Jobs are an invention of humanity. About 50% of people dislike their job. People spend much of their lives working. Poverty and inequality are a choice made by society if society chooses poorly.
On the plus side, if there really is no value to labour, then farm work must have been fully automated along with all the other roles.
On the down side, rich elites have historically had a very hard time truly empathising with normal people and understanding their needs even when they care to attempt it, so it is very possible that a lot of people will starve in such a scenario despite the potential abundance of food.
It's either:
1) the rich voluntarily share the means of production so everyone becomes equal,
2) the poor stage successful revolutions so they gain access to the means of production and everyone becomes equal,
3) the poor starve or are otherwise eliminated, and the survivors will be equal.
All roads lead to equality when the value of labour becomes 0 due to 100% automation.
Over history, lots of underclasses have been stuck that way for multiple generations, even without the assistance of a robot workforce that can replace them economically.
Some future rich class so empowered would be quite capable of treating the poor like most today treat pets. Fed and housed, but mostly neutered and the rest going through multiple generations of selective inbreeding for traits the owners deem interesting.
Non-human pets don't have the capacity to rebel though; make humans into pets and there will again be the constant danger of rebellions as with slavery in the past. Without the economic incentive to offset.
On the first, non-human pets rebelling is seen every time an abused animal bites their owner.
On the second, the hypothetical required by the scenario is that AI makes all human labour redundant: that includes all security forces, but it also means the AI moving around the security bots and observing through sensors is at least as competent as every human political campaign strategist, every human propagandist, every human general, every human negotiator, and every human surveillance worker.
This is because if some AI isn't all those things and more, humans can still get employed to work those jobs.
If truly 100% automation (including infantry/police) the most likely scenario is not any if the above; most people will be kept on some kind of minimum sustenance enough to keep them from rebelling (“UBI”) and those who disagree will either be coopted into the elite or eliminated.
There's no reason to keep anyone on minimal sustenance though. They're absolutely useless alive from an economics perspective, and so would probably be better served ground up into fertilizer or some other actually useful form.
> They're absolutely useless alive from an economics perspective, and so would probably be better served ground up into fertilizer or some other actually useful form.
Indeed. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."
But while some may care about disassembling this world and all non-rich-human life on it to make a Dyson swarm of data centres, there's also the possibility each will compete for how many billions of sycophants they can get stoking their respective egos.
In 1, 2 and 3, any progress stops because no one is making new means of production, so we must stop population from growing. No? Who’s building the factories or whatever those means of production are?
In the hypothetical where humans can no longer be employed because of AI, it is necessarily the case that AI must be able do any job at least as well as the best human for that job. That includes building factories, doing research.
Humans reproduce, there is no requirement that even destruction and death would lead to equality, not even if the elites still put themselves close enough to the rest of us as to be attackable.
For the latter point, consider that no matter how much the people of North Sentinel Island hate outsiders, they're not going to pose any risk to the rest of us.
Now, an elite whose membership includes those who want equality for the rest of us, that may create conditions for such a rebellion to succeed, but absent such from an insider (which could be encoded into the AI via either a bug or deliberately from whoever created the AI), some elite whose defence is handled by the kind of AI under consideration would not face any more of a threat from the wider population than we here in the west today face from the North Sentinel Islanders.
Note however that I'm not saying what will happen, but what is possible in various conditions. There's no guarantee of anything at this point.
Is that true? In communities or tribes of antiquity I assume there was some trading fruits of different labours before coinage. Still an 'invention' beyond baser individual survivalism.
Many (most?) people make a living from their job whether they like it or not. Having a job that they dislike is far better than losing one because of AI whatever that means.
Could also be possible today, but we chose a capitalistic system that leads to an increasing wealth gap. And now we're in a situation where the richest 1% own 50% of the wealth.
So, if we increase automation and the ownership structures stay the same, this inequality will get worse, not better.
It’s interesting, people talk about inequality and I definitely feel it myself – I see so many rich people around me. But I am in that 1%, just like many on this forum. At least according to https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce... yet I still have to work for a living.
> The cost will exponentially increase over time and the systen will eventually collapse.
From what I'm seeing in the numbers, the big problem of the coming century is population collapse. Maybe I'm just too much of a believer in the intermediate value theorem, but I'm sure there has to be a way to arrive at a society with a sustainable usage of resources.
Nope. If everything is totally automated, if ever, the gap between the rich and the poor will widen even more. Most people will live in misery while only a handful of people enjoy all the automation.
> Having a job that they dislike is far better than losing one because of AI whatever that means.
Is it really worse even if "whatever it means" is living in a post-scarcity society where everyone can shareel in the fruits of the AI's labor?
I'm not saying that's where this are necessarily going. But I am saying that that's what we should be aiming for, rather than trying to preserve the status quo.
The only thing invented about jobs is that through cooperation, the activity undertaken can seem completely unrelated to obtaining food, shelter etc. All organisms spend a majority of their energy on survival and reproduction.
Every biological being works to survive. Being good at survival is what builds self esteem.
The "problem" with many modern jobs is that they're divorced from the fundamental goal, which is one of: 1) Kill/acquire food, 2) Build shelter, or 3) Kill enemies/competitors/predators
The benefit of modern jobs is that they are much more peaceful ways for society to operate, freeing up time for humans to pursue art and other forms of expression.
What he got wrong was that this alienation results from capitalism.
It actually results from civilization. The people who built the pyramids across every continent, for example, performed assembly line-like work. Any large-scale project requires it. And large-scale projects are fundamentally necessary for most societies.
For the pyramids specifically: their architects and builders were skilled artisans who got to own their craft from top to bottom. As such, they were well-paid and pretty respected. Very much not alienated, under Marx's definition.
I don't think Marx said that worker alienation was specific to capitalism, rather, his work was in describing the economic system of his time, and what that would entail for people living in it.
> It actually results from civilization.
I disagree, I can't think of anyone in Medieval Europe as alienated from their work as a modern sweatshop worker. Not that serfs had it better, but you get me.
The pyramids took 20k+ people to build, which inevitably requires division of labor/specialization. Some chunk of that population had to mine the copper, which was probably an absolutely terrible job with ancient technology.
Serfs were essentially slaves who had effectively 0 ownership over their output, so I'd strongly disagree with that sentiment.
I think the best argument for a time when there was almost 0 alienation of labor was when we were all hunter gatherers. Where every activity was closely connected to something necessary for survival.
As soon as we built larger societies, greater division of labor became necessary to efficiently support the society. And thus alienation of labor became much more pronounced.
And when have we not? When in history has mankind ever treated the idle poor well? What makes this age different, that we who can no longer work would be taken care of?
Well we're animals and "domesticated" is synonymous with "civilized", so no problem there. And I can't see why anyone would make themselves a "nuisance" when literally all their needs - and most of their desires - are being met, so whatever outcome you're referring to is extremely unlikely.