Comment by Kon5ole
5 days ago
>First is the replacement of white-collar labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is solved. On the road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to feed your family, is a minor nuisance.
My attempt to talk you out of it:
If nobody has a job then nobody can pay to make the robot and AI companies rich.
Who needs the money when you have an autonomous system to produce all the energy and resources you need? These systems simply do not need the construct of money as we know it at a certain point.
The star trek society is is a remote possibility here. One can hope.
I think we're going in that direction. The typical reader here I think can't see the forest for the trees. We're all in meat space. They call it real life. Most jobs aren't on the internet and ultimately deal with the physical. It doesn't matter what tech we have when there's boxes to move and shelves to stock. If AI empowers a small business owner to do things that were previously completely outside their budget I can only imagine that will increase opportunity.
The Star Trek society was a myth - even on Star Trek. This was called out by Quark on DS9. There was very much the idea of “credits” and rationing based on limited resources.
During the original Star Trek show, you never really saw what life was like for everyone who was not aboard the flagship starship. They started exposing more of the universe in subsequent decades
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What makes you think the people who control these post-scarcity machines are going to share their output with you?
Don't take it to the limit, but consider a continuous relaxation : underemployed people doing whatever is not feasible or economically attractive to AI/robots, like prostitution, massage therapy, art, sales, social work, etc.
Being rich is ultimately about owning and being able to defend resources. IF something like 99% of humans become irrelevant to the machine run utopia for the elites, whatever currency the poors use to pay for services among each other will be worthless to the top 1% when they simply don't need them or their services.
Would we just be splitting society in two in that case? Seeing as the poor would have nothing to give to the rich, nor the rich to the poor, wouldn’t the poor 99% just create their own new society with their own units of value?
Or the poor decide the rich have no more right to be rich than themselves and start burning and destroying rich people's stuff and anger turns to blood.
It is far easier and faster to destroy than to build and technology can only protect you so much. Unless someone manages a completely self contained enviroment and has a good enough place to hide with it they could be at risk.
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Unless the poor cause global warming with their bonfires and that inconveniences the rich. In that case...they will kill the poor.
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So what? If you can generate all goods and services without anyone else's help, you'll just do that. You don't need other people buying what you produce. You don't need other people at all, except for a very small number of servants.