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Comment by matheusmoreira

15 hours ago

This is our one chance to reach the fabled post-scarcity society. If we fail at this now, we'll end up in a totalitarian cyberpunk dystopia instead.

28 comments

matheusmoreira

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ijeifnekfjekd  14 hours ago

What? In what way does companies becoming dependent on AI chatbots will solve the world-spanning problem of resource scarcity?

The hell?

  • juleiie  14 hours ago

    The idea is that cheap and readily available and upgradeable intelligence is going to massively increase our purchasing power and what everyone can order for the same cost basically.

    If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.

    But on the other hand from the other direction there is a wage decrease incoming from increased competition at the same time. What happens if these two forces clash? Will cheap labour allow us to buy anything for pennies or will it just make us unable to make a single penny?

    In my view the labour will fundamentally shift with great pain and personal tragedies to the areas that are not replaceable by AI (because no one wants to watch robots play chess). Such as sports, entertainment and showmanship. Handcrafted goods. Arts. Attention based economy. Self advertisement. Digital prostitution in a very broad sense.

    However before it gets there it will be a great deal of strife and turmoil that could plunge the world into dark ages for a while at least. It is unlikely for our somewhat politically rigid society to adapt without great deal of pain. Additionally I am not sure if hypothetical future attention based society could be a utopia. You could have to mount cameras in your house so other people see you at all times for amusement just to have any money at all. We will probably forever need to sell something to someone and I am unsettled by ideas what can we sell if we cannot sell our hard work.

    Someone who sees the roads ahead should now make preparations at government level for this shock but it will come too fast and with people at the steering wheel that don’t exactly care.

    • wiseowise  6 hours ago

      > The idea is that cheap and readily available and upgradeable intelligence is going to massively increase our purchasing power and what everyone can order for the same cost basically.

      Seriously? You really don’t see who wins from this and who doesn’t?

      > If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.

      Yes, hundreds of thousands lose jobs and a couple of neuro surgeons become multimillionaires.

      Okay, I see from the rest of the comment that we understand each other where it goes.

    • mxkopy  13 hours ago

      We could also literally have Star Trek. Think of all the scientific discoveries we could make if we had armies of scientists the size of our labor force.

      But we will have to (painfully) shed our current hierarchies before that comes to pass.

      8 replies →

apical_dendrite  12 hours ago

Just a year ago, Elon Musk was gleefully destroying the US government agency that provides food and medicine for many of the poorest, most desperate people on earth. He was literally tweeting about missing out on great parties to put USAID into the "wood chipper".

The tech overlords don't even want to spend a minuscule percentage of the federal budget helping starving people, even when it benefits the US. They are not going to give us a post-scarcity society.