9 ms·
If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. However, every advancement that has come in
by jarjoura 3y ago
If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it.
However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work.
If you're really dreaming for AI that can wipe-out entire classes of decent middle-class jobs in one big swing, don't forget that we're going to take down the world economy with it and it's going to be a very long recession where nobody will win.
Meanwhile, those lucky enough to have made it to the top will continue to horde all the profits.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yreg 3y agoThe mean quality of life is sky high compared to 100 years ago and it is such thanks to the advancement made.
- digdugdirk 3y agoThe mean quality of life is irrelevant if the mode quality of life is only a tenth of that.
- didibus 3y agoAnd honestly the range matters a lot here as well. The mean just isn't a useful metric for human emancipation.
- jacquesm 3y ago> The mean just isn't a useful metric for human emancipation. For those at the top of the foodchain it is a very useful metric: it allows them to sleep at night.
- vikinghckr 3y agoThe median quality of life is MUCH higher today than 100 years ago. And bottom 1%-tile quality of life might be 1000 times better. All thanks to advance in technology and increased productivity.
- yreg 3y agoThe mode quality of life is also sky high compared to 100 years ago. So is the median quality of life. Mode and median were raised even faster than the average. Humanity managed to uplift a huge fraction of people out of extreme poverty. In 1820s around 70-80% people lived in extreme poverty In 1920s it was around 60-70% In 2020s it's around 10% source: e.g. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e20f2f1a-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/e20f2f1a-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e20f2f1a-en/index.html?i...
- vikinghckr 3y agoThat this even needed to be said on a forum like HN baffles me. I suspect it's a result of decades of mainstream political/cultural doom-and-gloom propaganda.
- nverno 3y agoThis quality of life metric is purely economic, but it is easy to read it as general life quality- personally, I'd swap now for 1820s homesteading out west in a heartbeat even though that would register as 'extreme poverty' on the economic scale.
- vikinghckr 3y agoWell, for a start, it's safe to assume you're not a woman or a minority. And even if you're a young healthy white male, your quality of life would be significantly worse in the 1820s. Not only would you lose access to a lot of the everyday conveniences of life today, you're also far more likely to die a young and painful death from any number of disease.
- nverno 3y agoConveniences don't make life worth living, and a long life doesn't mean a good life. Do you really think people, on average, enjoyed their lives less back then? I don't
- almost_usual 3y agoAnd as the Earth burns away and we choke on the smoke we rejoice as we have our AI entertainment and we can go quietly into the night.
- darawk 3y agoLol. Nobody is choking on smoke. The earth is fine. Humans may make life slightly more difficult for themselves in the next century or two due to global warming, but those difficulties will be more than offset by advances in technology, even under pessimistic assumptions.
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoA good portion of NA is literally choked in forest fire smoke.
- coryrc 3y agoNo one except most Canadians, the West Coast, Midwest, and Northeast of the US. And Texas too apparently: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/environment/article/wildfire-smoke-deaths-houston-report-18208284.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/environm... Is there anywhere in the continental US not affected by wildfire smoke? Hawaii is probably doing alright.
- ChumpGPT 3y agoThey are getting choked by Chinese pollution.
- justinhj 3y agoWildfires are periodic and affected by forest management not just heat
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoDoing pretty well in Phoenix. For as long as the AC keeps up!
- 3y ago
- rolandog 3y agoThe mean quality of life can be skewed by outliers. I wonder if there are median quality of life indicators with the box-diagram of Upper and Lower Fence values based on the Inter Quartile Range
- jarjoura 3y agoActually, economists are now saying that the 20th century was an anomaly in terms of QoL and we're reverting back to U shaped distribution of wealth. It will be very interesting times when all that 20th century earned Baby Boomer wealth moves to the next generation and accelerates the shift even faster.
- nverno 3y agoDo you mean U-shaped on a wealth vs. age graph, or something else? I would imagine wealth distribution to look more like an exponential distribution.
- vbezhenar 3y agoWhat about quality of life compared to 50 years ago? I guess it depends on country but I feel like my parents generation lived better life compared to mine.
- vikinghckr 3y agoWhat did they have you don't?
- thatguy0900 3y agoMy parents bought a house and went on multiple family vacations every year and never really were too concerned about money, saving up a decent amount for retirement. My mom was a teacher in a poor inner city school and my dad was a low level insurance salesman. My mom never had to worry about student loans, they were easily paid off. I think trading fiscal peace and security for an iPhone is a bad trade.
- tomrod 3y agoNot sure, sounds like that is a baked measurement intended to superficially mollify people. Medicine and health costs more than ever. Inequality higher than ever. Sure, we can buy cheapish bread and occasional circuses, but is that a valid measure of life?
- usednet 3y agoThe logical conclusion that people don’t like to hear is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy. AI will, in the not so distant future, eliminate the vast majority of jobs. The choice will then be between a socialized economy or barbarism.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoIn practice so far, socialized economy is barbarism. But next time will be different due to .... magical AI god?
- jacquesm 3y agoThere are many pathways to such a restructuring and not all of them are wide enough to accommodate 8 billion people.
- monero-xmr 3y ago[flagged]
- wahnfrieden 3y agoThose have all been authoritarian. There are anarchist visions of "socialized economy"
- philistine 3y agoA socialized economy does not need to come with the death of democracy. The idea that communism can only be achieved if power rests on workers through something else than legislative elections is poison.
- antris 3y agoSame goes for capitalism currently. If the bar for the economic system is no more genocide, barbarism, hunger, exploitation of the workers or wars then you're aiming for something utopian immediately. Capitalism definitely has not solved these issues. In fact it's currently destroying the whole ecosystem.
- 3y ago
- whateveracct 3y agoIt's not about efficiency it's about devaluing workers so you have more leverage over them.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago> If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. The only way that'll happen is worker co-ops. The benefits of increased productivity always accrue to the owners, not the employees.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoAnd somehow most people consider this wrong
- theonlybutlet 3y agoNot every innovation, for a long while it was linked to benefits but then I think the 1970's they started stripping away unions, worker rights and pay, hours etc. started becoming detached from productivity.
- PheonixPharts 3y agoPersonally I find the fact that Keynes's 15-hour work week never materialized despite massive improvements in automation to be fairly strong evidence in favor of Marx's Labor Theory of Value. One of the ways that Marx posited capitalist extract surplus value is to have the increase in quality of life always lagging the increase in efficiency. Our quality of life does increase, but only if capitalists are able to increase greater surplus value from our labor than that quality of life increase accounts for. > don't forget that we're going to take down the world economy with it Interestingly enough this is one of the major focuses of Capital vol III: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx argued that eventually the Capitalist pressure to increase efficiency through automation means that while production continues to be more efficient, precisely because of this the ratio of profit to capital expended decreases. For Marx this was the ultimate threat to Capitalism itself.
- vba616 3y ago>Personally I find the fact that Keynes's 15-hour work week never materialized despite massive improvements in automation to be fairly strong evidence in favor of Marx's Labor Theory of Value. I don't understand the train of thought that lead to the sentence above. "Marx's Labor Theory of Value" is a well-known phrase, but its meaning is probably more precise for you than me. Do you not think, broadly speaking, there is some economy of scale with longer hours (compared to 15/week), that gaining experience more quickly has some value, that overhead like shift handoffs or putting work aside for the next day becomes more significant the shorter the day/week is? I'd also suggest it's plausible that automation changes the nature of work to increase the efficiency of long hours. The more education and thought a job requires, the longer it takes to "get up to speed" and to hand off work to other people.
- dheera 3y ago> If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. What I'd personally really hope for is a future in which AI and robotics allow high quality food, housing, transportation, clothing, state-of-the-art medical care, and basic necessities to be available for free to everyone. Basically, a modest, comfortable, safe middle-class-quality life should be free and provided for by robots to everyone in the world. Anything above that, one would have to work for. It would also likely be a world in which any work humans voluntarily do is interesting work. There might also be some kind of analog art renaissance.
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoOne tractor can do the work of tens of people easily, and in the last ~150-200 years, we've gone from a vast majority of people producing food to a tiny minority, while the rest can be social media managers and feng-shui specialist. One excell spreadsheet can do the work of a 100+ paper-based accountants, and that's even before a database and automation. We could've stopped at tractors, lived the same lifestyle as before, but with 1-2 hours work per day (or even less), but we decided we wanted and needed more, and more is what we got.
- CharlieDigital 3y agoKey difference: productivity gains in agriculture made food not only more plentiful, but also cheaper. We can say the same for the steam engine and transportation. It made it cheaper to move goods and people. Question is whether advancements in AI translate to making some fundamental goods or services cheaper and more accessible.
- Gehinnn 3y agoDoesn't the free market regulate this?
- ricardonunez 3y agoIt is going to make profits more accessible to those at the top; that’s that.
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoAnd gains in computing made computers cheaper. An esp32 which is way way more powerful than desktop machines ~30-40 years ago costs $4, you can buy a full laptop for ~150eur, or a smartphone for even less. Yes, of course AI will make stuff cheaper and more accessible, but you'll want more and more of that stuff. Just count the number of "computers" in your home now, and think what else will become "smart" in the future.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoHot water, sewers, decent food, television and films, warm & damp-resistant housing, electric lights and much more and I'm glad of it. I remember living in places where hot water had to come from a kettle and the house was cold and in winter the damp rose nearly to the ceiling from the floor. And the food back then was expensive and pretty bad.
- whack 3y ago> If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work. If you're content to live at the same quality-of-life that people had in 1923, you can certainly achieve that by doing half the amount of work. The cost of living that quality of life is dirt-cheap - median household real-income back then in today's dollars is less than $30k. The average person back then had a life expectancy of ~60, barely traveled long distances, had minimal electronic gadgets, and lived in houses that have none of today's modern amenities. If you're content with that kind of lifestyle, you can easily achieve that by either working as a freelancer for 20 hours per week. Or by working a high-paying job, saving most of your money, and retiring in your 30s/40s. Most people don't do this because ... they don't want to live like someone in 1923. Our own life expectations today are far higher, and hence, we push ourselves to work 40+ hours/week to meet them. The risk of hyper-income-inequality is real. Fortunately we also live in a democracy. Billionaires like Murdoch will be able to exploit wedge issues like guns and LGBT for only so long. Sooner or later a critical mass of people will demand sharply more progressive tax rates, and even things like UBI, if too much wealth is concentrated in too few hands.