4 ms·

Layoffs for profits are the way. Unions are also the way. It's a tale as old as time. Some kind of universal basic income tempts my thinking as a solution to

by ncr100 3y ago

Layoffs for profits are the way. Unions are also the way. It's a tale as old as time. Some kind of universal basic income tempts my thinking as a solution to not having enough need for labor anymore.

bamboozled 3y ago
Newflash: people don’t just need some minimum wage money to be happy. UBI might be better than nothing, but boy are people going to be lost without social mobility and purpose. Hopefully we can find that some other way if all labor is ever replaced. Which I am skeptical about.
- LNSY 3y ago
  Or we could have a generation of amazing musicians, programmers, painters and social workers. Have you read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs? He talks about how a lot of the British music scene of the 60's and 70's was basically funded by social welfare programs. Broke kids having time to hone their craft. It could be another renaissance
  - throwitaway222 3y ago
    Yes there will be a tiny percentage of the population like that, but by most accounts it's WallE (before they returned) and Idiocracy.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    > He talks about how a lot of the British music scene of the 60's and 70's was basically funded by social welfare programs. Broke kids having time to hone their craft. Just because somenthing happened organically/by chance in the past, doesn't automatically mean you can just replicate the same result today by forcing thse same policies from the 60's in the world of today. You might definitely get a completely different outcome. We had something like that during the pandemic. Kids, or young adults, were blowing it all their easy money on crypto and $GME stonks which led to tonnes of get-rich-quick scammers and pyramid schemes, not making new music or art at home. Also, the generation of The Baatles didn't have their brains fried by endless doom scroling on tiktok, social media and Fortnite. If they were bored at home with no job, they had little escapism so listening to other artists and creating their own competing content was the go-to, while today if you've got no job and are sitting bored at home there's million other hedonistic avenues of keeping yourself entertained that are much easier than having to pick up a guitar, learn to play it well and come up with meaningful lyrics. Passionate artists and musicians will always find a way to create content they enjoy even if they'll still be broke as every generation before them. The Beatles of today are on twitch or youtube, creating content about the stuff their passionate about and getting funded via Patreon or other donations. I have another anecdote to bring to the table. I'm from Eastern Europe and the best music, especailly hip-hop, that came out of my post-communist hellhole country was in the 90's when we had the worst possible economy, rampant inflation and crime, no jobs, no welfare, no money, no opportunities, nothing. But those times produced the best artists and football players(soccer for you guys). Now the economy and welfare is 100x better than back then, but the quality of art and music has gone down the toilet. Why is that? I think the new found prosperty brought with it a career focused culture and because now there's more and better things to do for money and entertainment than struggling with creating good music in a garage while broke. So to me, it seems the most depressive economic periods produce the best art and music, and the abundant "easy times" produce the worst and least inspiring. It was similar to 50 Cent's "Get rich or die trying" or Eminem's "8 Mile", all these artist came from suffering of economic harship, not economic prosperity, but nobody sane in the head wants to bring back the hard times just so we could get better hip-hop and music.
    - yterdy 3y ago
      NFTs were the new music and art, once you cared to look past your given Bored Apes. I also don't think that it's a coincidence that XR and AI hit their strides during that period. There are more examples. And, note that the momentum-killer in all these cases was not organic, but institutions clawing back their riches - by hook, and certainly by crook, in many cases (I'm glad you mentioned GME). Return-to-office had every rational reason not to happen, and they forced it anyway.
    - ncr100 3y ago
      Pain seems to amplify and enrich artistic expression, in my experience.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      Blues music is a another example of a crappy economic and social situation producing something brilliant. Maybe AI job losses will spawn the next wave of amazing art and music...
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    But the "AI" of today can just copy and style, can make art faster than people. I think that while we can say, art is art, people just like doing art, which I think is true for some people, there was also a major inventive to make good music in the 60s and 70s which will no longer be there if a machine can write an album in 20 seconds and steal your style almost instantaneously. Maybe people will be using AI to make unimaginably good art and prosper from that, which I hope so but as it stands now, it's a very different situation to what happened in the past.
- oneshtein 3y ago
  Panem et circenses.
  - bamboozled 3y ago
    En vino veritas
    - debo_ 3y ago
      Hab SoSlI' Quch
    - yterdy 3y ago
      Carpe verpa
- howlin 3y ago
  Career focused culture has destroyed a large amount of social cohesion. If machines do more work, humans can go back to community building. Type A personalities that demand social mobility can play politics to see who leads their respective tribe. The rest of us can spend the time learning about the world, developing engaging hobbies, reading philosophy and experiencing great works of art. Maybe just focus on a personal spirituality and/or self-actualization. There is so much humans should be doing to make our brief existence a little more happy and fulfilling. Little of this has to do about contributing labor.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Career focused culture has destroyed a large amount of social cohesion. Eaxtly, spot on! > If machines do more work, humans can go back to community building. In an ideal utopic society, yes, but that's not what's happening. More automation replacing workers just means more people out of work from older jobs, means more competition and lower wages for the remaining few un-automatable jobs flooded with now jobless workers. It's impossible to pull off if all the profits from automation go to those doing the automation instead of the disposed workers, but if those in charge of investing and reasearching automation would not get huge profits they wouldn't be motivated to invest in automation in the first place and we'd be back to the middle ages. So what do we do? What's the realistic sollution? Do we go back to communism and have the state in charge of all economic planning and development? Maybe not since that doesn't works too well in the long run. Ideally there should be a middle ground that's missing right now where replacing workers with autoamtion is done through union negociations at a steady pace to enure disposed labor can be retrained in newer careers.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    I do think this sounds like a plausible outcome. I can even see the "AI wealthy" getting a bit lonely at the top and wanting to be part of the human race again. Notice how rich people wear hoodies and train at the gym like everyone else now?
- yterdy 3y ago
  There are many basic social needs that aren't being met for a majority of the population because so much time and energy has to go towards merely surviving. I think people who have a vested interest in this paradigm overestimate how much the average person "needs" work for "social mobility and purpose", versus, say, companionship, community, education, curiosity, housing stability, etc. Maybe they're afraid that people will realize that the rat race and daily grind don't fill the hole, but stuff that doesn't cost money or that is difficult to profit from do.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >There are many basic social needs that aren't being met for a majority of the population because so much time and energy has to go towards merely surviving. Always has been since humanity's ~200k year history. The unpriviledged masses having free time for leisure and entertainment between work and sleep that isn't a Sunday, is a relatively new development of about ~100 years or less, for which much blood has been spilled. My grandparents were doing subsistance farming working about ~14h/day, 6-7 days/week just to survive, while today I can have my needs met by clocking in 8h of work in an office 5 days/week. Ideally we should strive for better, but we forget our ancestors had it way worse not too long ago.
    - yterdy 3y ago
      >Always has been since humanity's ~200k year history. The unpriviledged masses having free time for leisure and entertainment between work and sleep that isn't a Sunday, is a relatively new development of about ~100 years or less Incorrect. If anything, the period during and immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution (before those hard-won labor victories) is the outlier. The common thread in the traditional societies that still exist is a great deal of leisure time or light physical labor, even for farmers. Through the Middle Ages and up to the the advent of chattel slavery and industrialization in the Americas and Europe, labor schedules were quite mild and left plenty of time for leisure, socializing, labor outside of primary production duties (chores, cooking, etc., through which creative faculties could be exercises); much of the literature describing back-breaking labor, written by the privileged classes, was actually a form of propaganda or wish-fulfillment fiction. I'd suggest reading The Overworked American by Juliet Schor. It provides an overview of historical modes of labor in the West.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  The value of UBI is it means your ability to survive isn't tied to having a job, giving you a much stronger negotiating position. It's the same as socialized health care, housing, subsidized or socialized food...if you have to risk your life to find a better offer, it's harder to walk away from the table. In theory, base on supply and demand, jobs should be priced at difficulty * value * unpleasantness Instead, a lot of the hardest, most important, and most unpleasant jobs pay some of the lowest wages, because they default land on the people with the least negotiating power (undocumented immigrants, prisoners, or those so stuck in crushing poverty they have to take the first option they get), and the employer gets to get away with paying well under the "market" value of the labor. So many jobs wouldn't exist at their current price point (if at all), if there was a basic minimum amount of "You can just about get by" money that everyone had.
squidbeak 3y ago
The transition will be painful either way - mass unemployment, aggravated by a steep deflationary cycle, mass boredom and hopelessness in a redundant workforce conditioned from birth to find purpose in paid work, and the cultural and political upheaval from the permanent consolidation of power and wealth by the tiny elite supplying and developing the AI who are suddenly bigger than any or all governments.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  Replace AI with factories and you're describing the Industrial Revolution. We have a playbook for this game.
- zogrodea 3y ago
  Do most people find purpose in paid work? I know some young adults about 25 years old who want to retire early (seems to be a movement). I personally would value being a provider and career but work is just a means to that goal and not the end-goal itself.
gruez 3y ago
>Unions are also the way. Unions derive power from their ability to withhold labor. What's their leverage when their labor isn't needed anymore because of AI?
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  As a current AI researchers, my opinion is while AI may surpass the average human soon (if not already) in a game of 9s humans are always better. So I wouldn’t trust a system with 0 humans in it for failsafe.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >my opinion is while AI may surpass the average human soon But will AI be able to surpass me bootlicking my boss?
- mcmoor 3y ago
  This is what I'm thinking everytime I see union comments in layoff posts. Either those unions will be very weak because of AI or AI will be artificially weaken by them, which is not the best case either.

by ncr100 3y ago

Layoffs for profits are the way. Unions are also the way. It's a tale as old as time. Some kind of universal basic income tempts my thinking as a solution to not having enough need for labor anymore.

bamboozled 3y ago

Newflash: people don’t just need some minimum wage money to be happy. UBI might be better than nothing, but boy are people going to be lost without social mobility and purpose. Hopefully we can find that some other way if all labor is ever replaced. Which I am skeptical about.

LNSY 3y ago
Or we could have a generation of amazing musicians, programmers, painters and social workers. Have you read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs? He talks about how a lot of the British music scene of the 60's and 70's was basically funded by social welfare programs. Broke kids having time to hone their craft. It could be another renaissance
- throwitaway222 3y ago
  Yes there will be a tiny percentage of the population like that, but by most accounts it's WallE (before they returned) and Idiocracy.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  > He talks about how a lot of the British music scene of the 60's and 70's was basically funded by social welfare programs. Broke kids having time to hone their craft. Just because somenthing happened organically/by chance in the past, doesn't automatically mean you can just replicate the same result today by forcing thse same policies from the 60's in the world of today. You might definitely get a completely different outcome. We had something like that during the pandemic. Kids, or young adults, were blowing it all their easy money on crypto and $GME stonks which led to tonnes of get-rich-quick scammers and pyramid schemes, not making new music or art at home. Also, the generation of The Baatles didn't have their brains fried by endless doom scroling on tiktok, social media and Fortnite. If they were bored at home with no job, they had little escapism so listening to other artists and creating their own competing content was the go-to, while today if you've got no job and are sitting bored at home there's million other hedonistic avenues of keeping yourself entertained that are much easier than having to pick up a guitar, learn to play it well and come up with meaningful lyrics. Passionate artists and musicians will always find a way to create content they enjoy even if they'll still be broke as every generation before them. The Beatles of today are on twitch or youtube, creating content about the stuff their passionate about and getting funded via Patreon or other donations. I have another anecdote to bring to the table. I'm from Eastern Europe and the best music, especailly hip-hop, that came out of my post-communist hellhole country was in the 90's when we had the worst possible economy, rampant inflation and crime, no jobs, no welfare, no money, no opportunities, nothing. But those times produced the best artists and football players(soccer for you guys). Now the economy and welfare is 100x better than back then, but the quality of art and music has gone down the toilet. Why is that? I think the new found prosperty brought with it a career focused culture and because now there's more and better things to do for money and entertainment than struggling with creating good music in a garage while broke. So to me, it seems the most depressive economic periods produce the best art and music, and the abundant "easy times" produce the worst and least inspiring. It was similar to 50 Cent's "Get rich or die trying" or Eminem's "8 Mile", all these artist came from suffering of economic harship, not economic prosperity, but nobody sane in the head wants to bring back the hard times just so we could get better hip-hop and music.
  - yterdy 3y ago
    NFTs were the new music and art, once you cared to look past your given Bored Apes. I also don't think that it's a coincidence that XR and AI hit their strides during that period. There are more examples. And, note that the momentum-killer in all these cases was not organic, but institutions clawing back their riches - by hook, and certainly by crook, in many cases (I'm glad you mentioned GME). Return-to-office had every rational reason not to happen, and they forced it anyway.
  - ncr100 3y ago
    Pain seems to amplify and enrich artistic expression, in my experience.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    Blues music is a another example of a crappy economic and social situation producing something brilliant. Maybe AI job losses will spawn the next wave of amazing art and music...
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  But the "AI" of today can just copy and style, can make art faster than people. I think that while we can say, art is art, people just like doing art, which I think is true for some people, there was also a major inventive to make good music in the 60s and 70s which will no longer be there if a machine can write an album in 20 seconds and steal your style almost instantaneously. Maybe people will be using AI to make unimaginably good art and prosper from that, which I hope so but as it stands now, it's a very different situation to what happened in the past.
oneshtein 3y ago
Panem et circenses.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  En vino veritas
  - debo_ 3y ago
    Hab SoSlI' Quch
  - yterdy 3y ago
    Carpe verpa
howlin 3y ago
Career focused culture has destroyed a large amount of social cohesion. If machines do more work, humans can go back to community building. Type A personalities that demand social mobility can play politics to see who leads their respective tribe. The rest of us can spend the time learning about the world, developing engaging hobbies, reading philosophy and experiencing great works of art. Maybe just focus on a personal spirituality and/or self-actualization. There is so much humans should be doing to make our brief existence a little more happy and fulfilling. Little of this has to do about contributing labor.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Career focused culture has destroyed a large amount of social cohesion. Eaxtly, spot on! > If machines do more work, humans can go back to community building. In an ideal utopic society, yes, but that's not what's happening. More automation replacing workers just means more people out of work from older jobs, means more competition and lower wages for the remaining few un-automatable jobs flooded with now jobless workers. It's impossible to pull off if all the profits from automation go to those doing the automation instead of the disposed workers, but if those in charge of investing and reasearching automation would not get huge profits they wouldn't be motivated to invest in automation in the first place and we'd be back to the middle ages. So what do we do? What's the realistic sollution? Do we go back to communism and have the state in charge of all economic planning and development? Maybe not since that doesn't works too well in the long run. Ideally there should be a middle ground that's missing right now where replacing workers with autoamtion is done through union negociations at a steady pace to enure disposed labor can be retrained in newer careers.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I do think this sounds like a plausible outcome. I can even see the "AI wealthy" getting a bit lonely at the top and wanting to be part of the human race again. Notice how rich people wear hoodies and train at the gym like everyone else now?
yterdy 3y ago
There are many basic social needs that aren't being met for a majority of the population because so much time and energy has to go towards merely surviving. I think people who have a vested interest in this paradigm overestimate how much the average person "needs" work for "social mobility and purpose", versus, say, companionship, community, education, curiosity, housing stability, etc. Maybe they're afraid that people will realize that the rat race and daily grind don't fill the hole, but stuff that doesn't cost money or that is difficult to profit from do.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >There are many basic social needs that aren't being met for a majority of the population because so much time and energy has to go towards merely surviving. Always has been since humanity's ~200k year history. The unpriviledged masses having free time for leisure and entertainment between work and sleep that isn't a Sunday, is a relatively new development of about ~100 years or less, for which much blood has been spilled. My grandparents were doing subsistance farming working about ~14h/day, 6-7 days/week just to survive, while today I can have my needs met by clocking in 8h of work in an office 5 days/week. Ideally we should strive for better, but we forget our ancestors had it way worse not too long ago.
  - yterdy 3y ago
    >Always has been since humanity's ~200k year history. The unpriviledged masses having free time for leisure and entertainment between work and sleep that isn't a Sunday, is a relatively new development of about ~100 years or less Incorrect. If anything, the period during and immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution (before those hard-won labor victories) is the outlier. The common thread in the traditional societies that still exist is a great deal of leisure time or light physical labor, even for farmers. Through the Middle Ages and up to the the advent of chattel slavery and industrialization in the Americas and Europe, labor schedules were quite mild and left plenty of time for leisure, socializing, labor outside of primary production duties (chores, cooking, etc., through which creative faculties could be exercises); much of the literature describing back-breaking labor, written by the privileged classes, was actually a form of propaganda or wish-fulfillment fiction. I'd suggest reading The Overworked American by Juliet Schor. It provides an overview of historical modes of labor in the West.
BobaFloutist 3y ago
The value of UBI is it means your ability to survive isn't tied to having a job, giving you a much stronger negotiating position. It's the same as socialized health care, housing, subsidized or socialized food...if you have to risk your life to find a better offer, it's harder to walk away from the table. In theory, base on supply and demand, jobs should be priced at difficulty * value * unpleasantness Instead, a lot of the hardest, most important, and most unpleasant jobs pay some of the lowest wages, because they default land on the people with the least negotiating power (undocumented immigrants, prisoners, or those so stuck in crushing poverty they have to take the first option they get), and the employer gets to get away with paying well under the "market" value of the labor. So many jobs wouldn't exist at their current price point (if at all), if there was a basic minimum amount of "You can just about get by" money that everyone had.

squidbeak 3y ago

The transition will be painful either way - mass unemployment, aggravated by a steep deflationary cycle, mass boredom and hopelessness in a redundant workforce conditioned from birth to find purpose in paid work, and the cultural and political upheaval from the permanent consolidation of power and wealth by the tiny elite supplying and developing the AI who are suddenly bigger than any or all governments.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
Replace AI with factories and you're describing the Industrial Revolution. We have a playbook for this game.
zogrodea 3y ago
Do most people find purpose in paid work? I know some young adults about 25 years old who want to retire early (seems to be a movement). I personally would value being a provider and career but work is just a means to that goal and not the end-goal itself.

gruez 3y ago

>Unions are also the way. Unions derive power from their ability to withhold labor. What's their leverage when their labor isn't needed anymore because of AI?

polygamous_bat 3y ago
As a current AI researchers, my opinion is while AI may surpass the average human soon (if not already) in a game of 9s humans are always better. So I wouldn’t trust a system with 0 humans in it for failsafe.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >my opinion is while AI may surpass the average human soon But will AI be able to surpass me bootlicking my boss?
mcmoor 3y ago
This is what I'm thinking everytime I see union comments in layoff posts. Either those unions will be very weak because of AI or AI will be artificially weaken by them, which is not the best case either.