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.
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.
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.
The hand has been played and trend has been set, I don't see anything coming close to a reversal, short of gereatric nepo babies dying off but their replacements don't look any better..
Hoping for something like that without taking direction action today is naive.
Direct action won't fix shit unless critical mass does it, so also got to spread the word about the fuckening we are enduring, most people are really not aware of the conditions on the ground beyond their personal experiences.
is ironic because that’s exactly how mega corps vote
Peasants (as you said) wouldn’t be able to get their break without
that’s a needed. 100% agree
what about people who are already consuming the bare minimum? What are they supposed to do?
100% agree
100% agree
wrong. That’s a privilege. Privileges can be taken away. Freedom is the ability to retard and expect repercussions or advance humanity in a civilized manner. What you are referring to is anarchy, and anarchy doesn’t have to be bad. It puts the power in the individual with no government influence. However anarchy relies strictly on human nature and dependency
Peasants (as you said) wouldn't be able to get their break without
How are they getting a break now?
As for 7, we are talking direct action? i am not following this response.
what about people who are already consuming the bare minimum? What are they supposed to do?
there is always room to improve consumption patterns... low hanging fruit is high processed foods. this can be driven two zero without any serious consequences. that's more of my point here.
You can't stop eating tho, no doubt, but you can chose what you eat.
Yeah, but we’re talking about the possibility of a utopian society. It’s completely theoretical at this point. You are talking about the logical here and now. What do you want for people in the future?
i think we disconnected somewhere. but yeah the idea of direct action is to leader by example until critical mass is hit which would finally yield better QoL
just got to make sure direct action is actually fighting the right enemy, currently working people are fighting each other mostly.
Hey, that’s a reasonable thing to hope. The flip side, of course, is that I’m hoping I don’t have to live through Star Trek’s idea of how the 21st century goes. They definitely got all of the details wrong, but I’m afraid the vibes are matching a little too well.
I think it’s as relistic a future as the complete destruction of mankind, but your point of view makes life a lot more enjoyable. Here’s a nice quote to back it up:
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future” - Victor Hugo
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
Well, in the purely fictional hypothetical that an LLM could advance to the point of reliably replacing humans without a stark loss of quality and marginal cost-benefit before legislations step in to make the cost of increased power consumption and environmental damage reflect on what these companies pay in:
Their will be an owners class who have stake or claim over facilities and technology to utilize the AI, and then there will be an everybody else who have to fight tooth and nail politically for basic human rights as well as shelter and food. Just the current system but whether it’s that much worse or better depends on how well our democracies function.
An llm will never be able to do this. Unfortunately the word AI has been hijacked by companies and marketeers. Ai now means just about anything really.
They’re actually coming up with new words to describe what AI used to mean such as AGI, which stands for artificial general intelligence.
To elaborate on the premise of this post, The boost that we’re going to get from an actual artificial intelligence one that is perhaps sentient will be so much that the tasks that were once performed Will become so mundane and menial that it will not make any difference who performs those tasks or if they’re even being paid to do so.
In the same sense that the printing press removed the necessity for scribes, at least for the majority. Or the firearm displaced the bow and arrow as the dominant weapon.
Eventually, what general artificial intelligence will give us is a world free of our Faith-Based monetary system currently dominating the world.
In essence, we shouldn’t need money after general artificial intelligence is implemented.
The term AGI has been used since more than 2 decades ago, and AI never specifically implied something with human intelligence (maybe in the 40s-50s when it was just being invented, but not after that). “AI” has always refered to things like Siri and the YouTube algorithm and pathfinding AIs and trackers for anti-air systems and whatever else.
I remember that before I started programming I’d get annoyed at machinery like 3d printers for the “stupid AI” not working. Then I’d probably bang it or something to try to get it to work lol
The meaning of the term “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) has indeed evolved in recent years. Initially, AGI was conceptualized as a form of intelligence that could understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks, much like a human. This notion dates back to the mid-20th century, rooted in foundational neural network algorithms and deliberative reasoning hypotheses from the 1950s and 1960s
In recent times, the definition and understanding of AGI have been influenced by advancements in specialized AI technologies. Modern discussions often revolve around the practicalities and challenges of achieving AGI, with a focus on the limitations of current AI systems, which excel in narrow tasks but struggle with generalizing across different domains. For example, while models like GPT-3 have shown some cross-contextual learning abilities, they still lack the comprehensive reasoning, emotional intelligence, and transparency required for true AGI
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?
Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.
Funny thing is that capitalism accidentaly solves global warming same way as it created it - turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources
The problem is that the previous accumulation of capital has centralized a lot of power in actors who have a financial incentive to stop renewables. If we could hit a big reset on everything then yes, I think renewables would win, but we’re dealing with a lot of very rich, very powerful people who really want us to keep being dependent on them.
Solar power is booming world wide, consistently since many years. At >20% annual expansion rate, the exponential growth will start putting a dent on fossil within few years.
Everywhere except countries that have subsidized non-renewables which means they’ll become dumber and polluted and regress. And these countries (the US, specifically) have nuclear weapons and a lot of authoritative policy power.
They are only slowing us down though. They really cannot stop the change, because solar power is simply cheaper than oil. Once governments stop subsidizing oil, the big oil companies will be done for if they haven’t innovated by than. That is also one of the reasons why they are slowing us down, so they can buy more time to innovate and remain on top with a new, green business model.
I hope all the big oil bosses get locked up for crimes against humanity, but I think they’ll just change their business model into something green and exploit us in some different way.
This is not “capitalism accidentally solves climate change”. This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way. From there, capitalism took over, as intended. For green energy to be be feasible, we needed it to get picked up by the capitalist machine, because the capitalist machine has all the power and infrastructure in place to make it into a succes.
I predict that the same thing will happen with large capacity, small size home batteries once they become economically feasible. They are on the brink of becoming profitable and once they do, they will become a huge success and help reduce energy waste.
Same thing goes for fusion, but we’re a long way off making that economically viable.
This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way
I think this oversimplifies it a lot. There were a lot of different actors involved - I'm sure a lot of development was coming both from the semiconductor industry, and from state funded research, but in the end, the greed machine (aka capitalism) takes care of further researching and scaling it to the global level.
Also it's not like there wasn't any money in that business years ago - even back then solar was commonly used as a remote power source in mobile applications (calculators, camping and so on). Also NASA, but this was purely state funded
Last I heard, there were proposals already put forward that would quintuple the current natural gas supply. Even though it’s more expensive than renewables.
The companies that got natural gas off the ground in the first place might not see a return on that investment for another decade or two. There’s a reason every year demand for natural gas has been going up.
Back around the housing collapse, natural gas was being touted as a “bridge fuel” that could get us away from filthy coal and serve as a temporary energy source until we got renewables up to speed. Funnily enough, what’s been built doesn’t seem like much of a bridge because there’s no plan for ramping down natural gas.
Yup, economics are all about “LiNe mUsT gO uP!!!” It’s infuriating as all hell for people that can actually see further than the tip of their own nose.
The whole increasing concentration of wealth and fall in median quality of life can be traced back to basically each individual of the Owner Class thinking that somebody else will keep the system going by employing people and paying them well enough so that they keep on buying stuff.
The whole think is pretty much a Tragedy Of The Commons as defined in Games Theory, only instead of a shared grazing commons that would be fine if just one person had a few more sheep than they should (but gets overgrazed and then everybody looses if more people have a few more sheep than they should), we have the Economic system.
Historically one of the big reasons for the invariable appearance of some kind of social construct above the individual with the ability to make decisions for the group and force individuals to comply (from the “council of elders” all the way to the modern Democracy) is exactly to stop people from, driven by pure selfishness, “overgraze” in the various “commons” we have and ending up destroying the whole thing for everybody - if you have one or two doing it the “commons” can handle it, but too many and you get a tragedy.
And here we are after 4 decades of Neoliberalism whose entire purpose was to reduce the power of entities making decisions for the good of the group to overseeing the commons and force individuals from overexploiting it, so it’s not at all surprising that we are seeing various common systems starting to collapse due to over-exploitation.
I’m pretty certain that whatever societies will be dominant next are not those which embraced Neoliberalism the most as those will be the ones with the most collapsed systems and that stuff takes a lot of time to recover, plus the very people who overexploited them to collapse will do all they can to avoid having stop what they’ve been doing and that gave them so much personal upside maximization and they’ve basically bought politics in the West, so there is no actual will to do it in the Power Elites (there’s a will to get the upsides of a well functioning society but no will for they themselves to do the concessions needed, only for somebody else to do it, which is exactly the mindset that when not stamped out by some kind of oversight entity causes the problem in the first place).
Some people would, but who cares? Oh no! You mean people are sitting in a home watching TV and being with each other? How incredibly horrible.
I bet people would also be disgusting cretins and go see new places as well! Imagine the vile critters walking through the woods seeing nature without burning vacation days making the rich even richer!
Due some special circunstances a few years ago I was one year without a job and without the need to find a job because I had my finances and laboral future secured. At no point I was without anything to do. I just did a bunch of personal projects that were not driven by money but for my own enjoyment and the need to create some things. Also did a lot of exercise and took on trekking.
I could live all my life like that if I needn’t a job for sustaining myself.
Why would we need anyone to buy things? Remember that money is an abstraction for resources. If you can do everything with AI, then you already have all the resources you need. Whether or not someone else needs what you produce is irrelevant when you already have access to everything you could want.
Yeaaaah, the issue there is that, that is completely incompatible with our current system of capitalism. If we do not take deliberate steps to transform the system, it will collapse.
Instead of collapsing like a phoenix and birthing a new better world, it will cause death, suffering, and turn us into some sort of fucked up techno fuedalism worse than we are now.
I understand the nihilism, but we need to take the broken pieces we have now and reshape them into something better, not throw them out hoping things become better for no reason. They won’t.
There is literally death, suffering, and we’re heading towards some sort of fucked up techno feudalism today. Like we don’t need a revolution for that, that’s the path we’re currently heading towards without one.
Revolution isn’t pretty but just as when we overthrew monarchs, the end result and saving of future lives justifies it.
It’s no less compatible with capitalism than any other economic system. The idea that humans are no longer needed to do any kind of work is an issue the world has never faced before.
They kind of do. (I am so sorry, not trying to be that guy).
Look at HIV. The original strain is horribly deadly, but the strains that have evolved within the last decade are much more tame. It’s because the virus that kills its host doesn’t get to spread - Zombie outbreaks excluded here.
The flu is the same way. New strains always emerge, but they are usually not fatal to most even without a vaccine.
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.
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).