[joshuaheard]

Every time I read one of these doom and gloom pieces on AI/robotics, I think they are only describing the transition. After that, I think society will align with Musk's vision of AI/robotics freeing humans from work and scarcity. Then, humans will be able to focus on exploring the universe, scientific discovery, and artistic expression.

[some_random]

I'm kind of tired of the assumption that a post-scarcity world will without a doubt look like Famous Science Fiction Television Show "Star Trek".

[lossyalgo]

> freeing humans from work and scarcity

How will that be possible if all wealth is held by a small group of ultra-rich individuals? Or do you think they will all simultaneously opt to distribute their wealth to everyone in some form of UBI?

[adithyareddy]

He said humans. He didn't say all of them, or specify which ones, but I think we can guess.

[D-Coder]

All it takes is one ultra-rich individual to say, "I'm having my bots build a bot-building factory and giving them to everyone who wants a bot. For free (after all, bots are doing all the work!) Or a hundred bots, who cares. They're free, bots are doing all the work anyway."

[xg15]

Those will be the only humans left.

[munksbeer]

I'm not an economist but you're just echoing a trivially shallow meme.

Research:

  - Where does most money come from?
  - What are these gazillion AI agents creating if no-one has any money to buy anything? 
  - What is this "wealth" of this small group of ultra-rich individuals? Who is buying the shares of their companies to make them wealthy? Who is buying their products? 

The economy must be self balancing. There is no other way. If demand collapses, no-one gets rich.

[franktankbank]

This is the dumb meme. Those who own the automation don't have any non-moral non-ethical reason to feed and house the masses. Money is a proxy for power.

[munksbeer]

It's like you didn't even read my post.

[franktankbank]

You said no one gets rich. I disagree with the end result, a few do get quite rich.

[outside1234]

Is that Musk's vision? Because he just elected the guy that is gutting all of the safety nets that would enable the second part.

[pirate787]

He also elected the guy who did a 180 on AI regulations and stopped FAA harassment of SpaceX.

[outside1234]

“Harassment” = following rules and laws?

For the 180 on AI regulations you are going to have to explain that to me because as far as I can see there wasn’t any regulation under Biden of AI

[rramadass]

This will never happen. I think you need to re-read Orwell's 1984 and understand the Nature of Power. Our current Technologies have made it orders of magnitude easier to gain/amass/seize/monopolize and hold "absolute power".

As Lord Acton said - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”

O'Brien from 1984;

'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'