← Back to context

Comment by stego-tech

11 hours ago

And all of that sounds great on paper, until - again - you remember that what's being pitched and sold is not the cotton gin, or industrial automation, or robotic assembly lines, but generalized artificial intelligence. The sales pitch is the eventual replacement for all human labor in a consumption-driven society.

Who is going to buy flying vehicles when there's no jobs, and said vehicles are manufactured in dark factories like current Chinese EVs are? Certainly not the swaths of the unemployed.

Who is going to pay for MMORPGs curated by human GMs (again), their compute infrastructure, their content, their maintenance? Not the unemployed, not absent profound societal and policy changes!

The fact you're falling all the way back to basic resource extraction as potential outlets for labor is just...I don't even have the words to describe how profoundly out of touch you are with the effort involved, the harms caused (mining is one of the single most dangerous professions a human can possibly do, and your pitch is to send more humans into the mines? Or onto asteroids? Have you ever talked to a miner?), and the pittance of pay doled out to these humans as-is, nevermind in a post-AI society where labor availability far outstrips available roles.

The problem was never "what will humans do when they don't have to work", but "how will humans survive when they can't find work in a society predicated upon it for survival", and wow, you've done nothing to address that question beyond "send 'em to the mines".

Jevon's Paradox falls to pieces in the fact of a proposed tool that can replace human labor wholesale, and ya'll know it. Stop trying to wallpaper over this with historical context alone and actually sit, think critically, and address the core question at hand:

If human labor is no longer required due to generalized artificial intelligence and robotics rendering humans obsolete, how do we prepare for such a potentiality ahead of time without risking the collapse of society due to sudden and mass displacement of labor?