Well here’s a story written in 2003 about exactly that, that I find myself thinking about more and more often
Look up crisis theory, the rate of profit tends to fall in capitalist systems. Because each company is driven by competitive self-interest, it is incapable of acting for the good of the whole. You simply cannot devote resources to anything but trying to out-compete your rivals and in doing so the profit for everyone tends lower and lower until you have a crisis.
Which is why you place hards limits on capitalism with a lotmof oversight like in the north European countries. It can be done right ifnits done right. That is, of you wa to do it right. If you simply want to say “fuck it, I want to get rich” then you go for the no limits no safe wors style that the US is practicing.
My base rule is that if it’s needed or used by a majority of people, then the government should have it (probably exclusively too). Like hospitals, schools, infrastructure like roads and trains, electric grid, eventually the internet.
Now, shops and food isn’t in there, probably because we shop wildly differentt I guess, but some base could be handled by rhe government (which is usually the case, like minimum rights to food etc).
1024: This new farming technology means one person can feed 1000 people! What are the other 999 people supposed to do? Are the lords just going to conscript all us serfs and have us fight for their entertainment?
That’s pretty much what happened tho
That’s the cool part, you won’t. If everything crucial is automated, people can drive things forward for passion rather than for money. Of course, this would effectively collapse capitalism, which won’t happen painlessly.
Ohhh, oh. So you didn’t see that episode of black mirror yet?
It’s a good one.
Look at empires of the past.
Things were so bad in Dickens’ London that living in sewers to live off whatever scraps you could find was an actual occupation.
Wealth creates its own reality.
In theory, UBI.
In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.
If AI is really as good as its evangelists claim, and the technology ceiling will rise enough. IMHO, even the LLM technologies are getting exhausted, so it’s not just a training data problem, of which these AI evangelists littered the internet with, so they will have a very hard time going forward.
There is zero chance any UBI model would keep the economy going in a mass layoff scenario UBI may keep people alive for a short while (few years) getting the basics needs but that’s as far as it would go.
In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.
This is likely the mildest of outcomes
If AI is really as good as its evangelists claim, and the technology ceiling will rise enough. IMHO, even the LLM technologies are getting exhausted, so it’s not just a training data problem, of which these AI evangelists littered the internet with, so they will have a very hard time going forward.
100% agreed. AI evangelists overhyped “AI” to get companies to commit more money than it’s worth through FOMO. Exact same way CVS lost its panties to Elizabeth Holmes
What gives you such confidce it will fail if I may ask?
All the experts laughing at the answers it couldn’t plagiarize from Reddit.
I’ve seen it mtiple.times before, and nothing in this round looks any different
“Trust me bro”?
I see three possibilities if AI is able to eliminate a significant portion of jobs:
- Universal basic income, that pays out based on how productive the provider side was per person. Some portion of wealth is continually transferred to the owners.
- Neofeudalism, where the owners at the time of transition end up owning everything and allow people to live or not live on their land at their whim. Then they can use them for labour where needed or entertainment otherwise. Some benevolent feudal lords might generally let people live how they want, though there will always be a fear of a revolution so other more authoritarian lords might sabotage or directly war with them.
- Large portions of the population are left SOL to die or do whatever while the economy doesn’t care for them. Would probably get pretty violent since people don’t generally just go off to die of starvation quietly. The main question for me is if the violence would start when the starving masses have had enough of it or earlier by those who see that coming.
I’m guessing reality will have some combination of each of those.
If ONLY some smart fella had pushed a theory about collective ownership of the means of production or something
That man: Abraham Lincoln.
-Wayne Gretzky
In the USA, it would be option 3 all the way. We would see three classes: Mega Rich, the warfighters of the mega rich, and then the rest of us left to starve.
They wouldn’t just pull the plug and leave us to our own devices, they would actively destroy farming equipment and industry to make sure life is awful
I’m not even sure it will be 3 classes because having a soldier class risks them deciding to just take over. This is one of the real dangers of AI, they won’t have any issue going into an area and killing everything that moves there until they are given an encrypted kill command. Or maybe the rich will even come in with an EMP (further destroying what infrastructure is left) and act like they are the heroes while secretly being the ones who give the orders to reduce the numbers in the first place.
Worst part is the tech for that already exists. The complicated kill bot AI is getting it to discriminate and selectively kill. I remember seeing a video of an automated paintball turret that could hit a moving basketball with full precision 20 years ago. Not only that, it was made by a teenager (or team of teenagers).
How is everyone going to be fired by AI? First define AI, because what we have now is a bunch of LLMs.
In the end, it’s more practical to have both working in tandem. You have a person who has common sense guiding and an AI tool who assists the person in doing the work.
At worst, people would have to up skill/re skill to have working experience with AI tools.
But people are not gonna stop working. New jobs will be created and some old jobs will disappear, as it has been the case
This isn’t any different from any other automation , so far. Every time there is a new level of automation, someone asks this question. Yes there can be disruption, even a generation or two lost at the level of “Industrial Revolution”, but so far it’s always come back with more jobs, more opportunity.
So what’s different this time? Do you thinks it’s good enough to replace thinking? That was my fear when it looked like self-driving was coming fast, but that fizzled out, and I have Vern blower expectations for this round of generative ai. Sure, it might be transformative to some roles and destructive to the remains of journalism but I don’t see it taking many actual jobs
We’re arguably already in this situation with outsourcing, smart automation, service industries, where there seem to be fewer “middle” jobs. While some of us can be the higher skilled new jobs, way too many new jobs are just not
We got this guy Not Sure…
As stated, the companies that push AI aren’t concerned with the long-term consequences. But if you want to know how the individuals who run those companies personally feel, do a search for billionaire doomsday preppers.
TL;DR: They’ve got a vision for the future. We’re not in it.
All kinds of people fatasize about the end of times. From the losely asociated groups of rednecks, to the religious cults. The rich just has a better budget for their hobbies, and their toys are more visible. Which, paradoxicaly, disqualifies them from the prepping game.
Number one rule about the secret bunker is not telling anyone about the secret bunker.
rednecks, to the religious cults
I see your point, but usually those groups don’t have the ability to accelerate the arrival of the end times, whereas the billionaires might.
The rich. Companies will stop targeting products to wider and wider swathes of people, just like nobody caters to the homeless now.
This doesn’t sound sustainable at all. A billionaire only needs so much gasoline, food, medicine, TVs…
Collapse of entire industries will happen way before we even get a chance to see industries reinvent themselves to cater to billionaires. Don’t believe me? Just look at what happened to the economy during the pandemic.
Yeah of course industries will collapse. 100 car factories will close, 5 superyacht factories will open, tying up the same amount of productivity. Owned by the same guy.
There will be tons of spacecraft launchpads, private jet hangars, etc.
And wars of course.
Ever heard of the everlasting sustainable war? https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Sustainable_War
If robots generate all of productivity and human labor is no longer needed, the economy would not be able to sustain itself. Instead, in trying to cope with the unneeded human labor and to ensure continued productivity, the only area where productivity would be ensured is by means of war using human resources, namely destroying things in order to be rebuild, thus generating a sustaining feedback loop. The rich will get richer and everyone else will only be employed as soldiers in a continuing war economy.
Even though this is a sci-fi concept, i believe it’s not a stretch to say we are headed to this direction.
We’re already there, in a sort of way. Products aren’t built to last, aren’t built to be repaired. Buy a new phone, computer, washing machine, every year! You wouldn’t want the social embarrassment of not having the latest gadgets! And if that fails, we’ll just release a patch that prevents the irreplaceable battery from lasting a full day.
Plus after computers made it so one person could do the job of 100, entire new industries popped up to do meaningless jobs shuffling digital money around. Some of the most comfortably-paying upper-working-class jobs are entirely pointless. But it keeps educated people from questioning the system. As long as they get a cushy paycheck twice a month they’ll happily make another B2B web 3.0 cloud-based KPI tracking analytics platform and not question if their job is meaningful.
Well I mean Orwell hit on the same concept with 1985, with the major powers just rotating who was blowing up who at any given time in order to keep the proles in line.
You accidentally added a year. The book is 1984.
I believe the full title of the book he was referring to is 1985: The Revenge.
Then we had 1986: Commando
Then came 1987 and 1988: 1987 II Electric Boogaloo
Someone always has the money. That’s who will be buying things.
