Comment by gljiva
3 days ago
As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes, once most of the simpler office work becomes obsolete, because, let's be real, average person's reasoning, work-pay efficiency, obedience and meticulousness shouldn't be too hard to surpass with AI in a few years. AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo, while being harmful to the environment and decreasing the share of current-level-of-above-average-quality-user-oriented output.
So yeah, money becoming less of a proxy of "how much someone contributed to society" and more "how much someone contributed to the oligarchs' goals", while those goals are for AI and for peoples' detriment, makes the situation actually about AI.
The technology that helps extract wealth improves, while most of the purely consumer-oriented products are becoming a con and a scam, especially if US companies are involved. The Mirabell's "original" recipe turned the best treat in the world into a generic candy, all are just palm oil + sugar + shrinkflation. There is also non-repairable tech with non-standard components, non-removable batteries, meat gets filled with water, washing machines die right after warranty ends, every digital service is trying to steal data instead of taking only the necessary or at least being transparent about what's taken and why, entertainment like Reddit and streaming services also get worse... AI slop is just another example, but a bit more visible and with a bit more side-effects.
> AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo
This seems like the polar opposite of what the "AI safety" people are worried about and it seems unlikely that they could both be true at once.
> As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes
These are both two independent things and two independent sets of people.
The main group of people opposing housing construction is landlords and existing homeowners. The ones doing AI have almost no overlap with that. Moreover, "you get paid less" and "housing costs more due to artificial scarcity" are only tied together in the sense that money going to landlords and banks isn't going to workers, which again isn't the AI thing.
Or to put it a different way, you could mitigate a lot of the "AI problems" by building more housing and the AI people would be pretty fine with that.