Writing a speech filled with meaningless buzz words then clocking off early to play golf with a client is such a rough gig.
So much pressure if you fail as well. Imagining having to resign from your CEO job and then take a position as the chairman of another globo corp. Doesn't even bear thinking about.
Yes but you have the money and resources to live in an entire different world. You eat in the finest restaurants. You get ferried about on private transport and stay in the finest hotels. You have the finest clothes and consumer goods and you probably have the most dating opportunities out of anyone on the planet save top athletes and celebrities.
Look, I'm not saying that there aren't any downsides to the job. But saying being a CEO of a large corporation is the worst job in the world is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Find me a single CEO of a Fortune 500 company that wants to swap his job to become a rare metals miner with a pick axe in the Congo then come back to me.
Yes, but you cannot trust anyone, sometimes not even your own family. You become increasingly paranoid that you will be stabbed or poisoned or taken hostage or something. You, or your family.
So you isolate yourself, and all the shit you mentioned is really the cost of your freedom. I don't give a fuck about being in a mansion, superyacht, private island or plane if the cost of that is my freedom and the ability to socialize with other humans.
My conscience has a price too. If the price of my fortune was having a large amount of people making minimum wage, using medicare/medicaid and wearing diapers to avoid productivity penalties for taking a restroom break, I would not fucking do it.
> Yes, but you cannot trust anyone, sometimes not even your own family. You become increasingly paranoid that you will be stabbed or poisoned or taken hostage or something. You, or your family.
This really isn't any different to anyone else on the planet save the hostage situation. There are plenty of people living in rough areas who could easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time and be a stabbing victim. I would argue that your chances of being a victim of violence as a CEO are significantly lower than your average citizen.
> So you isolate yourself, and all the shit you mentioned is really the cost of your freedom. I don't give a fuck about being in a mansion, superyacht, private island or plane if the cost of that is my freedom and the ability to socialize with other humans.
I'm pretty sure they have healthy social lives. In fact, the reason they can do what they can do is precisely because they have healthy social lives. They constantly network with other people at the same level and help each other out.
> If the price of my fortune was having a large amount of people making minimum wage, using medicare/medicaid and wearing diapers to avoid productivity penalties for taking a restroom break, I would not fucking do it.
So why are you trying to make out that the people who don't have to do these things have a worse time of it than the people who do?
OK, fuck it. Please go become a CEO of a large corporation if you can. And then try to find peace in your dumb Trump hotel themed world, surrounded by fake smiles, cringe, and living in constant fear and being forced to make decisions you don't want to make, being legally liable for the mistakes of each one of your 100,000 employees and losing all your humanity in the process.
Try to be happy knowing that you could change the life of a family by just giving them $500 but instead you spent $5,000,000 on a renovation for a stupid boat that you don't even have the time to use.
I get more satisfaction sharing with others than driving a luxury car.
> OK, fuck it. Please go become a CEO of a large corporation if you can. And then try to find peace in your dumb Trump hotel themed world, surrounded by fake smiles, cringe, and living in constant fear and being forced to make decisions you don't want to make, being legally liable for the mistakes of each one of your 100,000 employees and losing all your humanity in the process.
If this is your view of what a CEO’s life is I think it’s pretty warped. It’s a job. Yes you have to make some big decisions. But at the end of the day they still have a life outside of work, and a pretty fucking good one at that. And I’d argue that they very much want to be making those decisions which is why they became CEOs in the first place.
> Try to be happy knowing that you could change the life of a family by just giving them $500 but instead you spent $5,000,000 for a renovation for a stupid boat that you don't even have the time to use.
Well in defence of the CEO he probably contributed far more good to the world employing a bunch of people to renovate his yacht for $5 million than a one off donation of $500.
I’m going to stop replying to you now because if you think that a CEO has it worse on any level than a kid who works in a sweatshop and keels over before they turn 30 you’re absolutely delusional.
Oh really? How does the CEO of Coca Cola, the #1 plastic polluter and one of the top diabetes causing companies on Earth contribute good the world?
Or the CEO of Meta, who has demonstrably made teenagers depressed around the world? created a platform that facilitated multiple election manipulation campaigns and even ethnic cleansing in Myanmar? And the consumption of millions of lifetimes worth of time wasted paying attention to pointless content?
> It’s a job. Yes you have to make some big decisions. But at the end of the day they still have a life outside of work, and a pretty fucking good one at that.
Its a high stress job with crazy hours, travel etc. Some people thrive in those circumstances I guess but there's no way this doesn't affect your free time and personal life.
Interrupting:
I assume you are a wealthy, healthy person living in a wealthy, pleasant city.
If you compare a CEO to a normal person living a wealthy, healthy life in a wealthy, pleasant city, I think being a CEO is actually a bad choice.
Most parts of the world are so bad that for people who live in them, the idea that being a CEO is actually a bad thing sounds mocking or ridiculous, and it's hard to get past that.
This guy is making a statement from his position of elite privilege. He already got his bag.
When the Europeans came to feudal China they were mystified that the Chinese had all this technology they weren't using. It was intentional. The reason is because the Chinese were smart enough to know that if they automated and outsourced everything they would end up with roving bands of unemployed men causing trouble in the countryside.
So yes, AI and ML can take many people's jobs today. Absolutely and in some areas it would be a beneficial improvement, e.g. guided medical procedures. But for other stuff, maybe not so much. What are these now unemployed people to do?
There's only so many hamburgers that can be flipped, and you have to have money to buy one anyway. Is the IBM CEO's vision of the future an economy where everyone works at a hamburger joint and then goes to another one to spend their pay to eat a hamburger made elsewhere?
Our society is not set up to allow for mass unemployment. Basic income needs to happen first.
Where I live, McDonald's and other stores have already started replacing cashiers with touchscreens.
Not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer. What about all those people who used to do a job that is now replacing them with a touchscreen or a "chat bot"? What do you envision for them? That they go back to school to train to be a doctor or a lawyer? Sure, will you agree to making education and training free or accessible, or will this require continued privilege where it's a requirement to be born into a rich family first?
There's over 8 billion people on the planet. How many blue collar jobs do you envision as being available to people if all the white collar jobs are replaced by AI and ML and automation and outsourcing and offshoring? Am I supposed to be a bricklayer now when I'm already too old physically for the punishing demands of that job?
A long time ago I knew a guy whose job was off-shored to the Philippines from Canada. He actually moved to the Philippines to keep it, but this isn't an option available to most people.
>The make-work bias is best illustrated by a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an economist who visits China under Mao Zedong. He sees hundreds of workers building a dam with shovels. He asks: “Why don’t they use a mechanical digger?” “That would put people out of work,” replies the foreman. “Oh,” says the economist, “I thought you were making a dam. If it’s jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons.”
I think you are wrong in saying "Basic income needs to happen first." [emphasis mine] We have continually increased efficiency for hundreds of years without causing mass unemployment. I think there's still quite a ways to go before we have more bodies than we can find a use for. Not to mention there's a shorter, 32-hour week on the horizon that could negate the effect of less demand for labor.
You are decades out of touch with reality, because I read years ago already that some guys estimated we hit the break even point (in the "western world") in the mid 90s already. That is almost 3 decades ago by now, and automation hasn't stopped during that time. Do you see the effects? Very much so, if you start looking for the signs of that.
Furthermore, the idea that we went through a number of such changes and this one is all the same is merely wishful thinking. Economy exists because humans divide work. Why do we work? To fulfill our needs, you know, stuff like not being thirsty, hungry, having shelter, being healthy, having some entertainment, this kinda stuff. The more we automate all these things, the less humans are involved, and following that it means the economy will shrink. As said: humans divide work, or more correctly: Their time, which is the ultimate currency in this whole thing. It is only during the phase of ramping up the automation that we need to do more than for our needs: We have to have additional economy and thus work to make the automation happen.
Following that it is clear that a basic income people can actually live from MUST happen during the transition phase towards "full" automation, not after. Even more so with the system as it is currently, because no work means no income, and if the government doesn't keep people alive, you can just wait for civil war to happen, and before that a big raise in all kinds of crimes. There are more than enough examples of that out there, some of them pretty recent.
>You are decades out of touch with reality, because I read years ago already that some guys estimated we hit the break even point (in the "western world") in the mid 90s already.
And you are out of touch with the current reality. The "western world" is currently undergoing a labor shortage; in the United States, unemployment just hit its lowest point in 50 years! That runs completely counter to the thesis that increased automation will inevitably cause mass unemployent.
You've also disregarded the obvious solution to any decreasing demand for labor: make the work week shorter and everyone simply works fewer hours.
>The more we automate all these things, the less humans are involved, and following that it means the economy will shrink.
You've conflated "the size of the economy" and "total hours of labor". By any reasonable definition of economic size, if you have two societies and one produces more economically valuable output than the other, then it is larger, regardless of how many hours of labor are involved. One worker with a spoon produces less than one worker with a shovel, and spending ten times as long to achieve the same result does not make that economy larger.
Offshoring and automating contracts the economy because all the people who were employed were spending money on goods and services.
Now what has happened is that they don't have a job or the job left to employ someone in a foreign country.
Economy contracts.
Sure, the owners of company X have a few more dollars, and sure, the economy of the foreign land grew a bit because now there is someone purchasing goods and services, but the domestic economy contracted.
Then for a double whammy, because the people who ran the country were stupid and allow foreigners or foreign-controlled corporations to come in and buy up real-estate, this money then floods in and starts buying up residential properties creating a shortage of housing, which creates a double crunch because now these unemployed folks need to figure it out as supply and demand is causing purchase or rent of real estate to go up. Food is going up, everything is going up.
The outside economy it's no problem for them because through economies of scale, they can just keep the money flowing in to take over, but it only benefits a few people, not everyone. It's not as if there's any sort of organized structure here to be "oh, let's all just employ people to build ghost cities one after the other so foreigners can park their money in empty real estate".
People like the IBM CEO are part of the problem destroying society. I do not applaud him or his peers. They are parasites with vast multi-million dollar salaries.
"IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and ex-exec-chairwoman Ginny Rometty were collectively awarded more than $38m in compensation for their services in fiscal 2020, a year in which Big Blue's revenues shrank and operating profit more than halved."
Not bad eh? 2 people got more than $38 million in a single year. To do what? Golf and attend meetings.
Not sure what you mean. If we end up with roving bands of unemployed men raising trouble, the next step for them is incarceration. The law is the law, no matter your circumstances.
> if they automated and outsourced everything they would end up with roving bands of unemployed men causing trouble in the countryside
Tangent: I'm not even sure that Universal Basic Income would solve this problem. If you browse Financial Independence forums, you'll see many anecdotes of early retirees who go back to work for one reason or another. So even (some? Most? Not sure...) people with enough money to not have to work, want to work. It seems like a large cultural change around work would be needed.
Having said that, it's also possible that we just keep inventing new jobs and a huge unemployment spike never comes. That doesn't seem likely to me, but I'm fairly certain most of my predictions will end up being wrong.
There are many misconceptions about work, and one of the big ones is that work actually often means "paid work". There is tons of unpaid work being done. And there is a certain percentage of people who cannot sit still and have to do something. If that gets paid or not is a whole different matter.
Unemployed people can plant potatos and feed themselves from the land. Men were able to do so with very little technology for thousands of years. Surely they can do that with today tech even more efficiently.
I don’t know how you square your anecdote about keeping workers busy and tired so they won’t rebel, with the idea that UBI is needs to come for all the unemployed people.
They’ll just invent a bunch of make work bullshit jobs to teach us the dignity of work and to appreciate our largesse, and make sure we fight among ourselves instead of question the whole damn system
The idea of AI taking over customer service jobs essentially just means "we need an excuse to stop providing customer service". The open secret is that AI isn't very good at anything. That's why you're not getting driven by a driverless car, and you still have to yell at your Alexa to actually do what you asked it to do. This CEO's statement isn't for the public, it's to pretend to IBM's B2B clients that they have something that could actually cut costs. Thankfully it can't and it won't. The social implications are besides the point given that they're nowhere near to what they pretend they're capable of. Watson was a failure, Alexa is just bleeding money and ChatGPT is already losing its luster. AI is all hype, cheap labor overseas will take your job way before AI does.
I switched to Google Fiber primarily because of this, I can actually talk to someone just by calling. No endless messages, no nothing. Actual customer service and support. That I also get better speed is just the cherry on top
Cruise has started aggressively scaling its fleet of driverless cars, that are currently taxiing people without a human driver..
I'm not sure if its some weird human psychology thing going on, but the amount of posts and emotional responses claiming that the current advances in AI are worthless is kind of crazy. AI is without a doubt going to change society, and I suppose that is scary, but we are only at the beginning.
Why not put your money where your mouth is and start or invest in a company selling insurance to Cruise?
I would personally feel reluctant to do so, because I think insuring the tail risk of a company like Cruise or really even Tesla (pertaining to FSD) is a fool's errand and not a positive ROI proposition. And I don't mean now, I mean until proven otherwise.
There is no guarantee or even really proof points that the model AI works around even does a good enough job to account for edge case scenarios that account for most of the tail risk. If that is not the case, then the entire hypothesis around AI (which is that it is structurally more efficient than alternatives) really falls apart, doesn't it?
I think that what you're seeing with people claiming the advances are worthless (which most people aren't) is really just a reaction to the equally crazy claims being made about the advances made by other people overhyping the advances. A sort of social counterbalance.
As always, the truth is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
I don't know why a company that loses billions of dollars a year and is known for bizarre driving patterns is an example of AI success. Confidence in AI is a product of faith, a lack of confidence is a product of evidence.
People have this idea that one day robots will start showing up all over the place and taking everyone's job. Ideally, the thinking goes, we will set up universal basic income so that ordinary humans can still survive without jobs.
But no- as you imply, AI isn't taking anyone's job. But AI can still be a useful and effective tool. It's a tool in the same way that programming is a tool; something that can be used by skilled workers to improve their productivity. It's another skill you need to master if you want to stay competitive in today's world. People who can't keep up will lose their jobs to people that can. And they won't get any benefits, because they weren't replaced by AI: they were replaced by other people. Setting up an effective AI-powered customer service system is not as simple as plugging in ChatGPT, it will take a large and continuous engineering effort. And the engineers won't want to share their paychecks with the manual laborers they replaced.
AI will most likely eliminate most white collar workers up to and including CEOs when they are "good enough". I look forward to a board of directors replacing this try hard with AI.
The problem with jobs being replaced by machines is that historically, there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were still somewhat fulfilling or failing that, (b) at least the next generation could switch into.
However, we have never tested the "limiting case" of this phenomenon, where there is a machine (AI) that is so good that it could take over most jobs. Are we there yet? No, but we are not far off either.
Now, I'm not saying this is inevitable, but we have to ask the question: what if we CAN get to the limiting case where the only jobs left are a few coveted technical jobs or manual labor? Is there even a remote possibility that this could happen? I believe it's likely, and if it is, then what are we going to do?
The best-case scenario is some sort of UBI scheme where most people don't work, but if you think about it, that's actually a horrible thing because most people need some kind of purpose in life, and very few people can find their purpose independently from a system which allows them to trade their comparitive advantages for those of others.
Concluding, IBM's CEO is despicable of the highest order. He might be right in that AI taking your job is good for the economy, but if we unpack that statement, it basically means that AI is good as a mechanism to make our system more efficient for concentrating wealth into his pocket at the cost of long-term stability.
>there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were still somewhat fulfilling
That may have been the case till post-WW2 economy where if the refrigerator factory you used to work at got moved to China, you could take those skills to the car factory next door, but most of the industry jobs left in the west today, that haven't been offshored or automated away, are highly specialized ones that require years of training or higher education and don't have many transferable skills between them, and there's no way you can simply switch to those jobs without that specialized training the employers with those jobs are expecting you to have. It's a lot easier these days to find yourself obsolete and unemployable.
Barbers aren't an industry job nor a job you can offshore. Neither are doctors, teachers, policemen, garbagemen, plumbers ... you get the point. Vital service jobs will always be safe, especially unionized ones at government or city level.
But I was talking about industry jobs in the private sector, like my coding job and my friend's job at the local car factory which on the other hand ... well, we're not too safe from automation or offshoring if our companies don't stay bleeding edge, competitive and highly profitable for them to decide it's worth investing in us metatags further.
UBI will never come because we’ll always have jobs. Sure the jobs won’t pay as well, but the idea that there won’t be jobs and masses of people will be forced into the street is laughably implausible.
Why? Because the oligarchs won’t allow that to happen.
They’ll invent jobs for everyone. Low paying jobs without benefits for sure, but they’ll make sure you have a job. Simply because of the fear of a populace that has enough time and energy to be fed up with their lot.
Jobs make people busy and tired. And busy and tired people don’t rock the boat. Now they’ll say something about the luxury of human touch, or some other clap trap. But then they’ll also talk about, needing to learn the dignity of work, or giving people something to do keep people off the street. Or saying how making people work for the bare necessities in life makes them appreciate it more.
It’s the same moralizing bullshit they always say about poor people.
It’s why productivity has gone up, but wages and working hours have stayed constant.
They FEAR a population that’s screwed over and has the time to organize.
What you're describing is what we had in communist times in Eastern Europe. Absolutely everyone had a job since not having a job was illegal. It might not have been a useful one, or a well paid one, or the job of your dreams, but everyone was given a job to do, regardless of how pointless it was, even if you didn't pursue any higher education or vocational training.
You were always given something to do for the state, no matter your situation. That's why automation was so shit compared to the west in the '80s. Why invest in advanced automation to make goods faster and cheaper when you already have endless cheap labor you need to keep busy so they don't revolt, and you don't have much consumer demand for goods since everyone is more or less equally poor?
Granted, most people weren't terribly bothered by this back then, as most jobs, even the shitty ones, came with free housing from the government and free schooling for your kids. So as long as you kept your mouth shut, your head down, showed up to your useless busy-work job, and didn't rock the boat, you'd could have a pretty easy life regardless of your lack of skills or education.
That's not how capitalism works. Owners will hire the minimum number of workers for as close to minimum wage as possible. Any attempt to have government-created jobs will encounter major fights, even though the USA could use a WPA to fix infrastructure and do the inspirational public works that we can't bring ourselves to otherwise. Masses of starving people are just fine with the owning class.
>productivity has gone up, but wages and working hours have stayed constant.
If you can leverage technology to improve productivity, your wages WILL go up to match it. Software engineering wages have exploded over the last decade and are increasing far faster than productivity. The game is not rigged - great contributions lead to great rewards.
But if you don't have relevant tech skills, and you work the same way your parents worked, like most people do... then obviously no, your wages will not and should not go up. It doesn't matter if society in general is becoming more productive, if you didn't contribute to that productivity increase then why should you benefit from it?
People need to wake up and understand that raw labor is not valuable anymore. We don't need people who work hard and can follow directions, that's what computers are for. We need people who understand how things work. People who can improve existing processes and create new ones. For people like this, opportunities are endless.
>If you can leverage technology to improve productivity, your wages WILL go up to match it
This idea runs counter to history of industrialization and automation. If you can get the same output of six people with one person, you fire five them, because you can’t produce or sell 36x as much.
Actually, automation is bad for the economy. Imagine something like Star Trek replicators, maybe a bit different of sorts, how would you still do economy with something like that around (and is able to replicate itself so you can make more of these)? Automation kills economy, because economy means humans have to spend time to do the work and split work to fulfill their needs -- which is why economy exists in the first place: You make weapon, I go hunting with that for us both, this kinda stuff. If all that is done by machines, there is no need for any of that anymore: Economy = dead.
What the IBM CEO is on about is the boomers dropping like flies out of the workforce now and the generations following are much less in numbers (demographics and all that). Which means this will put more pressure on automation of various things. But it will also put more pressure on how to do taxes and other such things, because a lot of that isn't prepared for "inverted" population pyramids, automation, and related issues.
There's a lot more "economy" you can do with automation, though. Automatic switched-packet routing has enabled a lot of value-add over fully-manual postal systems, for example.
There's a reason there was a big knee in the global GDP graph in the mid 1800s: industrialisation, which is too say, automation of previously manual processes.
It's far from obvious to me that 100% automation that obviates any need for humans is anywhere in the foreseeable future. What it does mean is that under the current system, capital will continue to tend to concentrate in the machine-owners hands, which might result in not having enough people to sell their goods to, if the rate of wealth concentration exceeds the rate of wealth generation.
(making the (safe?) assumption there will NEVER be a social safety net or UBI..)
I think things will “bounce” between:
- AI providing shareholder ROI and “releasing” labor back into the labor pool. Making people either choose to be homeless or accept the lowest paying jobs that are not yet done by AI.
- Making then the cheap labor pool cheaper than the AI. Giving the AI time to catch up and overtake the next “caste” of labor up…
Corporations only EVER and always do things in the name of profit and to see a corp take so fast to something means someone has done the math.. before you have.
There's no point in making most of the population poor. The population, and especially the "first world" population, are the customers of all these businesses. If nobody buys stuff, there's no way to turn a profit, and no point to run a business.
One can imagine a classic dystopian landscape of haves surrounded by robots that serve them, without much need for human labor, and have-nots who are stuck in the previous step and live in a dirtier, poorer still-industrial society with lots of human labor, and with an intense envy to the haves.
I don't really believe this dystopian view because the AI technology already seems accessible to the modern industrial societies; it's not something unobtainable, and with science mostly being done in the open, not something completely secret. So more and more of the have-nots will graduate to haves, if they can handle the social order that allows to accumulate enough resources to kickstart the AI + robots transformation, and can handle a social order after that.
The question then remains: what the humans are going to do when putting food on the table stops being a major concern? (For an endgame, see the Culture series by Ian M. Banks.)
BTW obviously AI needs learning about the world, and maybe humans are still better than it at discovering things, and at "teaching".
I wouldn't care at all if IBM's CEO was actually an AI. But I sure as hell care that the person I have on the phone when inquiring about something is a human.
Tell me you haven't been on the phone with a customer support person recently, without telling me you haven't been on the phone with a customer support person recently ;)
Can you make your point more directly? I'm not sure what you mean.
Anecdotally, whenever I've failed at solving a problem myself through online/self-serve tools, I have _never_ been able to then solve it by being connected to an Customer Service bot - but I've had pretty good results when speaking with an actual human. If I'm reading your implication correctly that "nowadays Customer Support people aren't useful" - I disagree.
A “job” is when you are doing something useful for other people, and you are rare enough so it makes sense to pay you money for it for a long time. Nobody ever guarantees you a “job” if you are not useful anymore for some specific field of work. It doesn’t make any business sense. If you continue to get money for something while not being useful enough for your employer, this is not a “job”, this is charity.
And since jobs were a XX century social construct where one could expect that people would have professions which are useful enough for most of their lives — there will be no more “jobs” soon. Only contracts, alms, charities, and war mercenaries.
And there is no way to turn this around, until we invent new ways of doing business, without relying on “jobs”.
I agree with him, but this also implies there's a sustainable plan for everyone out of work going forward. I'd love a world where having a career is an active choice. Not everyone can and should work, with all the progress we've made we should try to work less and let the machines do more for us.
Unfortunately not many people can imagine a world like that so we end up chasing growth just for the sake of growth. Meanwhile the world we're supposed to share is shrinking.
For reference, 8 people own half of the so-called resources (yes I know it's not liquid) on the planet. Before covid that number was around 30.
I think IBMs CEO is being a bit on the optimistic side with regards to the actualy capabilities of AI..
However, I do hope strong AI will emerge eventually, and it will start some singularity-type event that basically makes most humans redundant.
If nobody's got a job, nobody's got money, money becomes redundant too.. If machines are taking care of mankinds basic needs, we become free to pursue higher purposes than merely surviving by working.
As fulfilling as our white-collar jobs may be, we'd still not do exactly THAT if we weren't paid.. We'd do something slightly different that we personally wanted..
I love programming, but I love programming my little useless hobby projects more than I enjoy programming whatever the company I work for pays me to do (even if those projects are honestly pretty cool at times)..
When I was a kid, I was sure that by the time I'd be an adult, I'd not have to work, because I had already seen robots assembling cars!! I lacked the imagination to think that mankind weren't coorporating towards the obvious goal of making survival, production of food, housing and other required work be done by machines.. I didn't realize at the time how silly my fellow humans were..
But something like a strong, general-purpose artificial intelligence, it should force the decision to either kill everyone who becomes redundant, or set mankind free to pursue higher, personal goals, while the machines work for them.. I'd prefer the latter option.
What if those machines are owned for the purpose of profiting their funders? They are only made for the purpose of returning billions to these owners, where do thise come from?
In my opinion, there will be a point where profits lose their meaning.
That point might be either, or a combination of:
Nobody else has any money to be taken (because they have no jobs)
Stuff is free because machines are making it, so you can just get whatever you want made for you.
Money are a proxy for time and work, when machines get to a point where they're autonomously able to spend all the required time and do all the required work, there's nothing left for money to do..
If we stood on the edge of a scarcity-free world, I doubt even the greediest *illionaire would find any good reason to stop it (and if they did, well, I doubt they'd survive it for long)
I suppose the desire for the luxury available to the *illionaire is not combined with the feeling that it should not be made available to others. It is combined with the knowledge that this earth cannot support billions at that level of luxury. And if the population is reduced to a quantity that the earth would support at that level, they'd want it to be made up of people they feel like hanging out with.
That ia the population they want the machines to support. Everyone else should be shot into space.
There's an assumption there which says you have intrinsic value and you don't need to justify your existence. There's a reason why some people get existential when there's talk about being replaced.
I don't necessarily believe anyone has intrinsic value. I also don't believe one needs to have value, or justify ones existence.
I think the main reason these needs arise, is exactly because people have grown up in the current society, where so much value is placed on contribution, exactly because there's scarcity.
It might be, in a post-scarcity world, those same pressures would exist, in new, more society-oriented forms.
However, I hope we can get past that, and simply accept that people exist, and let them enjoy existing for no larger purpose than simply inhabiting time and space for a while, and have whatever experiences they have before they perish.
There are so many dead ends in your thought processes here, though! Holes I can drive a truck through. What if's a-plenty!
> post-scarcity world
Why do you believe you deserve to be invited into such a world by the owners of that world? Have you not been noticing any patterns in the news, especially in the past 20 years, accelerating in the last 3? I observe that run-of-the-mill humans are not loved nor respected.
Elon winked at us and said "post-scarcity" and toyed with "MBI". Did you wink back? (It's ok to say yes, I wanted to wink as well, he's a great optimist.)
There is no scarcity now, for you and I. There is rampant slavery and injustice all over the world. Add up all the work done and then estimate how many slaves have lived and died complete lives to make cheap crap and give you comfort over just your lifetime? 1? 2? Sugar is over a hundred times cheaper than it should be.
The money systems are rigged for theft and twisted beyond reckoning. Misallocated capital at every turn. We have thrived because of and in spite of the current systems. Our lives depend on this unjust system!
> However, I hope we can get past that, and simply accept that people exist, and let them enjoy existing ...
When I watched The Matrix for the first time, I knew nothing about the movie. Had seen no ads, was kindof heads down in work at the time. A friend wanted me to go see it.
I got all the way to the morpheus red/blue pill scene and he's talking about what the matrix was. He was going on about taxes and religion and then slavery. And I thought, disappointed, oh geez, this is gonna be some race baiting thing... I was in this little petty politics mindframe. Blacks and whites. Liberals and conservatives.
And then right after that, some goofy retro tech sci-fi and I'm thinking, "interesting computer graphics!" but still not understanding anything.
And then, jump scare, surprise! First person shot, eyes slide open, water noises; we're in a pod.
It's an experience I may never have again because of the surprise factor and how it awakened me to monstrous possibilities in my own existence. My mental frame of self and this existence widened considerably that day.
Our matrix of propaganda and lies we tell ourselves has you. Has you willingly and you're grumpy with me for saying so. That's the powers that be's greatest trick: getting us to fight with each other over their invented reality and their pet causes rather than fighting them.
What I will say now is out of love even if it sounds incredibly harsh.
Your words make you sound fat, dumb and happy. You sound content, and maybe a little bored with life.
The loving part is in the word 'sound'. I know you are not those things, or need not be them if you are some of them.
World War 3 will be another banker's war. It appears to be right around the corner and America is starting it/funding it. You must oppose war in all its forms. Small and large offensives are abhorrent. Oppose all war out of principle from now on.
If you ever find yourself making excuses for war or even for funding someone else's war again, then you and I cannot be friends. War is a red line.
What activity would the majority of the population perform now that does not require one to be in the top few percentiles of human intellect (nature or nurture argument aside)?
We moved people from fields to factories to offices with most of them still relegated to doing relatively simple repeatable tasks.
Now if you have a tool which can take over those tasks, get better at doing them and other tasks at almost an exponential rate you might have a problem on your hands.
And no UBI isn’t a solution and one of the possible danger of AI is that the change can be far more rapid than before. Mechanization and industrialization took generations, software can be iterated on and pushed at much greater pace so you also have a major risk that even if societal adaptations would be possible they might not be at the pace of change you’ll likely to see.
Now it doesn’t mean that we should be smashing GPUs and FPGAs en mass however one should not dismiss the danger of what happens when several generations both incumbent and upcoming that were educated and trained for a very specific world all of a sudden find themselves in a very different one.
First, often the premise of these pontifications conflate AI’s with automation. Automation will take many jobs,
AI won’t.
Second, the problem with these hypotheses is that AI’s don’t really work better than humans. They just are cheaper and corporations are in the position that they can force customers to use them instead of humans.
Nobody wants to call an AI model . They would rather call a human with the ability to actually solve their problems. When you call an AI, you don’t have something that can solve your problem, you’re presented with a stone wall of options (most of which are suboptimal). The same goes for most direct human to AI interactions.
AIs (short of a true general AI) work best in augmenting human ability. Helping doctors/radiologists read X-rays and mris better. Helping farmers predict weather patterns for farming. Folding proteins. These are the best utilizations of AI. Not wholesale replacements or humans.
>They would rather call a human with the ability to actually solve their problems.
Unfortunately a lot of humans in customer support are also failing to solve my problem since they have little say in the system, and are mostly meat based automatons following a script or logic flow chart they've been given. If your problem doesn't fall into what they've been taught to do, well, then tough shit for you, you might as well have been talking to an AI bot instead of the metatag getting paid minimum wage to take shit from customers angry at the corporation for failing to provide the service they took your money for.
84 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadEverything they say will offend someone so they can't say anything. And they have to live in hiding with bodyguards.
Being the CEO of a large corporation is probably the worst job in the world.
So much pressure if you fail as well. Imagining having to resign from your CEO job and then take a position as the chairman of another globo corp. Doesn't even bear thinking about.
And read the news and see people talking shit about you for weeks.
And everyone you know wants your money as if you won the lottery.
And some people will hate you and want to harm you beyond insulting you online.
If you walk in the streets without bodyguards again someone will surely brutalize you, because we live in a messed up world.
So in the end you just make yourself a big visible target for everyone to throw shit at.
On the other side, people on the board have none of that liability for the most part as nobody knows them.
Look, I'm not saying that there aren't any downsides to the job. But saying being a CEO of a large corporation is the worst job in the world is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Find me a single CEO of a Fortune 500 company that wants to swap his job to become a rare metals miner with a pick axe in the Congo then come back to me.
So you isolate yourself, and all the shit you mentioned is really the cost of your freedom. I don't give a fuck about being in a mansion, superyacht, private island or plane if the cost of that is my freedom and the ability to socialize with other humans.
My conscience has a price too. If the price of my fortune was having a large amount of people making minimum wage, using medicare/medicaid and wearing diapers to avoid productivity penalties for taking a restroom break, I would not fucking do it.
This really isn't any different to anyone else on the planet save the hostage situation. There are plenty of people living in rough areas who could easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time and be a stabbing victim. I would argue that your chances of being a victim of violence as a CEO are significantly lower than your average citizen.
> So you isolate yourself, and all the shit you mentioned is really the cost of your freedom. I don't give a fuck about being in a mansion, superyacht, private island or plane if the cost of that is my freedom and the ability to socialize with other humans.
I'm pretty sure they have healthy social lives. In fact, the reason they can do what they can do is precisely because they have healthy social lives. They constantly network with other people at the same level and help each other out.
> If the price of my fortune was having a large amount of people making minimum wage, using medicare/medicaid and wearing diapers to avoid productivity penalties for taking a restroom break, I would not fucking do it.
So why are you trying to make out that the people who don't have to do these things have a worse time of it than the people who do?
Try to be happy knowing that you could change the life of a family by just giving them $500 but instead you spent $5,000,000 on a renovation for a stupid boat that you don't even have the time to use.
I get more satisfaction sharing with others than driving a luxury car.
If this is your view of what a CEO’s life is I think it’s pretty warped. It’s a job. Yes you have to make some big decisions. But at the end of the day they still have a life outside of work, and a pretty fucking good one at that. And I’d argue that they very much want to be making those decisions which is why they became CEOs in the first place.
> Try to be happy knowing that you could change the life of a family by just giving them $500 but instead you spent $5,000,000 for a renovation for a stupid boat that you don't even have the time to use.
Well in defence of the CEO he probably contributed far more good to the world employing a bunch of people to renovate his yacht for $5 million than a one off donation of $500.
I’m going to stop replying to you now because if you think that a CEO has it worse on any level than a kid who works in a sweatshop and keels over before they turn 30 you’re absolutely delusional.
Or the CEO of Meta, who has demonstrably made teenagers depressed around the world? created a platform that facilitated multiple election manipulation campaigns and even ethnic cleansing in Myanmar? And the consumption of millions of lifetimes worth of time wasted paying attention to pointless content?
Its a high stress job with crazy hours, travel etc. Some people thrive in those circumstances I guess but there's no way this doesn't affect your free time and personal life.
And you refuse to do it and resign as a hero.
When the Europeans came to feudal China they were mystified that the Chinese had all this technology they weren't using. It was intentional. The reason is because the Chinese were smart enough to know that if they automated and outsourced everything they would end up with roving bands of unemployed men causing trouble in the countryside.
So yes, AI and ML can take many people's jobs today. Absolutely and in some areas it would be a beneficial improvement, e.g. guided medical procedures. But for other stuff, maybe not so much. What are these now unemployed people to do?
There's only so many hamburgers that can be flipped, and you have to have money to buy one anyway. Is the IBM CEO's vision of the future an economy where everyone works at a hamburger joint and then goes to another one to spend their pay to eat a hamburger made elsewhere?
Our society is not set up to allow for mass unemployment. Basic income needs to happen first.
Not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer. What about all those people who used to do a job that is now replacing them with a touchscreen or a "chat bot"? What do you envision for them? That they go back to school to train to be a doctor or a lawyer? Sure, will you agree to making education and training free or accessible, or will this require continued privilege where it's a requirement to be born into a rich family first?
There's over 8 billion people on the planet. How many blue collar jobs do you envision as being available to people if all the white collar jobs are replaced by AI and ML and automation and outsourcing and offshoring? Am I supposed to be a bricklayer now when I'm already too old physically for the punishing demands of that job?
A long time ago I knew a guy whose job was off-shored to the Philippines from Canada. He actually moved to the Philippines to keep it, but this isn't an option available to most people.
With fertility rates below replacement level in the west... nothing! We'll need these workers in more lucrative and useful industries.
> That they go back to school to train to be a doctor or a lawyer?
Interesting you chose the two professions with the most gatekeeping. How about the hundred of skilled trades making civilized life possible?
>The make-work bias is best illustrated by a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an economist who visits China under Mao Zedong. He sees hundreds of workers building a dam with shovels. He asks: “Why don’t they use a mechanical digger?” “That would put people out of work,” replies the foreman. “Oh,” says the economist, “I thought you were making a dam. If it’s jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons.”
I think you are wrong in saying "Basic income needs to happen first." [emphasis mine] We have continually increased efficiency for hundreds of years without causing mass unemployment. I think there's still quite a ways to go before we have more bodies than we can find a use for. Not to mention there's a shorter, 32-hour week on the horizon that could negate the effect of less demand for labor.
Furthermore, the idea that we went through a number of such changes and this one is all the same is merely wishful thinking. Economy exists because humans divide work. Why do we work? To fulfill our needs, you know, stuff like not being thirsty, hungry, having shelter, being healthy, having some entertainment, this kinda stuff. The more we automate all these things, the less humans are involved, and following that it means the economy will shrink. As said: humans divide work, or more correctly: Their time, which is the ultimate currency in this whole thing. It is only during the phase of ramping up the automation that we need to do more than for our needs: We have to have additional economy and thus work to make the automation happen.
Following that it is clear that a basic income people can actually live from MUST happen during the transition phase towards "full" automation, not after. Even more so with the system as it is currently, because no work means no income, and if the government doesn't keep people alive, you can just wait for civil war to happen, and before that a big raise in all kinds of crimes. There are more than enough examples of that out there, some of them pretty recent.
And you are out of touch with the current reality. The "western world" is currently undergoing a labor shortage; in the United States, unemployment just hit its lowest point in 50 years! That runs completely counter to the thesis that increased automation will inevitably cause mass unemployent.
You've also disregarded the obvious solution to any decreasing demand for labor: make the work week shorter and everyone simply works fewer hours.
>The more we automate all these things, the less humans are involved, and following that it means the economy will shrink.
You've conflated "the size of the economy" and "total hours of labor". By any reasonable definition of economic size, if you have two societies and one produces more economically valuable output than the other, then it is larger, regardless of how many hours of labor are involved. One worker with a spoon produces less than one worker with a shovel, and spending ten times as long to achieve the same result does not make that economy larger.
Now what has happened is that they don't have a job or the job left to employ someone in a foreign country.
Economy contracts.
Sure, the owners of company X have a few more dollars, and sure, the economy of the foreign land grew a bit because now there is someone purchasing goods and services, but the domestic economy contracted.
Then for a double whammy, because the people who ran the country were stupid and allow foreigners or foreign-controlled corporations to come in and buy up real-estate, this money then floods in and starts buying up residential properties creating a shortage of housing, which creates a double crunch because now these unemployed folks need to figure it out as supply and demand is causing purchase or rent of real estate to go up. Food is going up, everything is going up.
The outside economy it's no problem for them because through economies of scale, they can just keep the money flowing in to take over, but it only benefits a few people, not everyone. It's not as if there's any sort of organized structure here to be "oh, let's all just employ people to build ghost cities one after the other so foreigners can park their money in empty real estate".
People like the IBM CEO are part of the problem destroying society. I do not applaud him or his peers. They are parasites with vast multi-million dollar salaries.
"IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and ex-exec-chairwoman Ginny Rometty were collectively awarded more than $38m in compensation for their services in fiscal 2020, a year in which Big Blue's revenues shrank and operating profit more than halved."
Not bad eh? 2 people got more than $38 million in a single year. To do what? Golf and attend meetings.
Tangent: I'm not even sure that Universal Basic Income would solve this problem. If you browse Financial Independence forums, you'll see many anecdotes of early retirees who go back to work for one reason or another. So even (some? Most? Not sure...) people with enough money to not have to work, want to work. It seems like a large cultural change around work would be needed.
Having said that, it's also possible that we just keep inventing new jobs and a huge unemployment spike never comes. That doesn't seem likely to me, but I'm fairly certain most of my predictions will end up being wrong.
They’ll just invent a bunch of make work bullshit jobs to teach us the dignity of work and to appreciate our largesse, and make sure we fight among ourselves instead of question the whole damn system
My applause to Google Fiber.
I'm not sure if its some weird human psychology thing going on, but the amount of posts and emotional responses claiming that the current advances in AI are worthless is kind of crazy. AI is without a doubt going to change society, and I suppose that is scary, but we are only at the beginning.
I would personally feel reluctant to do so, because I think insuring the tail risk of a company like Cruise or really even Tesla (pertaining to FSD) is a fool's errand and not a positive ROI proposition. And I don't mean now, I mean until proven otherwise.
There is no guarantee or even really proof points that the model AI works around even does a good enough job to account for edge case scenarios that account for most of the tail risk. If that is not the case, then the entire hypothesis around AI (which is that it is structurally more efficient than alternatives) really falls apart, doesn't it?
As always, the truth is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
But no- as you imply, AI isn't taking anyone's job. But AI can still be a useful and effective tool. It's a tool in the same way that programming is a tool; something that can be used by skilled workers to improve their productivity. It's another skill you need to master if you want to stay competitive in today's world. People who can't keep up will lose their jobs to people that can. And they won't get any benefits, because they weren't replaced by AI: they were replaced by other people. Setting up an effective AI-powered customer service system is not as simple as plugging in ChatGPT, it will take a large and continuous engineering effort. And the engineers won't want to share their paychecks with the manual laborers they replaced.
However, we have never tested the "limiting case" of this phenomenon, where there is a machine (AI) that is so good that it could take over most jobs. Are we there yet? No, but we are not far off either.
Now, I'm not saying this is inevitable, but we have to ask the question: what if we CAN get to the limiting case where the only jobs left are a few coveted technical jobs or manual labor? Is there even a remote possibility that this could happen? I believe it's likely, and if it is, then what are we going to do?
The best-case scenario is some sort of UBI scheme where most people don't work, but if you think about it, that's actually a horrible thing because most people need some kind of purpose in life, and very few people can find their purpose independently from a system which allows them to trade their comparitive advantages for those of others.
Concluding, IBM's CEO is despicable of the highest order. He might be right in that AI taking your job is good for the economy, but if we unpack that statement, it basically means that AI is good as a mechanism to make our system more efficient for concentrating wealth into his pocket at the cost of long-term stability.
That may have been the case till post-WW2 economy where if the refrigerator factory you used to work at got moved to China, you could take those skills to the car factory next door, but most of the industry jobs left in the west today, that haven't been offshored or automated away, are highly specialized ones that require years of training or higher education and don't have many transferable skills between them, and there's no way you can simply switch to those jobs without that specialized training the employers with those jobs are expecting you to have. It's a lot easier these days to find yourself obsolete and unemployable.
But I was talking about industry jobs in the private sector, like my coding job and my friend's job at the local car factory which on the other hand ... well, we're not too safe from automation or offshoring if our companies don't stay bleeding edge, competitive and highly profitable for them to decide it's worth investing in us metatags further.
Why? Because the oligarchs won’t allow that to happen.
They’ll invent jobs for everyone. Low paying jobs without benefits for sure, but they’ll make sure you have a job. Simply because of the fear of a populace that has enough time and energy to be fed up with their lot.
Jobs make people busy and tired. And busy and tired people don’t rock the boat. Now they’ll say something about the luxury of human touch, or some other clap trap. But then they’ll also talk about, needing to learn the dignity of work, or giving people something to do keep people off the street. Or saying how making people work for the bare necessities in life makes them appreciate it more.
It’s the same moralizing bullshit they always say about poor people.
It’s why productivity has gone up, but wages and working hours have stayed constant.
They FEAR a population that’s screwed over and has the time to organize.
You were always given something to do for the state, no matter your situation. That's why automation was so shit compared to the west in the '80s. Why invest in advanced automation to make goods faster and cheaper when you already have endless cheap labor you need to keep busy so they don't revolt, and you don't have much consumer demand for goods since everyone is more or less equally poor?
Granted, most people weren't terribly bothered by this back then, as most jobs, even the shitty ones, came with free housing from the government and free schooling for your kids. So as long as you kept your mouth shut, your head down, showed up to your useless busy-work job, and didn't rock the boat, you'd could have a pretty easy life regardless of your lack of skills or education.
If you can leverage technology to improve productivity, your wages WILL go up to match it. Software engineering wages have exploded over the last decade and are increasing far faster than productivity. The game is not rigged - great contributions lead to great rewards.
But if you don't have relevant tech skills, and you work the same way your parents worked, like most people do... then obviously no, your wages will not and should not go up. It doesn't matter if society in general is becoming more productive, if you didn't contribute to that productivity increase then why should you benefit from it?
People need to wake up and understand that raw labor is not valuable anymore. We don't need people who work hard and can follow directions, that's what computers are for. We need people who understand how things work. People who can improve existing processes and create new ones. For people like this, opportunities are endless.
This idea runs counter to history of industrialization and automation. If you can get the same output of six people with one person, you fire five them, because you can’t produce or sell 36x as much.
What the IBM CEO is on about is the boomers dropping like flies out of the workforce now and the generations following are much less in numbers (demographics and all that). Which means this will put more pressure on automation of various things. But it will also put more pressure on how to do taxes and other such things, because a lot of that isn't prepared for "inverted" population pyramids, automation, and related issues.
There's a reason there was a big knee in the global GDP graph in the mid 1800s: industrialisation, which is too say, automation of previously manual processes.
It's far from obvious to me that 100% automation that obviates any need for humans is anywhere in the foreseeable future. What it does mean is that under the current system, capital will continue to tend to concentrate in the machine-owners hands, which might result in not having enough people to sell their goods to, if the rate of wealth concentration exceeds the rate of wealth generation.
I think things will “bounce” between:
- AI providing shareholder ROI and “releasing” labor back into the labor pool. Making people either choose to be homeless or accept the lowest paying jobs that are not yet done by AI.
- Making then the cheap labor pool cheaper than the AI. Giving the AI time to catch up and overtake the next “caste” of labor up…
Corporations only EVER and always do things in the name of profit and to see a corp take so fast to something means someone has done the math.. before you have.
One can imagine a classic dystopian landscape of haves surrounded by robots that serve them, without much need for human labor, and have-nots who are stuck in the previous step and live in a dirtier, poorer still-industrial society with lots of human labor, and with an intense envy to the haves.
I don't really believe this dystopian view because the AI technology already seems accessible to the modern industrial societies; it's not something unobtainable, and with science mostly being done in the open, not something completely secret. So more and more of the have-nots will graduate to haves, if they can handle the social order that allows to accumulate enough resources to kickstart the AI + robots transformation, and can handle a social order after that.
The question then remains: what the humans are going to do when putting food on the table stops being a major concern? (For an endgame, see the Culture series by Ian M. Banks.)
BTW obviously AI needs learning about the world, and maybe humans are still better than it at discovering things, and at "teaching".
Exactly why the “bounce” along the bottom, in my opinion.
The corps will charge as much and pay as little - and I think they’re all doing what they are designed to do.
Profit over people. :/
A future where a company needs a great visionary CEO and an AI
Anecdotally, whenever I've failed at solving a problem myself through online/self-serve tools, I have _never_ been able to then solve it by being connected to an Customer Service bot - but I've had pretty good results when speaking with an actual human. If I'm reading your implication correctly that "nowadays Customer Support people aren't useful" - I disagree.
And since jobs were a XX century social construct where one could expect that people would have professions which are useful enough for most of their lives — there will be no more “jobs” soon. Only contracts, alms, charities, and war mercenaries.
And there is no way to turn this around, until we invent new ways of doing business, without relying on “jobs”.
Unfortunately not many people can imagine a world like that so we end up chasing growth just for the sake of growth. Meanwhile the world we're supposed to share is shrinking.
For reference, 8 people own half of the so-called resources (yes I know it's not liquid) on the planet. Before covid that number was around 30.
However, I do hope strong AI will emerge eventually, and it will start some singularity-type event that basically makes most humans redundant.
If nobody's got a job, nobody's got money, money becomes redundant too.. If machines are taking care of mankinds basic needs, we become free to pursue higher purposes than merely surviving by working.
As fulfilling as our white-collar jobs may be, we'd still not do exactly THAT if we weren't paid.. We'd do something slightly different that we personally wanted..
I love programming, but I love programming my little useless hobby projects more than I enjoy programming whatever the company I work for pays me to do (even if those projects are honestly pretty cool at times)..
When I was a kid, I was sure that by the time I'd be an adult, I'd not have to work, because I had already seen robots assembling cars!! I lacked the imagination to think that mankind weren't coorporating towards the obvious goal of making survival, production of food, housing and other required work be done by machines.. I didn't realize at the time how silly my fellow humans were..
But something like a strong, general-purpose artificial intelligence, it should force the decision to either kill everyone who becomes redundant, or set mankind free to pursue higher, personal goals, while the machines work for them.. I'd prefer the latter option.
Money are a proxy for time and work, when machines get to a point where they're autonomously able to spend all the required time and do all the required work, there's nothing left for money to do..
If we stood on the edge of a scarcity-free world, I doubt even the greediest *illionaire would find any good reason to stop it (and if they did, well, I doubt they'd survive it for long)
That ia the population they want the machines to support. Everyone else should be shot into space.
I think the main reason these needs arise, is exactly because people have grown up in the current society, where so much value is placed on contribution, exactly because there's scarcity.
It might be, in a post-scarcity world, those same pressures would exist, in new, more society-oriented forms. However, I hope we can get past that, and simply accept that people exist, and let them enjoy existing for no larger purpose than simply inhabiting time and space for a while, and have whatever experiences they have before they perish.
> post-scarcity world
Why do you believe you deserve to be invited into such a world by the owners of that world? Have you not been noticing any patterns in the news, especially in the past 20 years, accelerating in the last 3? I observe that run-of-the-mill humans are not loved nor respected.
Elon winked at us and said "post-scarcity" and toyed with "MBI". Did you wink back? (It's ok to say yes, I wanted to wink as well, he's a great optimist.)
There is no scarcity now, for you and I. There is rampant slavery and injustice all over the world. Add up all the work done and then estimate how many slaves have lived and died complete lives to make cheap crap and give you comfort over just your lifetime? 1? 2? Sugar is over a hundred times cheaper than it should be.
The money systems are rigged for theft and twisted beyond reckoning. Misallocated capital at every turn. We have thrived because of and in spite of the current systems. Our lives depend on this unjust system!
> However, I hope we can get past that, and simply accept that people exist, and let them enjoy existing ...
When I watched The Matrix for the first time, I knew nothing about the movie. Had seen no ads, was kindof heads down in work at the time. A friend wanted me to go see it.
I got all the way to the morpheus red/blue pill scene and he's talking about what the matrix was. He was going on about taxes and religion and then slavery. And I thought, disappointed, oh geez, this is gonna be some race baiting thing... I was in this little petty politics mindframe. Blacks and whites. Liberals and conservatives.
And then right after that, some goofy retro tech sci-fi and I'm thinking, "interesting computer graphics!" but still not understanding anything.
And then, jump scare, surprise! First person shot, eyes slide open, water noises; we're in a pod.
It's an experience I may never have again because of the surprise factor and how it awakened me to monstrous possibilities in my own existence. My mental frame of self and this existence widened considerably that day.
Our matrix of propaganda and lies we tell ourselves has you. Has you willingly and you're grumpy with me for saying so. That's the powers that be's greatest trick: getting us to fight with each other over their invented reality and their pet causes rather than fighting them.
What I will say now is out of love even if it sounds incredibly harsh.
Your words make you sound fat, dumb and happy. You sound content, and maybe a little bored with life.
The loving part is in the word 'sound'. I know you are not those things, or need not be them if you are some of them.
World War 3 will be another banker's war. It appears to be right around the corner and America is starting it/funding it. You must oppose war in all its forms. Small and large offensives are abhorrent. Oppose all war out of principle from now on.
If you ever find yourself making excuses for war or even for funding someone else's war again, then you and I cannot be friends. War is a red line.
Perhaps he imagines he is doing something other than administrative work?
We moved people from fields to factories to offices with most of them still relegated to doing relatively simple repeatable tasks.
Now if you have a tool which can take over those tasks, get better at doing them and other tasks at almost an exponential rate you might have a problem on your hands.
And no UBI isn’t a solution and one of the possible danger of AI is that the change can be far more rapid than before. Mechanization and industrialization took generations, software can be iterated on and pushed at much greater pace so you also have a major risk that even if societal adaptations would be possible they might not be at the pace of change you’ll likely to see.
Now it doesn’t mean that we should be smashing GPUs and FPGAs en mass however one should not dismiss the danger of what happens when several generations both incumbent and upcoming that were educated and trained for a very specific world all of a sudden find themselves in a very different one.
Second, the problem with these hypotheses is that AI’s don’t really work better than humans. They just are cheaper and corporations are in the position that they can force customers to use them instead of humans.
Nobody wants to call an AI model . They would rather call a human with the ability to actually solve their problems. When you call an AI, you don’t have something that can solve your problem, you’re presented with a stone wall of options (most of which are suboptimal). The same goes for most direct human to AI interactions.
AIs (short of a true general AI) work best in augmenting human ability. Helping doctors/radiologists read X-rays and mris better. Helping farmers predict weather patterns for farming. Folding proteins. These are the best utilizations of AI. Not wholesale replacements or humans.
Unfortunately a lot of humans in customer support are also failing to solve my problem since they have little say in the system, and are mostly meat based automatons following a script or logic flow chart they've been given. If your problem doesn't fall into what they've been taught to do, well, then tough shit for you, you might as well have been talking to an AI bot instead of the metatag getting paid minimum wage to take shit from customers angry at the corporation for failing to provide the service they took your money for.
AI _is_ automation.
Won’t someone please think of the shareholders??
(/s… in case it’s not obvious..)