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Comment by majormajor

19 hours ago

We've had many decades of technology since Asimov started writing about robots, and we've seen almost all of it used to make the day-to-day experience of the average worker-bee worse. More tracking. More work after hours. More demands to do more with less. Fewer other humans to help you with those things.

We aren't working 4 hour days because we no longer have to spend half the day waiting on things that were slower pre-internet. We're just supposed to deliver more, and oh, work more hours too since now you've always got your work with you.

Any discussion of today's AI firms has to start from the position of these companies being controlled by people deeply rooted in, and invested in, those systems and the negative application of that technology towards "working for a living" to date.

How do we get from there to a utopia?

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majormajor

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Lerc  8 hours ago

>How do we get from there to a utopia?

How to get there:

1. Define the utopia in more detail.

2. Make the case that this is a preferable state. Make people want it.

3. Make the case that it is sustainable once achieved.

4. Identify specific differences between the preferred destination and where we are now.

5. Avoiding short term and temporary effects, work towards changing the differences to what the destination has. Even if that is only proclaiming that these changes are what you want

6. Show how those changes make us closer to the destination that people want.

Some of these are hard problems, I don't think any are intractable. I think they don't get done because they are hard, and opposing something is easier. Rather than building something you want, you can knock down something you don't like. Sure, that might get you closer to your desired state if you consider nothingness to be better than undesired, but without building you will never get there.

If you want everyone to live in a castle, build a castle and invite everybody over. If you start by destroying huts you will just be making adversaries. The converse is true also, if you want everyone to live in huts, build more huts and invite everyone over. If they don't come it's because you haven't made the case that it is a preferable state. Knocking down the castle is not going to convince them of that.