[Nursie]

I enjoyed seeing a meme the other day (rare for me to enjoy!) that summed it up as something like -

"Having to do manual labour to make ends meet while the robots paint and write poetry was not the future I had in mind".

And I think that sums up the feeling quite well. I do agree that automation in general has not paid off in the way the utopians would predict - instead of freeing humanity from the need to work, we have disenfranchised large portions of the population. That said, more people than ever (in the west) are freed from manual labour, and are working historically shorter hours for better quality of life than ever before. But the fruits of our productivity gains are not distributed equally and it is all too easy to imagine a future in which it is the owners of the smart systems who reap all the rewards, with everyone else fighting for scraps.

[antupis]

I have visited several art exhibitions this year and generally would say that stuff at front page of /r/StableDiffusion/ is just more original and better than some random art exhibition.

[sambazi]

"Stop staring at my hands"

[firen777]

>"Having to do manual labour to make ends meet while the robots paint and write poetry was not the future I had in mind"

Thank you for this quote! This speaks out the reason for my innate disgust toward the current "creative" AI which I couldn't quite articulate before.

[hnfong]

And this kind of highlights the kind of hypocrisy implied by the original comment.

"Having to do manual labour to make ends meet while the _______ paint and write poetry was not the future I had in mind"

For the less fortunate people struggling to make ends meet, it may not matter that much whether it's robots or the aristocracy, or the upper middle class doing the poetry writing.

Until the last couple decades, 99% of humanity was always doing doing manual labor to make ends meet. It's just that the literate class throughout history always identified with the 1% rather than the 99%. We're conditioned to think that creative endeavors are always more "noble" than manual labor because that's what nobles did.

Ironically the fact that we pay "knowledge workers" more than manual laborers might have contributed to this outcome. If toilet janitors commanded a $500k salary maybe more R&D budget would go to inventing robots that are good at cleaning toilets, instead of AI systems that are good at solving leetcode.

[nemo44x]

I think it’s because of supply and demand in addition to value. A manual laborer, even a very skilled one, is limited by their own output on how much value they can create. A software engineer creates outputs that can generate many multiples of their compensation for doing so.

[0thgen]

it could just be that freeing humanity from the need to work takes longer than we thought

are we worse off than we were before industrial automation? I thought the economics said the opposite (even if we exclude the eastern nations that benefits from western job loss from our utilitarian analysis here -- which we shouldn't)

that meme was really good btw

[taway_6PplYu5]

> it could just be that freeing humanity from the need to work takes longer than we thought

May I suggest your read Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules"?

We've created a society which requires us to spend oodles of hours doing bullshit work and administer hundreds of bullshit services.

We could easily feed, house, clothe, entertain, and care for everyone with 25 hour work weeks. We (as a society) just chose not to.

[JumpCrisscross]

> We could easily feed, house, clothe, entertain, and care for everyone with 25 hour work weeks

Assuming zero innovation or growth, yes. If a society is comfortable opting into declining relative living standards, they should have the right to do so. But framing this is a costless trade-off is facile.

Better argument: we can afford to feed, house, clothe and care for every American, possibly, almost every human. (The long tail is exhaustingly costly.) But it would come at the expense of some peoples’ lifestyles, majorly, and everyone’s, in small ways. It almost certainly doesn’t occur with a reduced work week and current adolescence/education and retirement expectations.

[0thgen]

Society's aren't individuals. They are collections of many individuals. I don't think society "chooses" to do or not do things in the same way we assume humans "choose" to do or not do things.

I don't think the complexity of human society can be boiled down to "we just choose not be perfect"

[WalterBright]

Distributing the fruits of production equally has been tried several times. The result is everyone becomes equally poor.

[atoav]

Are you sure? Isn't the Scandinavian model essentially "Socialism" by US standards. Last time I checked they were doing quite well compared to literallly everybody else on the planet (excluding other, similar social democracies).

The US went like: socialism is bad, let's go for the polar opposite and make the poor poorer and the rich richer. For many that are poor in the US people "being equally poor under socialism" is not the threat you think it is, even for the ones that currently go the authoritarian route. Something is brewing in the US and it is an explosive mixture — you can squeeze out only so much from the people without things going sideways.

[WalterBright]

Norway sits on an ocean of oil that they use to prop up their economy.

> socialism is bad, let's go for the polar opposite and make the poor poorer and the rich richer

The US free market moved scores of millions of dirt poor immigrants into the middle class and beyond.

[defrost]

Well, if that's your idea of success:

    Based on Pew's income band classification, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 39.1 million people (3.1 percent of the population) in 2000 to roughly 707 million (50.8 percent of the population) in 2018.

https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class

[WalterBright]

China switched to free markets. They also had the advantage of technology that didn't exist in the 1800s.

Before China switched to free markets, they had an equal distribution of all income economy. You might want to check it out.

So, too, the USSR, Cambodia, Vietnam, Jamestown, Plymouth, etc.

[A_non_e-moose]

China and free market in the same sentence is quite a paradox.

Did you mean to say they moved from a planned economy to a market economy? A market economy yes they do have, but free? Boy oh boy that it is not. Plenty of western companies wanting to enter that market are finding that out the hard way

[l3mure]

> Before China switched to free markets, they had an equal distribution of all income economy. You might want to check it out.

Hmmm I'm checking it out right now. Seems like life expectancy jumped massively under Mao, is that bad?

[atoav]

Yeah. Norway. Famously the only country in Scandinavia.

Seriously, do you think anybody will fall for cherry-picking like that, or was this more to convince yourself?