[layer8]

The displaced human workers risk joining the global poor, is what he’s saying. And that would increase competition for the manual labor jobs, thus worsening the situation for the global poor. Not to mention what will happen when robotics take off for these kinds of jobs.

[triceratops]

Or they provide leadership and organize the global poor.

[layer8]

Because the global poor have been too stupid to organize until now?

[triceratops]

No just too busy surviving.

[card_zero]

In this vision, then, everybody is so unimaginative that all they can think of to do is compete over the same old manual tasks, without inventing new ways to be useful, while robots are better than them at everything intellectual. We have a duty to the global dull.

(If there's some doubt, I don't think it would pan out that way, because humans are imaginative.)

[apsurd]

This is about compassion.

The rice workers in Vietnam just need to follow your podcast. The problem is they were just too dull this whole time.

(I have no idea about Vietnamese rice workers' quality of life, so I don't mean to assume one way or the other. But it's interesting that what they and we think of their life, according to card_zero the cause is a lack of imagination)

[card_zero]

No, it isn't. It's about displaced workers from the knowledge economy. You're invoking a pernicious trope here about blaming the poor for being poor, in order to explain why everybody will be poor when those workers are displaced from cliche-churning jobs, because supposedly they're just that helpless.

[apsurd]

Fair enough but it means you're giving a lot of credit to these white-collar workers losing their jobs. I've seen enough to know office workers are not the intellectual savants their college sold them on. People are mostly trying to pay their debts.

[card_zero]

I was thinking about it like this: in the apocalyptic vision mentioned above, there's still just as much food being made, and still just as much fancy-pants stuff too, IP and services, except those are being made by robots. So all these displaced workers can be fed, practically speaking, except supposedly all the money goes to owners of robots while the humans are out in the fields and unable to buy beans. They're being punished for being useless.

Well, I don't believe the economy is limited to bland things AI can do on one hand, and paddies and beanfields on the other. I don't believe there's a great mass of useless people who we've been looking after so far through a kind of polite fiction of makework. I'm not saying they'll get rich, and I don't expect them to be brilliant, but I expect them to display low cunning and be less than completely feckless. Sometimes for complex reasons, forces beyond our control trap us in poverty. I don't see why that would be a universal effect that applies to these displaced office workers.