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.
And if you then go around wandering “oh, but not every AI builds something those few people want”, “that’s way too few people to fill a market”, or “and what about all the rest?”… Maybe you should read Keynes, because that would not be the first time this kind of buying-power change happens, and yes, it always suck a lot for everybody (even for the rich people).
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.
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.
The vanishingly small amount of people that will be unfathomably rich in a privatized post-scarcity economy will give us just enough in UBI to make sure we can buy our Mountain Dew verification cans. And without the ability to withhold our labor as a class, we’ll have no peaceful avenue to improve our conditions.
Except it's not. That wealth isn't cash in some bank account, in most cases it's a stock in companies these people built from scratch - Bezos made Amazon, Gates Microsoft, Buffet Berkshire Hathaway and so on
The wealth of super rich is allocated in places that produce goods and services
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, my friend, is the problem for whichever schmuck is in charge after me, a C Suite executive. By then I will be long gone on my private island, having pulled the rip cord on my golden parachute.
Everyone will be working multiple shitty service jobs that robots are not cost effective to automate. Our miserable wages will be just sufficient to keep the wheels on the cart from falling off.
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).
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).
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.
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.