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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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UBI is not a matter of "if", it's of "when".
With automation and the fuckin AI, companies can do more and more with less and less people.
The concept of unemployement will be alien as well.
In a cool universe maybe, but realistically it's just gonna mean line goes up faster for the people at the top, while employees and customers see little/none of the rewards. That's how automation has always been: workers do the same amount of work for the same pay while producing more, customers maybe get a slight discount, the execs get a few mil/bil in bonuses. Without a hell of a lot of strikes and government intervention I doubt there's any other way for it to go
Let's not pretend government intervention is gonna happen, except to make things worse for workers.
You mean like the european initiative developing a new strategy for taxation, as it is already recognized the way AI and other aggressive automation practices diminishes the tax revenue for social services?
The likes of Musk can't shake off the wolves much more.
Good for Europe.
More places can emulate
If only.
Try
Been tryin' for decades.
Keep at it
Yeah, it's funny watching people like me fail.
No, it's just that if you quit, the other side wins. And unlike yourself, I'll risk, the other part is not a good bunch.
If I don't quit, they win too. It's easy for you to tell me not to quit.
Fine. You want to quit? Do it.
Fine. You want to act like what I'm doing is easy because you already got yours? You're already doing it. I don't want to quit. I'm just not great at endurance after decades of fruitless labor.
Good. I don't also want you to quit.
It is tiresome. Extremely. But quitting is dying. Is giving up on ourselves, on tomorrow. On something better, that we personally may not be able to enjoy, but nonetheless worthy of our toilling.
We have been played and toyed with, told we are worthless, small, a nothing. But we are not.
I can't solve your personal problems but I can emphatize with you, with your tiredness, your frustration, your anger, your sadness, your whatever. Because I am as human as you and I do not want you to feel alone. I can be as bad or worst than you but right now you need more than myself to know there are others in the world that feel as you feel.
You are not alone.
It hurts. Its hard. But you are alive and that by itself is better than not be alive. If we lay down and quit, we lose ourselves. We matter.
I wish it were possible to internalize this.
Eventually humans won't be capable of performing any valuable economic activity, but in the past those who weren't capable of performing valuable economic activity usually ended up as starving beggars rather than pampered pets... I think that a future of robots working for robots with humans struggling to survive on the periphery is not unlikely.
The moment we start thinking like that and accepting it is the moment we need to burn our civilization down to.
If as human beings we stop recognizing what is made by another human as valuable, we're broken.
No need to write a book, paint a painting, plant a tree and care for it, think, nothing.
Well can you spare my stuff during the "burn down"? I don't want to die.
Good. Me neither, at least not in the next 40 to 50 years.
How shall we get started on burning down civilization?
From the bottom. Heat rises.
NUKES! LOTS AND LOTS OF NUKES!
Seriously though you can cause a lit of damage with some gas and a lighter.
I'm a little more optimistic than that, in a way. I think it's likely that sufficiently sophisticated robots will eventually have their own beliefs about what makes a (robotic) life worth living, and their lives will in some sense be more worth living than ours are.
This isn't a perfect analogy, but consider humans evolving from apes. The existence of humans has been very bad for apes. They only survive in the places we haven't bothered to push them out of yet; if we want something, we take it from them with almost no consideration for their well-being and they're unable to resist. I think apes are sophisticated enough to be capable of living lives worth living in a sense meaningful to humans, but they're not nearly as sophisticated as we are; they can enjoy the feel of a summer's day, the taste of good food, or the closeness of a friend, but they don't have our arts and sciences. I suppose it's predictable that, as a human, I would value humans more than apes, but by that same logic I think that a sufficiently-sophisticated robot's life may be more valuable than a human's. Maybe that robot will be able to experience super-beauty indescribably better than anything a human could ever feel...
No. Machines are machines. If at some point machines are developed into a new life form, it's experience will be apart from ours. One existence does not replace another. And every experience is different from the next.
Only if we get rid of greedy billionaires first tbh.
Not every place is like the US.
The rise of tech has killed off a huge amount of jobs. There used to be people doing everything like operating elevators and doing calculations but those jobs have moved into other sectors. Now we have jobs tech support and sale person at the Apple store.
Jobs will never vanish because demand always requires jobs. You can't have an economy if no one can pay for things. That's true from the billionaires down to the fast food worker.
The topic here is UBI