5 ms·

By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce, therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete, therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lo

By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce, therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete, therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lots of starvation, poverty and death. When billionaires say "think about the trillions of people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about _their_ descendants, not yours.

skybrian 4mo ago
This is dystopian speculation. You don't have to believe every science fiction scenario someone famous talks about.
- dag100 4mo ago
  It's hardly speculative when it is effectively what happened just after the Industrial Revolution, but with more power ceded to capital. In many ways, it's already happening.
  - skybrian 4mo ago
    No, that was not "effectively what happened" in the Industrial Revolution. That was an enormous change, but it didn't "completely eliminate the need for a human workforce." That's just hype.
    - dag100 4mo ago
      Fine, it is not effectively what happened then. It is worse. At least workers are required to run factories (even though working conditions were ridiculously horrible back then). With AI, in maybe 20 years, 95% of all white-collar workers will be economically irrelevant. You won't need accountants, or programmers, or designers. And we can't all become lawyers and surgeons, or tradesmen. The Industrial Revolution indeed did not completely eliminate the need for a human workforce. The AI Revolution will.
SR2Z 4mo ago
If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to? Nobody wants to be king of the ashes. The future is going to be the same as now, just with a little less menial work.
- dag100 4mo ago
  > If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to? Themselves. The economy is a big cycle where money changes hands to drive production i.e. things getting made. AI will simultaneously greatly increase production (especially once humanoid robots are as dexterous as humans) and make the humans whose jobs it will do economically irrelevant. So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.
  - SR2Z 4mo ago
    > So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either. Here's another framing for you: at this point _there are no longer rich and poor people_. There are fewer people, but we knew that was going to happen as a consequence of declining birthrates. The elderly are taken care of despite an otherwise unsustainable dependency ratio, because robots can manage the actual business of survival. In that world everyone is a member of the nobility by the virtue of being _human_. There are a few holdouts - mostly religious nuts and other cults - but by and large everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to. There is no world where legions of filthy rich AI barons lord it over the technologically illiterate peasants, though. How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model? When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate? One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.

skybrian 4mo ago

This is dystopian speculation. You don't have to believe every science fiction scenario someone famous talks about.

dag100 4mo ago
It's hardly speculative when it is effectively what happened just after the Industrial Revolution, but with more power ceded to capital. In many ways, it's already happening.
- skybrian 4mo ago
  No, that was not "effectively what happened" in the Industrial Revolution. That was an enormous change, but it didn't "completely eliminate the need for a human workforce." That's just hype.
  - dag100 4mo ago
    Fine, it is not effectively what happened then. It is worse. At least workers are required to run factories (even though working conditions were ridiculously horrible back then). With AI, in maybe 20 years, 95% of all white-collar workers will be economically irrelevant. You won't need accountants, or programmers, or designers. And we can't all become lawyers and surgeons, or tradesmen. The Industrial Revolution indeed did not completely eliminate the need for a human workforce. The AI Revolution will.

SR2Z 4mo ago

If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to? Nobody wants to be king of the ashes. The future is going to be the same as now, just with a little less menial work.

dag100 4mo ago
> If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to? Themselves. The economy is a big cycle where money changes hands to drive production i.e. things getting made. AI will simultaneously greatly increase production (especially once humanoid robots are as dexterous as humans) and make the humans whose jobs it will do economically irrelevant. So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.
- SR2Z 4mo ago
  > So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either. Here's another framing for you: at this point _there are no longer rich and poor people_. There are fewer people, but we knew that was going to happen as a consequence of declining birthrates. The elderly are taken care of despite an otherwise unsustainable dependency ratio, because robots can manage the actual business of survival. In that world everyone is a member of the nobility by the virtue of being _human_. There are a few holdouts - mostly religious nuts and other cults - but by and large everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to. There is no world where legions of filthy rich AI barons lord it over the technologically illiterate peasants, though. How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model? When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate? One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.