3 ms·

> The question is, we know AI is going to do take over doing work, how will that change the system when like 80% of people have no means of earning their income

> The question is, we know AI is going to do take over doing work, how will that change the system when like 80% of people have no means of earning their income. It will need to grow hands first. We’ve been “replacing” people with robots for a few decades now yet manual labour is still a thing. We have software that can literarily do all accounting tasks for us yet accountants are fine. I think will be an aid but not a replacement.

pixl97 3y ago
Eh, I think it's a little more complicated than that. Most companies don't get rid of employees until economic pressure is put upon them. So companies will increase capability for some time into the future. Then we typically run into a trigger of some kind. For example a housing crash that causes a recession. Then mass unemployment occurs and we'll consider this 'normal'. Then we'll start to have an economic rebound, but white collar jobs just won't come back in mass (unlike eventually after 2008 which was very slow). Then people will push hard into manual/blue collar labor, but the new influx of labor will drop pay significantly especially where low skill jobs are under pressure. The economy can generate an unlimited number of jobs... The real question is can it generate 'paying' jobs that allow a person to survive the ever increasing cost of assets.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  That does make sense. But I am wondering. Will we always want what we have today? Did we simply exhaust all need for travel once we developed cars? Or did we remove the need for food once we switched from hunting to farming? My point being that new tech has always led to demand for new services and things. Once everyone has access to ai and ai does everything for us would we not want new stuff? And if as per your comment we have a couple of years until a possible replacement may have taken place wouldnt we have developed a demand for new services and jobs by then? We had no clue we needed a tiktok app before we made the iphone and we had no clue we needed digital artists before we invented the computer.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    There are a few systematic problems with how we're thinking about AI that present large risks... For example the development of vehicles directly contributed to the scale of WWI. This then directly fed into the rapid expansion of flight and the development of city destroying nuclear weapons, which again lead to rocketry and civilization ending scale weaponry. In that same time frame we went from an anti-fragile society to a very, very fragile one. In 1900 if the town next to you burnt down, at the end of the day it didn't affect you "that much". Today if the town that produces fertilizer for half the nation burns down, we'll there's a good chance you'll eventually have a bad day. You used to grow your food in your back yard. Now that food may be grown on the other side of the planet. This is why can't just say "Well this worked in the past". When the underlying assumptions change you can have rapid destabilization. For example, world wide war because AI figures out how to disable nukes at launch time reliably undoing the last 70 years of MAD.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Thats interesting. Indeed new tech led to new weapons and potentially more deadly conflicts. But conflicts comparable to or worse than ww1 already occurred well before mechanised weaponry: in china, the mongol invasions, the colonisation of the americas, and so on. MAD was mostly posturing, with few close encounters. In effect there was more anxiety than death. Also i agree that there are far more single points of failure. Your example with fertilisers sounds plausible and logical. Both due to logistics and also due to losing farming skills. Yet somehow we suffer less from famine. Now theres more anxiety over it happening rather than it actually happening. The pattern i see is that yes the risks are real and plausible but the odds of them occurring are slim. And almost always (almost because i dont know of a specific counter example) technology only posed a risk due to politics rather than the tech itself. There is no single example i am aware of technology posing an existential threat on its own - but at the same time we never created autonomous machines and software before at this level. No matter what i do i keep getting back to the idea that the only danger is us. Our emotions, politics and instincts. I feel conflicted.

pixl97 3y ago

Eh, I think it's a little more complicated than that. Most companies don't get rid of employees until economic pressure is put upon them. So companies will increase capability for some time into the future. Then we typically run into a trigger of some kind. For example a housing crash that causes a recession. Then mass unemployment occurs and we'll consider this 'normal'. Then we'll start to have an economic rebound, but white collar jobs just won't come back in mass (unlike eventually after 2008 which was very slow). Then people will push hard into manual/blue collar labor, but the new influx of labor will drop pay significantly especially where low skill jobs are under pressure. The economy can generate an unlimited number of jobs... The real question is can it generate 'paying' jobs that allow a person to survive the ever increasing cost of assets.

gumballindie 3y ago
That does make sense. But I am wondering. Will we always want what we have today? Did we simply exhaust all need for travel once we developed cars? Or did we remove the need for food once we switched from hunting to farming? My point being that new tech has always led to demand for new services and things. Once everyone has access to ai and ai does everything for us would we not want new stuff? And if as per your comment we have a couple of years until a possible replacement may have taken place wouldnt we have developed a demand for new services and jobs by then? We had no clue we needed a tiktok app before we made the iphone and we had no clue we needed digital artists before we invented the computer.
- pixl97 3y ago
  There are a few systematic problems with how we're thinking about AI that present large risks... For example the development of vehicles directly contributed to the scale of WWI. This then directly fed into the rapid expansion of flight and the development of city destroying nuclear weapons, which again lead to rocketry and civilization ending scale weaponry. In that same time frame we went from an anti-fragile society to a very, very fragile one. In 1900 if the town next to you burnt down, at the end of the day it didn't affect you "that much". Today if the town that produces fertilizer for half the nation burns down, we'll there's a good chance you'll eventually have a bad day. You used to grow your food in your back yard. Now that food may be grown on the other side of the planet. This is why can't just say "Well this worked in the past". When the underlying assumptions change you can have rapid destabilization. For example, world wide war because AI figures out how to disable nukes at launch time reliably undoing the last 70 years of MAD.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Thats interesting. Indeed new tech led to new weapons and potentially more deadly conflicts. But conflicts comparable to or worse than ww1 already occurred well before mechanised weaponry: in china, the mongol invasions, the colonisation of the americas, and so on. MAD was mostly posturing, with few close encounters. In effect there was more anxiety than death. Also i agree that there are far more single points of failure. Your example with fertilisers sounds plausible and logical. Both due to logistics and also due to losing farming skills. Yet somehow we suffer less from famine. Now theres more anxiety over it happening rather than it actually happening. The pattern i see is that yes the risks are real and plausible but the odds of them occurring are slim. And almost always (almost because i dont know of a specific counter example) technology only posed a risk due to politics rather than the tech itself. There is no single example i am aware of technology posing an existential threat on its own - but at the same time we never created autonomous machines and software before at this level. No matter what i do i keep getting back to the idea that the only danger is us. Our emotions, politics and instincts. I feel conflicted.