Corporations, especially publicly traded ones, can’t think past their quarterly reports. The ones that are private are competing with the public ones and think following trends by companies that are “too big to fail” will work out for them.
You’re implying AI has the intelligence to remotely achieve this. It doesn’t. It is all venture capitalist porn for over glorified keyword copy paste. Thats it.
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.
Economists generally believe that this is temporary. Workers will take new jobs that are now available or learn new skills to do so.
An example is how most of the population were farmers, before the agricultural revolution ans the industrial revolution. Efficiency improvements to agriculture happened, and now there’s like only about 1% of the population in agriculture. Yet, most people are not unemployed.
There was also a time in England when a large part of the population were coal miners. Same story.
Each economic and technological improvement expands the economy, which creates new jobs.
There’s been an argument by some, Ray Kurzweil if I remember correctly, but others as well, that we will eventually reach a point where humans are obsolete. There was a time when we used horses as the main mode of land transportation. Now, this is very marginal, and we use horses for a few other things, but really there’s not that much use for them. Not as much as before. The same might happen to humans. Machines might become better than humans, for everything.
Another problem that might be happening is that the rate of technological change might be too fast for society to adapt, leaving us with an ever larger structural unemployment.
One of the solution that has been suggested is providing a basic income to everyone, so that losing your job isn’t as much of a big problem, and would leave you time to find another job or learn a new skill to do so.
A major problem is all the money from these increases in efficiency go to a handful of people, who then hoard it. A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.
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
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.
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
Here’s the problem with that: it relies on things like the LUCAS CPR assist machine which doesn’t fit on a lot of people. I’ve done CPR on a lot of people, and only a handful of them would have even fit in a LUCAS in the first place.
Tha makes sense. My point was only to refute the “AI can’t do CPR” comment. Every technological breakthrough in history was imagined as impossible by some, so to claim that because something is hard to do means it probably won’t be done has been shown to not be the case
Q3 2026 will come around and the AI will report that revenues are down. The CEO will respond the only way they know, by ordering that costs be cut by laying off employees. The AI will report there is no one left to lay off but the CEO.
To be a little pedantic, should you permit me, the question said AI not robots. ‘Robots’ have beem welding cars for decades, but that hasn’t replaced people. When you learn to weld, because it is AI proof 🙂, you’ll find that there are some things you need to do by hand.
Sex work isn’t synonymous with sex, and sex isn’t the same as fucking something/someone. Just wait until you and another person use one another, or you have make uo sex, and you’ll know what I mean.
I trust you’ll grant me tap dancing? Either way, don’t worry young (d|gl)oomer, everything is going to be fine. You should probably worry more about what’s going on in the politics threads 🤣
That hasn’t really been an issue for more than a decade at this point. Domestic manufacturing production in developed nations has actually been increasing. They just don’t use humans much. You’re not losing your job to poor people overseas. You’re losing it to robots, and you have been since before the current AI craze.
What, do want a shitty graveyard shift call center job? Trust me, you aren’t losing out by not having access to that.
Unemployment isn’t even high right now. Why are you whining about a non-issue to begin with? What good would it do you to have more low paying jobs when the problem is that all the jobs are already low paying as it is? We just saw that if there are more jobs then people they’ll happily crash the economy until there aren’t just to make sure wages don’t go up. What do you hope to accomplish by spreading 30 year old conservative propaganda?
War will be fought with AI too. It’ll be like that episode of Star Trek where each society’s AI battles the other and whatever death toll the computers calculate, that many citizens must report for euthanasia.
I remember in Interstellar, the Blight caused huge starvation among the poor causing them to riot. The government asked NASA to drop an orbital bomb on them but NASA refused, which caused the government to remove funding for NASA and close it publicly. It was just fiction then but it’s looking a bit grim now.
I like how you mixed a few notions together in a way specifically designed to induce chaos.
Even assuming that AI can take away jobs, which is itself I think inaccurate, and provably so, that has nothing to do with people lacking money. In an ideal world, we could use technology to improve productivity so that we would need to work less.
So then what you are actually asking is a different question. What you’re actually asking is, what happens if we create an economic system that takes away most money from most of the people, to much larger degree than is currently happening. And for that, all you need to do is go look at the history books.
Finally, your question as posed is partly self-contradictory. You’re talking about AI being competent enough so that it can fire everyone, but improvements in technology are not always monetized. They can also lead to extreme cost savings. If for example, if I don’t have the money to hire an accountant, but I don’t need to because the software package is good enough to handle all of it for me, then there’s no problem to be solved. And this is true for any number of so-called white collar jobs.
So then what we actually see is that jobs change and evolve over time. The word computer used to talk about a person who did arithmetic and other such operations. Now it’s used to refer to the machine itself.