Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people.
Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy in the world by the way, and the US is actually falling behind into developing-country territory when you look at the population and their access to basic services. And just because right now it is convenient to rely on the US companies, and we're deep allies btw, doesn't mean europeans couldn't spin up the same tech if really needed.
The first time around (and every subsequent time) the tools used for production, lets call them capital, made laborers more efficient and cheapened goods and drove wages up (mostly). In all of these cases there was still the need for a laborer.
At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own the "compute capital". The two options will be to let everyone starve because they weren't lucky enough to shareholders in the company that owns all the bots, or just make that enterprise socially-owned and pay the unemployed workers.
Maybe, but they still need a different type of capital. Unless property rights stop being enforced, where are all the people who don’t own land, or people who don’t own arable land supposed to farm? Are we bringing back manorialism?
Considering I am mostly obliged to rent land where I can perform work so I can use my salary to pay my rent just makes me feel like I live in some sort of distributed virtual manor to be honest.
I supposed if the gracious techno-overlords are gracious enough to grant the underclass a nature preserve where they can keep living in a labor-powered society then sure. Somehow I feel that bulldozing ghettos would be the more realistic outcome.
Truthfully I think we'd have a few large societal shifts before we ever got to the stage where genius level AI could be spun up and down like containers, but it helps to illustrate the point that a post-labor society is incompatible with the tenets of capitalism, which is something that a lot of people fail to comprehend when they worry about AI.
Laborers are not fungible you know. There is plenty of evidence of lives ruined by industrial change.
The fact that the net result is positive doesn't mean that everyone profits equally. Having lived in capitalistic societies should have made that clear already.
I never said that it was. I just explained why this time was different. Innovation always hurts people but it benefits enough people that there's not massive social unrest. I am not making a moral assertion here just pointing out the qualitative difference.
french revolution and socialist revolutions went different. its not preventing the machines, its strictly solving the problem of who owns them - fairly easy thing. It "only" needs to build up a bit more suffering for the masses until this naturally happens again.
The thing is then the people in power were reliant on other people to provide force. What happens when the tech-overlords and government cliques put their hands on perfect robot AI slaves which are completely superior to humans when it comes to fighting?
Kill bot enforced gated communities and a free for all outside, naturally. Maybe in due time we have a second industrial revolution and rebuild modern society ourselves...
I think with the advanced level of weaponry we (will) have, the is no thing like a truly gated community no matter the bots.
And given the amount of time needed to actually build this against the current pace of AI progress, the angry mob should materialize itself much earlier. French Nobles didn’t see the Guillotine coming either, even like a day before the revolution
We are no where near that. We don't even yet have AIs that can write better code than random college student googling.
We will need to crack fusion (or some other way of creating "free" electricity) and then 3D printers that can convert energy into matter and then slap AGI on top of it and we are in post scarcity society where robots can do everything.
If you miss any one of thous things you won't get there.
There will never be anything free. We always have to pay with labor. But maybe we should share the fruits of labor more equally instead of giving most of it to someone who has some documents they got from their parents.
It is always easy to demand more from the people who are better off than you and attribute their success on luck, be it heretical or not.
I am not going to say that I haven't been more privileged than most of the people on the planet. My ancestors made my country into what it is which gave me free education, low corruption, and in general a good start in life. However there are also a lot of people who had the same start as I did, but managed to squander it on the way.
Everyone should absolutely have equal opportunities in life. Education should be free for everyone. Bare human necessities should be taken care of no matter what you do. But I do not agree that everyone should have equal outcome no matter what.
"they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" is a failure because currently the prosperity of the society needs these people to actually work effectively.
On the other hand, the hypothetical solution of "own the machines and distribute the wealth" is intended for a future which is substantially different, where it doesn't matter if everyone pretends to work or even explicitly avoids working, because that work isn't necessary for prosperity as it can be done by machines, and it ceases to be a problem if everyone can be as lazy as they want.
Artificial scarcity is a thing, so something being dirt cheap to produce doesn't necessarily mean that it will be actually affordable, and in the current economic environment there seems to be sufficient motivation for powerful people to try and make various monopolies based on capital-gated barriers of entry, even if the marginal cost approaches zero; so I'd expect that the default scenario is not like "salt". Getting to a mental model "like salt" seems to be a reasonable outcome in the long run, but I'm afraid that it would take some significant pressure from the masses to get from here to there.
it begins with everyone has enough to begin with, and whatever is importent is available as public services. there are different flavors to do this, the currently best implementation is to have very high&progressive taxes that fund a strong public sector, that in turn makes people feel safe and allows them to pursue higher education (doctors, teachers, ...) that again are needed for all this.
Sure you can work to have more, but not 100x more than your neighbor, nobody is worth that. instead of focussing on the single one elon musk, try to give everyone access to a good safety net and encourage them to try something, so statistically you will end up with many high-contributors instead of few parasitic billionaires.
> but not 100x more than your neighbor, nobody is worth that.
Hard disagree. Have you seen the average human, and compare him to somebody like John Carmak, Andrej Karpathy, etc. They create value at least 100x as big as the avg person
And without a society around them to support them, they would be unknown and busy trying to survive.
Even if many people might not be able to do some genius things, they do other stuff that is ultimately mandatory for the geniuses.
So yes, they might produce massively more value, but are still not worth that much more, since they wouldn’t be able to thrive without the others to begin with.
>Is it "just" that someone who drinks and parties all the time "owns" the same amount as someone who works and saves for 20 years?
You mean kinda like capitalism? Where people born into wealth just party and drink all the time and own 10^10 times more then someone who works and saves for 40+ years?
Rawlsian justice is actually an enormously influential idea in political philosophy, arguably the most influential in the 20th century. It has 3 central principles that work together:
1. You enable equality of opportunity.
2. You allow the chance for "winners" and "losers".
3. You adopt the original position ("the veil of ignorance") because no one has foresight into their place of birth and the conditions therein (ie. no one can a priori help themselves), therefore you enact the "difference principle" which states that, insofar as you allow the chance for "winners" and "losers", governments enact policy in such a way that the majority of the benefits of those policies go to the "losers" over the "winners".
There has, of course, been enormous debate on the nature of Rawlsian justice, but it's not like "just" has to immediately equate with communism. Most modern western democracies are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) modelled on Rawls' idea.
You wanna tell me how you got from not wanting socialism to not paying taxes? Or do you think taxation is socialism?
And while we are here obviously I do my best to pay as little taxes as possible, but due to where I live I do end up paying more than 30% of my salary in taxes.
Socialism is splitting your shit. Learn your philosophy. This is like how students at my colleges "socialist party nights" always got angry when I took beers out of their fridge. That's literally what socialism is.
Socialism is literally looting people who have stuff and handing it out to others. I didn't have money nor beer and they were supposedly socialists, so I gave accordingly to my ability and took according to my needs.
I guess Socialism is always nicer when you see yourself on the receiving end. We are both in the top 1% of the world, so we'd be giving away pretty much all we have.
Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy in the world by the way, and the US is actually falling behind into developing-country territory when you look at the population and their access to basic services. And just because right now it is convenient to rely on the US companies, and we're deep allies btw, doesn't mean europeans couldn't spin up the same tech if really needed.