Comment by dudul
20 hours ago
Humans just want to be able to work and feed their families. Notice how this is something that is never addressed for example in Asimov's writings where robots do everything. How do people do anything to be able to afford these robots? How do Solarians make money to maintain their massively gigantic estates? It is never explained, but we always jump straight to the "robots do everything, everything is free, nobody works". How about the in between?
Oh yes, I agree entirely. I look at The Jetsons or Star Trek, and I see the fruits of technology shared by all of humankind.
But if the current trends continue, Elon will own all of the robots and the rest of us will be at his mercy.
How we change that - I don't know. But I do know we don't change it by putting our heads in the sand. AI is here and it is real. We MUST take it seriously. Shunning is not a viable option.
We're going to have to (collectively at some point) decide that we shouldn't tie survival to working.
Whether that's UBI, or Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, or UBS, or some AI managed economy, or some other such thing, we need to decide that "hey, we don't want to tied survival to output under our current system."
That's really the Rubicon we have to cross, and there are a LOT of people who can't really come up with a better way in their own heads yet.
Look, we all saw how things can be during the pandemic. That was a dark time, but it also gives us a model, we can just... do things. We just have to decide to do them.
Oh! Damn! Stupid me! "We have to collectively decide this", when is the meeting to vote on that again? When is the last time we all decided something collectively?
WTF does the pandemic have to do with this? "dark time", oh yeah, people stuck at home watching Netflix, what an incommensurable suffering!
Buddy, I can admire the naive childish optimism to a degree, but come on. "We just have to all decide". Do you live in a Disney movie?
> WTF does the pandemic have to do with this?
I'm not sure, but if I may guess, I suspect he's talking about the fact that the entire US shut down for a year and people survived because the US Government printed money and gave it away free to businesses so they wouldn't collapse. (PPP loans.)
If we can do something like that for the pandemic, we can do something similar when push really comes to shove.
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I mean, a at least something like million people died just in the US with the most conservative estimates that I've seen (and by 2022). It was pretty dark, yeah.
But we also decided during that time to literally pay people to stay home for awhile. That was a really revolutionary thing and it was awesome. We could decide to do that again.
You can ad hominem until the cows come home, but yeah, we literally just kind of have to collectively decide that there are better ways to do things.
There's a fantastic book called "The Last Emperor of Mexico" I read a few years ago that really talks about how the idea of a Republic or Democracy in general was a pretty novel concept in the mid 1800s. People were a lot more skeptical about it than we're lead to believe now. But eventually, the ideas of aristocracy and some "well bred" group of various types of monarchs became silly on it's face. Now the default is that we should have some sort of democratic representation. That would seem utopian AF in 1820.
Well, we're going to have to bridge that sort of gap for getting rid of the need to justify our existence through work too. The transition is going to be weird, but we'll have to come up with something else and run with it.
Dream big buddy, I know it's hard, lord knows I do, but dream big, and work little by little towards those things you want to see in the world.