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having jobs are not our purpose. If a society can sustain itself without most of their members working till they expire, that should be the goal.
billionaires are the problem, not unemployment.
fuck this. It's only the "funny" community. On my home, 5 posts below this one, i have that post ☞ https://slrpnk.net/post/26809803
Except we’ve been eliminating manual labour jobs for much longer than we’ve had AI.
And yet we're still far from succeeding. It's sad.
Hardly sad, first of all. Second, we've been reasonably successful, or there'd still be at least twice as many such jobs now (likely more). Third, recent advances in multipurpose robotics have a strong likelihood of having major effects in this area before much longer - especially when combined with AI tech.
So you don't think that automating production and freeing people to do what they enjoy while improving their standard of living is a worthy goal? Yes, we are moving in the right direction, but there's still an astonishing amount of manual labor in terrible conditions happening in poor countries to produce cheap stuff. For things that are automated elsewhere, but it would cost more than the cheap labor there. As I said, it's sad.
If improving people's standard of living were actually the end result, but it's not been the case thus far.
In general, it obviously is. The standard of living is rising over the last few hundred years. Many people can quite easily get things and amount and types of food that would be unthinkable just several decades ago. Many of which wouldn't be possible to manufacture at scale, if at all, without progressing automation. Jobs shifting from production (agriculture and manufacturing) toward services are clear indication of this.
Enriching the rich disproportionately more is also happening. But that is somewhat different story with partially different causes.
If you compare recent history to a hundred years ago, sure. Now, analyze the trajectories of trends from that recent history and extract where things are going over the next century.
If you select a sufficiently short and localised subset of data, you can show almost anything. Would I be wrong to guess tjat your opinion is heavily influenced by the current state of the US? While I agree that the situation there is complete shit and something needs to happen, I would argue (admittedly without any solid data in hand) that globally, automation is helping loads of people and is going to continue to do so.
I'm glad you still manage have a more positive outlook on the future than I do.
Yes, my perspective is definitely colored by my experience in America, but if you think similar won't happen elsewhere then I think you're being overly idealistic - at least when it comes to the full population of the world. Those who enable the powerfully wealthy will certainly do better - at least until those who don't are no longer much of a threat, and said wealthy no longer need their enablers.
Yeah "while improving their standard of living" sounds great except the wealth generated isnt being spread out among the population.
If there are 5 factory workers on a line, and a machine comes out that means there's only 2 on that line now, are the 3 who are out of a job still going to get paid the same, or are the 2 remaining going to get any kind of pay rise? Are they bollocks. The 3 losers need to "Just get a job" and the 2 people left need to start producing more for the same pay.
Maybe the value is getting passed onto the consumer? Probably not with shrinkflation, regular inflation and skyrocketing CEO bonuses.
We had artificial power and artificial movement for much longer than we've had artificial intelligence.
(Ok, it's not really artificial movement, but I couldn't think of a better phrase that referred to motors and stuff while still being "artificial" lol)
well actually, even if your job is safe from AI, AI is still gonna affect your wages a lot.
if AI takes some jobs, the demand for human labor overall decreases, so the prices for human labor (a.k.a. wages) decreases by the rule of supply and demand. now, this affects your wages no matter which job you work, because these laid-off workers are gonna flood into your field and now there's more supply of potential workers in your field which is gonna lower wages for you.
Wages aren't all that important though, the important thing is purchasing power. Theoretically, if AI replaces jobs and costs less to operate than those jobs, the price of whatever that job produced should go down. If it's a widespread phenomenon, we should expect deflation to occur.
The important thing is to make sure costs actually go down. That should be true if there's enough actual competition in the market, so if one service keeps prices up, another will eat its lunch.
If those jobs aren't replaced with other jobs and prices remain high, demand will crater as more and more people can no longer afford to pay, and that hurts profits.
I'm not too worried long term and mostly worried about market manipulation from companies claiming there's value when there isn't.
The problem is that wages are only like 30% of the cost of a product. The rest is materials and company profit.
If wages drop to zero because AI does it, then yes, the cost of products is also gonna drop, but only by 30%, while your wages drop by 100%. You see the issue: decreasing purchasing power. Maths.
That's assuming that new jobs aren't created.
As Plato says... And people act like there's no solution when this happens.