I'm tired of these gloomy takes. Everyone only ever focuses on the negatives.

Automation being the end of work would be an unambiguously good thing. Machines can be far more productive than humans ever can, and it would free us up to do whatever we want. We might have to rework the social and economic order a little bit, but we probably needed to do that anyway.

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stego-tech 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's less "gloomy" and more of a passionate "Hey, we need to rework the social order anyway, so can we maybe not set everything on fire before we do so?"

Nobody's disagreeing with your latter line, just vehemently screaming that there's no need for willful harm.

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Legend2440 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Several issues with this:

1. Economic change drives social change. The political will to create something like UBI will not exist unless there is mass unemployment.

2. Right now we need people to work, in order to create the things they need to live. It will not be possible to allow willful unemployment until machines can actually do most jobs.

3. We don't actually know if 100% automation will happen. Past automation has tended to create new jobs, and we've maintained full employment at higher wages. We should see if this happens again before we start panicking.

We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.

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stego-tech 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.

Get that accelerationist fatalism outta my face. Just because you personally have no qualms with harming others in the name of some facsimile of progress, doesn't mean it's the only option available to us. Slowing things down through regulations, through employment mandates, through pleas for cooperation instead of immediate replacement, all of those and more are ways of gradual reform and adaptation.

We're proposing letting the organism (humanity) adapt to traditional work and employment being wholesale eliminated in a society that demands work for basic survival through gradual and continuous reforms as circumstances change. Your proposal is the functional equivalent of telling an endangered species, "lol get gud bruv".

We are not the same.

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Hizonner 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> through employment mandates

Be careful not to create a permanent future of mandatory makework.

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Legend2440 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're panicking. We're gonna be fine.

We've done lots of automation before, and we all benefited immensely. Just chill and deal with problems as they come up.

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switchbak 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s just faith though. And I see no driving reason to trust in your faith.

We’ve never seen anything remotely close to this kind of upheaval. This kind of techno-optimism makes sense in the very young, but seems painfully naive once you’ve been around the block a bunch of times.

There are no adults in the room driving this. There’s weird ultra elite people driving this forward with their competitive megalomaniacal egos. And we’re stuck in a game theoretic landscape where it’s effectively an inevitable race to a max AI future. None of this is a recipe for a stable or prosperous future.

If this wild accelerated future ends up being a utopia, I’ll be jazzed to eat my words. I just haven’t seen any utopias unfold in my life, and I’m skeptical of those who tell me to chill and embrace the chaos.

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danaris 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The "problems that come up" will be people homeless and starving.

I'm 100% with stego-tech that I think we should address the major, glaring concerns that come with greater automation before that happens.

Because I care about my fellow human beings, and do not want them to suffer.

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fluoridation 2 hours ago | parent [-]

People starving en masse because there was no work to do anymore and no way to get paid, despite there being plentiful food, is something that has never happened. If the amount of money on the consumer side of the food economy were to shrink significantly, what should happen is that the price of food should also go down until people can buy food again. The stock has to move no matter what, otherwise it spoils.

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danaris 2 hours ago | parent [-]

And if the price that those people can afford is $0, because ClaudeGPTPilot MegaAGI took all their jobs? What then?

There is a price below which no farmer is going to sell, regardless of whether they have another buyer.

What you're saying effectively amounts to "come on, there's no way they'd actually let people starve in the streets! That's something that could never happen these days."

Think about whether there might be other things that "could never happen these days" that are happening right now, in various places in America.

	▲	fluoridation 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If we're talking about huge groups, like thousands, of people having no money for food, it would behoove the government to pay for that food, just to avoid a revolt. Just as a matter of self-preservation.