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▲ 0c3ca83 2 hours ago

Yes. It removes political power. As a thought experiment, what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?

What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?

▲mx7zysuj4xew an hour ago | parent | next [-]

They start waving flags around, voting for someone who will promise to "make things great again" all the while languishing in poverty and dying of fentanyl overdoses

▲lurk2 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The majority of anti-tech sentiment in America has been coming out of left-leaning circles for the last five years. Go look at a video of the people protesting data centers in your nearest metropole; I guarantee you they look nothing like the caricature you have in your head.

▲Buttons840 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The left tea party and left version of Trump hasn't arrived yet, but it's coming.

▲jacobolus an hour ago | parent [-]

The "Tea Party" was an astroturf operation organized by GOP operatives and funded by the Koch brothers and some other billionaire donors. Its appearance of popular support was substantially artificial and heavily amplified by supportive GOP-aligned media.

What kind of "left" version are you imagining?

▲lurk2 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

> What kind of "left" version are you imagining?

The Open Society Foundation.

▲octoberfranklin 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

You mean antifa?

▲pj_mukh 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?”

This is an interesting question and I’d love to come to a good answer that works for all, but can we also accept that we went from a world that had people manually light lamps around the city like 150 [1] years ago to the full electric lights. Do we then stop that progress now and keep people manually collecting garbage when a replacement tech is around the corner?

[1] mm more like 120 years. The last lamplighters strikes was close to 1907 in NYC

▲beremaki 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Do we then stop that progress now and keep people manually collecting garbage when a replacement tech is around the corner?

No we take the tech and socialize its control

▲pj_mukh 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

That’s the same thing as stopping it.

If you “socialized” Edison’s electricity and gave the control to the lamplighters, we’d all be living under gas lamps now. There is zero reason for the lamplighters to negotiate any progress whatsoever.

▲psadri an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Perhaps the real answer is people’s buying power. If people can’t withhold their work, they could withhold their spending, ie boycott misbehaving entities.

▲10111001 an hour ago | parent [-]

>> Yes. It removes political power. As a thought experiment, what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?

>> What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?

> Perhaps the real answer is people’s buying power. If people can’t withhold their work, they could withhold their spending, ie boycott misbehaving entities.

But if they don't have work, they won't have buying power to withhold. Post AI-displacement, the economy will reorient around serving the people who still have buying power (the oligarchs and their hangers-on).

Expect demand for food to plummet and demand for dick-waving pyramids and rocket cars to skyrocket.

▲octoberfranklin 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used to point this out whenever UBI came up for discussion.

People got very very angry at me for pointing this out.

So I stopped doing it.

▲jongjong 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No it doesn't. People can still protest, block roads, boycott etc... If they get UBI/UHI, they will have more time to engage politically too (in a productive way).

▲Toslink 2 hours ago | parent [-]

[dead]

▲augment_me 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment and mass extermination of those that refuse.

Otherwise you might end up with disruptive things like protests, blockage of value creating infrastructure, etc.

Another less dramatic option would be containment in prisons or similar where minimal costs can be incurred.

▲ElProlactin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The irony of comments like this is that the vast majority of people who make them would not be in the group they think they belong to.

▲augment_me 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I find some irony in that this hyperbolically late-stage neoliberal take is being taken as something I want in all but 2 replies

▲coldbrewed an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Won't anyone think of the leopards? They can't subsist on faces alone and yet people keep feeding themselves to the leopards?

▲tavavex 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're still undershooting just how grim the optimal outcome of our system is. It's not going to be about 'refusal', like taking a bargain and making choices. If total automation is achieved, huge swaths of people will be placed into that bracket immediately, based largely on their luck, the country they live in and their wealth. An automated world doesn't need this many people to run itself, so only a chosen few will make it through. The rest will eventually be slowly destroyed in the most cruel ways possible. People will keep chanting "Adapt or die" until it turns into simply "Die".

▲pjc50 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, that for many people is a "AI must be prevented from happening at all because it will bring about this outcome" argument.

▲drivebyhooting 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don’t be daft. All that man power would be excellent for bolstering the army and invading neighboring countries.

I imagine a human body will still be cheaper and more agile than robots for a long while.

▲altcognito 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Russian typing detected.

▲akst an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment

I say this who is voluntarily returning to university to pursue a different profession after working 10 years as a software engineer. This isn't going to work for 95% of people, people who have dependents children and partners, mortgages.

> mass extermination of those that refuse

I have no words, but you sound like a dickhead.

▲xp84 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

I distinctly did not get the impression that GP is happy about or approving of what he’s suggesting may be “economically rational.” It reads more as foreboding to me.

▲augment_me 6 minutes ago | parent [-]

This is how I meant it, but the replies above might have attributed this to moral values somehow

▲ 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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