Were already seeing a drop in product quality and reliability. Just try a search engine for practically anything. Chances are you already type “wiki” or “reddit” or “Lemmy” or whatever along with your search terms. AI(LLM) is just advanced cargo cult development. It won’t translate to physical design even though that’s being pushed by management level and marketing. Products will stop being useful altogether.
That’s on top of the tailoring to business and wealthy class as others have argued here. But even that will have to endure enshitification. Ultimately the wealthy will pay for labor on their toys(they already do, we just can’t afford those).
I would if I didn’t fear that the scarcity will then be artificial to keep groups in power. The idea is beautiful, our current direction is terrifying.
Bad news: it is going to be an artificial scarcity economy. It basically already is, we have plenty of money for everyone to live well but it is all going into hoards.
This is what the mega rich don’t seem to realize. They already have 99.9% of the wealth, but if they had 99.1% of it no one would give a shit how much money a few trust fund babies had.
We would all be able to take care of ourselves and our families. Instead they want all the wealth and are willing to kill most of the global population along with the earth to get it.
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.
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.
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 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.
If the rich can hire a handful of the middle class to build and maintain their robots, then they can just cut the poor and working poor out of the economy entirely, and they will be willing to accept any conditions for food and shelter.
We can arrange the economy anyway we choose. Taking all of the decision making for themselves is part of the plan.
They won’t need maintenance if they’re a general purpose intelligence. A technology that has the possibility to free all of humanity from scarcity, has the possibility to finally collapse dominance of aristocracy for good. Sure, they’ll try and put themselves on top somehow. But once the knowledge exists, anyone can create a version for the greater good.
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
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).
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
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.