It's the same "give me a lot of money and everything will be great for everyone!" pitch that rich guys have been running for the history of humanity.

I keep warning people that promising UBI and not delivering UBI both serve the same end, undermining opposition.

By the time you find out that their promises of UBI are empty it’s too late to do anything about it.

Given how resistant American voters and politicians are against any sort of welfare or social assistance I doubt UBI would ever be possible here. Remember the backlash against "ObamaPhones" and "welfare queens!" We can't even get mandatory paid parental leave approved; UBI would be a non-starter.

Americans are fine with low taxes for billionaires and don't mind high inequality as one of their core beliefs is that upward class mobility is achievable and they might also get rich.

What’s an example where they took a side on taxes?

Haven't really paid attention to Altman, so can't comment there, but on the Musk file I will say it is insane that anyone relies upon his future benevolence. And they do rely upon it given that America is 100% a plutocracy now and is run in the service of the ultra-rich who hold complete and utter control over government.

Musk's entire history on this planet betrays him to be a profoundly selfish individual with perilously little regard for anyone else. Musk and his ilk (Trump, Bezos, Page, Ellison, Thiel, etc) are more likely to see you ground up into Soylent Green than to offer largess like UBI.

UBI == neo-slavery

It's 100% accurate to say that the history of the United States is filled to the brim with political change via violence.

I don’t condone it but I’m also expecting it to escalate. I grew up extremely poor and remained so until I dug myself out (through an absolutely ridiculous amount of work that no one should have to do this is not pro bootstraps).

Every week was a struggle to eat and the cost of living has significantly increased since then.

I guess the question is what is the terminal percentage of people who can’t afford to exist?

It’s 25% increase…for every meal missed.

> There will be suffering during transition and there will be many that don’t fare well

Yeah, and the people suffering are not going to like that. If people are afraid of being in that group, then they will not be very happy about it.

If you put yourself in the shoes of someone suffering from AI, how comforting do you think your observations here are?

Don't ignore the transient.

The industrial revolution created a hell on Earth for workers for the better part of a century.

You are confusing the macro view with the personal. Try losing your job and being told "don't worry, your quality of life will improve over time!" Would you respond positively?

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Machine-Origins-Rebellion-Again... Has some pertinent examples.

Industrial revolution made lives of many people into a hell. In the long term we gained, but only after those people went through periods of violence and fights.

> AI is an incredibly powerful technological shift in our way of life but where is the net employment hit taking place? Unemployment numbers remain stable.

At this point, a lot of AI is hot water rather then powerful shift in our way of life.

The true AI doomsayers believe in some sort of technological singularity, which means a point after which things become so strange that the world is radically transformed.

Things like "jobs" and "careers" are so integral to society that we can't really imagine what society would be like in a world where people don't have any clear purpose. That's why you won't get a definitive answer. The whole idea of a singularity is that people don't have the faintest clue what day to day life would look like after.

We often to choose to believe that a singularity can't happen, because we don't know what that even means. We can't answer the simple question. So it definitely better not happen, that would be very inconvenient.

You're asking a question that only applies to rational actors.

Corporations exist for one purpose: to get as much money as possible. Side concerns, which can range from "not destroying the environment" or "not destroying the economy," are objectively not their goal, nor do they consider them their responsibility. Those are things "someone else" should worry about.

AI destroying all jobs is similar to a nuclear arms race; these companies don't want to eliminate everyone's ability to buy things, but they don't want to be the only entity without that ability, so ...

Nobody can answer that?

There are jobs AI can't easily come for... not always nice ones, but either too physically fiddly or too cheap to bother automating.

But jobs go "extinct" all the time. My ancestors going back generations were sugarhouse labourers. That job's gone, but the lineage isn't: we just do different things now.

The pattern seems pretty consistent: raise the floor (dishwashers, CNC machines, laundry), and people tend to climb to higher levels of abstraction. The real question is who captures those productivity gains; and historically, it isn't the workers.

Shoes are the classic example. Automation made them cheaper and accessible to everyone. Then, once the market was captured, mid-tier became the ceiling and anything above it got expensive again. Nobody won except the owners.

There will still be jobs. Manual jobs, the kind that break our backs and have us breath various stuff we shouldn't (dust, fumes). Robots are difficult and maybe not so economically viable when everyone is desperate for any job at any cost.

Why would the doomsayers be the ones who need to answer that? That’s kind of their point! It’s the AI boosters who need to answer that, and so far it’s just a big collective shrug + silence.

We shouldn't be surprised people have a negative view of AI when Altman et al. have stated on stage that the goal is to replace everyone.

It's bizarre that some of the doomsayers are AI stakeholders. It's like they don't realize that most people don't have net worth in the 7-8 figures.

I console myself with the fact that without a functioning economy, AI will implode since capital will dry up. Then all of the investment in data centers, R&D, etc. will never be recovered. Then we'll be back to rational thinking? Maybe?

The consumer economy only exists to extract value from common people and funnel it up the wealth ladder. If robots and AI take over all the production, you don’t need a consumer economy, the robots produce and their output directly goes to the top. The rest of us are left to starve.

Take any econ 101 course, and you'll realize that this isn't a factor in the capitalist system. Capitalism is simply concerned with maximizing profit, and in this case, returning shareholder value. It's just simply not in the purview of the system to think about what happens when you completely get rid of your labor force.

Envisioned another way, the future of labor might look the way it did for laborers over 100 years ago, before major industries unionized; making 'Amazon-bucks' that can only be redeemed at the 'Amazon company store'.

Fully automated luxury space fascism doesn't really need buyers. A risk of high automation/post-scarcity is that abundance exists but remains under the control of people who are not interested in justice or equality or freedom. Lots of people feel that describes the leadership of most AI tech companies.

If they don't need your labor, and they don't need you as a customer, and they don't care about you as a person... where does that leave you?

[to be clear, I think post-scarcity, even in knowledge work, is a lot further off than most ai-doomsayers or ai-worshipers who take statements from people like Altman and Musk at face value]

the answer to every question: Agents, of course! With GPU-collaterized credit or some other idiocy.

The robots will tell you what to do, you will own nothing, and you will be happy. I think that is the plan?

If you have a magic robot that builds everything you want you don’t need anyone to buy anything.

Jfc this site is the worst. Use your words instead of drive by downvoting.

the fact no one can actually describe these "new jobs" makes #2 appear increasingly more probable.

I don't think it an either / or. The current AI models, as they are, improve productivity quite a bit. They're just super expensive but the expense is being subsidized so it appears reasonable.

An alternative possibility is that the models become much cheaper and their use becomes more ubiquitous which would be helpful.

If your competitor is cutting jobs because of AI you can either race them to the bottom or you can use the humans you already have to leverage AI to expand your product offering, become more competitive, tackle more work, deliver better quality results etc. I don't see a world where AI does the work and humans sit around poor and idle.

Its probably a combination of both. Also, the "lots of folk" in the two scenarios are probably different orders of magnitude.

If one of both cases happens you can be sure the people most responsible will be the least affected. That is why this can get ugly. Honestly they deserve for it to get ugly. We can keep giving the Musks, Zuckerbergs, Altmans and co the benefit of the doubt

There is a third and, to me, so much more likely outcome that it's not even worth talking about the other two: AI makes workers more productive and unlocks more economic activity.

Fixed pie fallacy.