> "The past decades have shown that the benefits of technology are unevenly distributed, with some rich becoming super-rich with a good portion of the people lagging behind. However, it is also fair to say that the average well being in the world has steadily increased."
The average is far less important than the median, when it comes to social stability. You could argue that the establishment of plantation slavery in the American South improved the average wealth and leisure time relative to the pre-slavery economy, but the median would be highly skewed by a few people hoarding all the wealth and enjoying all the leisure time.
In the case of AI, ensuring that the results of individual productivity gains are not hoarded by the uber-wealthy is important. If AI helps an employee finish what used to be a 12-hour job in just 6 hours, why not cut the employee's working hours in half while retaining the same salary, instead of giving the executive suite another million-dollar compensation boost?
A 30-hr work week, enabled by AI assistance, would mean people had more time for community engagement, family interaction, personal development and so on, leading to healthier societies.
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion in the first place. Life has improved a lot for most people, but it has improved in ways that you don't really notice. Your car is safer, your apartment is safer, your neighbor's apartment is safer (so it's less likely to burn down yours), there's less crime, there's less hunger, there's more available life saving medicines etc etc.
These improvements just aren't all that noticeable. But this is the stuff that really matters. Whether the wealthiest person's bank account shows an extra zero or not means very little in comparison to your kid being able to get medicine for a disease that wasn't treatable 30 years ago.
While what you say is true, housing is becoming an issue pretty much in every first world country, purchase power for the bottom 50% percentile is at historical lows, young people have issues entering a job market, retirement age is constantly pushed exacerbating the difficulty's young people have in entering the job market.So, yes, quality of life is increasing in some dimensions, but it's also drastically decreasing in others.
For instance, until I manage to purchase an house I felt very stressed about renting for my whole life and owning nothing of consequence. This impacted severely my mood and indirectly my quality of life.
You only need to go look at the productivity & remuneration graph over the last 50 years to see that that doesn't hold. They're diverging. Inequality continues to increase, yes everyone's standard has been improving but the common man is getting less and less of that additional value-add from their additional productivity.
If you look at any metric like life expectancy, literacy rates, child mortality, things have gotten so much better. (One exception is the US where life expectancy dropped. As was heavily discussed online the last days, this is mostly due to gun violence, traffic accidents and drug abuse which IMO are largely cultural and not due to automation)
> this is mostly due to gun violence, traffic accidents and drug abuse which IMO are largely cultural and not due to automation)
Not really. It's mostly due to food and metabolic disorders (i.e. diabetes, heart disease; iirc heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US, and depending on how you group, diabetes is in the top five), which actually underscores the point. People are dying at higher rates because they can get cheap calories at a rate unprecedented in human history.
Again, are you looking at the average or the median? Just saying the same thing over and over without data to back it up doesn't count for much. The discrepancy is fairly large - average US 'familial' net worth is $748,000, median is only $122,000 - and the median net worth for non-homeowning families is only $6,000.
A serious medical condition is also likely to cause bankrupty and loss of homeowner status for many homeowners in the mid-range for US citizens, which is unusual relative to other industrialized countries.
If you add in obvious stress factors - economic instability, environmental degradation, increasing climatic variability, the revival of infectious disease threats - then you can see why a dystopian future is a real probability, and that the status quo approach is unwise.
Is there a median child mortality or literacy rate?
For net-worth, which I never mentioned, your own source shows increases over time of both median and average since 2016.
All the distressing situations you describe of course are real, but were they less common in the US in the past?
QoL has gone up tremendously over the last fifty years, especially if you look at it globally. Do we need something like UBI to avoid terrible poverty for everyone? Absolutely! As we slowly move towards a post-scarcity society, re-distribution of wealth becomes more and more critical. That said, I'd rather be bottom 30% of income today than top 70% 50 years ago. No money in the world could have bought you minimally-invasive surgery, modern anesthesia...
UBI? let's just start with reliable food, housing and medical(including mental health). and shore up some kind of retirement funds. then lets talk about cost effective daycare so raising a child doesn't destroy your financial prospects. If there's anything left I'm all about it.
I suggest UBI because I believe it's the most cost-effective way to allow people to get those things. Targeted intervention have often high overhead and undesirable side effects. For example, demand-side interventions to support limited goods and services drive up the price of these things while cost controls frequently lead to prices going actually up, due to the regulatory overhead. See https://www.niskanencenter.org/cost-disease-socialism-how-su...
Let's just raise the poverty floor instead and let people decide what to do with the money.
Yes, that's progress, lucky for some of us, we no longer live in a world of subsistence (living hand to mouth at the mercy of the world around us). The real question is, are we creating additional value i.e. is the value that we developing/building/creating compounding? (You'll see this in increasing GDP per capita and increased productivity) and what proportion of that are we taking? The amount we are taking for our efforts is deteriorating and inequality is widening, eventually it gets to a point where social mobility is halted and you're back to subsistence.
I know people below the poverty line who have access to cheap forms of insulin that didn't even exist fifty years ago because rich people funded the research
> why not cut the employee's working hours in half while retaining the same salary
Because every C-suite wants to see YoY and MoM growth, every single year. An easy way to get that in your scenario his have the employees suddenly become 2x as productive with no extra hiring and minimal additional cost.
It's not only C-suites. It's also everyone of us because we like to see our retirement savings go up. Raising the floor needs to happen at a societal level through a coordinated effort like UBI. If a company were to decide to just give all productivity gains to its workers, that company would get no more funding and ultimately lose to its competitors.
> If AI helps an employee finish what used to be a 12-hour job in just 6 hours, why not cut the employee's working hours in half while retaining the same salary, instead of giving the executive suite another million-dollar compensation boost?
> "The past decades have shown that the benefits of technology are unevenly distributed, with some rich becoming super-rich with a good portion of the people lagging behind. However, it is also fair to say that the average well being in the world has steadily increased."
The average is far less important than the median, when it comes to social stability. You could argue that the establishment of plantation slavery in the American South improved the average wealth and leisure time relative to the pre-slavery economy, but the median would be highly skewed by a few people hoarding all the wealth and enjoying all the leisure time.
In the case of AI, ensuring that the results of individual productivity gains are not hoarded by the uber-wealthy is important. If AI helps an employee finish what used to be a 12-hour job in just 6 hours, why not cut the employee's working hours in half while retaining the same salary, instead of giving the executive suite another million-dollar compensation boost?
A 30-hr work week, enabled by AI assistance, would mean people had more time for community engagement, family interaction, personal development and so on, leading to healthier societies.