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The reality is that our economy and entire understanding of human society relies on labor. If we free humans from labor, they just die. Like you're depriving th

The reality is that our economy and entire understanding of human society relies on labor. If we free humans from labor, they just die. Like you're depriving them of oxygen. Automation is great and all, and it's worked because we've been able to push humans higher and higher up the job ladder. But if, in the future, only highly specialized experts are valuable and better than AI, then a large majority of humanity will just be excluded from the economy all together. I'm not confident the average Joe could become a surgeon, even given perfect access to education. And I'm not even confident surgery won't be automated. Where does that leave us?

marcuskane2 2y ago
> Where does that leave us? Free to pursue our desires in a utopia. Humans used to work manual labor to produce barely enough food to survive, with occasional famines, and watch helplessly as half of their children died before adulthood. We automated farm labor, mining, manufacturing, etc so that one worker can now produce the output of 10, 100 or 100,000 laborers from a generation or two ago. Now those people work in new jobs and new industries that didn't previously exist. Today we're seeing the transition from automating physical labor to automating mental labor. Just as before, we'll see those workers move into new jobs and new industries that didn't exist before. Our society already spends 1000x more resources on children, elderly, disabled, unemployed, refugee, etc than would have been possible in the 1800s. The additional societal wealth creation from AI will mean that we can dedicate just a tiny portion of the surplus to provide universal basic income to everyone. (Or call it disability payments or housing assistance or welfare or whatever term if UBI doesn't resonate politically)
- throwaway290 2y ago
  > Free to pursue our desires in a utopia. In other words, useless. If one dies no one would care if no one depends on anyone except big tech products.
- consteval 2y ago
  Practically I think this is the only way forward. The previous solutions of pushing people "up" only works for so long. People are hard limited by what they're capable of - for example, I couldn't be a surgeon even if I wanted to. I'm just not smart enough and driven enough.

marcuskane2 2y ago

> Where does that leave us? Free to pursue our desires in a utopia. Humans used to work manual labor to produce barely enough food to survive, with occasional famines, and watch helplessly as half of their children died before adulthood. We automated farm labor, mining, manufacturing, etc so that one worker can now produce the output of 10, 100 or 100,000 laborers from a generation or two ago. Now those people work in new jobs and new industries that didn't previously exist. Today we're seeing the transition from automating physical labor to automating mental labor. Just as before, we'll see those workers move into new jobs and new industries that didn't exist before. Our society already spends 1000x more resources on children, elderly, disabled, unemployed, refugee, etc than would have been possible in the 1800s. The additional societal wealth creation from AI will mean that we can dedicate just a tiny portion of the surplus to provide universal basic income to everyone. (Or call it disability payments or housing assistance or welfare or whatever term if UBI doesn't resonate politically)

throwaway290 2y ago
> Free to pursue our desires in a utopia. In other words, useless. If one dies no one would care if no one depends on anyone except big tech products.
consteval 2y ago
Practically I think this is the only way forward. The previous solutions of pushing people "up" only works for so long. People are hard limited by what they're capable of - for example, I couldn't be a surgeon even if I wanted to. I'm just not smart enough and driven enough.