Comment by cautiouscat

12 hours ago

> Post-work society is an inevitability if we don't destroy our planet.

Is it?

Walk current technological progress down the road.

I can't see a future in which almost every system (both physical and virtual) are not automated and optimized by autonomous entities.

What do you do when everyone is out of a job?

If you don't want pitchforks and riots in the streets, you give everyone UBI and housing so society doesn't collapse.

  • I’m all for an UBI but a future where people have no purposeful jobs, no way to actually make a real difference to anything around them, is a bleak one.

    • I would love such a future. I would be perfectly content focusing on my hobbies and playing video games rest of my life. Perhaps the UBI would be sufficient even for a little bit of travel.

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  • > If you don't want pitchforks and riots in the streets, you give everyone UBI and housing so society doesn't collapse.

    As much as I’d love UBI to happen, in current geopolitiks it’s a no-go. People are not happy with having what the others have.

  • How do you determine who gets the house on the beach? Who gets the mountain view? Who gets stuck with the corner lot on a busy noisy road?

    • Even if in the unlikely case UBI gets implemented, there is no way payment will be equal. Why would the rich give up their positions of power? They’ll just get more security and bribe politicians, enough to build private armies and fortresses so the poor and starving can’t touch them, and have no choice but to live out their lives in squalor…we’re seemingly headed that way according to many even without pervasive autonomous machines taking away all work.

    • Obviously the AI will conclude that no humans will get those things. The future is dark, folks.

    • It wouldn't be a redistribution of our current assets like that. I think there would be a whole lot of repurposing of these things.

      The beach houses, mansions, mountain views could be vacation places, or used as libraries, or simply dismantled for the materials.

      The "slums" on noisy roads could be eliminated entirely and used for something people don't need to be at.

      We'd move to a more equal distribution of assets closer to the middle line.

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  • Or you build bunkers and build robots to keep the riffraff out. Shock collars on the guards' necks.