> Wilson rejected the idea of mass joblessness due to AI as "a very silly fear because human desires and human wants are infinite, and therefore, we always find new things for people to do."

While I'm highly skeptical that the current iteration of LLM tech will lead to mass joblessness, the reasoning above is flawed. If it costs less to employ a bot than to employ a human, then the price of human labor will fall until it reaches equilibrium with the bot. And if that equilibrium price happens to be below what it takes to keep a human alive, then it doesn't matter if "human wants are infinite" because it would be cheaper to fulfill those wants without paying a human.

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lesuorac 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm more concerned that the above reasoning is flawed just because it's untrue.

I don't know any yacht owning people but the few people I know with boats are very happy with it's size. The people looking for a football field on water are _limited_. Human desires are limited and if that limit can be achieved without the collective efforts of all humans then under our capitalistic model somebody is going to starve.

While I agree that the replacement of humans with AI would lead to joblessness, I think you'll see far sooner mass joblessness as a human with better technology can replace 50+ other humans (like containership engineer vs sailship crew).

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techblueberry 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, we’ll see what happens, but one of the interesting things about the book sapiens, is it highlights that there are plenty of paradigm shifting events in human history that change our basic assumptions.

“Life is suffering” meant something very different when the Buddha first said it to now. The idea that “the only constant is change” is a relatively modern creation(or at least the significance of it), so this idea that economics is going to keep working the way it always has - at least feels like it’s going to change if we get more advanced AI.

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dullcrisp 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What if you want is to keep a human alive. How can that cost less than keeping a human alive?

	▲	kibwen 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The assertion that we are refuting is this: "human wants are infinite, and therefore, we always find new things for people to do". The context here is specifically about employment, human labor, and the spectre of joblessness. What you're describing is not a labor market, it's charity. And indeed, one peaceful, idyllic solution to mass unemployment that gets trotted out is something like UBI, where you pay people to simply keep them alive, without expecting anything in return. But that's not at all what's being discussed here; instead, what the OP is asserting is the usual yarn that technological advances will not decrease human employment, but at a certain point this simply stops being the case, and that point will be reached if or when the price of artificial labor falls below a critical level. In short: at the limit of technological advancement, you can either prioritize a market economy, or you can prioritize keeping people alive; you cannot have both.
	▲	moralestapia 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Great question that will unfortunately be ignored by GP, as it happens usually.
	▲	bluefirebrand 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't think anyone pushing AI really cares about keeping humans alive AI is a fundamentally antisocial anti-human technology