[seer]

I really liked reading through the Mars trilogy. It imagined a world where AI is used for fluent effortless translation - local languages get a renaissance since now you _dont_ need a lengua Franca, everyone just speaks what they like the most, and can understand everyone else. Much more “flavour” to human interaction.

Also ai makes things just resource constrained, not labour - whatever you imagined, you could make happen, just needed to “talk to an ai” about it. Lots of terraforming Mars / Venus in that book were imagined like that.

But it also analysed the social / political / behavioural aspects of it. Places that had to preserve old power structures - aka US/Europe/China - got engulfed with mega corps controlling everything etc.

But Mars - where people had enough freedom to imagine something different, came up with political/financial structures to incorporate all of that, and thrived.

I think it tried to play the card of “if US was being created right now - what would its ideals be” If you had a huge tract of land that was “free” and nobody (powerful enough) claiming it, and a population that didn’t yet have strong allegiances and could be persuaded to band together, what would AI, tech and all these years of progress allow us as humans to achieve politically.

Which also makes you feel kinda sad for the US in that world - it is the old rusted power center that can’t innovate and is stuck in the past…

Now it’s only sci fi of course, but it was quite interesting to imagine a world where AI gets smarter and smarter but never reaches that “sentient” threshold. I think the whole trilogy aged incredibly well all things considered.

[tacocataco]

Sounds like you would enjoy this short story.

Manna - https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

[TheOtherHobbes]

The issues are really social/political/behavioural.

If white collar jobs are decimated the economy will collapse, because it's still - nominally - a consumer economy, even though most of the spending comes from the top 10%.

If 25% of that top 10% is suddenly out of work, that's a huge chunk of GDP gone, and a likely depression as the knock on effects spread.

I don't see anyone thinking about this seriously. [Something something UBI] is not a serious attempt to deal with the problem.

Ultimately you end up with an economy where most humans are surplus to economic requirements and will literally be murdered by economics.

Or wealth and opportunity are widely distributed, but "jobs" are nothing like they are today.

Given where we are now option 1 looks closer.

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

>I really liked reading through the Mars trilogy. It imagined a world where AI is used for fluent effortless translation - local languages get a renaissance since now you _dont_ need a lengua Franca, everyone just speaks what they like the most, and can understand everyone else. Much more “flavour” to human interaction.

any multilingual person knows that's simply impossible. some things just don't translate, all the subtleties and much of the meaning are lost. even a galaxy-sized superintelligence made of computronium couldn't possibly translate even something as mundane "she sells seashells on the sea shore" into German without either substituting it for another tongue twister or providing a lengthy translator's note.