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A comment on ChatGPT, the Abacus, and Education. Parent comment

Re:ChatGPT, the Abacus, and Education by xg15 on Friday December 09, 2022 @01:54PM (#33925081)
I fully subscribe to that goal, but I think we'd need some far broader changes in society to make that a reality. We could already greatly reduce the amount of working hours and distribute essential resources more fairly. But what actually happens is that any increase in efficiently is frantically translated into an increase of output, even if that output is completely unnecessary.

Work as of now is not a necessity to archieve some outcomes, it's what society is organised around in many aspects.

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Re:ChatGPT, the Abacus, and Education by mkaic on Monday December 12, 2022 @12:12PM (#33957234)
I agree that we could be already making some of these changes, and that the increase in output is definitely gobbling up a bunch of our capacity to do so. That said, we have seen a huge rise in average quality of life over the past 200 years of industrialization. The percentage of people in abject poverty is still much too high, but it's trending downwards [0] and I think AI automation could accelerate that change. I think it may be easier to just scale output so far that it overwhelms human greed — which might sound crazy, but in my opinion is easier than effecting large-scale societal change. We should absolutely be working on societal change as well, though!

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo...

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