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Comment by bulletsvshumans | Hacker News Reader

How about a tax on AI that goes towards unemployment benefits of some kind?

I don't understand why AI eliminating jobs is considered a problem. If any job can be done by a computer program it simply means that humanity has outgrown this kind of work and that nobody should do that mindnumbing crap anymore. Let's forget that the word "computer" used to mean "guy who sits in an office of an accounting firm, and adds numbers all day long".

That's fantastic, as long as there are alternative jobs for those people to go to that they can feasibly perform. This has historically been the case with technology replacing work, but it's not clear whether it's the case this time.

If there's no (or insufficient) jobs for people to go to, in a society that predicates your ability to live a pleasant life on having one, you have a huge social problem. Our current system is not set up to cope with 40% of the population being out of work.

Because with our current economic model, all the benefits will go to the people supplying the capital to develop and deploy the AI.

In the long term, we may discover more sophisticated AI has different goals and priorities than us, and we won't be able to control it or turn it off.

I agree. In fact, this is a recurrent piece of criticism that also appeared on an MIT Tech review, which I commented here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866253

Because there are too many people and people need to feed themselves and their families.

For example, consider if your job was made obsolete in 20-30 years. That there was no longer a need to program or manage computers any longer. All of a sudden all of this knowledge in your head is now basically useless and you have not likely developed any other meaningful skillset.

What do you do and what does society do for you?

THAT is why eliminating jobs is a problem. At some point the jobs simply aren't replaced by other things, or the other things are menial tasks, not meaningful tasks. If you eliminate enough jobs there isn't enough money to keep the consumer based economy afloat, and then the companies that own the robots go out of business because people who buy their products no longer have jobs or money to afford their product.

There are no clear solutions to this problem either.

But what is "AI"? Once something in AI gains traction, it quickly becomes part of the standard computer-science-toolkit.

For instance, programmatically tuning some variables can be considered a standard task, either with some bruteforce or a small search between the possible combinations. This was earlier considered AI, but is now a common approach. AI now would probably be to do more advanced problems with genetic algorithms or similar. But where to draw the line?

A nice and steep tax on capital gains would do fine. As technology progresses and machines contribute more and more value the income they generate returns to those that financed them.

I think, the perceived danger here is more the lack of social acceptance of unemployed people. I think however, that if a large part or even a majority of the population is unemployable it will necessarily lead to social acceptance. People will simply have a lot of leisure time.

It's more than that. You hit on it in the last part of your comment. This is about having tons of leisure life. How is it parceled out? How do people stay engaged in life and happy?

Remember, there are already lots of rich people who have as much leisure life as they want. And it's not a good thing for many of them. It's like a study posted on HN said a while back: you can have a meaningful life, or your can have a happy life. They are not the same thing. The more people that have meaningful lives, whether sweeping the streets, inventing new things, or writing novels? The better we all are. The more people choosing simply to be happy? Society will stagnate and die.

So this isn't some case of somebody telling somebody else what to do. Assuming we are entering the age of "robots do everything", our species has a crisis of meaning at hand.

But even in leisure time there are things to achieve, for example learning new skills, exercising and gaining reputation in virtual worlds. I think the concept of "meaning in life" is more flexible than often assumed.

It is not just social acceptance, though. It is also the problem that one's livelihood is closely tied to one's employment.

With both these things, the question is how the social acceptance and the detachment of livelihood from employment comes about. Will it require revolutions and civil war with accompanying bloodshed when the downtrodden unemployed rise up? Or will we be collectively smart enough to reform our economic systems before the rift through society becomes too deep?

Maybe I'm thinking in too simple terms, but I can't imagine that being a major problem because it will affect people from all classes in the same way and the change will probably be fairly quick (once the technology is available, everyone will want it immediately to remain competitive). Intelligence is distributed like a Gauss bell, so it will equally hit lower, upper and middle class, making the necessity for a basic income very quickly obvious. I don't think the lower class will be excluded from such a social system.

I personally think the bigger risks are AIs themselves, used as weapons or when they go out of control.

"it will affect people from all classes in the same way"

No. Given a roughly capitalist system as we have today, the vast majority of the economic benefits of AI is captured by "capital"[1]. People from a sufficiently rich and powerful background will not suffer like those who do not have any capital to speak of. Only those without capital need a basic income.

[1] Which is a problematic term, hence the quotation marks.

I mean that more in personal terms ("look, this machine is more skillful/faster/smarter than you") than in economical terms. There will be a huge impact on the service sector, so upper and middle class will be able to personally relate to the lower class and show empathy. I think the middle class will mainly promote the changes.

It will be difficult for a malnourished and disarmed majority, with little information about the structure of power, to raise against an AI army.

And until the AI army is ready, the AI capitalists can finance an elite of soldiers to keep the hungry masses at bay.

Or, more people (all those becoming unemployed because of advances in AI) will chase the little jobs remaining (those not taken over by AI), creating three classes:

A) the 1%: capitalists financing (and controlling) AI, will get phenomenal rewards once AI has taken over production of basic utilities, food, water distribution. Only political control will keep AI monopolies from appearing.

B) the 49.5%: those lucky enough to get a job in one of the areas not taken over by AI. They will have to be extremely competent, and lower their salary: they are competing in a very limited and not necessarily very complicated skill-sets (those skill-sets not taken over by AI) with 99% of the human population

C) the other 49.5%: those who are not making the cut to get a job.

(the sizes of the groups B & C obviously depend on the number of available jobs)

People will be able to move from B to C, but never to A (since building an AI empire from scratch is impossible, specially when capital has become extremely concentrated)

People in B are barely making ends meet, and people in C are in continuous existential danger. Political engagement drops to a minimum. Capitalists collude to create monopolies, raise prices and basically destroy democracy. The human race splits in two distinct classes, and the lower class is basically enslaved.

As I wrote below, I think that increasing machine intelligence will hit all classes both on in personal and economic terms. As soon as robots outperform many people in currently middle to upper middle class service sector, enough people will be affected to make something like a basic income a necessity.

Money is not the only problem. Unemployment leads to loneliness, demotivation, social stigma. This is not only caused by social pressure to have a job. Even rich people work. We need some form of Minimal Activity.

The letter will have no effect. Similarly, you can sing a letter to stop drugs.

In a world where unemployment was more pervasive and expected it likely wouldn't be that way.

Rich people also get lonely.

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