Technology

Bullish on scrap yards. Death to clankers.

I imagine lots of ugly social media posts promising ugly things but probably not a whole lot else, since "Revolt" isn't a clickable item on a menu. I'm speaking only as an American - we've become a people who buy bags of pre-shredded lettuce and pre-grated cheese. You can't expect much action from us if it takes us very far from a phone charger.

Loss of jobs is a distraction. People can get other jobs. If jobs can be automated cheaply, they should be. The problem is how the economy treats people who need to switch jobs and what it means for their income. Automate truck driving, please, but make sure ex-truck drivers are taken care of and can move on to other jobs that need doing.

Edit: I'll make an exception for jobs that need human interaction. There is a limit to automating things like care or service jobs because most people also need human interaction. And give those people decision making power, too, not this "computer says no" hellscape customer service workers have to go through

Nothing will happen.

Frogs in a pot of water being brought to a boil.

Those in charge will handwave away the job losses and blame some other factor for the economic downturn other their own shortsighted greed while they cry for their bailouts.

As a random thought:

One problem peasants tended to face was (slow) population growth in the face of limited land to feed that population with. There's only so far that you can divide your farmlands between your sons before it's not enough to sustain them any more. Some might be able to find employment elsewhere, but you'd eventually be left with young people (men in particular) that were desperate for a livelihood and out of options.

You can imagine that some of them turned to violence. I wonder, how that would play out today. Circumstances differ, so I'd caution transferring past patterns onto current situations is prone to error, but there is some tendency in human social dynamics to repeat. Not necessarily in results, but in mentality at least.

I mean, being against AI is not really a long-term solution. It's just pushing the can further down the road. Eventually, a lot of jobs will be lost anyways, due to conventional automation that has already happened the last 200 years. Progress is not an infinite story. It brings us from A to B and once we're there, it's the end of progress. Without progress, there are very few jobs, and there's absolutely no way that there'll be enough jobs for everybody in 30 years from now, AI or no AI. i don't see the protests against AI changing anything at all about that, even if they were effective (which they are very clearly not btw).

Really we need to find a way to organize society around something else than perpetual work. Only then can we find peace. I propose formulating laws around a society using universal basic income or some equivalent thereof (such as universal basic services). Just write a proposal for these laws, because only once there are meaningful proposals, we can actually demand politicians to implement them. So just start thinking about it now. The sooner, the better.