[usednet]

The logical conclusion that people don’t like to hear is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy. AI will, in the not so distant future, eliminate the vast majority of jobs. The choice will then be between a socialized economy or barbarism.

[jarjoura]

Sure, but I'm not really a believer that any government will have the political power to restructure the economy. At least nothing would actually change unless states utterly collapsed and there's loss of life.

I don't think AI is going to replace everything either. It will be a cheap knockoff replacement for a lot of decent low paying middle class jobs, enough to do real damage, but not catastrophic. We will be forced to adapt like we always do and the wealth disparity continues to widens like it has been.

I guess if anything, we'll make life so efficient that people will start to question if we need our life to be so efficient. There comes a point when you start having diminishing returns on all that efficiency. We'll still have the same problems we always do, with bad relationship breakups, or addiction, or whatever. AI will never fix those things.

So in my mind, the logical conclusion is just a march toward mediocrity and feeling handcuffed to whatever situation you were born into.

[bushbaba]

Totally disagree. You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yet here we are living better lives from the technological breakthroughs.

AI will just usher the next industrial revolution of the modern era.

[jacquesm]

There is absolutely no guarantee that what worked for the industrial revolution will be repeated for the AI revolution. None. At. All. It might be. But there are a ton of ways in which this could result in some very serious problems for which we currently do not have any solutions. Making the assumption that because something worked the last time it will work this time as well given the same circumstances is simply wrong. Even if - and that is a pretty big if - the circumstances around such revolution would be identical there are many ways in which it could have played out differently. The outcome of this is at this point in time unknowable, so you can't make any claims about what it will be like if and when it happens.

Maybe you're right. But consider the possibility that you are wrong and what the various bad outcomes could be and maybe then you'll at least make some kind of qualification to that statement.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrospective_determinism

Also note that the industrial revolution was a turning point and not necessarily a good one for everybody that was alive back then, and that there are plenty of bad effects from it into today.

[diatone]

Worth pointing out, we live better lives not just from the technological breakthroughs, but also from the social movements that have brought us things like the 40-hour work week and keeping children from labour for a reasonable time. Which were direct responses to the Industrial Revolution.

[tmpz22]

And we're starting to see the repeal of Labor laws in the US - newly passed or pending laws allow companies to hire children without work permits and allow children to work longer hours under more dangerous conditions in places like construction sites, meat packing plants, and automobile factories.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/27/1172544561/new-state-laws-are...

[MisterBastahrd]

There are states in the US who want to enjoy all the benefits of living in an advanced society but also want the social and political status quo of the 1910s.

[didibus]

This is an incredibly relevant point.

Take North Korea, they have access the the know how of all the same advancements and yet because of social conditions, it's population is not thriving.

This is true of many countries honestly. The impact of social justice, equality, and all that are huge. And can't be understated.

In fact, we can all easily imagine an Elite ruling the world at the helm of AI powered robots, leaving the rest of us to scrape the bottom.

Social breakthroughs are going to need to keep pace with technological advancements, otherwise those same advancement can also help to bring minority holding power even more stronghold on the rest.

[CBarkleyU]

>Social breakthroughs are going to need to keep pace with technological advancements, otherwise those same advancement can also help to bring minority holding power even more stronghold on the rest.

Which is why we should push for social breakthroughs instead of hindering technological advancements. Work for the sake of working is just occupational therapy, nothing more.

I'm extremely optimistic regarding all this AI kerfuffle. "In fact, we can all easily imagine an Elite ruling the world at the helm of AI powered robots", yeah, sure, we can. We can also easily imagine us sharpening the good old guillotine.

[mschild]

Sure, there's plenty of positives that came out of it, but lets not forget the downsides and the, quite literally, bloody struggles people had to go through to arrive where we are today.

Working conditions were for quite a long time absolutely horrendous. Child labour went from helping your parents on the farm to working in dangerous factories for 12 hour shifts.

Massive amounts of pollution, which we are seeing the effects of today, and that doesn't only include CO2 emissions.

Ideally, AI would help humanity work less or achieve more with less effort, but we both know that's not how corporations function. When there is more profit to be made, or money to be saved, they will.

AI will cost people jobs. Funnily enough, its trade jobs that are probably the safest from all these changes.

[coldtea]

>Totally disagree. You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yet here we are living better lives from the technological breakthroughs.

We're living more comfortamble lives and with more trinkets. More stressful, more depressed, more isolated, more damaging to the environment, more casually controlled and supervised, even downright less able to reproduce in the more modern of societies (the total gift of death)...

And especially in the first centuries of the industrial revolution peoples lives got a huge turn for the worse, pushed into cities and factories, working up to 16 hour shifts, little kids working just the same in body breaking conditions, discarded as useless when they had an accident, and so on. And it's not some change they welcomed either. They were pushed into it, by the rich classes destroying their previous livelihood, by legal changes making it impossible to survive, and even by raw police and millitary force. And they resisted tooth and nail to keep their previous way of life.

[hwillis]

> You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution.

Says who? What jobs did the industrial revolution eliminate? Essentially just spinners and weavers, and that caused a violent social uprising by the Luddites.

Textiles were far outweighed by the industrialization of steam power, ironworking, and machine tools. Those three things did not put people out of jobs, they just created huge numbers of new jobs and totally altered society.

I don't think anybody really believes AI will directly create new jobs, in any way comparable to steam or steel. They think it will be like textiles, but everywhere and without the balancing impact of those massive, unrelated new industries.

[jacquesm]

Not a lot of textile still made in Europe. The Luddites got that one right, they were just a bit off about the timing. But this AI thing, assuming it manages to click the ratchet a few more times has the potential to eliminate a good 50% of all of the remaining blue collar jobs and a sizeable fraction of the rest. That is the sort of economic blow that I highly doubt we are prepared for. The big problem is that I don't see where those jobs will be going to, they are eliminated, not transformed this time around and that is a very serious change in the recipe.

[the_only_law]

> they are eliminated, not transformed this time around and that is a very serious change in the recipe.

Don’t worry. Everyone and their mother will just go into the trades. Years from now we’ll be browsing PlumberNews where we’ll get to hear about how the demand for plumbers is infinite and how “plumbing is eating the world” and not to worry about massive increase of labor supply from people who are working on building plumbing robots.

[jacquesm]

If it weren't serious it would be very funny indeed.

Plumbing really is eating the world, by the way ;)

[itsanaccount]

The ruling class wants slaves.

Be it animal, human, or machine. In every case where something made a better slave, capital has switched to using it.

Recognize what class you're in and see it for what it is (lotta people identify with the ruling class on this site), but don't pretend for a second us tech workers are somehow insulated from being workers. No one will care when we're homeless on the street anymore than the current group of i-got-mines care about the current homeless.

[ojbyrne]

I am reminded of an argument from [1] that the Industrial Revolution completely wiped out a class of workers - but they were horses - and that class of workers largely became cannon fodder in WW1. So it seems reasonable to speculate that the same fate could await some amount of human workers.

1. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691121354/

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

The industrial revolution was also a period of incredible misery for a significant portion of the population. Without legal protection, and a strong social/political system, whole segments of the population were subject to poverty and filth.

The technological breakthroughs were great and we reap their benefits everyday. But, there was a lot more than simple technological revolution to get to the point where the majority of the population were no longer subject to immiseration at the behest of profit. There were a lot of hard legal and political arguments that had to end up on the side of labour to also give us the life of relative leisure we have now.

[marcosdumay]

> You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution.

Yeah, and that's when people make it clear they don't know history.

There were many points during the Industrial Revolution when if you said the same thing, you would be absolutely correct.

A few of those times, the problem was "solved" by violence and deep restructure of the economy; other times it was "solved" by violence and letting lots and lots of people die. By the 20th century people realized that if you restructure the economy earlier, you can avoid that violence step, but some also realized they can just spread propaganda saying problems never happen, and stop any reorganization.

[jfengel]

It was also tied to a number of other events that massively depleted the population, including the Black Death. Not violent but very deadly, leaving Europe open to social restructuring.

[Loquebantur]

Any such post-AI jobs are predicated on there being a difference between AI and humans in favor of the latter.

I presume, you imagine large parts of the population will be happy working in the sex industry or similar?

People's irrational assumption, the past could always be linearly extrapolated into the future is remarkably out of place when it comes to the epitome of non-linearity, intelligent consciousness.

[JimtheCoder]

"you imagine large parts of the population will be happy working in the sex industry"

About 50% might think it's cool for a while...

[asdf6677]

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

[jacquesm]

I'm with you in part, but I think it would be good to try to be fair: life as it was before the industrial revolution wasn't exactly paradise either. The industrial revolution solved some problems and replaced them with far larger ones. And for those far larger ones we don't have solutions, even after the thing has run for a couple of hundred years the problems are still increasing. And coupled with runaway economic systems, massive imbalance in the world with respect to where the benefits landed we don't look particularly good when it comes to the historical record of such revolutions.

[CyberDildonics]

Not much is stopping you from living in a log cabin in the woods.

[asdf6677]

The government will reclaim the land unless I pay for it with money I make from the system. It’s not possible to opt out anymore. They stole the land too but my guns are smaller.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/matthew-clarke-youtube-...

[CyberDildonics]

You could work at a job and then buy land outside a city, thus beating the system. This is something other people have done.

[mahogany]

You still need to pay property tax in perpetuity (in the US at least). Taxes can only be paid with USD aka “system money”, so you’re not really outside of the system in this situation. Plus there is eminent domain.

The only way to avoid needing system money would be to live on national land for free, but then you cannot have a permanent dwelling like a cabin.

[jacquesm]

Not a chance of that around here. And with any solution you have to ask yourself: does it scale? What if the current population of the earth would want to live in a log cabin in the woods? The woods would no longer be the woods.

[CyberDildonics]

you have to ask yourself: does it scale?

You don't have to ask yourself that because almost no one actually agrees with this person that the 'industrial revolution had disastrous effects on the human race'. They don't even believe it.

What if the current population of the earth would want to live in a log cabin in the woods?

They don't and no one said anything about that.

The woods would no longer be the woods.

That's what we have now because that's what people want.

[mahogany]

There is not a dichotomy between a post-Industrial Revolution society and living in the woods.

[cardy31]

I think AI will be less like the Industrial Revolution and more like a country finding large oil reserves.

Countries with strong social institutions like Norway do an amazing job of distributing the gains from finding oil.

Countries with poor social institutions (basically all of the developing world) end up enriching a small minority with the oil money. Even Canada doesn’t do a very good job of improving the lives of its citizens with its oil money.

Given the way the Western world has been going in terms of wealth consolidation, I am not optimistic about broad segments of the population seeing the benefits of AI.

[seanmcdirmid]

There will come a point when technology has advanced to the point to make most human labor obsolete. We are mostly just arguing about when that will happen, not if it will happen. I agree though, at this point, we could just be seeing another productivity boost that still requires human labor.

[ilyt]

And it will bring even bigger income inequality because yet again the rich can pay to replace the workers while reaping the benefits and avoiding taxing those benefits

[bugglebeetle]

> You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yet here we are living better lives from the technological breakthroughs.

You understand that the course of the Industrial Revolution was a huge increase in barbarism, correct? People forced off their lands, children into factories, labor conditions that were horrendous across the board. Violent labor upheavals, WWI, a communist revolution, the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, WWII and the first use of nuclear weapons. Only in the wake of all of that was there anything like the widespread improvement of people’s lives and in places like the US, this still required a tumultuous and again violent dismantling of segregation.

I certainly don’t hope the AI evolution follows the example of its industrial counterpart, or we’re in for a quite wild ride.

[thatguy0900]

It won't, the AI revolution also comes with fully autonomous weapons systems that will keep the rabble in their place this time around. I think the days of labor having the ability to violently threaten the government are also coming to a end.

[CyberDildonics]

AI will just usher the next industrial revolution of the modern era.

How will it do that? So far the only things being automated are Q&A and image generation.

[jacquesm]

That's a pretty narrow view.

The things that are being automated go much, much further than just those two examples. I'd like to add: classification (including lots of medicine) and diagnosis, lots of low level information processing, process and machine control, vehicle control (for instance: self driving cars) etc.

Whether all of those will succeed for 100% of the cases is up in the air but if I were coming-of-age and slated for some job I'd be very wary of what to pick as a blue collar worker because almost all of those jobs could well be on the chopping block in the next decade.

[CyberDildonics]

Are you calling all automation "AI" now?

[mouse_]

Totally disagree. The Industrial Revolution is the catalyst for a major extinction event, and our current trajectory is to certain doom.

[jstx1]

I don't think it will eliminate the vast majority of jobs, more likely that it will significantly reduce the demand for certain jobs in an uneven way. I guess some of this depends on the time horizon you're looking at too.

[Joeri]

Just because we can’t imagine the jobs that would exist in an AI future doesn’t mean they won’t be there. And there are many ways this thing plays out where we don’t get a world of cheap AI abundance where the AI provides without limit. If nothing else the copyright maffia will do its best to prevent that future from occurring.

[philipkglass]

The intellectual property lobby doesn't have much sway outside of countries with significant cultural exports, software businesses, and/or patent-protected manufacturing. That's basically the Anglosphere, richer parts of Europe, South Korea, and Japan. If countries outside this group can grow prosperous faster by pirating intellectual property than by continuing to play by WTO rules, they will.

If the only thing standing between poor countries and a world of cheap AI abundance is law, respect for those laws won't last. Why should e.g. India play by the normal rules of trade if foreign companies have developed do-everything robots that they want to license on a restrictive basis? India can obtain a few do-everything robots by means of normal trade, jailbreak or reverse engineer them, then duplicate do-everything robots domestically while ignoring the impotent griping of the original company and its government. There's no big IP lobby inside of India itself and it's really hard to see what "carrot" other countries could offer for compliance that tops the prize of having unlimited do-everything robots.

[jacquesm]

There are many pathways to such a restructuring and not all of them are wide enough to accommodate 8 billion people.

[polote]

The vast majority of jobs could be eliminated today without AI and still they are not, so we are very safe. Even with AI getting better and better we will be

[coldtea]

>is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy

Yes, and basically a fundamental restructuring of the power relations in the economy.

[solardev]

Barbarism usually wins. It always has so far.

[cscurmudgeon]

In practice so far, socialized economy is barbarism.

But next time will be different due to .... magical AI god?

[0xDEF]

>socialized economy

Here in Denmark a significant fraction of the population (students, elderly, long-term unemployed) are already on some kind of pseudo basic income.

Why not just do basic income in this future "total AI automation" scenario? Why do so many people on the Internet think only radical socialist revolutions can solve all our problems?

[sangnoir]

> Why not just do basic income in this future "total AI automation" scenario?

The oligarchy doesn't want to fund this future, and the federal, state and local governments in the US don't have the wherewithal.

[Shekelphile]

Basic income is a horrible idea. It resigns 80%+ of the population to being unproductive for life and living in abject poverty.

If AI is going to automate away all 'meaningless' low and middle class jobs then the government should be stepping in to tax the productivity gains and use the money to educate and employ those people in roles that AI can't (maybe ever) fill. Having the government pay tens of millions of people to further scientific research and innovation would be a massive boon for our society rather than the current ratcheting incrementalism and lack of innovation the pervades in our current system where innovation is always shunned unless it can provide immediate short-term gains.

Unfortunately it's moot to even think about. Nothing will change and the elites will simply let the majority of the population starve to death.

[labster]

I’ll bet one hundred dollars on barbarism. Seems like a sure thing.

[monero-xmr]

[flagged]

[chc]

Why do you think that? To the extent that a correlation exists between the level of social benefits offered by a country and the amount of horrors committed by its government, I would expect it to go the opposite direction (i.e. brutal dictators are more likely to hoard resources than share them freely). I have heard some attempts to substantively make the argument that socialized economies lead to brutality before, but every one I have seen has relied on a pretty blatant sleight of hand where laissez-faire economics is conflated with democracy. If you're aware of an analysis that does an apples to apples comparison and comes to that conclusion, that would be very interesting.

[philistine]

A socialized economy does not need to come with the death of democracy. The idea that communism can only be achieved if power rests on workers through something else than legislative elections is poison.

[wahnfrieden]

Those have all been authoritarian. There are anarchist visions of "socialized economy"

[antris]

Same goes for capitalism currently. If the bar for the economic system is no more genocide, barbarism, hunger, exploitation of the workers or wars then you're aiming for something utopian immediately. Capitalism definitely has not solved these issues. In fact it's currently destroying the whole ecosystem.

[MisterBastahrd]

It's hard to take a comment like this seriously given all the bloodshed that has come about because of capitalism.

Now, it could just be that people who accumulate power also accumulate the means to defend that power, and that to accumulate it in the first place you've almost got to be a sociopath, but that's actually being thoughtful instead of bringing up context-barren boogeymen.

[renewedrebecca]

strawman. socialism != communism.