever started by the lower class. They're always started by the middle tier of society, enraging those helpful idiots lower than them to attack those above them. They end up with many dead and many suffering. Those who cry out for revolution have never seen the horrors of war.

> “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. … You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! … War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”

-William T. Sherman

> You need to end scarcity to end money. That means dilithium crystals, replicators and virtually infinite energy.

That will never happen and capitalism is pretty creative in creating artificial scarcities.

You are far too naive if you think there is a non-bloody way to basically remove the wall between the classes, and that those in power will not try to do everything they can to keep their wealth and "higher lifestyle".

The evidence I've seen suggests that the most common source of scarcity is restrictions on trade, like taxation.

"What if we had taxed the internet?

"What was once framed as a trivial tax—half a cent to download a photo, or a cent to send 100 emails—would now cost the average American household an estimated $784,000 per year."

Incredible stats from @JaredWalczak"

https://x.com/senatorshoshana/status/2095980044657021352?s=2...

>This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for! The utopia where machines do all our work and we receive universal basic income to enjoy our freedoms.

No one promised any utopia of any sort. The only promise was that AI would put people out of work. The rest is just some naive Star Trek bullshit that was never on the table.

And people fattened up these companies with their own money :DDD. And now all they do is pouring excrement on the populace.

I can tell you that almost every single enthusiastic proponent of the technology I've ever spoken to has pretty much guaranteed this is where it takes us... But correct, its naïve as hell.

Sam Altman has been promising utopia (and talking about UBI) ever since he's been involved with OpenAI.

> This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for!

Pretty sure all it's being promoted for is that it will make ~10 people richer than any human being in history.

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