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From rust belt to robot belt: Turning AI into jobs in the US heartland
- jillesvangurp 8y agoThe industrial revolution already made a lot of work meaningless. Mostly, we're not working. And when we are working, the work we do is comparatively meaningless; as in not directly related to esssential things such as producing food or other goods people need to survive. The tacit deal is that we all pretend to be 'productive' and in exchange we receive cash which we use to spend on stuff we never really needed but are sort of nice to have. Things like restaurants, dog walking services, netflix, etc. So AI is just rubbing our noses into just how shallow and meaningless most jobs really are. So, your life's achievement was moving things around in some production line in some factory? Well, machines can do that faster than humans. Maintaining the machines is of course going to be a thing, until we automate that as well. The real question is what will drive the economy when nobody has any money to spend because we are all out of jobs. All those automated factories will be pointless if nobody is buying the output. The answer is very simple: print money and hand it out. That is in fact how economies work for the last century or so. You may think you have a meaningful job but it is just the illusion of productivity. In all likelihood what you do is not nearly as important (if it matters at all) for the economy as how you spend what you earn. Do the math: how much of your life in hours will you spend actually 'working'. In most western societies, the answer is about less than 5% on average since your productive life is only about 50% of your life span, of which you only work 20-25%. The rest is free time, weekends, vacations. And that is assuming you have a job and are actually part of the working force at all, which is not necessarily true for more than half the population.
- raducu 8y agoMoney is a voting system on how natural resources and the time of others is spent. The non-democratic component of money is good for innovation. How will we find a money-distribution process that: prevents 1% of people to accumulate 90% of the wealth, allows individual mobility across social classes, incentives innovation and correct allocation of resources?
- 0x445442 8y agoYeah, while agree with the first part of jillesvangurp's comment I think an argument can be made that the "printing" of money was one of the causes of the increase in meaninglessness work.
- dv_dt 8y agoLol, I think agree with first part, but not the second part. At best the non-democratic component of money doesn't completly squash innovation, but the capital distribution and control resulting from it has seriously constrained it in this phase of our economy.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoPrinting money devalues it a little. It hits harder when you have millions or billions, than when you have little. So printing money seems to be on the side of redistributing wealth, not concentrating it?